Your Wellness Debrief for March 2026
The news this month made it very clear that, under capitalism, whether or not your body belongs to you still depends on who you are and what you can afford.
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The gap between wellness as a product and wellness as a right has gotten obscene. The state forced Black women to receive C-sections. A Georgia woman was charged with murder for taking abortion pills. A Black town in Illinois has E. coli in its drinking water and has just lost federal funds that could be used to address the issue. Meanwhile, the wellness industry pushed nicotine patches and cold plunges in Norwegian fjords.
March made it very clear that, under capitalism, whether your body belongs to you still depends on who you are and what you can afford.
They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. | ProPublica
They’re forcing birth and forcing how those births play out. ProPublica found that Florida hospitals sought emergency court hearings—mid-labor—to override two Black women’s refusal of C-sections. One woman, a professional doula who understood the risks and made an informed decision, had a judge convened on a tablet at her bedside while she contracted. She had no lawyer or advocate present, and she was the only Black person involved in the proceeding. The judge told her race had nothing to do with it. ACOG has deemed court-ordered C-sections “ethically impermissible,” but, apparently, Florida doesn’t care.
We’ve yet another example of what fetal personhood looks like in practice. A laboring woman’s bodily autonomy will be weighed against an unborn child’s rights, and she will most likely lose.
And all this in a state that champions “medical freedom” for vaccine refusal. Tuh.
Georgia Woman Charged With Murder for Taking Abortion Pills | WSB-TV / AP
In December, Alexia Moore went to a hospital emergency room with severe abdominal pain. She told medical workers she’d taken misoprostol, one of the drugs used in medication abortions—and that became the basis for a murder charge, one of the first of its kind in Georgia since the state’s six-week abortion ban took effect.
I want y’all to read this again. A woman sought emergency medical care, and the information she disclosed to her healthcare providers was used to charge her with murder.
The judge who heard her bond case called the charge “extremely problematic” and set bond at $1. The DA said local police filed the charges without his office’s support. But the charge exists because these backward-ass laws allow it to. Pregnancy Justice found that more than 400 women have been charged with pregnancy-related crimes since the Dobbs ruling. Pair this with the ProPublica piece above, and it becomes crystal clear that the state is expanding its authority over pregnant bodies in ways that disproportionately criminalize Black women and women without resources—which anyone who pays attention to U.S. history knew was coming.
