I have been meaning to write for some days about the Supreme Court ruling, the utter hypocrisy of a court that has been so politically constructed through the most obvious clown politics which resulted from four years of a fake presidency, and now women are on the front lines of the American consciousness, a spectacle of absurdity to most of the developed world trying to imagine how far a country has fallen after so many decades of perceived membership in the forward movement of civil and human rights.
I haven’t written about it yet because I am still taking in all the implications. I have to start first by acknowledging that as a woman without a uterus, as a woman who has never had a uterus, I must acknowledge that I am less qualified to speak about this issue or express my opinion than a woman with a uterus especially one of childbearing age and especially a woman of color or any person with a uterus of child bearing age. I also acknowledge that the implications of this are that while I do support full reproductive rights for all women and people with reproductive options, I am speaking as someone excluded from that circle because of my unique body, which if capable of bearing children would gladly participate fully in this conversation.
Still, in spite of my trans woman status, I have long been in full favor of abortion and women’s rights more generally although that was not always the case. As a child, I was raised in an environment that was culturally against abortion. My childhood was not particularly informed about sex or reproductive choices, I was basically told throughout my childhood that birth is a miracle and God is in control of the world. I was also basically told that people have souls and that their soul is created in the womb of a mother. I remember words like womb, mother, baby. I don’t remember words like abortion, fetus, choice. I also don’t remember words like feminist, patriarchy, or male privilege being used in the context of my childhood.
What is particularly striking to me, in Dobbs, is that the argument that the court’s majority takes boils down to the talking point that there isn’t any constitutionally protected right to an abortion and that the language of the constitution doesn’t mention any such right, therefore it is not a constitutional right. The argument seems to be at the level of sophistication of a freshman-level of reasoning in a high school debate where the student has poorly planned and has presented their case without any historical, cultural, or legal understanding of American case law. It is difficult to even know where to begin to address this. We all knew it was coming. I could see the writing on the wall about six years ago and posted as much in a series of commentaries here on Facebook.
This issue, as well as abolition of nuclear weapons, the fight for civil rights, feminism, environmental protections, preserving social security, and expanding healthcare access for all Americans have been the defining issues of my generation. As a political activist, I have hung my hat on each of these hooks realizing that each civil and human right that we fight for must be zealously guarded and guaranteed by local, state, and federal law, and in addition to being protected by right of law, we must reinforce a culture in which the exclusion of these rights is deterred whether those efforts come from the church, political parties or the media.
The Left and Liberalism more generally, the struggle for the rights of the people is a struggle which has its origins in the west in the French revolution. The struggle for Liberte, Egalite, Maternite is also a slogan against colonialism, slavery, and subjugation. The original argument of the rights of the people as laid in the foundation of many historical documents of the enlightenment and dawn of representative government have all moved in one direction, toward the expansion of said rights. Now that has been stopped dead by a reactionary conservative court that is hell-bent on sending America back to the 19th century when women didn’t have any rights, gay people didn’t exist, and civil rights were a form of wishful thinking.
In human culture sometimes things move fast and sometimes they move slow. Some movements happen at the snail’s pace of the deep ocean global conveyor belt and sometimes things happen at the speed of a gulf coast hurricane. What just hit America is closer to a hurricane than it is to a deep-water current, but its roots are deep in American history. The problems that have led to this point are found in that foundational argument that the court so absurdly made in the last week of June 2022 when it established that women’s rights don’t matter and let the public know that gays can’t get married, queers can’t have sex, families can’t use contraception for family planning and the door is open again to anti-miscegenation laws.
On the one hand, I tell myself that this is just part of the way American politics works, I understand that in the long arc of history the pendulum of American jurisprudence swings this way and then swings that way. On the other hand, I remind myself that the entire American civil war could have been avoided if the court had ruled differently in Dred Scott and I wonder if this is a similar decision. I just don’t even know where to begin to unpack what this means culturally. This is a global event in that it intersects with almost every aspect of lived experience for American life. Perhaps it is best to start from a wide frame and move in, and I think it is best not to place our measurements in the hands of institutions that don’t represent us in any meaningful way, namely the courts, state legislature, federal legislature, or the executive branch.
Our ground of meaning is our innate rights given to us by nature. The natural rights of human beings will always be fundamental to any kind of human meaning and these rights will always assert themselves against the state, against the police, and any force which attempts to exert its form of authoritarianism over the body, whether that is the hospital, the priest or the anti-abortionist who will commit murder in the name of God. These people are the enemies of freedom and the enemy of women. Anyone who will take away human freedom must be met with force and resistance and that resistance isn’t legislative. The legislatures have failed us, they have failed to meet our real needs in any meaningful way. When the rights of the people have been so neglected then it is time for a revolution, indeed a revolutionary movement is past due in this country, a movement for women’s rights, for the rights of people of color, a movement for labor rights, for the rights of the environment, the rights of nature, animal liberation, peace, sexual freedom, freedom from religion, health care, prison abolition, and indigenous personhood.
In the moment though what does this mean? Don’t believe anyone who tells you this is a state’s rights issue. It isn’t. As soon as the Repugnicans can do it they will try to enact a federal ban on abortion. This is a moving target and that is actually the next big target. Now that some states have swiftly cashed in on their political position and banned abortion in Wisconsin and Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alabama they will feel empowered, the way a rapist does who commits the same act twice, anti-abortionist are going to feel empowered by their fake victory handed to them by the clown court put in place by their fake president, and they are going to go for the gold, their eyes on the prize of stuffing their bibles down every hole they can find filled with the zeal of their patriarchal god.
Any argument about State’s rights is total bullshit. It might be a brief transitionary landscape where private citizens will sue me in Oregon for contributing to funds that help women in Texas buy online pharmaceuticals or it might be a case before the Supreme court that attempts to argue there is no constitutional right to travel and therefore states are perfectly free to prohibit their citizens from traveling across state lines to commit murder. It might be a show trial of a gynecologist sentenced to death in Texas for performing an abortion on a 34-year-old woman who had an ectopic pregnancy or it might be a ten-year sentence handed down to a mother in South Dakota for bringing her daughter to Minnesota for an abortion after she was raped.
No matter how they do it, the Repugnicans and the religious right only have one goal and you need to remember that when you are planning your revolution. Their goal is to take away the right of every woman in this country to reproductive health care. Their goal is a federal ban on abortion, and they will distort every law, manipulate every gerrymandered state legislature, bribe every politician, occupy every right-wing AM radio station, and fund every political action committee with unlimited campaign donations in order to obtain their goals. They don’t have any problem with sending women to prison for having miscarriages and this is just the beginning of a long and unnecessary waste of time for women, the Left, and people of conscience to get back a right that we had just yesterday.
