I am pro-abortion at any point in the pregnancy. And having had two children now, I'm not totally convinced they're fully human even when they are born (for a more scientific point of view please see studies that discuss how human gestation is a balance between a fully functional baby and its large head size fitting through a woman's hips). A limitation I have not yet been able to figure out though, is that I also believe designer babies to be wrong - as a female and a member of a certain minority group I have considerable concerns about what eugenic rubbish people would do with that power. So how do you square a woman's right to choose, with the possibility of her choosing based on the characteristics of the baby?
For everything else and the whole viable life form and it's a person with rights stuff, I'd be a lot more impressed with those arguments if America always provided food, shelter and healthcare to children for free. Because their life is so sacrosanct, of course.
Or maybe the issue is actually a question regarding the scope of consent: those opposing abortion believe a woman who consents to sex automatically consents to a pregnancy (cf also that many think abortion is permissible in case of rape). Before marital rape was outlawed the idea was that a woman who marries gives her consent to sex with her husband for a lifetime, and think of those who think consent to a date includes consent to sex (cf your text about consent being not an action but a state of being).
The question whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant, as no born person has the right to use an other person's body against their will. There is e.g. no compulsory organ donation (not even e.g. blood donation for persons who caused an accident where the victim needs blood). After her baby is born, a mother is not forced to let her baby use her body, so actually a fetus has more rights than a born person, and a pregnant woman has less.
Compulsory vaccination is rare, so bodily freedom does include the right to contribute to the death of others by spreading disease.
I’m a 69 year old New Zealand woman who is feeling as if the premise on which I have based my life, that I am a person deserving of the rights of a person, is about to be declared mistaken by the country that, with Roe v Wade, once led the way to our freedom. For reasons I do not really understand, I am finding this profoundly upsetting. My grief for women and girls in the US is huge, but there is grief also for those of us not directly affected. When will men be burning us at the stake again? The pure hatred of the patriarchy is terrifying.
Patriarchy is such an obstinate ideology and it pervades every last detail of life in every corner of the world. Its roots in animal husbandry is profoundly shaping how ‘breeding’ and ‘gene pools’ regards women’s being as that of livestock. If livestock is sick, it’s disposed of; if it doesn’t breed, it’s disposed of; if it’s not eugenically pleasing, it’s disposed of. If there’s cruelty in the husbandry it’s dismissed as it is with animals - we don’t feel pain like patriarchal agencies do.
It regards womanly orifices, and women’s whole being, as property. It regards rape and assault as minimally invasive and simply sexual recreation for powerful males. Like animals in a meadow they are game, food, utility. In these acts and their forgiveness and erasure, all men are ushered within patriarchy to view women as holes, territory to have a phallic flag raised over.
It regards women or POC or queer people or aboriginal people or disabled people or the working class as trespassing when they dare to be people in their full and unique personhood, in any public sphere. Being outside, being public, being *visible* trying to walk as belonged in any realm is a threat to the obstinate, angry patriarchal system which is essentially based on primogeniture and patrilineal gene pools.
Abortion is a deep narcissistic wound of patriarchy. Men have always (and will always) fretted about the reproductive uncertainty of women. They’ve always fretted about their unfettered access to pussy. We are watching the rapacious tantrum of patriarchy completely unable to argue on its own terms. Because those terms are basically: women aren’t people, they are livestock.
We buy into terms about how much of a pregnancy determines the boundaries of our personhood with these encroaching arguments, aimed at razing any arguments of our human dignity.
Your central point that women are beings in the world, with our own stories of autonomous pride and heroism is so unsettling, is so destabilising to patriarchy’s control.
It won’t go quietly and I feel that’s the nub of what we are seeing. Angry men, with co-opted socially ushers, getting their way in defining over and over, our lack of human being-ness.
I dunno, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the United States (I won't speak for other countries in which I have never lived) was a mistake, and it isn't fair to the rest of us to have to live with these antisocial extremists and allow them a voice at a civilized table when they are so obviously and proudly opposed to the values that underpin a functioning society.
More that being forced to play with the kid who keeps kicking over your sandcastle isn't fair to the other kids. We're too big, and a huge portion of us don't want to behave.
I wonder if there's too much civ going on. It all seems like a computer game, trading off a few happy faces for a higher growth rate. It's all just icons and numbers, there are no human faces in here. It's actually terrifying, if you think of it that way.
I think you nailed it with your point about surveillance, Laurie. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the government didn’t have recourse to the current pantheon of medical and information technologies, from transvaginal ultrasounds to digital algorithms. In the wake of the pandemic, we’re even more primed than ever to let the state watch and manage what we do with our bodies. There’s no way misogynists won’t use that power to enforce reproductive controls on women, especially poor black and brown women. (Meanwhile, middle class women will be able to afford to send away for abortion pills by mail order.)
Absolutely. Before Roe, reliable pregnancy testing- and even ultrasounds- were far less available. The idea of making abortion illegal at six weeks would have been laughable.
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.
It seems to me that there are patterns within patterns, and there is good cause to worry about coercive policies that go far beyond reproductive healthcare, but I don't want to derail this discussion. At the moment, I just want to let people who might at some point be affected by Roe v. Wade know that I too am afraid and angry at the prospect of seeing it overturned.
I am increasingly worried that I have been suckered into thinking that demography made an overall trend inexorable: towards increasing diversity and increasing appreciation of diversity, and inclusion and equality. I am even more worried that all my intuition is wrong about how to respond to reversal of that trend, and that the people and organisations that laid the groundwork for Brexit and Trump will manipulate everything to where all that I hold dear is marginalised. Roe v. Wade does not affect me personally, but I am energised to work towards a future where all people can feel safe.
'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.
It's also important to note, and I'm paraphrasing my partner here, that outlawing abortion is theoretically antisemitic. This is a Christian supremacist group forcing its values on lots of people who do not share them, and limiting their religious freedom as a result.
Justice Sotomayor covered this in her rebuttal to Kavanaugh's gaslighting. She covered his deceptive choice of cases, and how many could fall if Roe does.
We keep allowing the conservatives to set the framework and tone of all our socio-political discussions, and therefore start from a 100-point deficit to begin with. Just like "insurance" is NOT "healthcare", abortion is not the issue. The real issue is whether a woman and her doctor are allowed the autonomy to make the best decisions for the woman's health, like men are allowed to with their doctors.
Men HAVE the right to discuss any medical issues openly and freely with their doctors. Including vasectomies, the prescribing of Viagra, or even whether or not to get a freakin' face lift!
Women do NOT have that right. THAT is the issue. Not abortion.
Until we reframe these issues as they ACTUALLY are - this is a healthcare issue, NOT an 'abortion' issue - we cannot have a productive discussion.
Doctors are trained to deal with a colossal range of health care issues, both the physical aspect and the mental aspects of those decisions. For example, choosing to amputate a limb comes with a heavy psychological burden... exactly like choosing to abort a fetus for any reason. Until we address these issues as holistic healthcare issues, we are playing soccer on a pitch that has a 45-degree tilt. It's time to level the playing field and stop playing the conservative rage machine's game with their ball, with their rules, on their pitch.
Liberals (like me) fall for this stunt every time the conservatives pull it. And we just need to stop lowering our discourse to their most reductive - and extreme - cases.
I'm interested - what do you think the difference is with framing it as 'healthcare' versus abortion? I suppose the issue there is who you're pitching to...
Conservatives have made abortion their philosophical issue. Agree to any point, and they can move the goalposts arbitrarily in any direction. Third trimester. Second trimester. Fourteen weeks. Engage with them on their terms, and they get to rewrite the terms of their political narrative, and obscure the real-world implications and impacts of their hateful policies on women's health.
But if it is an equal access to healthcare issue, there are plenty of interlinked policies that ca reduce the NEED for abortions… from simply providing access to contraceptives, to mental health counseling, to reinforcing laws to protect women from predators and stalkers. Expand the conversation to healthcare, and abortion becomes one small endpoint at the extreme end of one fork of assessing a health issue.
And that second paragraph is what gives away the game. They understand that pregnancy can be an undesirable consequence of sex, and they want it to be. Punishment for transgression is what they are after.
I think it reads dramatically differently depending on the audience. To a conservative, "healthcare" is a euphemism, whereas to a leftist it's simply accurate. On the other hand, using "abortion" directly addresses the right without euphemism, but is also a rallying cry for conservatives to fight against. Conservatives are quite good at weaponizing language, it turns out.
exactly. a mate of mine said recently that they are so much better than us at instrumentalising our own values against us. I think that's why we need to be clear about what our values here actually are.
I often wonder why, on issues like this- and especially with this issue- liberals and progressives back off from saying what we really mean. We start out on the back foot saying things like ‘we aren’t pro abortion.’ Why not? I’m pro abortion for anyone who needs it.
I suspect part of why we don’t articulate our real desires and fears is that part of us suspects, deep down, that we are wrong to feel this way. That if we were really decent people, nice girls, right-thinking god loving members of society we would not put women’s real lives above the notional life of a fetus. That feeling the way we do is somehow indecent, unethical, perverted, dirty and just plain wrong.
It isn’t.
We are morally correct on this issue and we need to start saying so. The Christian Right does not get to own the language of morality.
I am lucky in that on this issue at least I have as near as damnit absolute moral certainty. What is monstrous and unconscionable is the prospect of the state forcing any human being to go through pregnancy and childbirth against their will. What is evil is treating one class of people as disposable bodies that ought to be put wholly in service to another and calling it ‘pro-life’. It is utterly wrong.
I am not just pro abortion for anyone who needs it. I want safe abortions easily and freely (free in the sense of liberty, as well as paid for by taxes) available to anyone who _wants_ it. That is not a controversial opinion, though, among the people I socialise with.
Feeling worried for my friends in America. Though I also know how the women of America are tough and determined, and that they will fight like hell against any attempt to take away their bodily rights.
If there’s a positive here, it’s that this time, if they really go through with it, the backlash might just be strong enough to break some of those unjust power structures that let things get to this point. We can but hope…
I was 16 when the Supreme Court decided Roe. I was keenly aware of the victory as nations wide and personal. If I needed an abortion in the future I could get one. (And 3 years later, I did. And felt damn relieved Roe was law.) . My youngest son is now 16. He is not usually interested in politics but he is paying attention to this. It’s personal for him too. And sort of befuddling. I have tried to impress upon him that democracy and the rights he enjoys today are not necessarily going to be around forever. Sadly, he’s starting to see just how true this is. I feel sobered by the sense that a lot is slipping through our fingers right now. History does not necessarily curve towards progress.
I am pro-abortion at any point in the pregnancy. And having had two children now, I'm not totally convinced they're fully human even when they are born (for a more scientific point of view please see studies that discuss how human gestation is a balance between a fully functional baby and its large head size fitting through a woman's hips). A limitation I have not yet been able to figure out though, is that I also believe designer babies to be wrong - as a female and a member of a certain minority group I have considerable concerns about what eugenic rubbish people would do with that power. So how do you square a woman's right to choose, with the possibility of her choosing based on the characteristics of the baby?
For everything else and the whole viable life form and it's a person with rights stuff, I'd be a lot more impressed with those arguments if America always provided food, shelter and healthcare to children for free. Because their life is so sacrosanct, of course.
Or maybe the issue is actually a question regarding the scope of consent: those opposing abortion believe a woman who consents to sex automatically consents to a pregnancy (cf also that many think abortion is permissible in case of rape). Before marital rape was outlawed the idea was that a woman who marries gives her consent to sex with her husband for a lifetime, and think of those who think consent to a date includes consent to sex (cf your text about consent being not an action but a state of being).
The question whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant, as no born person has the right to use an other person's body against their will. There is e.g. no compulsory organ donation (not even e.g. blood donation for persons who caused an accident where the victim needs blood). After her baby is born, a mother is not forced to let her baby use her body, so actually a fetus has more rights than a born person, and a pregnant woman has less.
Compulsory vaccination is rare, so bodily freedom does include the right to contribute to the death of others by spreading disease.
I’m a 69 year old New Zealand woman who is feeling as if the premise on which I have based my life, that I am a person deserving of the rights of a person, is about to be declared mistaken by the country that, with Roe v Wade, once led the way to our freedom. For reasons I do not really understand, I am finding this profoundly upsetting. My grief for women and girls in the US is huge, but there is grief also for those of us not directly affected. When will men be burning us at the stake again? The pure hatred of the patriarchy is terrifying.
Patriarchy is such an obstinate ideology and it pervades every last detail of life in every corner of the world. Its roots in animal husbandry is profoundly shaping how ‘breeding’ and ‘gene pools’ regards women’s being as that of livestock. If livestock is sick, it’s disposed of; if it doesn’t breed, it’s disposed of; if it’s not eugenically pleasing, it’s disposed of. If there’s cruelty in the husbandry it’s dismissed as it is with animals - we don’t feel pain like patriarchal agencies do.
It regards womanly orifices, and women’s whole being, as property. It regards rape and assault as minimally invasive and simply sexual recreation for powerful males. Like animals in a meadow they are game, food, utility. In these acts and their forgiveness and erasure, all men are ushered within patriarchy to view women as holes, territory to have a phallic flag raised over.
It regards women or POC or queer people or aboriginal people or disabled people or the working class as trespassing when they dare to be people in their full and unique personhood, in any public sphere. Being outside, being public, being *visible* trying to walk as belonged in any realm is a threat to the obstinate, angry patriarchal system which is essentially based on primogeniture and patrilineal gene pools.
Abortion is a deep narcissistic wound of patriarchy. Men have always (and will always) fretted about the reproductive uncertainty of women. They’ve always fretted about their unfettered access to pussy. We are watching the rapacious tantrum of patriarchy completely unable to argue on its own terms. Because those terms are basically: women aren’t people, they are livestock.
We buy into terms about how much of a pregnancy determines the boundaries of our personhood with these encroaching arguments, aimed at razing any arguments of our human dignity.
Your central point that women are beings in the world, with our own stories of autonomous pride and heroism is so unsettling, is so destabilising to patriarchy’s control.
It won’t go quietly and I feel that’s the nub of what we are seeing. Angry men, with co-opted socially ushers, getting their way in defining over and over, our lack of human being-ness.
I dunno, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the United States (I won't speak for other countries in which I have never lived) was a mistake, and it isn't fair to the rest of us to have to live with these antisocial extremists and allow them a voice at a civilized table when they are so obviously and proudly opposed to the values that underpin a functioning society.
As in, the act of uniting the states?
More that being forced to play with the kid who keeps kicking over your sandcastle isn't fair to the other kids. We're too big, and a huge portion of us don't want to behave.
I wonder if there's too much civ going on. It all seems like a computer game, trading off a few happy faces for a higher growth rate. It's all just icons and numbers, there are no human faces in here. It's actually terrifying, if you think of it that way.
I think you nailed it with your point about surveillance, Laurie. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the government didn’t have recourse to the current pantheon of medical and information technologies, from transvaginal ultrasounds to digital algorithms. In the wake of the pandemic, we’re even more primed than ever to let the state watch and manage what we do with our bodies. There’s no way misogynists won’t use that power to enforce reproductive controls on women, especially poor black and brown women. (Meanwhile, middle class women will be able to afford to send away for abortion pills by mail order.)
Absolutely. Before Roe, reliable pregnancy testing- and even ultrasounds- were far less available. The idea of making abortion illegal at six weeks would have been laughable.
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.
Could you share the link to that post? 💜
It seems to me that there are patterns within patterns, and there is good cause to worry about coercive policies that go far beyond reproductive healthcare, but I don't want to derail this discussion. At the moment, I just want to let people who might at some point be affected by Roe v. Wade know that I too am afraid and angry at the prospect of seeing it overturned.
Thanks. That’s so so important. I take the note.
(AMA, I just wrote a giant book where I got deep into the weeds on all this)
I am increasingly worried that I have been suckered into thinking that demography made an overall trend inexorable: towards increasing diversity and increasing appreciation of diversity, and inclusion and equality. I am even more worried that all my intuition is wrong about how to respond to reversal of that trend, and that the people and organisations that laid the groundwork for Brexit and Trump will manipulate everything to where all that I hold dear is marginalised. Roe v. Wade does not affect me personally, but I am energised to work towards a future where all people can feel safe.
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.
It's also important to note, and I'm paraphrasing my partner here, that outlawing abortion is theoretically antisemitic. This is a Christian supremacist group forcing its values on lots of people who do not share them, and limiting their religious freedom as a result.
it's also been about racism from the very start.
It's not just Roe V Wade, it's also
Obergefell v. Hodges
Lawrence v. Texas
Griswold v. Connecticut
Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County
Brown v. Board of Education
Which can be struck down by just this one ruling.
Basically all the progressive equality related rulings back to ending segregation.
Hang on- explain?
They are all based on a certain interpretation of the constitution, and modern interpretations by SCOTUS can over rule the previous.
Justice Sotomayor covered this in her rebuttal to Kavanaugh's gaslighting. She covered his deceptive choice of cases, and how many could fall if Roe does.
We keep allowing the conservatives to set the framework and tone of all our socio-political discussions, and therefore start from a 100-point deficit to begin with. Just like "insurance" is NOT "healthcare", abortion is not the issue. The real issue is whether a woman and her doctor are allowed the autonomy to make the best decisions for the woman's health, like men are allowed to with their doctors.
Men HAVE the right to discuss any medical issues openly and freely with their doctors. Including vasectomies, the prescribing of Viagra, or even whether or not to get a freakin' face lift!
Women do NOT have that right. THAT is the issue. Not abortion.
Until we reframe these issues as they ACTUALLY are - this is a healthcare issue, NOT an 'abortion' issue - we cannot have a productive discussion.
Doctors are trained to deal with a colossal range of health care issues, both the physical aspect and the mental aspects of those decisions. For example, choosing to amputate a limb comes with a heavy psychological burden... exactly like choosing to abort a fetus for any reason. Until we address these issues as holistic healthcare issues, we are playing soccer on a pitch that has a 45-degree tilt. It's time to level the playing field and stop playing the conservative rage machine's game with their ball, with their rules, on their pitch.
Liberals (like me) fall for this stunt every time the conservatives pull it. And we just need to stop lowering our discourse to their most reductive - and extreme - cases.
I'm interested - what do you think the difference is with framing it as 'healthcare' versus abortion? I suppose the issue there is who you're pitching to...
Conservatives have made abortion their philosophical issue. Agree to any point, and they can move the goalposts arbitrarily in any direction. Third trimester. Second trimester. Fourteen weeks. Engage with them on their terms, and they get to rewrite the terms of their political narrative, and obscure the real-world implications and impacts of their hateful policies on women's health.
But if it is an equal access to healthcare issue, there are plenty of interlinked policies that ca reduce the NEED for abortions… from simply providing access to contraceptives, to mental health counseling, to reinforcing laws to protect women from predators and stalkers. Expand the conversation to healthcare, and abortion becomes one small endpoint at the extreme end of one fork of assessing a health issue.
And that second paragraph is what gives away the game. They understand that pregnancy can be an undesirable consequence of sex, and they want it to be. Punishment for transgression is what they are after.
I think it reads dramatically differently depending on the audience. To a conservative, "healthcare" is a euphemism, whereas to a leftist it's simply accurate. On the other hand, using "abortion" directly addresses the right without euphemism, but is also a rallying cry for conservatives to fight against. Conservatives are quite good at weaponizing language, it turns out.
exactly. a mate of mine said recently that they are so much better than us at instrumentalising our own values against us. I think that's why we need to be clear about what our values here actually are.
I often wonder why, on issues like this- and especially with this issue- liberals and progressives back off from saying what we really mean. We start out on the back foot saying things like ‘we aren’t pro abortion.’ Why not? I’m pro abortion for anyone who needs it.
I suspect part of why we don’t articulate our real desires and fears is that part of us suspects, deep down, that we are wrong to feel this way. That if we were really decent people, nice girls, right-thinking god loving members of society we would not put women’s real lives above the notional life of a fetus. That feeling the way we do is somehow indecent, unethical, perverted, dirty and just plain wrong.
It isn’t.
We are morally correct on this issue and we need to start saying so. The Christian Right does not get to own the language of morality.
I am lucky in that on this issue at least I have as near as damnit absolute moral certainty. What is monstrous and unconscionable is the prospect of the state forcing any human being to go through pregnancy and childbirth against their will. What is evil is treating one class of people as disposable bodies that ought to be put wholly in service to another and calling it ‘pro-life’. It is utterly wrong.
I am not just pro abortion for anyone who needs it. I want safe abortions easily and freely (free in the sense of liberty, as well as paid for by taxes) available to anyone who _wants_ it. That is not a controversial opinion, though, among the people I socialise with.
/rant
To a conservative, "healthcare" is a SINISTER euphemism*
Feeling worried for my friends in America. Though I also know how the women of America are tough and determined, and that they will fight like hell against any attempt to take away their bodily rights.
If there’s a positive here, it’s that this time, if they really go through with it, the backlash might just be strong enough to break some of those unjust power structures that let things get to this point. We can but hope…
I'd like to think we can do more than hope, and we can work to make it happen. Even those of us who are not in America.
I look forward to the involuntary live organ donation patrols.
But seriously, that politics is the only barrier protecting bodily autonomy is frightening!
I was 16 when the Supreme Court decided Roe. I was keenly aware of the victory as nations wide and personal. If I needed an abortion in the future I could get one. (And 3 years later, I did. And felt damn relieved Roe was law.) . My youngest son is now 16. He is not usually interested in politics but he is paying attention to this. It’s personal for him too. And sort of befuddling. I have tried to impress upon him that democracy and the rights he enjoys today are not necessarily going to be around forever. Sadly, he’s starting to see just how true this is. I feel sobered by the sense that a lot is slipping through our fingers right now. History does not necessarily curve towards progress.