Why It Matters
Why It Matters
Overturning Roe is about abortion access. But it's also about the status of women.
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The bastards actually did it: The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the era of legal abortion in the United States, and returning women as a whole to the status of second-class citizens — people who have ostensibly equal rights right up until one of our eggs is fertilized, at which point we have fewer rights than a corpse.
I am having a hard time writing this newsletter, because I am so absolutely fucking incandescent with rage. There are not enough goddamned italicized adjectives to emphasize how devastated / manic / scorchingly furious I am.
Maybe you are feeling the same way. I hope you are. I hope you are ready to burn it all down.
This decision has, obviously, devastating effects for people seeking abortions. As of this morning, getting a legal abortion is now close to impossible in nearly half of US states. We know what that means: An entire universe of people cut off from their potential, consigned to poverty and struggle. We have a pretty good idea, thanks to research in the US and from all over the world, what happens when people cannot get the abortions they seek:
Women wind up poorer, and more likely to be on public assistance.
Women are more likely to be trapped in abusive relationships.
Women sustain injuries and health complications that endure for years or possibly the rest of their lives.
Women’s existing children are worse off.
The children women were forced to have wind up worse off — poorer, with more social and behavioral problems, and less bonded to their mothers.
Women are less likely to go on to have planned, wanted children who have a better chance to thrive.
Women wind up sicker and with more mental and physical health complications.
Women are more likely to die.
These are simple facts, acknowledged even by more honest abortion opponents — they have just decided that women living in poverty, women sustaining serious physical injuries, children struggling and suffering, and women dying is a fair trade-off for the ability to force half the population to submit to male authority.
That doesn’t mean abortions won’t happen — feminists and abortion rights activists are working overtime to make sure that people can end pregnancies when they need to, regardless of where they live. Please do pass around information about Plan C and Aid Access, and emphasize that the end of Roe does not have to mean the end of safe abortion in America.
We will continue to get abortion-inducing medications to anyone in need. We will not cede ground. Our bodies are ours, and a change in the law does not change that truth.
But a change in the law — this kind of change in the law — does change the status of women overall. It is the highest Court in the land, backed by one of our two major parties, telling women writ large: You are not equal citizens.
Outlawing abortion puts women in a unique class. In no other context are people in the US obligated to donate their organs to another. I’ll be crass about it: If a fertilized egg or an embryo or a fetus is an independent person, fine — remove it from a woman’s body and let it do its thing.
What abortion opponents are not arguing for is the right of a fertilized egg or an embryo or a fetus to have the same rights as you or I; if that were the case, well, then that egg / embryo / fetus would have a right to life, but not a right to use someone else’s organs to sustain their life. That’s why people cannot demand that anyone donate them a kidney; it’s why the law does not even compel parents to donate a kidney (or any other organ) to their children; it’s why we don’t even have mandatory organ donation from the dead.
And yet abortion opponents would never agree to proposal to simply remove an embryo from the uterus and let it live its life without demanding of a pregnant person something we do not demand of anyone else in any other context. Abortion opponents don’t really care about the lives of embryos at all, except insofar as they can force women to carry pregnancies. Consider: Roughly half of fertilized eggs don’t implant, and flush out of the body. Not a single anti-abortion group has ever done one single thing to even investigate why half of these “lives” are dying before a pregnancy even begins. And yet they are more than happy to begin subjugating the rights of women from the moment sperm hits egg.
That’s because none of this is really about abortion or life or fetal personhood at all. It’s about expanding male authority and using the law as a cudgel to enforce female submission.
Outlawing abortion puts women in a totally unique category of person with fewer rights than any other — fewer rights, certainly, than the egg / embryo / fetus women are forced to carry. Outlawing abortion puts women from the moment an egg is fertilized in the lowest possible category of person. Even before a woman is pregnant, she is consigned to this status of sub-person who is legally required to use her body in the service of a fertilized egg imbued with far greater rights than she; she has fewer rights to her own body than any other category of person, dead or alive, in the US.
This matters for all of us.
This decision doesn’t just mean that some women will be poorer, or sicker, or will wind up dead, although it certainly does mean that. It means that women as a class are consigned to a lesser status; that we are broadly understood, pregnant or not, to be categorically subjugated to male authority.
It also means that women as a class will materially suffer. More women forced into pregnancy means more women sick, injured, mentally ill, and dead. It means fewer women who are able to pursue their goals and dreams. It means we will have so much less: Less creation, less art, less innovation. It means that children have fewer opportunities, that many who would have been invited into a world in which they were wanted and cherished and supported will simply never exist.
It means a return to a broader norm of seeing women as child-bearers first — a norm that will handicap all women in our work lives. It means a return to male authority over female bodies — a norm that will hurt all women in our personal lives. Some of this will be obvious but much of it will be subtle: The discrimination against women in the workplace because, when you can’t control your fertility, it’s awfully difficult to control the trajectory of your professional life; the power this hands men in heterosexual romantic relationships, whose partners are now taking an immense risk with every sexual interaction; the way that this turns sex from something ideally fun and connective into a locus of fear and violence — because yes, it is an act of physical violence to force a woman to continue a pregnancy against her will.
This decision is firstly about abortion access, and the fact that millions of people just lost it. But it is much more broadly about the oppression of women. Because yes, abortion is a healthcare issue, and it’s an economic issue, and it’s an equality issue, but abortion is fundamentally an issue of women’s freedom. It is a question of oppression versus liberation.
Even if you never need an abortion or would never want an abortion, every woman and girl in America (and a lot of men and boys, too) is worse off today because of this decision. Every woman and girl in America has been, with the stroke of a pen, designated something less than a full citizen.
xx Jill
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