A pregnant person and their physician
This starts out seeming to be a serious and interesting analysis of a familiar slogan:
I’m a philosopher and bioethicist. My research suggests “my body, my choice” was a crucial idea at the time of Roe to emphasize ownership over bodily and health care decisions. But I believe the debate has since moved on – reproductive justice is about more than owning your body and your choice; it is about a right to health care.
I was interested because I got into a brief wrangle on Facebook by saying I’ve always thought the slogan was stupid, because it’s not true. Choices about one’s body are not always solely personal. A couple of men replied to call me stupid with no further argument so I deleted my comment, but I remain interested in what’s wrong with the slogan. But…I hit a bump all too soon.
It makes sense that “my body, my choice” gained steam in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade – a time when reproductive rights activists were fighting for the government to stay out of abortion decisions. Roe did just that by determining that abortion is a private choice between a pregnant person and their physician.
Sigh. So much for the serious analysis, so much for the philosopher and bioethicist. If we can’t even say precisely and accurately what we’re talking about, then what is the point?
We can’t possibly talk about abortion and reproductive rights and the politics around them if we throw a dropcloth over the fact that it’s women’s rights that are at stake. If we pretend it’s undifferentiated “people” who need these rights then we can’t talk about why they’ve been denied them for all these centuries. How a philosopher and bioethicist can think that matters less than pampering the projected wounded feelings of a few deluded women who are pretending to be men is beyond me.
And it clots up her language in the worst way.
As a private matter, the Supreme Court determined that the government cannot interfere with one’s right to an abortion prior to fetal viability.
Not “one’s right” – a woman’s right. As of course she knows, but apparently we’ve now decided that we can’t say that. If we can’t say that we can’t defend women.
The point is self-ownership is not worth much if there are no good or even available options from which to choose. This was true for the laborer in Locke’s day, and it is true for the person seeking abortion care now.
And why? Because that person is a woman, and her rights must be curtailed because she does the human-making.
Laws like mandated waiting periods for those seeking an abortion get enacted without evidence-based medical benefit… Clinic closures force those needing abortions to travel longer distances to find a provider… Accessing care in these states when it is restricted in one’s home state creates additional costs related to travel, child care and lost wages or time off work. Many abortion-seekers must also pay out of pocket for their medical care. For 40 years, the Hyde Amendment has prohibited federal spending on abortion. This impacts those insured through Medicaid…One could argue “my body, my choice” is meaningless if a person cannot enact their choice
All the marked words are replacements for woman or women or her.
This shit really needs to stop.
This feels like old/new testament stuff, to me. People vaguely know about all the horror and genocide in the bible, but that was old testament stuff and then the new testament came along and fixed all that, right? (Spoiler: it didn’t.)
People seem to have collectively decided that things like racism and sexism and homophobia have been fixed, when in many ways they – especially the latter two – seem worse than they have for decades. Perhaps they’re worse because people think they’re fixed. I think so.
But anyway, the idea that there’s this sort of arbitrary cut-off between bad stuff happening to women in the past and now, where it’s all totally fine, means that the historical import of oppression and its impact on how we perceive, think and behave today is lost. As we discussed here recently with regard to racism, this is a really bad idea. The patriarchy isn’t a sort of monster that exists to blame arbitrary things on, it’s the result of the ways women have been (and continue to be) perceived, abused and oppressed and the ways these things have become enshrined in culture and law. It’s a thing to be picked apart over years and years of activism and vigilance, not just declared obsolete. It’s not something that can be just recognised as a bad idea and put behind us.
It’s as though people have all given up on trying to solve a problem because it’s hard. It’s old testament stuff, where we have to worry about things like theodicy, which become more complicated the more ‘sophisticated’ one declares oneself to be.
The new testament is way better, because it’s all basically just a slogan, right? The golden rule. This seems to be ringing a bell…
“It’s a thing to be picked apart over years and years of activism and vigilance, not just declared obsolete.”
That.
Of course in today’s world you just declare yourself male, whine about being assigned female at birth, demand shiny new pronouns, and then you don’t have to worry. You’re on the other side of the patriarchy.
We have too much tendency to look for simple answers to complex questions. Racism. Sexism. Global warming. Taliban. If we just do [X]… Except doing [X] usually ends up getting us in deeper.
I actually think the New Testament is worse. It’s not just the Golden Rule…it’s obey utterly the cult leader. Or face eternal torment. Jesus really emphasized the eternal punishment thing (given that the NT is basically Greek and Persian theology crammed uncomfortably into Judaism) To quote a fundie preacher on a metal album in my collection “Jesus spoke far more often about hell than heaven” Christians, especially of the American versions, love slobbering over the punishments they imagine their enemies will be facing