🕳️ Diabolical Imagination: The Creative Cruelty of Systems Designed to Deny Women Power
There’s a kind of imagination at work in the war on women—a diabolical imagination.
It’s not just found in the loud, obvious attacks. It lives in the quiet details. The paperwork. The bureaucracy. The loopholes that are actually traps. The laws that seem neutral, but are designed with precision to block, delay, punish, and deny.
It’s the kind of imagination that doesn’t just say no—it asks:
“What is every possible way we can make her fail?”
Not Just Oppression. Creative Oppression.
Diabolical imagination is what happens when lawmakers, judges, and strategists put their minds together—not to help women, but to outsmart them. It’s not clumsy. It’s not accidental. It’s engineered with intention and endless creativity.
It’s not just about abortion. It touches every part of life:
Voting
Healthcare
Employment
Education
Parental rights
Survival
This isn’t lazy discrimination. It’s innovative oppression.
Let’s Talk About Voting.
Imagine a woman who wants to register to vote.
She’s told she needs to present her birth certificate.
But the name on her birth certificate no longer matches the name on her driver’s license—because she got married. Or divorced. Or changed her name for safety reasons. Now? She’s “out of compliance.”
She’s disqualified.
This is not a fluke. This is diabolical imagination at work.
Someone anticipated that women would change their names and weaponized that reality against them. On purpose.
Other Examples of Diabolical Imagination:
A law requires parental consent for a teenager’s abortion. Her parent is abusive or absent? The law doesn’t care.
A clinic in a red state is forced to close—not because abortion is illegal, but because its hallways are one inch too narrow.
Title X funding is cut off—not by a vote, but by quietly declaring providers “non-compliant.”
Access to mifepristone is threatened—not by banning the pill, but by attacking the FDA’s authority to regulate it.
A woman tries to order emergency contraception online, but her package is delayed due to a new mail restriction. Clock runs out. Rights disappear.
This Is Not Incompetence. This Is Design.
Let’s be crystal clear: these are not unintended consequences.
They are not bureaucratic accidents.
They are not glitches in the system.
They are the system.
And the system is full of people who spend hours, days, months imagining how to trap women in a maze of denials, delays, and dead ends.
That’s diabolical imagination.
So What Do We Do?
We develop an imagination of our own.
But not for survival—for power.
If they can dream up a thousand ways to block us, we can dream up a thousand ways to break the system and build something new.
We protest—but we also run.
We call out lies—but we also write new laws.
We expose cruelty—but we also organize care, access, defense.
We imagine not just a better future—but a radically different one.
If they can weaponize imagination, so can we.
And ours won’t be used to punish.
It will be used to liberate.
Debra Lynch
1. What “normal” policy, rule, or process is actually a trap? The recent use of the word “compliance” in legal arguments and public policy around reproductive care—particularly in Supreme Court hearings—is a rhetorical trap. It presents itself as a neutral legal standard, but in reality, it's a weaponized term that masks the targeting and elimination of abortion access.
2. How does this represent diabolical imagination? Diabolical imagination hides cruelty in plain sight. It dresses domination in the language of order and safety. By using compliance without ever defining it, justices and officials maintain plausible deniability while constructing a punitive framework. They never clarify what clinics or providers are not in compliance with—because they don’t have to. The ambiguity itself is the tool. It's not medicine or science—it’s submission.
3. What systems intersect here? This is where law, religion, medicine, and white supremacy converge. Public health funding, like Title X, is being quietly funneled into crisis pregnancy centers that operate with no medical credibility. These centers promote superstition over science, shame over care, and surveillance over support. And they are now propped up by state funding and the seal of legitimacy.
4. Who benefits—and who is harmed by design? Religious extremists, conservative political actors, and patriarchal institutions benefit. They get control over bodies and narratives. Meanwhile, pregnant people—especially poor, young, Black, Brown, and undocumented folks—are deliberately pushed into a trap: manipulated by pseudoscience, denied real care, and left with fewer options by design.
5. What would liberation look like instead? Liberation would mean calling language like compliance what it really is: coercion. It would mean fully funding reproductive healthcare that is grounded in evidence, autonomy, and community. It would mean abolishing CPCs, and centering people—not systems—in every conversation about care. Liberation demands that we stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt when their actions speak volumes.
6. Mantra: If they can imagine a thousand ways to block us, I can imagine a thousand ways to burn it down—and build better.
What’s hitting you hardest right now? What headline, policy, or silence made you pause—or rage—this week?
This space isn’t just for reading. It’s for naming, venting, connecting, and strategizing. Your voice matters here. Start where you are—whether it’s a question, a story, or just a gut reaction. Let’s break the silence together.
👇 Drop a thought. Don’t self-censor.