Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter.

The Personhood Amendment happened. One of the ripples in its wake: Public Law 116-72. On January fifteenth—in less than three months—this law, also known as Every Child Needs Two, takes effect. Its mission: to restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families. Unmarried persons will be legally prohibited from adopting children.

In addition to valid marriage licenses, all adoptions will require approval through a federally regulated agency, rendering private transactions criminal.

clients. One described him as a NILF: Nazi I’d Like to Fuck.

Give me a self to take care of, and better. Again, please, again! We’re wired, it’s said, to want repeating.

“Use your NPR voice, chouchou,” says Didier. “I hate NPR!”

“The comparing mind is a despairing mind,” says the meditation teacher.

he thought it was going a little too far to make women pay for funerals for their miscarried fetuses; but, he said, there was a loving home out there for every baby who came into the world.

There is actually an Indiana state law that requires this. Still being challenged, I think.

flensing.

vocabulary. Slicing fat from a carcass like a whale.