Politics

Now, two years on, the transition was ailing. The economy was in free fall, partly due to austerity measures imposed at the IMF’s behest. Street protests were calling for the resignation of Abdalla Hamdok, the soft-spoken former UN economist who was serving as the prime minister in the transitional government, and a number of political parties had withdrawn from the FFC.

One was OK: a mistake. But two was a pattern. I knew at an early age that I never wanted to have kids but I didn’t think I was the type of girl who would have an abortion, certainly not more than one. Not because of adherence to a religious or natalist ideology but because I was too educated, too responsible—which is an ideology, too.

The fact that most doctors like me—my colleagues in obstetrics and gynecology very much included—don’t know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.

On paper, legislators passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act to halt what congresspeople erroneously called an epidemic of “meritless” prisoner-initiated lawsuits clogging court dockets. But the law’s effect — crushing imprisoned people’s access to the courts and limiting the federal courts’ power to remedy heinous prison conditions, especially via population control orders — was to severely narrow a key terrain of struggle for imprisoned people fighting not only for relief from abusive treatment and inhumane conditions, but also against the expansion of an intensifying regime of racialized mass imprisonment.

I could not direct you to the key evidence that exonerates the Wuhan Institute, and it might not exist. But this is also the crucial point. There are too many lacunae in the lab-leak explanation for the theory to stand on its own: proponents must fill the gaps with their own projections and beliefs.