'It's a hell of a scary time': leading US feminists on the threat to Roe v Wade
(well, the woman-hating gestational slavers did it. But this lengthy article is still a valuable read)
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Activists rally outside the US supreme court in Washington on 2 May 2022. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
‘It’s a hell of a scary time’: leading US feminists on the threat to Roe v Wade
With US abortion rights in jeopardy, Judy Chicago, Bonnie Greer, Rebecca Solnit and more explain why they are determined to fight back
by Sirin Kale, Leah Harper and Ann Lee
The US was shaken earlier this week by the news that Roe v Wade – the ruling that gives American women the constitutionally protected right to safe and legal abortion – could be overturned. If the leaked ruling by the supreme court does come into effect abortion would be a matter for individual state legislatures and Congress to rule upon. The change would mean women and girls no longer having the same rights their mothers and grandmothers fought for if Republican-controlled states move quickly to end abortion access and Republicans in Congress attempt to enact a nationwide abortion ban.
Leading US women’s rights activists and scholars tell us how they feel about the news.
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Bonnie Greer. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Bonnie Greer, playwright and novelist
When I heard the news of the draft decision, I went back to the time when I had an abortion in 1969. Abortion was illegal in Illinois, my home state until the day Roe v Wade was affirmed in 1973. I was brought up to be law-abiding. Brought up Roman Catholic to believe that I was committing murder. But I wanted to go to university, to have a life. The doctor was a Black man, so I felt safe.
It happened in his office after hours. It was a simple procedure for him. He was even jaunty about it. He made a joke about the gender of the foetus. So, wrapped in my Catholic guilt, was this: a Black man was killed. By me. There was no aftercare. If I had caught an infection, there was nowhere I could go. Because I had broken the law. There was no counselling to help me through a kind of grief. Women now don’t know that world – and I really don’t want them to know it. Taking away Roe v Wade, affirmed under the due process clause of the 14th amendment, protects the right to privacy. To agency. For an American citizen’s right to their own person.
What I mourn the most is that we women, under the law, are not equal to men. We’re in the wind. Again.
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Judy Chicago. Photograph: Leon Bennett/WireImage
Judy Chicago, feminist artist
It’s amazing and incomprehensible that a draft of a supreme court decision was leaked. That talks to the unusual times we’re living in. The potential overturning of Roe v Wade is symbolic of a larger worldwide push against progress that manifested as much in the Taliban restricting women’s rights to education again. It’s the story of pushing forward and pushing backwards. We’re in a period of pushing back. The fight for women’s rights is a long historic struggle against a set of values that restricts the rights of, not only women, but LGBTQ people, trans people and people of colour. When I was young, I had the money to pay for an abortion. There’s a quote that I encountered when we were working on the Holocaust Project, that those who have the least to say about human events suffer the gravest of consequences. So it’s going to gravely affect women who do not have the resources to access abortion. It’s going to affect them horribly.
. . . .
Are young people willing to stand up for their rights? Without that, we’re lost.
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V at an abortion rights rally on International Women’s Day in New York in March 2022. Photograph: Gina M Randazzo/Zuma Press
V (formerly Eve Ensler), playwright and activist
When I heard the news that the supreme court was poised to overturn Roe V Wade I thought: no, fucking no. The supreme court does not represent the majority of Americans – who support abortion – and it has no moral authority to control women’s bodies.
I have been getting emails all day and night from women around the world who are panicked, raging, saying this cannot happen in the US, for if it does, it will catalyse and amplify the rightwing misogynist project that is taking away the rights of women everywhere, having a devastating impact on their lives and now escalated during the pandemic. If we allow the erasure of this central right for women, it will escalate the erasure of them all. It is absurd for this country – with one of the highest maternal mortality rates and no paid maternity leave – to be forcing childbirth on women. And there is also no accountability for the people impregnating women – which is because this is not about babies, it is about destroying women’s agency and autonomy. And we know that this will most harshly affect the lives of Black and Brown women and marginalised people.
. . . .
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Mona Eltahawy. Photograph: Meghan Marin/The Guardian
Mona Eltahawy, author and activist
. . . . .
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/04/its-a-hell-of-a-scary-time-leading-us-feminists-on-the-threat-to-roe-v-wade