What Is a Woman?

According to conservatives, she's an incubator.

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

In 1990, Terri Schiavo of Florida had a heart attack that left her in a permanent vegetative state. She was on life support, and her husband wanted to take her off of the machines, arguing that she would not have wanted to live in that condition. Her parents disagreed. They all wound up in an ugly public court battle, and a heartbreaking, complex, and ultimately private family matter became a politicized spectacle.

If you weren’t alive or particularly tuned in during the Terri Schiavo case, it’s hard to understand how much of a media circus it was, and the degree to which it dominated the discourse. It was so pervasive that I have a clear memory of it, and was surprised, in googling the date for this piece, to see that it happened in 1990 — when I was seven.

It’s telling about how far we’ve regressed on women’s rights, then, that unless you’re really paying attention to abortion-related news, you probably haven’t heard the name Adriana Smith.