Open thread: abortion.
Roe v. Wade is in imminent peril. How’s everyone doing?
The real moral question of the age is not whether a foetus is a person. The more pressing question is whether a woman is a person- a fully human person, a person who deserves absolute bodily autonomy.
Apparently, this one is trickier to answer. Who the hell knew?
I’m watching the news roll in on the Roe V Wade hearings and trying to write, yet again, about why women’s freedom matters, about the fight against reproductive coercion in and beyond the USA. And I realised that what I actually want, first of all, is to talk to other people about how they’re feeling, about how I’m feeling, and what on Earth happens next.
How are you doing? What are you most worried about, and what gives you pause, and what do you want to know from me?
I’ll be on this thread from 8-9pm GMT, answering questions and checking in.
See you then. x
I just texted this to a dear friend:
'I’m so fucked off that I have to explain this again. In a typical column you are meant to lay out the basics, to spell out the underlying issue right up top so everyone’s clear. And sometimes that’s so demeaning. I'm just so sick of having to explain over and over again that it is fucking monstrous to force a human being to give birth against their will. That for most of recorded history abortion and contraception were non-controversial. That the laws being put into place in the USA and around the globe are the strictest, most punitive, most misogynist abortion laws the human race has ever known, that overturning roe v Wade would not be a return to ‘normal’- it would be instituting a completely unprecedented degree of reproductive surveillance.
Here's something I'm trying to work out how to articulate: this is actually bigger and scarier than 'Roe'. The prospect of losing 'Roe' is so overwhelming that I think it's easy to miss a bigger pattern going on around the world - where nations are instituting policies of reproductive coercion. Iran just this week passed laws designed to deprive women of reproductive healthcare, in a move that was specifically about their low birth rates (though not as low as North America's). And two days ago a new report came out describing exactly how coercive policies are proliferating around the world.