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| Photo by Jacquelyn Martin from the Associated Press |
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
This was written in the 98-page screed voting to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision leaked to POLITICO back in May. The draft supreme court opinion was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, an aggressively Catholic jurist known for his right-wing leanings and long-standing hostility to constitutional abortion rights.
He is 1 out of 5 justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade; he is joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
These are the names of the supposed guardians of the Constitution. Engraved above the front entrance of the United States Supreme Court building are the words in bold, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW which is the same legal principle that’s widely violated in a country that will staunchly protect a fetus and show more love for guns than actual living women.
In this unflinching historical setback, we witness the willful negation of women’s rights over their bodies. We live in a time that’s progressive enough to streamline robotics, AI, and big data but would very much treat women’s bodies as a legislative playing field—carving their wombs with regressive laws thereby taking away their fundamental right to self-determination.
The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave
I refuse to believe that the conservative justices were not influenced by their political and ideological leanings when Justice Alito himself has a long legal career that features firm opposition to abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, and support of gun rights. It is no surprise, yet with immense disappointment, that the majority-conservative Supreme Court overruled long-established progress that has definitively struck down democracy in a country that’s known to be “The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”
The American government has a long history of enforcing control over women’s bodies. Over the past decade, Republicans have introduced numerous measures in restricting access to abortion. They are demonstrative of their stance on the matter, such as Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene saying abortion laws “protect life” and former Vice President Mike Pence stating on Twitter that “today, life won.” But the claim on human life is silly, an argument that is just as silly as the reality of a male-dominated Congress making decisions on what women get to do with their bodies.
If it was really about protecting human life, then the facile argumentation of the pro-life movement proves how dismissive they are of social dynamics and the intersectionality of human life—meaning to be pro-life, the logic has to mean one must also help in cultivating the quality of life regardless of who people are and where they come from; this would include supporting sex workers, people who seek for divorce, and being one with the LGBTQIA+ community. And to even begin imagining religious, pro-life Republicans supporting queer people as part of their movement’s ethos is like trying to picture Jesus with horns. It just doesn’t work. It never will because the claim on life is far too simplistic when we’re talking about human issues that necessitate the multi-pronged approach of politics, economics, and jurisprudence—not tradition and religion. Moreover, if the pro-life movement’s religious argumentation is truly consistent with caring about lives, then they should also acknowledge and take decisive actions on the global cases of sexual abuse involving children in the Catholic Church.
Pro-life is not pro-humanity
The hypocrisy of the clamor and insistence that abortion is immoral because of how it destroys the “right to life” transpires in the same land that is fraught with police killings and racially prejudiced violence against Black people; xenophobic treatment and hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans; restriction of access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth; exploitation of ancestral landscapes and resources of Indigenous communities; and any politician who says they care about children would also care enough to do something about the numerous school shootings that have been happening so regularly and normally that any person could walk in with a gun and start shooting kids like they’re at an arcade.
This is the problem when justice is being theologized. There is nothing wrong with adopting a particular way of life in harmony with religious beliefs, and I couldn’t care less about a person’s religion, but when it comes to the matter of using religious beliefs to prohibit others from exercising their freedom, actualizing control over their lives, and enforcing authoritative means to ensure they do not get that autonomy is a different conversation. Abortion is not the extreme means, it is when people in power utilize their position and prowess to perpetuate the othering of women in society. Now, that’s extreme. Well, it’s usual for the patriarchy, it’s just like taking long walks on the beach and having a cup of hot coffee in the morning. Nothing out of the ordinary. Similarly, they take that kind of pleasure and comfort in furthering to secure their power in society.
There would be pro-life people who will argue that they aren’t just pro-birth—that they do care about mothers and babies after they’re born. But the extent of that claim’s sincerity is dubious and the reach of their conviction in caring would stop when policies begin to pervade and challenge their religious and moral systems of thinking. And these “concerned” politicians don’t really care. They don’t care if you are emotionally, mentally, and financially unprepared for a child. They don’t care about the substandard quality of maternal care. They don’t care if you are going to single-handedly raise a child. They don’t care if you had a miscarriage. They don’t care about maternal mortality, that around 303,000 women die annually due to childbirth, and how the majority of these deaths occur in developing countries and could have been prevented. They wouldn’t care if a woman has to bear a child out of rape or incest. I don’t have to include the latter as reasoning to give grounds for the absurdity of criminalizing abortion because the foreground of this matter is about freedom, equity, and reproductive justice, and achieving those basic human rights does not have to involve violating them in the first place. These are intrinsic to humanity, and the reality of how we continuously grapple to attain them is wildly enraging.
Shame and womanhood
So if a pro-life person tells you that they do understand and care, they don’t. If they do, they’d also recognize that the responsibility of childbirth and childrearing aren’t solely undertaken by women and they’d place the same emphasis on this onus to men. Why is it that so much of the gravity of making, raising, and sustaining life is centralized on women? As if the pain isn’t enough, society shames and devalues women because of the choices they make and how they live their lives outside the realms of the conventional image and traditional archetype of womanhood. Society shames women who are assertive by calling them pushy and bossy. Society shames infertile women. Society shames women who want many kids. Society shames women who don’t want to have kids. Society shames women who don’t want to get married. Society shames women who have been divorced or separated. Society shames women who want to prioritize their careers and dreams than start a family. Society shames women who challenge the status quo and take up space unusually larger than expected.
There’s just so much shame, distrust, and guilt-tripping on women. This is one of the main reasons why many people think women can’t lead, even if you slap them in the face with historical milestones championed by women proving that they are just as capable, if not, even better, they’d still think of the typified, “tried-and-tested” leader—a man—even when they could be incapable and far from qualified. As said by Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne, “it hurts to know that the most incompetent, morally bankrupt, and ignorant white man can be elected.” Moreover, she calls misogyny the “law enforcement branch of patriarchy” and I couldn’t think of a more apt representation of this whole predicament on Roe v Wade—using legislation to punish women—set them back and keep them there to maintain the power dynamics that strengthen the patriarchy.
Men and their marriage with power
This is the appalling socio-political fabric woven by men, who can move as they please because there are no laws prohibiting their bodily freedom, but they feel the necessity to enforce this prohibition on women under the smokescreen of public service. This issue is facilitated in society by men who celebrate and support such backward decisions; those who don’t stand against rape culture; those who think of patriarchy as normal; those who actively undermine women, when in actuality, patriarchy affects them too as it gives rise to the societal byproduct of toxic masculinity (which is also a topic fit for a separate lengthy discussion). Yet these are the same men who have no understanding of the uterus, how the vagina works, and if they can even differentiate the vulva from the vagina or locate the clitoris, have the extent of collective empathy smaller than all of their balls combined.
But it doesn’t really matter if they don’t know. There are men in positions of power, and would assume positions of power, who barely know anything but they get what they want simply because of misogyny and patriarchy. There are times that maybe, unbeknownst to us, certain victories can already be lost the moment a society learns that the one in contention is a woman, especially if she has an unorthodox mind and a gutsy spirit. And there is nothing more formidable to society than a woman like that, which is why people who seek to preserve and seek security in the dynamics of patriarchy are hellbent on bringing these kinds of women down.
It’s important to emphasize that the right to abortion is not an anomaly. It’s wrong to think that male supremacy is innately coded in society. Despite the universality of this issue, patriarchy is not a natural state nor will it ever be. As author and journalist Gaia Vince explained that the roots of patriarchy cannot be found in our biology; despite scholars like psychologist Jordan Peterson purporting that patriarchy is the “natural order” due to cognitive differences between men and women (that men are more intelligent and competent), there is no evidence that women are less intelligent or competent—there is no smarter sex! Biological determinism is a dangerous school of thought and it is only through cultural conditioning and entrenchment of social norms that misogyny is born. Just as how we ascribe certain identifiers to what we think is feminine or masculine—blue or pink, men are strong and women are emotional, men are brusque and women are delicate—we become driven by the social structures and relations we create. Hence, establishing an egalitarian society would destabilize the social arrangements supporting patriarchy.
Puritans: It wasn’t like The Scarlet Letter
Contrary to the current socio-political climate, there was a time in the early United States when abortion was legal and widely practiced, and it would be easier for a woman to access abortion in New England during the 17th-18th centuries than today. This comparison is jarring because before the 1840s, Puritans condoned and practiced safe prequickening abortion (quickening refers to the stage when the baby’s movements are felt in the womb) with the help of skilled midwives through herbs. But this eventually took a sharp turn as the campaign to criminalize abortion began when Americans saw the shifting dynamics in society as female independence increased which posed a threat to male power. White men also feared that women choosing to start families later would give rise to changes in racial dynamics and immigrants would occupy their country. As discussed by the Center for American Progress, male doctors saw midwives and homeopaths as competitions. To assert their authority and power, these male doctors joined forces with the Catholic Church and some sensationalist newspapers to campaign for criminalizing abortion.
The onward struggle for liberation
As we’ve come this far discussing abortion rights, we cannot leave this conversation without emphasizing how reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and self-determination do not just involve cis women but the LGBTQIA+ community, people of color, Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and more so to those who belong in more than one of the marginalized and displaced sectors in society. It has been elucidated to us how political intervention bolstered by misogyny has strong ties with racism, queer hatred, bigotry, fundamentalism, and male chauvinism. I cannot be told otherwise because the heart of this issue is simple: justice, equity, and freedom; the loss of women’s rights over their bodies is a loss not just to the spirit of the Constitution but to fundamental humanity. This is a heavier reality for BIPOC who will be placed farther away in the margin.
Misogyny, like practiced culture, justifies a series of norms in society. Oftentimes, without proper recognition and awareness, we unconsciously and subconsciously take part in it. Women can internalize misogyny and it is a heavy implication of the struggle when it can also take place inside. For the times I’ve caught myself projecting and believing in such a kind of hatred, and judging myself with no remorse through a male gaze, I’ve never hated myself more. But this is the nature of something that requires a systemic upheaval, which is also a point to reflect upon as sexism and misogyny could take form in different molds and be found in numerous spaces; even those called to uphold the highest standard of justice in a country could inflict women in the most damaging way, so it’s no surprise that misogynists can also find a home in political spaces—local, international, or even at school levels.
This newly realized claim on women’s bodies is an age-old message to people that it has always been about power—not protecting women and children—but the perpetuation and advancement of power. Roe v Wade is just one of many historical measures that shows how misguided and misaligned society can become in terms of our understanding of freedom and conception of equity. There is no such thing as human freedom if we can’t even trust women to have autonomy over their bodies. Justice is not and should never be a gendered discussion, end of the story.
