‘Exactly Where You Don’t Want To Look’

“How many rooms?” The Doctor asks Amy Pond.

Amy Pond : I’m sorry, what?

The Doctor : On this floor, how many rooms? Count them for me now.
Amy Pond : Why?
The Doctor : Because it will change your life.
Amy Pond : [pause] Five. One, two, three, four, five
The Doctor : Six.
Amy Pond : Six?
The Doctor : Look.
Amy Pond : Look where?
The Doctor : Exactly where you don’t want to look, where you never want to look. The corner of your eye. Look behind you.

One great thing about that scene from Doctor Who is that when he tells her to look “exactly where you don’t want to look, where you never want to look,” she understands precisely what he means — precisely where he means.

This isn’t just true in a science fiction story involving an interdimensional multiform hiding behind a perception filter. It’s true in everyday life, for everyone. We all have that place in the corner of our eye, where we don’t want to look, where we never want to look. We all have thoughts we don’t allow ourselves to think, facts and ideas we turn away from.

And, just like Amy Pond, we know where they are. We have to. The only way to never look exactly where we don’t want to look is to vigilantly keep track of where that is at all times. It becomes a habit, an automatic reflex — but never quite completely unconscious. Habit and practice makes the work of not looking easier, but it’s still work, work that we can never allow ourselves to stop doing.

What happens if you stop doing that work? What happens if you turn to look “exactly where you don’t want to look, where you never want to look”?

“It will change your life.”

That DNC Convention Roll Call was how I learned the happy news that Kate Cox is now expecting her third child, due in January.

I shouldn’t know who Kate Cox is. I absolutely should not know the most intimate details of her family, her personal life, and the health of her uterus. But I do. We all do. We all know all about all of that because the state government of Texas insisted on making her personal life and health a very public matter of state policy, state decision-making, and state interference.

There’s a certain amount of sympathetic interest that normal, decent people will and should feel toward a stranger who is going through physical and emotional pain. That’s our business, in a sense. But the intimate details of her very intimate, very personal health crisis were not something that the whole country should ever have heard about if the whole country weren’t deeply messed up in ways that make us anything but normal, decent people.

And so all of us know all of it. We all know all about Cox’s desperately wanted pregnancy and how it went tragically wrong. We know all about how this threatened her health and her future fertility. We know about the medical care she was denied and how that threatened her health and her future fertility. We know about how she was forced to flee her home state to find a hospital to spare her the Texas-mandated invitation to infection and sepsis that would mean an end to her family’s dream of having a third child.

If you need a refresher on that whole saga, here are some links from earlier this year, when Texas Republicans made sure that Kate Cox’s very personal business was headline news all over the countryL

I’ve also included those links just to keep you from confusing Cox’s story with any of the many other stories like it that have been reported in heartbreaking detail ever since the lawless, reckless Dobbs decision inverted subsidiarity and rescinded women’s right to have their business remain their business. I didn’t want you to mix up Kate Cox’s story with that of Anya Cook, who nearly bled to death after Florida’s “pro-life” laws denied her medical care for a miscarriage. Or with that of Kyleigh Thurman, who lost a fallopian tube because her health was valued less than the “sacredness” of an ectopic pregnancy. Or the story of Kaitlyn Joshua, who couldn’t find medical help in Louisiana while bleeding from a miscarriage because of that state’s anti-abortion laws.

There have been hundreds of such stories in the newspapers and on the news channels. And for every such story that gets reported, there have been many, many more that didn’t make the papers.

We all know these stories. And while we many not remember all of the names, we remember Kate Cox’s because her story was told so extensively and publicly.

So we all know who Kate Cox is and we all know her story.

Anti-abortion white evangelicals know this too.

But they try their very hardest to pretend they don’t. Her story is exactly where they don’t want to look, where they never want to look.

It’s a reminder of something they used to know. These commonplace horror stories of women suffering and being denied medical treatment post-Dobbs were absolutely predictable and absolutely predicted because they are the same as the commonplace horror stories of women’s suffering pre-Roe. Stories like this were why, before Roe v. Wade, white evangelicals in the Southern Baptist Convention and at Christianity Today supported legal abortion. It’s why evangelical publishers produced conservative textbooks on “biblical ethics” that fully supported a legal right to abortion.

They knew then that interfering with the medical care these women needed was cruel and immoral and wrong. And they know that it is just as cruel and immoral and wrong now. And that’s why they cannot allow themselves to know what they know. It’s why Kate Cox’s story and the countless stories like it are exactly where they don’t want to look.