Amanda Wright's World

A timeline explaining the history of Amanda Wright's America.

Without background information, understanding what I write might be hard. I am thinking of adding these timeline paragraphs to future editions of what I write.

The woman who will become Amanda Wright is an exceptionally bright, hazel-eyed ten-year-old who is bligthly unaware of how the world around her is about to change. 

Supported by practically limitless campaign funding from the financial sector and the extractive industries, the various conservative movements in the country form a coalition of interests and come to power, taking the Presidency, the Senate and the House.   

At the state, and federal levels, America undergoes a sea-change as the New Wave of the Conservative movement enters office and moves with with frenetic energy, creating wave after wave of policy-making. 

Every highschool textbook in the country is required by law to address "intelligent design" alongside The Theory of Evolution when it does not actually replace it. 

Students in New York and Boston gradeshools start their schooldays with prayers and "moments of silent contemplation." Civil liberties groups, together with the parents of children from the many religious minorities that gather in Americas urban areas, including Moslems, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs march together in the streets in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland Oregon...

The United States formally repudiates the Kyoto protocols. 

She is now, twelve. 

Taxes on capital gains are permanently reduced to a symbolic three percent�"for the top earners, this amounts to a savings in the tens of millions of dollars. 

Efforts to raise the federal minumum wage to a level commensurate with survival without government intervention collapse. 

The English, magazine-formatted newspaper, The Economist, publishes an article showing that American homelessness and starts for luxury housing rise in lock-step together�"accompanying photos show people in sleeping bags, sheltering around the building sites of new, super-exclusive, high-rises. 

To tears of joyful approval, elective abortion becomes illegal in the United States at the federal level, with no exception made in cases of r*pe or incest. God is specifically mentioned in the language of the law. 

A New York Times opinion columnist writes, "Ah, Ireland in the Fifties�"we've finally arrived."

A Supreme Court challenge creates an appeals process when the pregnancy itself poses a "substantial threat" to the life of the mother. Depending on the state, the appeals process takes from five to eleven months in Texas, and Mississippi, respectively. 

Civil Iiberties organizations label the exception "a farce" and publish photographs with capsule biographies of women who die as the result of the policy. Before they end the series, there are over a thousand of them.

Following protests by Canadian women's groups, Cornelia Tsao, the Canadian Minister responsible for the Status of Women, announces an "accellerated temporary visa" providing for a one-month stay in Canada for women with or without their partners, in a program that the American media dubs, "abortion tourism."

Later, similar programs are offered by France, England and Germany. 

God is again mentioned in legislation nationwide as states establish or strengthen "fetal harm" laws that provide for life-imprisonment for "intentionally harming a fetus, or being party to any act that leads to such harm irrespective of where this act takes place."

Ashley Mung, the woman who had starred in the religious right's pro-life public-relations campaign following her decision to raise a daughter who was the product of a sexual assault as a single-parent, is found dead in her Austin, Texas apartment from a single gunshot wound. Her child was found drowned in the bathtub. 

The note she left read: "She had his eyes. I'm sorry."

A number of women university students quietly elect to undergo tubal ligation. During an interview, one such recently-sterilized student, Rebecca Grossman, calls the procedure "an act of self-defense."

Research into Alzheimer's Disease, coupled with new nano-surgical procedures and brain-imaging allow controlled, permanant memory-block in human subjects.

A researcher in Australia wins the Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of a procedure to completely reverse the effects of a spinal-chord injury using fetal stem cells. Based on this research, a German University research team creates the first artificial human kidney and, five years later, the first fully-functional, laboratory-grown artificial heart even as American legislators dismantle the last vestiges of the Affordable Care Act. 

Inspired by the events in Australia and Europe, Amanda Wright decides that she will pursue medical research. She is fifteen, bright and driven. 

American students slip further behind the rest of the Industrialized world in science. 

The Economist notes in an article that the life-expectancy of the Average American is actually declining. It is the only country in the industrial world in which this is happening. 

As a student at Columbia University, she rises to the top of the Dean's list and remains there with what her fellow students jokingly call, "depressing regularity."

During a visit to her parents, she is dragged into a van by five men who repeatedly assault her sexually, beat her, and leave her for dead by the side of a road on the outskirts of D'Iberville, Mississipi. 

Her doctors discover that she is pregnant by one of her attackers. 

Even before she has fully recovered from her injuries, her father insists that she take time off from school for a "Canadian Vacation" and then stay in New York where "people know how to mind their own business."

Two years later, her father is dying of esophageal cancer. 

Against his wishes, she goes home to visit him and is arrested, tried, and imprisoned�"her father dies while she is awaiting trial. Following a suicide-attempt after her first year of encarceration, she is offered the option of participating in an experimental furlough program that "involves a set of medical procedures."

During her video recorded consent to the procedure, she asserts that she is probably one of the only inmates to whom the procedure is being offered who fully understands its implications. Her interviewer asks if she is withdrawing her consent. She tells him that she simply doesn't care.

Martin Wright names the remant of her in his charge, "Amanda."

None of the five men who assaulted her is ever arrested or prosecuted, all of them however, are eventually found. 

None of them is ever heard from again.