I’m seeing a lot of comments that This Is The Beginning. Referring of course to the leaked SCOTUS opinion to overturn Roe.
No, this is not the beginning. The beginning was the first time we allowed the so-called Pro-Life movement to derail state services to protest something that ought to be considered a basic right. It has grown from that seed. This is not the beginning, this is somewhere along just past the middle.
The mistakes—only in hindsight in some instances, but not all—began when we allowed the notion that one person’s idea of proper behavior merited their intrusion into another person’s life choices. We can air all that time and again and gain no traction because for the committed anti-choice advocate there seems to be no compromise. They come from a deep background that does not allow for a conception of sex as a matter of individual choice. Which is why we see so many of them not only on the front lines of the anti-abortion movement, but also advocates for limiting access to contraception, anti-LGBTQ rights, and among the loudest in opposition to Trans rights. We can try to psychoanalyze motives all we want, but clearly they have some belief that sex should only ever be conducted within the strict limits of a presumably biblical model, because evidently sex is not a right shared by humans but a reward for Good Behavior (gifted primarily if not exclusively to heterosexual men) and grounds for punishment if indulged by anyone outside those limits.
The emphasis on those limits tells us what is at stake politically. All the posturing and rhetorical sleight-of-hand aside, what this says to women as a group is: how dare you have aspirations.
All personal aspirations—goals, dreams, ambitions, preferences—begin in a recognition of choice. And all choice—the “reward” of growing from child to adult—is grounded in the ability to say No.
When you say to a woman that she may not control her life based on her own aspirations, you are telling her she may not say No.
You are telling her that she has no choice.
And before you object that men are likewise bound, very simply we are not. In this particular part of life, we have one freedom women have for millennia been denied: we can walk away.
All the rest follows from that basic distinction.
Now, of course this limitation of choice is useful for any dominant group in relation to those not in that group. But it all comes down to that one thing—a denial of the freedom to have aspirations and act on them.
This has been pointed out and argued for five decades—longer—and yet those who would gleefully overturn Roe are unmoved. They know what they want and the longer we ignore the fact that what they want has nothing to do with the ostensible focus of their cause and try to litigate what is or is not “human” in the context of what happens within a uterus, the more we lose ground. It is an intractable argument in those terms because it is not based on fact, evidence, or logic, but on sentiment and resentment. The kind of sentiment, I might add, that rejects all other sentiment if it does not align with theirs.
A woman’s ability to determine her own reproductive destiny, regardless of circumstance, is fundamental to any concept of equality.
And as we have seen since the Phyllis Schlafly campaign to derail the ERA, that is the thing at the heart of the matter. One group saying to the other, you may not have aspirations. We want you to fill a subordinate role.
Equality begins with the freedom to say no. No, I will not surrender my autonomy to meet your expectations of who I should be.
And boys, if you don’t think this applies to you, too, I think you have a surprise coming.
