I was in the middle of reciting Ya Seen, the 36th chapter of the Quran, when the executioner signaled to me that was enough. It was time to kill Orlando Hall. Across a strip of tape dividing us, Orlando received a shot of lethal injection before I could finish the verse’s final, essential line. “So glory be to Him in whose hand is the dominion of everything, and to Him you will be returned.”

Orlando lost consciousness while reciting the Shahada, as I, his spiritual advisor, had instructed him.

The execution of Orlando Hall on Nov. 19 was the first I had ever witnessed. As a business professor at Indiana University, I never thought I’d ever be in that position, nor did I expect to become a spiritual advisor to a man on death row. What struck me in the execution chamber was how surreal it felt. It almost looked like a hospital. Orlando lay on the gurney as if awaiting surgery, with tubes attached to his arm like an IV. A blanket lay over him, concealing the straps that held him down. The facade seemed deliberate. But unlike doctors in an operating room, the executioners — standing just four feet away from me — wore no masks.

The Bureau of Prisons had posted signs throughout the facility advising COVID-19 safety measures such as wearing masks, washing hands, and keeping six feet apart. They had also suspended visitation since March in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. But executions, despite being potential super-spreader events, continue.

Shortly after the execution, I tested positive for COVID-19. I was not surprised. I knew when I went to Orlando’s execution that I was stepping into a high-risk environment. Prisons are petri dishes for COVID-19, and executions only add to the risk because they draw hundreds of people who travel from across the country, including correctional and Department of Justice staff, family members of the victim and the accused, lawyers, and press. The prison where all federal executions take place, FCC Terre Haute, was already experiencing an outbreak when the Justice Department resumed federal executions last summer, and there was a spike in cases in the surrounding community of Terre Haute, Indiana, after the first executions in July.

The decision of whether to attend an execution isn’t always simple. Some attendees are correctional staff just doing their jobs. Others may feel obligated if they are friends or family members of the victim or the accused. Spiritual advisors like myself attend at the request of the person being executed, to perform rituals and bring comfort as they leave this world. When Orlando asked me to stand at his deathbed at his moment of death, conduct the rites of passage and bring him comfort through our faith, I could not deny him; I could not say no to a man who would soon be killed. The tenants of my faith demanded as much. Helping him was more important than the risk to myself

I certainly never expected to find myself in the position I was in. In Islam we have no clergy, so I don’t hold an official position or title that would justify such a heavy task. I learned about Orlando when a local Unitarian minister reached out to our community’s listserv, in search of somebody to fill the role of spiritual advisor at Orlando’s request. I agreed to meet with him to give some spiritual guidance in his final days. Together we discussed Islamic funeral rites, and I translated verses from the Quran to make sure he understood the words he would recite at the moment of his death. It was information I already knew from years of study. But there was no way to prepare for what I actually experienced on the day of the execution.

On the morning of Nov. 19, hours before his execution, I met with Orlando one last time. The next time I saw him, he was strapped to a gurney. The many hours in between were spent going through the prison’s cumbersome standard processes for executions, most of which did not seem to take the virus into account. First, I was transported to the execution chamber in a packed van, along with Orlando’s family members. We were not even permitted to open the windows. When we reached the death row unit, we were seated in a small waiting area while officers processed us one by one, using body scanners, metal detectors, and hand wands.

Once the security screening was over, they put us back in the van and drove us to another building, where we waited in another small, crowded, windowless room until about 10:30 p.m., when they took me to the execution chamber. There, I was shuffled from room to room by staff, including some who wore their masks below their noses. There were signs throughout the prison that masks were mandatory, but I did not see anyone enforcing this rule.

The execution itself took only a matter of minutes. I stood in the chamber — a tiny 10 by 12-foot space — with Orlando, an official, and two unmasked executioners. A strip of tape on the floor marked the line I could not cross, two feet away from Orlando’s gurney. When it was time, I began to recite the customary verse we had discussed that morning, meant to bring comfort to the dying. But the executioner cut me off. They administered the shot of pentobarbital, and I watched Orlando recite the Shahada and tell his family that he loved them, and that it would be OK, until he lost consciousness.

After Orlando was pronounced dead, I started to pray over his body, as I had been given permission to do, but almost immediately the unmasked executioner interrupted me and told me to stop praying.

It was difficult to grasp the reality of what had just happened. On the gurney just a few feet away from me, a man I had spoken to that morning was suddenly gone. The execution process was so ritualistic and medicalized, full of rules and protocol. And worst of all, I didn’t feel like I was just a witness — I felt like an accomplice. I was one part of an elaborate machine designed to take a life.

That I contracted COVID-19 in the process was collateral damage. I tested positive on Nov. 27, and I am certain that I contracted it during the execution. I closely followed social distancing guidelines in my day to day life. I even drove back and forth from Bloomington to Terre Haute by myself to and from the execution and the funeral home, instead of staying at a hotel or with friends and risking exposure. My only risk of exposure was the day of the execution, when I was shuffled back and forth from packed vans to crowded rooms, and stood in the death chamber only feet away from unmasked executioners. Thankfully, I am mostly asymptomatic so far. Not everybody will be so lucky.

To date, more than 274,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19. There is no reason to put more people in danger just to kill one person. But the government is still scheduling more executions for December and January — during our second wave of the virus. These executions are a sad reminder of how the criminal legal system dehumanizes the people it touches, especially during a pandemic. So many people are dying already. Why add more death?

Over the past four years, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to launch attacks on women — including in housing, the workplace, and schools. When President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris take office, their administration and Congress must make it a top priority to not just undo the damage, but to push forward an agenda that will ensure everyone has the freedom to live, work, learn, and serve free from discrimination based on sex.

Here are just a few of the many items that should top the Biden administration’s to-do list: 

Assure safe and stable housing for women and families.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put as many as 40 million people in this country at risk of eviction. This is both a racial justice and gender justice issue: Black women face eviction at twice the rate of white renters. And, once a family has been evicted, the devastating harms can follow them for years, exacerbating and reproducing conditions of economic inequality and preventing families from securing stable housing anywhere else. 

Thankfully, the next administration can take concrete steps to ensure all people have access to safe and stable housing during the pandemic and beyond: 

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should extend and expand its eviction moratorium — currently set to expire on Dec. 31 — until Congress passes comprehensive relief. That must include measures such as rent relief that will allow families to remain stably housed, avoid debilitating amounts of back rent, and prevent the long-lasting harms of eviction. The Biden administration also can take action to address how prior eviction filings stop applicants from obtaining new housing, often for years, and advocate for the right to counsel for tenants, who usually are unrepresented in eviction cases.
• With reports that landlords are subjecting tenants to sexual harassment at alarming rates during the pandemic, the administration should require housing providers that receive federal funds take steps to stop this abuse by adopting policies to inform tenants of their rights. It should also support reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which — among other protections — would block local governments from adopting measures that allow eviction of  residents simply because they call 911, allowing survivors of gender-based violence to remain in their homes.
• The incoming administration must also restore tools needed to dismantle residential segregation that lock out women, people of color and children from housing opportunities. The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule was one important step in this direction, but the Trump administration gutted the rule before it could be effectively implemented. Similarly, the Trump-led Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled back a 2013 Disparate Impact rule protecting people harmed by policies that disproportionately injure women, people of color, and other marginalized groups who have historically faced barriers to housing. Reinstating both rules will lay a legal foundation for fair housing for all.

Remove barriers to workplace equality for women.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put women at the center of the most unequal recession in modern American history; more than 2 million women have left the workforce since January 2020, with Black women and other women of color hit the hardest. As we plan a path toward recovery, it’s more critical than ever to ensure women have equal access to opportunities on the job. In addition to any pandemic recovery plans, the next administration must prioritize and call on Congress to pass these critical measures:

• Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, to protect workers who need temporary job modifications during their pregnancies, so that they won’t have to choose between their paycheck and having a healthy pregnancy. 
• BE HEARD in the Workplace Act, to make the promise of the #MeToo revolution a reality, and create workplaces free of harassment in all its forms.
• PUMP (Proving Urgent Maternal Protections) for Nursing Mothers Act, to make sure workers who need to pump on the job can do so safely, and without penalty.

In addition to fighting for these new protections, the Biden-Harris administration can help make existing protections a reality, through robust enforcement of civil rights and labor laws by government agencies. That includes holding corporations accountable for sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination and unfair labor practices by franchises, contractors, and others.

Eliminate sexual harassment and assault in our nation’s schools.

Sexual harassment and assault have no place in our schools, yet over a quarter of women endure sexual assault during their college years and more than half face harassment in junior high or high school. Instead of strengthening protections for these students, whose education can be derailed as a result, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos dramatically reduced schools’ obligations to respond to sexual harassment and assault at all. Thankfully, President-elect Joe Biden has already said his administration will withdraw DeVos’s damaging double standard, which allows schools to ignore reports of harassment based on sex where similar reports based on race, national origin, or religion would require an appropriate response. The Education Department must not only rescind the DeVos double standard, but replace it with strong protections against sexual harassment and fair processes for all students.

Ensure military opportunities are open to all regardless of sex.

The Biden administration should end the Department of Defense’s biased policies that harm women who want to serve in combat, including sex-segregated Marine Corps boot camp and refusing to assign junior female Army soldiers and Marines to combat units unless and until senior women officers are installed there, too.

The Trump administration’s quest to force abortion patients to needlessly risk COVID-19 exposure as a condition of obtaining care has entered its sixth month, and is as violently out of touch with reality as ever.
 
Following an October order from the Supreme Court, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland is considering new evidence in our lawsuit challenging a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy requiring patients who need a medication used for early abortion care to travel in person to a clinical setting for the sole purpose of picking up a pill and signing a form. That policy has been blocked under a court order we won in July — but Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has continued to fight us every step of the way.
 
Their latest argument: COVID-19 is no longer a serious risk, so the federal government should be free to force us to risk exposure as a condition of obtaining essential reproductive health care.
 
This could not be farther from the truth. On Oct. 30, the day the Trump administration filed their latest brief in the district court, nearly 100,000 people in the United States were diagnosed with COVID-19 — then a new global record — and nearly 1,000 people died from it. The United States broke its own record days later, and then again and again; yesterday, a staggering 196,000 new cases and 2,760 new deaths were reported in a single day. The nation’s top infectious disease experts warn that the country “could not possibly be positioned more poorly” for this winter and that we are entering the “most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic.”
 
Despite the Trump administration’s own experts at the CDC acknowledging that being Black or Hispanic is associated with dramatically higher risks of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, Trump’s lawyers argue that it is no big deal to force medication abortion patients — a majority of whom are Black or Latinx — to unnecessarily incur heightened COVID-19 risk.
 
Let’s be clear: There is no genuine dispute that forcing people to travel to a health center continues to impose serious COVID-19 risks. That is why the CDC still recommends that patients use telemedicine whenever possible and use mail-order or other delivery services to pick up prescription medications. It is because of this ongoing risk that HHS Secretary Alex Azar renewed the nationwide COVID-19 public health emergency and continues to allow patients to obtain addictive medications like fentanyl and OxyContin through telemedicine.
 
One look at the Trump administration’s legal filings shows just how flimsy their argument is. Unable to muster a single declaration from any employee at HHS or the FDA to support their argument that travel and personal contact no longer pose a meaningful threat, the administration instead asked the court to rely on declarations from officials in seven states (virtually all of which are already seeing sharp COVID-19 spikes), noting that their states have allowed certain businesses and services to re-open. But these local decisions have nothing to do with our case. Allowing people to voluntarily use in-person services cannot justify a federal mandate forcing higher-risk populations to engage in unnecessary travel and personal contact, regardless of their individual circumstances and their clinicians’ judgment, as a condition of obtaining essential reproductive health care.

Trump administration officials might be committed to maintaining the fantasy that COVID-19 is under control, but we know the truth: The pandemic is still real, still dangerous, and forcing abortion patients to needlessly risk exposure to it still poses real harm to them, their clinicians, and their families — with particularly severe risks for people of color.

The path forward is clear. First, the courts must keep the in-person requirement blocked. And as soon as President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January, he should not only direct the FDA to agree not to enforce the in-person requirement during the public health emergency (precluding the need for further litigation), but also instruct the FDA to undertake a comprehensive review of the full set of restrictions on mifepristone. This will ensure that beyond the pandemic, patients’ access to this safe, effective medication is based on the latest science and medical evidence. Medication abortion — like all abortion services — is essential health care, and we hope to never again see FDA restrictions weaponized for a political, anti-abortion agenda.