I know it’s not normally polite to talk about abortion, but hey, it looks like the gloves are off. Good, I’ve been waiting for this moment.
In the coming days and weeks we’re going to hear a lot of things from a lot of people, and there is already so much dishonesty and manipulation going on that I feel compelled to make some predictions here, so that later I may have the divine pleasure of saying “I told you so” to everyone trying to downplay or normalize what has just taken place.
Why was Roe struck down? Let’s ask the people who did it. “Roe was a famously weak decision,” they say. “All this does is return the matter to the states, where it belongs. It was wrong for the Supreme Court to make a blanket ruling that forces every state to legalize something like abortion”. I see. Look, if you believe the people who say this, then I’ve got a real sure-thing investment opportunity I can’t wait to tell you about.
These people are lying to your face when they say they believe abortion should be a state decided issue, just like the justices who struck down Roe lied in their confirmations when they said “they believed Roe was a settled matter”. Doesn’t seem so settled now, does it? So why believe them when they say they will let the states decide on abortion? They won’t.
The next step (already being publicly discussed) is to ban abortion at the federal level once conservatives control congress. Their talk of “states’ rights” is nothing more than dishonest pedantry and the type of casuist trick designed to make people think losing their rights is actually good for them, simply because some folks feel the paperwork that outlines those rights is kind of sloppy.
This is like when the Grinch steals Cindy Lou Who’s Christmas tree and, when caught, tells her he’s simply taking it back to his workshop to fix it up and return it to her better than ever.
“You don’t want to enjoy your rights if they’re based on shoddy paperwork, do you? Please… let us take these rights away from you, work on them in our workshop, and return them in better condition than ever!”.
Well, just like the Grinch and the Christmas tree, the GOP has no intention of fixing and returning your rights after a proofread. The Grinch was simply out to destroy Christmas because he hated it… likewise the GOP and your uterus. The fact that a woman is probably safer around the actual Grinch than simply existing in 2022 America is chilling indeed.
This line of reasoning – the “argument from paperwork” - also calls into question so many things that don’t make sense when you follow them to their logical conclusions. Firstly, the suggestion that I don’t want my rights simply because whoever wrote them down in a Supreme Court decision 50 years ago did it in a sub-par fashion is preposterous.
I actually don’t give a flying fuck about the paperwork when it comes to my bodily autonomy or right to exist free from religious interventionism. The fact that Roe empowered women, saved countless lives, and delivered untold numbers of women from unthinkable personal tragedies is enough reason for me to believe it should have stuck. The paper it was written on, shoddy or not, had a profoundly positive real world impact. For that reason alone it should have stood.
On the matter of paperwork, I don’t care if the founding fathers didn’t bother to specifically enshrine the right to abortion in the constitution. They also didn’t enshrine anything about women having the right to vote, black people being free equal citizens, interracial marriage, segregation, gay marriage, internet censorship, broadcast television standards and practices, and a whole lot of other things that have landed on the desk of the Supreme Court and been firmly decided by them. Simply put, if Roe wasn’t something the Supreme Court had business deciding, then Clarence Thomas should lose to right to be married to his Caucasian wife – because his right to be in such a relationship was decided on the same grounds, by the same court. Interested in revisiting that one, Clarence?
To believe the constitution is truly the be-all and end-all document, and that any right not specifically written down in it by the founding fathers is not a right that you are entitled to, is, frankly, stupid. They never mentioned you have the right to dye your hair. They never mentioned you have the right to cut your nails. They never mentioned you have the right to pierce your ears. Gone, gone, gone, apparently, if your state legislature decides it would like control over that particular part of your body.
Why should the world stop at 1776, in a room with a few dozen men in powdered wigs writing a document? Why would we want to pause the advancement of society there, 225 years ago, at a time when very few Americans enjoyed freedom or civil rights at all? Can it really be said that every advancement in civil liberty since that time was a mistake, or that we should suspend everyone’s rights until we can double-check the paperwork? This is completely absurd, but the thing is this: conservatives don’t actually believe this. It’s just a smokescreen for the advancement of their religious values, and they could care less about the constitution in earnest.
That’s the point I’m making with this diatribe. Their pretend constitutional reasoning is bullshit, and you’re a fool if you think they themselves believe it.
All across America, millions of conservatives who were opposed to abortions because of religious or moral reasons have been waiting with baited breath to learn what the OFFICIAL reason was for overturning Roe – the one that leaves out God - so that they can turn to their liberal friends and family members and loftily pronounce “well, ACTUALLY, Roe was weakly argued and the constitution never intended to protect this right and so…”
With this Byzantine reading of the constitution, the Supreme Court has winked and handed conservatives a reason to advance their religious agenda wrapped in faux intellectualism. American conservatives don’t actually understand, believe, or care about the constitutional sophistry used to overturn Roe. They believe life begins at conception, and that the mother’s rights to autonomy end in that same moment. This is purely a moral issue for them, not a constitutional one. Well, if we want to have a brief moral argument, let’s touch on it.
Why should the rights of the unborn trump the rights of already born? Why should a fetus without developed internal organs, fully formed limbs, or a brain capable of conceptualizing itself as a living being with a sentient mind have more rights than an adult woman with a job, family, friends, and a place in her community? A woman who has been alive and existing in the world for many years, whose life may be profoundly altered or even ended if forced to carry a baby to term, in my view, should have absolute priority when it comes to the game of “whose rights matter more?”.
The mother’s do, absolutely. A fetus is a hypothetical person until it’s born – which it may not be for natural reasons anyway. There’s plenty to go wrong along the way, and if it does, there is a very small group of people who will be affected by this fetus’s loss. Namely, the people who would have been its parents. But that’s about it.
When a grown woman dies giving birth, or is forced to have the baby of her rapist, her entire world is turned upside down (if she lives at all), and it makes a dramatic impact not just on her but everyone in her life. It creates a tear in the fabric of a community that, to be perfectly blunt, a miscarriage or discrete abortion does not. So why put the rights of a fetus, who has no real place in the world outside of its mother’s womb, above the rights of someone already living and breathing, who people depend on and who has a tangible presence in reality?
“Because every life is precious, that’s why,” these people will tell you, as they bite into a hamburger made from a murdered bovine. Funny how life ceases to be precious when it also happens to be delicious. If you believe that every potential life is divinely precious because God made it, then how do you explain a normal miscarriage? You don’t – because that makes no sense.
“Overturning Roe has given a voice to the voiceless,” I’ve heard them say, in regards, of course, to an embryo the size of a grain of rice. Removing Roe hasn’t given a voice to the voiceless, it’s simply removed the mother’s voice entirely. Fetuses still don’t have voices. Perhaps because they’re not people yet and they haven’t developed lungs or vocal cords.
How do you know a fetus would even choose to be born? Would a baby who never developed a liver or eyeballs and would only live a month of agonizing existence before dying a slow painful death really “choose” to be born? How the fuck do you know? You haven’t given a voice to the unborn – you’ve just transposed your own voice onto some poor woman’s pregnancy and muted her out of the conversation entirely.
Finally, to the people saying “actually, this was the right decision – legally speaking. Now it can just be a state issue. And hey, I’m pro-choice! I just think this makes sense constitutionally…” – shut the fuck up. Shut your mouth. If you’re pro choice and you believe this will end at states rights, you are either naïve, an idiot, or lying through your teeth. This was just the first domino to fall, don’t think they aren’t coming for more. And I’m not just talking about abortion, because when they’re done excising that from our lives they will be outlawing contraception (except for married couples by prescription), gay sex and marriage, voting rights, and the wall separating government and church. Shove the “maybe this was the right decision – legally speaking” talk up your ass. There’s more on the line than perhaps you realize.
Was this a rant? Yes – I admit it. But it is also meant to serve as a prognostication: this doesn’t end here. It will not end at states rights. They will come for abortion on a federal level, and when that happens, all I can say is I hope all the conservative women of America have nice, easy, uneventful conceptions and pregnancies. I hope they all have babies they want and were prepared for and that they are healthy enough to deliver them. Because if not, well… that’s going to be a moment of self-awareness that will really sting.
I’ll close with one final thought for all of you men who are against abortion. I promise you with 100% confidence that someone you love – your mother, your sister, your girlfriend or wife – has had an abortion. I can practically guarantee it. And their life, whatever it looks like today, is only how it is because they were able to make that decision for themselves. You might be thinking “not me, not my family”. Yes you, yes your family. I promise you. And before you judge them, just remember that YOUR reality and relationship with the women in your life only exists because THEY have enjoyed the right to self-determination. Without it, your life, too, would look very different.
Think on it.
Comments