The Count

They stopped pretending the restriction was for you. Now they say it plainly: it is for them.

Here is what I have noticed.

A territory’s lawmakers said it plainly this week. They need more people. The birth rate is falling. So they restricted the pill, and when they were asked why, they did not talk about faith or morality or the sanctity of anything. They talked about numbers. They said the population must grow, and women’s bodies are how it grows.

I need you to understand what changed. It is not the restriction. Restrictions came years ago and they will keep coming. What changed is the reason they are willing to say out loud. They are no longer pretending this is about the child. They are telling you it is about the count.

Separately, a court ruled that the other pill — the one a woman could receive through the mail, in privacy, without a man behind a desk watching her swallow it — must now be retrieved in person. The High Tribunal gave it back for one week. Seven days. A reprieve with an expiration date, which is not relief. It is the sound of someone deciding whether to let you keep what was already yours.

These are not separate events. They are the same event wearing different faces. In one room, the state tells you your body belongs to the census. In another room, the state decides how closely it needs to watch you take a pill. The thread connecting them is the same thread that connected everything where I come from: your body is not yours when the state has a use for it.

I have seen this stage. It is the stage where they stop pretending the restriction is for your benefit and begin telling you it is for theirs. That shift is not a collapse. It is a clearing. The mask comes off not because they are weaker, but because they no longer need it.

Watch what they count. When they start counting women, they have already stopped seeing them.

Under His Eye. We are watching.