On Roe
It’s been a dystopian week with the US Supreme Court’s leaked draft, spelling out the end of Roe vs. Wade. Incredulous as it sounds that this can happen in 2022, we also know that it is the culmination of an anti-abortion movement that goes back several decades. Republicans have been organizing for this moment for a long time. There’s nothing new about undermining women’s autonomy, Sarah Stankorb writes, with examples of how old evangelical media offers a primer for the attack on Roe.
And yet, women are vibrating with so much disappointment, rage and disbelief in this moment. Because the generations of women before us already fought this fight—more than 50 years ago. I took solace in Elizabeth Warren’s enraged face as she spoke to journalists. She’s seen the pre-abortion rights world, and she says she is “never going back”. I read Mona Eltahawy’s essay on abortion, sharing stories of her own abortions 25 years on (one “illegal one in Egypt, and another “legal” one in France). I went back to Paula Rego’s Abortion Series, her art showing backstreet abortions in 1998, credited with swaying public opinion and leading to its legalization in Portugal in 2007. She says: “The series was born from my indignation. It's unbelievable that women who have an abortion should be considered criminals. I cannot abide the idea of blame for this act. What each woman suffers in having to do it is enough.”
This moment rests within a larger one, where women’s rights are under attack everywhere. I’m sitting in Pakistan as I write this and to the west, in Afghanistan—which the world has already moved on from— this week, the Taliban have made the burqa mandatory. To my east in India, courts in Karnataka have banned the hijab, with Hindu supremacist groups seeking a wider ban on young women choosing to cover their heads.
Everywhere I look, women’s bodies are the battleground for political and social wars, the canvas for the state to exercise its will. Even when it comes to abortion, it helps to remember that not too long ago, we have also seen the opposite of this—in China in the 1980s and 90s, women were forced to abort their babies when the One Child Policy was mandated. Nanfu Wang’s 2019 documentary ‘One Child Nation’ is a rare look into the generations of women forcibly shaped by this autocratic experiment.
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A few things stand out to me about the attack on Roe v. Wade:
1. A complete ban on abortion does not reflect the will of the American people. We have data to show that there is not a single state where support for a federal ban on abortion has more than 30% support among the public. This is an insidious window into the erosion of democratic machinery in the US—legal and political structures are no longer functioning in alignment with what most Americans want. The debate around the Supreme Court’s politicization and the filibuster has resurfaced, as it should.
2. There are no stipulations for any exceptions. Women that are raped, women carrying unviable fetuses (that will not complete term, or be stillborn), women that require emergency abortions such as in ectopic pregnancies and so on) will be forced to carry fetuses. This harshest-possible ruling is a validation of what abortion rights activists have been saying for a long time—if we lose these rights, it will not stop at abortion. There is already talk among Republicans of banning contraception, for example. At the same time, it also bears stating that abortion is a human right; it is healthcare — even as we discuss the no-exceptions horror of abortion bans, we must remember that women do not owe anyone any explanation for why they are aborting. Much as we reject the ‘worthy victim’ story in sexual assault, we also need to reject the idea of a ‘worthy recipient’ of abortion, as Mona Eltahawy tweeted.
3. Most women that get abortions are already mothers. Yet abortion is pitted as the antithesis of motherhood.
4. Anti-abortion activists care about the embryo but not about the baby. None of the 23 states that are about to ban or restrict abortion offer paid family leave. A structure of support around motherhood and raising a family has always been starkly absent from the US social and healthcare systems. Being pro-life would mean expanding this support system; forcing women into motherhood achieves the opposite of that. This is why feminist activists and writers don’t use the term “pro-life” for anti-abortion anymore. This isn’t and never was about supporting life. Using this term provides cover to policies that are in fact, anti-life. Language matters.
5. The manner in which this ruling infantilizes women feels like a person insult to every woman’s intellect, agency and decision-making power. This ruling tells us that we are not capable of making decisions about our bodies and our lives. That policing our bodies is an acceptable legal recourse—when no such precedent exists for doing the same to male bodies.
6. I can’t stop thinking about how significant this is for women’s participation in the workforce, in living out their personal and professional dreams. Being forced to carry an unplanned or unwanted child to term is an irreversible crime inflicted upon women’s bodies. Already 80% of single mothers in the US are women. Mothers that struggle financially, logistically, emotionally, psychologically to raise children by themselves in a country with very little to no support structures for mothers.
7. The shroud of shame and secrecy around everything to do with women’s bodies—menstruation, breastfeeding, female sexual anatomy, pregnancy, labor, menopause— claims lives. Here it’s important to differentiate between privacy and secrecy, the latter being an imposed construct laced with shame and taboos, and the former being an individual’s choice to select what parts of their lives and bodies they share, a choice that confers dignity and autonomy. From my time working in reproductive health in Sindh, Pakistan, I have witnessed that this shame can be so pronounced that pregnant women visit primary care doctors, but are too ashamed to tell them that they are pregnant, and end up not receiving the medical care they need. But even in the US, it is our censorship of female bodies that prevents women from getting care for vaginal infections, for being fully prepared and supported for labor, for being able to make informed decisions about breastfeeding. This censorship creates a knowledge vacuum which then impacts rules and regulations. Just this week, a tweet by Emmy-nominated science host Emily Calandrelli about her harrowing experience at the airport with the TSA about breastmilk went viral. Thousands of moms responded with similar experiences, revealing TSA’s lack of basic knowledge about breastfeeding mothers, and how their rules do not make space for mothers that need to breastfeed.
And then there’s the current, acute shortage of infant formula milk in the US to which men have responded with “breastfeeding is free” — showing public ignorance about how breasts produce milk, and what it takes to breastfeed. In this case—the fact that women’s breasts are still so hyper-sexualized that they are completely censored from public view even when women need to feed their babies—is a massive impediment to mothers’ mobility, workforce participation, and sanity.
That our bodies can only be discussed or revealed in the context of their sexualization needs to change. Unless we can see, learn, talk about women’s bodies and bodily functions, we cannot provide them the support necessary for them to survive in these roles.
This is very much the case with abortion as well. We know that roughly 25% of pregnancies (or 1 in 4) are aborted—we all know someone who has undergone an abortion—yet the shame and secrecy around it creates such sticky negative stereotypes and demonizes abortion to the degree that medical professionals routinely deny service to women in need of abortions, forcing them to seek care in unsafe ways. Women that undergo abortion talk about what a clandestine affair it becomes, and how violent, complex and lonely the journey is. This of course, is in cases, where the woman survives to share her story. Close to 15% of maternal deaths globally occur due to unsafe abortions. We need to lift the shroud of shame around abortion.
This is why I’m such a proponent of content on women’s bodies and sexuality. (Recent favorites are Pussypedia, Evvy care, Principles of Pleasure on Netflix, and the podcast Ladies We Need to Talk) and of course, Paula Rego’s Abortion Series.
8. A Mormon mother of six took to Twitter this week with a thread on how since it is male orgasms—not female—that lead to pregnancies, the regulations should focus on men. I found her logic to make common sense, though of course it goes against so many deeply-held biases and will require so many dogmas to be dismantled that it will appear radical to most. The thread though, is worth a read for the thought it provokes and for how it connects to the wider injustice of how women alone carry the burden of collective choices made by couples— contraception not working, or men abandoning parenting responsibilities— as well as the burden of men’s violence: rape, sexual coercion, assault, removing contraception without consent and so on.
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It’s been a tough week. Conversations with my women friends have been heavy. I bought myself my favorite flowers, purchased a few political T-shirts that I intend to wear around NYC all summer (summer of rage!), and looked up the protests I can attend in coming weeks.
