Americans' rights to their own bodies are, for some reason, perpetually up for debate.
Well, not all Americans—funnily enough, it never seems to be cis straight white men hearing their autonomy debated on the news and in Congress.
By far the most frequent of these debates centers around whether someone has a right to terminate a pregnancy—a condition that requires the constant use of their body and all its systems for the better part of a year. I hesitate to even argue the many reasons why a person is entitled to their own body because it should be self-evident, in the same way we shouldn't have to discuss whether to detain people and perform nonconsensual surgery on them to harvest their organs for patients in need of transplants. It should just be a given that no one has the right to use others' body parts or functions without their consent.
And yet here we unfortunately are. Still. Again. Despite legal precedent established in 1973 that continues to have broad majority support from the public.
Rather than arguing why someone has the right to their own body—a case that shouldn't have to be made—I'm going to try to focus on aspects of the debate itself, including some strategies that work, some strategies that don't work, and ideas for how we can fix this once and for all.
Honesty is Such a Lonely Word
Hypocrisy is as abundant as grains of sand. People who most vocally call themselves "pro-life" often oppose any form of gun control despite the fact that it's more dangerous to be a child in an American school than a deployed soldier. They also support the Death Penalty even though we have definitely executed innocent people. They don't give even a fraction of a solitary shit about migrant children or poor children or children with special needs or children in other countries, even though they claim to care so so much about life.
They also tend to endorse every single one of our imperialistic wars; they support Israeli expansion into Palestinian territory; they think any civilian casualties spent in the interest of American "security" are acceptable losses; they passionately refute Black Lives Matter because they don't see any problem with police gunning down unarmed black kids… the list goes on and on and on and on and ON and ON. Really, when you add it all up, "save the precious babies" is an outlier from all the awful, violent, overtly cruel, evil sentiments they normally espouse. (And we haven't even gotten into what the Bible says about murdering actual children.)
But some anti-choice advocates actually are consistent—they oppose capital punishment, want gun control, think what we do to immigrants is appalling, oppose our wars and imperialism in general, want socialized medicine and programs for those in need… and also think we should outlaw abortion. Does that ideological consistency make it okay for them to remove people's bodily autonomy? No. Of course not.
That's not to say it isn't a good point to make—most of them endorse some deeply heinous garbage, and it's good to call that out even when it's not in contrast against claims of being "pro-life"—but it's also not relevant because none of them care about their own hypocrisy. In fact, many of them have weaponized that lack of care as a rhetorical tactic so that they can always seem correct even when what they're saying directly conflicts with other things they've said. When you stop caring about being called a hypocrite, you've effectively factored out an entire category of refutation by your opposition.
Plus, they're even hypocrites when it comes to abortion itself. There are countless stories from abortion providers about performing abortions on people they've seen protesting outside their clinics. It's a well-known effect that people will give themselves more leeway and justify when their own actions are inconsistent with previously-stated philosophies or convictions, especially if they think "most of the time I'm doing the 'right' thing, so I have space to do the 'wrong' thing sometimes." And abortion is such a complex and personal issue that when someone is actually confronted with whether or not to have one, they're going to view it much differently than when it's just an abstract concept.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that such profound inconsistencies should create a brain-rending dissonance that leads them to shamefully reevaluate their belief systems and core selves, they don't care—either because their glassy, impenetrable brains prevent them from recognizing the inconsistency, OR because they know if they refuse to acknowledge inconsistencies they can pretend they're always right.
Sadly, I think we're going to have to retire the "pointing out hypocrisies" approach to political debate altogether.
Where the Boys Are
On the whole, straight cisgendered white men are the ones making these awful decisions. It's important to call that out because it's deeply unfair on a number of levels. The fact that their (my) demographic is so grotesquely overrepresented in our government is a travesty at baseline, and fixing those demographic proportions would mitigate a lot of problems in a lot of areas. And of course, cis men can never be pregnant, so it's ludicrous and unreasonable for them to have any say in the matter, let alone the dominant and often sole control they exert.
But that angle somewhat camouflages the reality that the patriarchy isn't only men. It's not just about who's a man and who's a woman—it's concerted systems of exploitation and disenfranchisement engineered to empower wealthy white cis straight men, and also benefit everyone who falls into any of those demographics: wealthy, white, cis, straight, or men. There are plenty of anti-choice women, and in fact the Alabama bill was sponsored by one of them: Terri Collins. Women don't get to decide what happens to other people's bodies either, because in general, people don't get to dictate what other people do with their own bodies regardless the identification or orientation of anyone involved.
Much of this can be ascribed to internalized misogyny instilled by a culture that by and large resents and oppresses women. This effect is especially magnified for people indoctrinated into our most prevalent religions. But the end result is the same, and a person who loses their bodily autonomy isn't going to care whether it was Terri Collins or Scott Stadthagen who made it happen. Focusing too hard on the "men don't get to decide" angle distracts a little from the full spectrum of oppressive power channels in play, and the multifaceted vectors through which they operate.
Case of the Fake People
The existence of anti-choice Democrats is a firm reminder that policies—not party labels—are what truly matter. Similar to the previous point, a person stripped of their bodily autonomy isn't going to feel any better that it was a Democrat who signed the bill into law. We need to condemn everyone who opposes choice, and any Democrats who betray these values do not deserve your votes.
(If you're banking on them for their opposition to Trump, well… aside from Elizabeth Warren, the Congressperson most vocal about impeachment is a Republican. Hashtag Resist!)
I'll have a lot more on the historical and present uselessness of Democrats in a number of future updates, but it's important to recognize that reproductive rights aren't only under threat from the "other side".
Life Begins at Forty
I've been writing about politics online for sixteen years and have spent a lot of time fighting about differences in fetal development, and I can assure you this is not a tactic worth wasting your time on.
The problem begins with the anti-choice movement's hyperbolic, inaccurate, and emotionally/visually visceral propaganda. They'll show ultrasounds or illustrations of near-to-term fetuses and present them as depictions of earlier stages of fetal development to give the impression it's this little cherubic homunculus throughout the pregnancy. Often they'll display gruesome photos from later-stage abortions—which are performed in nearly every case out of medical necessity—presented without context as representative of all abortions.
They'll also refer to the atrocities of Dr. Kermit Gosnell as representative of abortion as a whole, despite everyone acknowledging he was a cruel madman who performed abortions using bizarre experimental torture devices nobody else has ever used. There are already laws prohibiting everything that man did—which is why he went to prison. Claiming he represents abortion is about as accurate as claiming that every doctor will carve their initials on your liver because Dr. Simon Bramhall did it.
For most people, the terminology used to describe fetal development is all just abstract concepts veiled behind an abdomen. You can explain what a blastocyst is and what a zygote is and walk through the precise steps in systems development until you've cycled all the air in our atmosphere through your lungs but they still won't necessarily understand what any of it means—especially if their social or religious prejudices motivate them against accepting the medical realities of it all.
Most crucially, this whole aspect of the conversation just allows the other side to set the terms, by starting from the assumption that there is some sort of in-utero threshold for when an accumulation of cells becomes A Baby. And then you're stuck defending your position on when exactly that occurs—a juncture that can't easily be defined or proven, at least not in any meaningful way. It's Playing Defense, which already puts you in a terrible position, and then you have to compete against emotionally-manipulative propaganda.
And none of them are going to believe you anyway, because nothing will convince them that's not A Real Live Fully-Cognizant Baby from conception. Thankfully, this steadfast ignorance only really applies to people unlikely to come around on abortion regardless which approach you take.
With any luck, maybe we can radically improve our K-12 educational system so that we can provide future generations with the critical thinking toolkits to quell all the manipulative misinformation they'll be bombarded with. That's unfortunately the only real fix here, and it's frustratingly indirect and long-term.
No matter what anyone tries to tell you, this is not a human being. (Because this is an elephant embryo.)
Anything Is Possible
One tactic some anti-choicers employ is to admit that "maybe life doesn't begin at conception… but even if it doesn't, it's still a potential human life." It's hard to argue with that, right?
Actually, it's really easy:
If we're going to start getting into potentials, then we're opening up all kinds of wild doors. Once you start messing with indirect causality, you're a mere few steps away from Anything Goes territory. (No, not the musical.)
If we're going to permit cruelties and oppressions based solely on potentials, then nothing can stop you from making a case that, say… if you randomly murder half the population, then the other half of the population will thrive. After all, we have very finite resources—at our current rate of population growth, things will eventually become unlivable, especially factoring in global climate change. So it's a very real possibility—a.k.a. potential—that the only way to prolong the existence of 3.5 billion humans is to kill 3.5 billion humans.
(Or, taking it in the other direction, we could say that everyone has to be having sex all the time. Think of all those potential babies that aren't getting born just because eggs go unfertilized!)
It's about the possibilities, right?
Okay, that's a little hyperbolic and definitely not an original idea, but there's a far more realistic (and less Stolen From Marvel Comics) picture of potentials here: Let's say a seventeen year old becomes pregnant—for any reason—and does not have the option of abortion. She has the baby and it derails her life. She wanted to have kids but not like this…
Actually, you know what, Ursula K. Le Guin explains it better than I could:
It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.
But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.
The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents….
But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear.
Anti-choicers' "potential human life" angle only works when you have an extremely narrow scope for what potential is. It's possible that broadening the definition whenever they try to take this approach would be helpful in permanently closing off this avenue of debate from them. But this too is Playing Defense a bit.
Breaking the Law
In general it's a good rule of thumb to never trust anything a politician says, and that's especially true when it comes to medicine and science. For one thing it's their job to be manipulative, but for another thing most of them don't have the slightest idea just what the hell they're talking about.
Doctors typically go through four years of undergraduate school, four years of medical school, three or more years of residency, and then maybe a year or two of fellowship before they can really do their jobs independently. That's a decade or more of learning and research. They have to know—master, really—biology, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, physics, biochemistry, biophysics, diagnostics, and all the myriad things that go on in—and go wrong with—the human body.
Sure, okay, a lot of politicians are lawyers and that requires a lot of education too… but it doesn't require medical education. Being a lawyer or a physicist or a rocket scientist or any other career requiring advanced learning and knowledge doesn't mean you know about all knowledge. There's a reason they don't just phone in the nearest quantum physicist to perform heart surgery if the cardiothoracic surgeon can't make it in.
But really, politicians can be anyone. Especially if they're rich. They can even be an inexplicably popular reality TV host with a skull full of disassembled LEGO bricks who blew most of his father's fortune on bad investments and tacky self-aggrandizement. There's a very strong chance many of them don't have even the first clue about a lot of things.
Like Ohio state Representative John Becker who claims ectopic pregnancies can be "reimplanted" in the uterus, carried to term, and safely delivered. Ask any doctor and they'll tell you that's a procedure that has never even been attempted because it's medically impossible. They know this because—unlike John Becker—they are, in fact, doctors.
So you can kinda see the problem here with expecting people who don't know anything a subject to make informed laws governing said subject. "Hey instead of letting people die why don't we put their brains in dogs? I'm the Republican Senator from Ohio and I will not yield the floor!"
Even if you think abortion should only be legal under certain circumstances, attempting to codify those exceptions into law is a logistical nightmare, and would be impossible even for people with the expertise to do so. There are myriad combinations of things that can go wrong in a human body at any point, and new conditions and diseases emerge or are discovered all the time. The law will always lag behind the science—but that's irrelevant because medicine should be decided by doctors, not lawyers.
Everyone recoils at late-term abortions, but the truth of the matter is that they have only ever been done out of medical necessity or (with extreme rarity) in cases where either legal proceedings or other extenuating factors have blocked abortion access earlier in the pregnancy. That is to say—and I can't emphasize this enough—restricting abortion and stymying access actually lead to more late-term abortions. But it's very important to note that abortion at any point in the pregnancy has never involved birthing a live baby and then killing it outside the womb, as Trump recently claimed. If any doctor ever did deliver and then kill a baby, that's murder and there are already laws against it. It's just another one of those hyperbolic, emotionally visceral lies the anti-choice movement uses to get people on their side.
Murder Was the Case
The new bills are especially heinous in that—unlike any of the laws prior to Roe v. Wade—they seek to punish people who have abortions.
This is if nothing else a logistical nightmare in that it turns every miscarriage—which happens in 15-20% of all known pregnancies just naturally—into a murder investigation. Considering there were nearly 4,000,000 babies born in the U.S. last year, that's around 1,000,000 miscarriages. Compare this with the U.S. homicide rate of around 17,000 per year. If we were to extend the laws in states like Alabama and Georgia to the entire country, we would increase our homicide investigations nearly 59 times over.
Strangely the same people who ask "who's going to pay for it?" when it comes to providing children healthcare are mysteriously silent on how we're supposed to pay to investigate every miscarriage. Considering around 40% of murders go unsolved every year, it doesn't exactly seem like a great use of resources.
It's My Life
Have you ever noticed that cis straight men rarely speak up about how abortion also benefits them? Even on the left you don't hear this angle very often. I'd like to think that maybe on the left they're just downplaying their own needs and focusing on how this all impacts people who can get pregnant… but I'm not that naive. The reason cis straight men by and large don't discuss the way abortion also benefits them is because nearly everyone—across the political spectrum—just assumes that pregnancy is a woman's responsibility.
If the distribution of responsibilities and expectations were actually fair (the pregnancy itself aside, of course, as you can't bear a child without a uterus), cis men would be a lot more concerned about how an unwanted pregnancy would derail their own lives, but in many of their minds they won't have to compromise any of their plans or careers. Nobody expects them to stay home with a kid—in our society that all just falls on the mother by default. And if it becomes too much of an inconvenience they can just leave with no strings attached aside from child support. Just another bill, like rent or the internet. Courts can't mandate you give a shit.
It's a real bummer that more cis straight men aren't readily and aggressively taking up the mantle and standing up for abortion rights. Really, this "it's good for men too" angle shouldn't matter because we should all be fighting for what's right whether it benefits us or not. But I suppose people in general tend to only really care about issues that affect them personally.
Regardless, maybe more cis straight men in the center and on the left could be persuaded to care and to fight for abortion rights if we appealed to their interests. In a society with equal expectations for parenthood responsibilities—an equitability many progressive cis straight men claim to endorse—abortion rights would benefit them as well.
So open your goddamn mouths, men, because this is our fight too.
You Can't Always Get What You Want
We've ridden in this rodeo before. Abortions were illegal in our country and all around the world and the evidence demonstrates that it doesn't actually significantly reduce abortions—it just makes them either less safe or more expensive.
Banning abortion would, however, jail healthcare professionals in a country where we already have severe shortages of doctors and nurses. That doesn't mean abortion providers will stop operating in states where it's illegal—it just means it will blast open a space for black market and self-managed abortions, as history has demonstrated. And when people can't afford or find access, they'll take matters into their own hands, safely or not. If the goal is to reduce abortions, it's not going to succeed.
Of course, that's not to say that abortion rates can't be reduced. They can, by significant amounts—but it requires doing things conservatives don't want to do, like:
Comprehensive and open sex education that destigmatizes the topic and teaches various forms of contraception.
Guaranteeing a living wage so that poverty doesn't inhibit people from having children. (The same applies to regulating rent prices, providing public services, guaranteeing uncontaminated drinking water, and anything else that benefits lower and middle classes, helping to provide a welcoming environment for new parents and their children.)
Guaranteeing public healthcare so that parents don't risk bankruptcy over the expenses of pregnancy and birth, and families don't risk bankruptcy over all the new healthcare needs of an entire new human being they're responsible for taking care of.
These have all been proven to reduce abortion rates, especially those first two (the others are indirect but the data proves a demonstrable causal link), so it's pretty strange how conservatives are adamantly opposed to implementing any of them.
Could it be that their intentions are disingenuous?
Better Off Dead
The answer is obviously yes.
This isn't about babies or children or "life" or whatever else—it's about controlling society and reproduction. My partner Ali, a medical student and future abortion provider, put it better than I could:
NGOs the world over have shown that supporting women, specifically, in a community is the surest way to do the most good for a struggling population. Women pass on their successes to their children and others who are vulnerable and lift the whole population up. If you can understand that, you can understand why (mostly Republican, mostly male, mostly white) lawmakers across our country attack abortion rights and access to healthcare, eschew UPK and paid family leave, and generally undermine the social supports that give women (and others not among the white, cis, straight patriarchy—I in no way mean exclude my LGBTQ comrades) a chance to thrive. This is intentional. If you control women, you control communities.
The backdoor abortion ban in Georgia and others like it are about control. They are not about saving lives or supporting families/the vulnerable. This rhetoric is asinine, destructive, and intended to hurt those among us with the least power. Do not fall for it.
If you want to do the most good, reject policies such as those in Georgia. BE VOCAL in your support of people in making choices that best serve themselves and their families. Stay positive and buckle up, for the fight has just begun.
That's why there are so many inconsistencies in their beliefs. That's why none of them are pushing for mandatory organ donations, even from corpses. How fucked up is it that we give corpses more rights to their own dead bodies than we give people who can become pregnant rights to their own live bodies?
Deep down they know they're full of shit. If you ask them whether they'd save a newborn or an 8-weeks-along fetus from a burning building, they're either going to pick the newborn or they're going to get a sour little microexpression on their face that lets you know they're lying when they pick the fetus. They know the difference. They're not stupid, but they really like to pretend they are so that they can make political points.
It should be noted, too, that the reason mediocre white cis men have maintained power throughout history is by oppressing women and trying to control sex. It's the source of their power.
Keep Hope Alive
Fortunately most people in the United States strongly oppose banning abortion. Even in states that have been passing bans, there is if nothing else vast majority support for exemptions for rape and incest and medical need. (Which, abortion rights shouldn't be conditional at all, but this illustrates that representatives are acting against the will of their constituents—and can do so thanks to the inherent power multipliers built into our government.)
Despite what Georgia and Alabama and Ohio will tell you, abortion is still unconditionally legal nationwide—and that's part of the Republicans' strategy. These bans are intended to incite lawsuits that escalate to the Supreme Court, where state-level bans could end up being upheld by the conservative-majority Justices, which would effectively overturn Roe v. Wade.
(By the way, upholding Georgia's ban—which would punish people who travel outside the state to get abortions—would also undermine the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. That precedent means that other states could start retaliating by, for instance, taxing peaches and other products sold by Georgia.)
While there's no guarantee that Roe v. Wade will be upheld, overturning it would oppose the will of the vast majority of Americans. Even if it gets overturned, many individual states are already working to guarantee abortion rights, including Nevada and—of all places—Kansas, whose Supreme Court recently ruled that abortion is protected under their state's Constitution.
Don't give up hope. There are solutions to all of this, and they all unfortunately require that we keep fighting a battle we won 46 years ago. The oppressors have already lost, and have spent the last half a century putting together a strategy that defies the will of the public and has only persisted due to power amplifiers that should not exist. Four of the nine members of the Supreme Court were placed there by Presidents who've lacked a public mandate, who only won because of the Electoral College. The Senate gives states with shakier support for abortion rights far more power than states where such support is firm. Gerrymandering in the House and in local state districts has only ever benefited Republicans, who are far more likely to want to ban abortion.
If you take away their unfair advantages and their hyperbolic misinformation, they have no real influence. So let's dismantle all those institutional advantages, and let's burn down the patriarchy, and let's win this fucking fight once and for all.
Never Go Back.
Stuff I'm Enjoying
This newsletter has been especially long so rather than dumping a bunch of unrelated stuff I've been enjoying I'm just going to link to:
The National Network of Abortion Funds - As a reminder, the 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funds from being used to pay for abortions except to save the life of the pregnant person or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape. Local abortion funds help ensure that everyone has the right to choose regardless of their ability to pay.
Thanks!
As always, thank you for reading. If you've been enjoying this newsletter, please tell your friends. This content is free so don't hesitate to forward the emails or spread the links.
I hope I've done justice to this subject, because it's an important one. Special thanks to my partner, the indomitable Ali Cooper, who helped hone this essay with insightful critique and healthcare expertise.
Until next time!