Fifty two years ago today America enacted women’s right to abortion, and it has remained a ground of struggle ever since.
Such a long, multigenerational struggle, over such a simple question; to whom does a woman’s body belong?
Half of humankind remains slaves to the other half; and I very much hope that we can sort this out before another fifty years pass.
As written by Simon Winchester in The Guardian on this day in 1973, in an article entitled Roe v Wade: US women win abortion rights; “In a long awaited decision the United States supreme court ruled today that a woman has a near-absolute right to an abortion, but only in the first three months of her pregnancy. During the later stages the State has an increasing power of intervention, the court ruled by a seven to two majority; and during the last trimester can refuse to allow the operation.
The decision, which came today as part of a lengthy ruling which declared the Texas and Georgia anti-abortion laws unconstitutional, has been generally welcomed by liberal groups here. Mrs Lee Giddings, of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, said today she was “absolutely thrilled.”
The court’s ruling is a rare reversal of long-settled law that will fracture the foundations of modern reproductive rights in the US.
But one of the two dissenting supreme court justices, the Nixon appointee Justice Byron White (the other dissenting justice was also a Nixon appointee, Mr William Rehnquist), later criticised the verdict as “improvident, extravagant, and an exercise of raw judicial power.”
In his ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun said that during the first three months of a pregnancy “the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the woman’s doctor.” After that, the State “In promoting its interest in the mother’s health” may regulate the abortion procedure by among other things, making laws, regulating the doctor’s terms of reference.
Only in the third three-month period, when a foetus could presumably live, if there was a premature birth, can the State “regulate or even forbid abortion.” The justices ruled the State could intervene thus “where it was necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of life or the health of the mother.”
The one dissenting voice raised today at the supreme court ruling came from the Women’s National Abortion Action Committee, which condemned the “artificial and arbitrary” time limits imposed by judges. A spokesperson, as they say here, says that “a woman should always have an absolute right to determine what happens to her own body.” Harsh reaction is also expected, of course, from the Roman Catholic church and other anti-abortion lobby groups.”
Where are we now with this issue, and of the larger question of the equality of women? As written by Carter Sherman in The Guardian, in an article entitled The fight for abortion rights: what to know going into 2024; “A presidential election and another major supreme court case is on the horizon, after a dramatic year in which pro-choice and foes have waged a state-by-state war.
More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the dust from the landmark decision’s collapse has yet to settle.
It has been a dramatic year of fallout, with abortion rights supporters and foes now waging a state-by-state skirmish for abortion rights. They are sparring in state legislatures, courtrooms, voting booths and hospitals, with each side racking up victories and losses.
With a presidential election and another major supreme court case on the horizon, the coming year promises to be at least as eventful. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over abortion in 2023 – and what it means for 2024.
Abortion rights supporters keep winning at the ballot box.
In 2022, Republicans underperformed in the midterms and abortion rights activists won a string of ballot measures to preserve abortion rights, even in conservative states. This year, activists extended their winning streak – and they hope to replicate their successes in 2024.
In November, Ohio became the first reliably red state since Roe fell to vote in favor of proactively enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, while Virginia Democrats successfully fended off Republicans’ attempt to retake the state legislature by campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban.
For activists and Democrats, these victories were proof that abortion is an election-winning issue – and, potentially, an issue that can draw in voters from across both sides of the ideological spectrum. Activists are already at work on 2024 abortion-related ballot measures in roughly a dozen states, including swing states like Arizona and Nevada.
Abortions are on the rise
After abortion clinics across the south and midwest were forced to shutter, patients overwhelmed the country’s remaining clinics. In the first year after Roe’s demise, the average number of US abortions performed each month rose rather than fell. Clinics and their advocates are now struggling to keep up. “What actually is happening is a complete disruption,” one expert told the Guardian.
There is also a gaping hole in the data, which was released in October by the Society of Family Planning: it does not include abortions performed at home, a practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to self-manage an abortion using pills early on in pregnancy, and a number of services shipping abortion pills have increased in visibility since Roe’s overturning. But while evidence suggests that self-managed abortion is on the rise, the lack of concrete data about the practice reflects a growing problem in the post-Roe United States: as abortion moves further into the shadows of US life, we will know less about it.
Legal battles over abortion bans are ongoing.
Abortion bans continued to cascade across the country in 2023, with near-total bans taking effect in Indiana, North Dakota and South Carolina. North Carolina and Nebraska, meanwhile, enacted laws to ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. In total, 24 states or territories have now banned abortion before viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, which would have been illegal under Roe.
Litigation over abortion restrictions is still unfurling in many of these states, and court cases have frozen bans in states like Wyoming and Iowa. Wisconsin abortion providers, meanwhile, found themselves in a unique position this year: after a judge ruled that an 1849 law that had been interpreted to ban abortions instead only banned feticide and did not apply to what she called “consensual abortions”, providers resumed performing the procedure – even though the ban is still technically on the books.
Lawsuits may force other hardcore anti-abortion states to soften their bans in 2024 to clarify exceptions when abortions are permitted in medical emergencies. While Tennessee and Texas carved out narrow exceptions in their abortion laws, abortion rights supporters have still filed lawsuits in those two states, as well as in Idaho, that challenge the language. One Texan mother of two filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency abortion while she was still pregnant. (She ultimately fled the state for the procedure.)
Theoretically, people in medical emergencies should be able to access the procedure even in states with bans – but doctors say that, in reality, these bans are so vaguely worded that they block doctors from helping sick patients. This summer, one of these lawsuits led women to testify in a Texas court about their experiences of being denied abortions. It was the first time since Roe fell, if not the first time since Roe itself was decided, that women did so.
Abortion pills are in peril.
The most common method of abortion, abortion pills, is at the mercy of deeply conservative courts in 2024.
In April, a conservative judge in Texas ruled to suspend the FDA’s approval of a key abortion pill, mifepristone, in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of rightwing groups determined to make the pill the next target in their post-Roe campaign against abortion. A federal appeals court soon scaled back that decision, ruling to keep the pill, mifepristone, available but impose significant restrictions on its use. The supreme court then stepped in and decreed that the FDA’s rules around mifepristone should stay the same while litigation plays out.
The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone in September have asked the supreme court to formally hear arguments in the case. In December, the justices agreed.
Although the justices indicated that they will only rule on the restrictions imposed by the appeals court, rather than on the overall legality of mifepristone, the case could still have enormous consequences. Rolling back the FDA’s rules could allow future lawsuits against other politicized medications, like gender-affirming care, HIV drugs or vaccines. Plus, the supreme court will probably rule by summer 2024 – just months before the presidential election.
Mifepristone is used in more than half the abortions in the country. If access to the drug is curtailed, many abortion clinics have said they will pivot to using doses of a different drug, misoprostol, to perform abortions, but misoprostol-only abortions are less effective and associated with more complications.
Doctors are fleeing states with abortion bans.
With abortion bans endangering their patients and threatening to send doctors to prison, doctors are fleeing states where the procedure is banned. After Idaho banned abortion, at least 13 reproductive health physicians left the state and at least two rural labor and delivery wards have closed. Doctors in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida have also told reporters that they are leaving states with abortion bans or planning to do so.
OB-GYNs are already in short supply in the United States. About half of US counties do not have a practicing OB-GYN, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The US maternal mortality rates are also worsening, particularly for Black and Native people, at a time when the United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries.
Doctors are now even afraid to get trained in states with abortion bans. Applications to OB-GYN residencies in states with near-total bans fell by more than 10% the year after Roe’s demise, according to data from Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications to US OB-GYN residencies overall dropped by about 5% – indicating that fewer doctors are planning to become OB-GYNs at all.”
And so the ground of struggle is defined, both here in America and throughout the world, and in all our possible futures, for all humankind.
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2023, Anniversary of the End of Roe Versus Wade and Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; On this day last year half our nation’s people were stripped of meaningful citizenship and their bodies declared property of the state by the Supreme Court.
Of this ongoing horror and crime against humanity I wrote in my summation of last year’s liberation struggle and electoral politics in America in my post of December 28 2022, This Year Was Defined in Politics by Resistance Against the Patriarchy and the Issue of Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy; 2022 was defined in politics by resistance against the Patriarchy and the issue of women’s rights of bodily autonomy, both globally in the glorious and spectacular revolution against theocracy and patriarchy originating in Iran and here in America the mass resistance to the end of Roe v Wade which galvanized a historic blue wave in our midterm elections.
While this has always been a wedge issue used by elites and forces of reaction to make women vote against their own interests, freedoms, and equality, and rode the wave of change of the #metoo movement, something has shifted and become new in this arena, forever transforming the ground of struggle and defining the terms of debate; it is now an existential crisis central to the survival of democracy itself, and women are responding not with the subjugation of learned helplessness, but with the fury of the oppressed and the solidarity of a dehumanized class.
In 2022, women realized they are enslaved and have begun resistance and revolutionary struggle. Patriarchal authority has lost its legitimacy, and begun its inevitable collapse. Without its fig leaf of theocratic lies and illusions, with the amoral brutality of its systemic and historical forces and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, there is only one way this ends.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Here follows my journal on this Defining Moment for America in 2022:
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2022, The End of Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; The Supreme Court has just declared women’s bodies to be property of the state and of men, and mass protests have once again erupted throughout America.
This is an area of ideological fracture and polarization in which few persuadable voters remain on either side, the classic wedge issue by which Patriarchy and sexual terror subjugates and dehumanizes us, and through which our enslavement by hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege legitimize their regimes of weaponized faith.
Electoral politics and legislative change have failed, for in our system a few unelected and corrupt judges, infiltration and subversion agents placed at the apex of social power by hegemonic elites to replace democracy with theocracry, can rule by fiat in total disregard to the will of the people. Our Justice system has lost its legitimacy and become a junta, and this we must resist.
After all our hopes and dreams for Liberty and a free society of equals, we’re back to the Underground Railroad.
As written by Emily Janakiram & Lizzie Chadbourne in Truthout; “As reproductive rights organizers have long anticipated — and as a leaked memo all but confirmed last month — the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The decision came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law prohibiting all abortions after 15 weeks except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. This suit is part of an effort by the right to legally challenge what was previously the constitutionally protected right to abortion in Roe, and the court has sided with the state of Mississippi to repeal that right. This ruling undoes the federal protection of abortion, resulting in the total or near-total ban of abortion in 26 states.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal, like New York and Washington, D.C. Republicans are poised to attempt passing a federal ban on abortion.
Despite Justice Samuel Alito’s claim that the ruling does not affect contraceptive access, the anti-abortion right has also opposed hormonal contraception, the copper IUD and the morning-after pill on the grounds that they are “abortifacients” since from their perspective, human life begins at conception and these methods prevent the fertilized egg from implanting. Last month, Louisiana lawmakers deliberated over a bill which would have criminalized both the IUD and the morning-after pill. The bill ultimately failed, but we can expect to see similar initiatives gaining ground in states hostile to abortion rights.
The anti-abortion right frames the overturn of Roe as an act of democracy, “returning the decision to the states,” and correcting federal overreach. This is misleading at best. The states in which abortion is now illegal are heavily gerrymandered and undemocratic themselves; it is simply not true that abortion bans reflect the will of the people. In fact, a majority of Americans — about 60 percent — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The consequences of abortion restrictions in red states prior to this moment have been disastrous as residents have been forced to travel out of state to access care at significant personal cost. Texas’s notorious Senate Bill 8 law resulted in a significant number of patients from Texas with a gestational age past six weeks traveling to Oklahoma for abortion appointments — until Oklahoma passed a total abortion ban, leaving Texans seeking abortions with even fewer options.
We can expect this situation to spread further across the country, with abortion patients forced to travel even longer distances to access abortion. Of course, this will place an undue hardship on patients without the means to travel out of state — whether that be due to the financial burden, lack of access to child care, sick leave, or other reasons.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal.
More grotesquely, abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so. Texas’s SB 8 law allows literally anyone to file suit against someone who “aids or abets” in an abortion — though not the abortion patient themselves. Someone who drives a patient to a bus so that they can receive an abortion out of state could be sued, and the plaintiff would be awarded $10,000 in damages. Abortion patients themselves cannot be sued.
While the law has been carefully designed so that there is no criminal penalty — and thus, ironically, protecting it from certain legal challenges — it still invites police violence against abortion patients. Recently, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera of South Texas was arrested and detained under suspicion of having induced her own abortion after a stillbirth. Even if the states that criminalize abortion only penalize providers and those who “aid and abet” abortion, patients themselves can still be subject to police violence in cases of self-managed abortions, which will become the only recourse available to many patients who cannot travel out of state to a clinic. Although only a handful of states currently criminalize self-managed abortion specifically, in over half the states there have been criminal investigations into pregnancy loss based on suspicion of self-managed abortion. People from communities that experience heightened levels of policing and state surveillance and who choose to self-manage their abortions will be at an increased risk of criminalization.
Even when abortion patients manage to reach less-restricted states, safe and unfettered abortion access in those places is by no means a given either. Many clinics are already functioning at capacity even before the heightened influx of patients from other states, and the anti-abortion movement has set its eyes on cities like New York. Their base has been galvanized to confront “the evil of abortion” at its center — the clinics where abortions happen. When abortion is halted in over half the states, we can expect that campaigns of harassment will expand at clinics in less-restricted states by anti-abortion groups shifting their focus to regions where abortions are still performed legally.
Abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so.
In New York City, the Archdiocese leads a campaign of clinic harassment every month in all five boroughs — with the blessing and sanction of the police. The police do not help patients enter the clinic safely but escort the clinic harassers — whom they seem to be on friendly terms with — and threaten and intimidate clinic defenders. It is no secret that the police and the far right are closely allied, in some cases one and the same; we cannot count on them to protect abortion patients. We will need a militant response to counter the right in less restricted states.
Moreover, the criminalization of providing abortion care and aiding and abetting abortion puts pregnant people in grave danger. Some states may make “life of the mother” exemptions. But most United States hospitals are either for-profit or religiously affiliated nonprofits with ideological opposition to abortion. There is seldom a clearly demarcated point at which an abortion becomes absolutely, unambiguously medically necessary. A private health care facility may not risk criminal charges in order to save a patient’s life. Notoriously, Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in an Irish hospital when doctors refused to perform an abortion because, though her pregnancy was no longer viable, a fetal heartbeat was still detected. As of this writing, an American woman, Andrea Prudente, is set to be airlifted out of Malta, the only country in the European Union with a total abortion ban. Even though her pregnancy is no longer viable, and without an abortion, she risks the same fate, a fetal heartbeat is still detected and doctors refuse to provide an abortion. Of course, the U.S. leads the developed world in mortality during childbirth. With the end of Roe, it will become even more dangerous to give birth in the U.S.
Many reproductive rights organizations advise that pro-choice activists put aside “coat hanger” imagery and refrain from dwelling on history of dangerous back-alley abortions. This is not to erase the history of violence that accompanied abortion bans, but because it unproductively obscures the abortion situation as it exists today. Self-managed abortions are safer than ever, thanks to the advent of the abortion pill and networks that provide access through the mail; and even abortions in the home can be performed safely using aspiration. In fact, they are more safe than home births, belying the right-wing canard that abortion and the abortion pill is more dangerous than childbirth. The right uses this lie to push for the closure of clinics and make obtaining the abortion pill unduly burdensome.
Laws against aiding and abetting abortion — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
However, the secrecy in which abortions have had to happen historically is what made them so dangerous — that people don’t know how such abortions can be performed safely, or even the basic facts of pregnancy (a situation that’s especially dire in red states given a lack of sex education in schools). This secrecy is enforced by the police. Laws against “aiding and abetting abortion” — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy, and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
If we are to resist abortion bans, each one of us must be prepared to aid and abet abortion, whether that’s being trained in administering a self-managed abortion, buying and donating abortion pills, driving someone across state lines to receive an abortion, participating in clinic defense, or donating to an abortion fund. But we cannot lose sight of the ultimate goal: a mass movement to establish free abortion on demand as an inalienable right.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean; “Millions of women are now less free than men, in the functioning of their own bodies and in the paths of their own lives.
The story is not about the supreme court. Today, the sword that has long been hanging over American women’s heads finally fell: the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to an abortion. This has long been expected, and long dreaded, by those in the reproductive rights movement, and it has long been denied by those who wished to downplay the court’s extremist lurch. The coming hours will be consumed with finger pointing and recriminations. But the story is not about who was right and who was wrong.
Nor is the story about the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy, or the supreme court’s fractious internal politics. In the coming days, our attention will be called to the justices themselves – to their feelings, to their careers, to their safety. We will be distracted by the stench of partisanship and scandal that emanates from the shadowy halls of One First Street; by the justices’ grievance-airing and petty backbiting in public; or by their vengeful paranoid investigation into the leak of a draft of Samuel Alito’s opinion some weeks ago. We will be scolded not to protest outside their houses, and we will be prevented, by high fences and heavy gates and the presence of armed cops, from protesting outside the court itself. But the story is not about the supreme court.
The story is not about the Democratic politicians, whose leadership on abortion rights has been tepid at best, and negligent at worst, since the 1990s. In the coming days, people who have voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment, a provision that has banned federal funding of abortion since 1976 – effectively limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to only those Americans wealthy enough to afford one – will tell us how terrible this is. They will issue statements talking about their outrage; they will make platitude-filled speeches about the worth and dignity of American women. They will not mention their own inaction, persisting for decades in the face of mounting and well-funded rightwing threats to Roe. They will not mention that they did nothing as all that worth and dignity of American women hung in the balance; they will not mention that most of them still, even now, oppose doing the only thing that could possibly restore reproductive freedom: expanding the number of justices on the courts. But the cowardice, hypocrisy, and historic moral failure of national Democrats is not the story. And certainly, the story is nothing so vulgar as what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for that party’s midterm election prospects.
The story is not, even, about the legal chaos that will now follow. It is not about the fact that in 13 states, today’s order has made all abortion immediately illegal, the consummation of sexist ambitions that had long been enshrined in so-called trigger laws, provisions that have been on the books for years and decades that ban abortion upon the court’s reversal of Roe – misogyny lying in wait. Nor is the story about the other 13 states that will almost certainly ban abortion now, too, meaning that the procedure will be illegal in 26 of the nation’s 50 states within weeks.
The story is not about how legislatures, lawyers and judges will handle these laws; it is not about whether they will allow merciful exemptions for rape or incest (they won’t) or impose draconian measures that aim to extend the cruelty of state bans beyond their borders to target abortion doctors, funders, and supporters in blue states (they will).
The story is not about the cop who will charge the first doctor or the first patient with murder – that’s already happening, anyway. The story is not about the anti-choice activists, sneering in their triumph, who will say that they only want the best for women, and that women can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. The story is not about the women who will be imprisoned or committed at the behest of these activists, or the desperate pregnant people, with nowhere to turn, who will be ensnared by them into deceitful crisis pregnancy centers or exploitative “maternity ranches”.
The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity. It is not about the pundits who will scold feminists that really, it is the overzealous abortion rights movement that is to blame; that really, women must learn to compromise with the forces that would keep them unequal, bound to lives that are smaller, more brutal, and more desperate. The story is not, even, about those other rights – the rights to parent, and to marry, and to access birth control – that a cruel and emboldened right will come for next.
The real story is the women. The real story is the student whose appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, who will get a call from the clinic sometime in the next hours telling her that no, they are sorry, they cannot give her an abortion after all. The real story is the woman waiting tables, who feels so sick and exhausted these past few weeks that she can barely make it through her shifts, who will soon be calling clinics in other states, hearing that they’re all booked for weeks, and will be asking friends for money to help cover the gas, or the plane, or the time off that she can’t afford. The real story is the abortion provider, already exhausted and heartbroken from years of politicians playing politics with her patients’ rights, who will wonder whether she can keep her clinic open for its other services any more, and conclude that she can’t. The real story is the mom of two, squinting at her phone as she tries to comfort a screaming toddler, trying to figure out what she will have to give up in order to keep living the life she wants, with the family she already has.
The real story is about thousands of these women, not just now but for decades to come – the women , whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.
The real story is in the counterfactuals – the books that will go unwritten, the trips untaken, the hopes not pursued, and jokes not told, and the friends not met, because the people who could have lived the full, expansive, diverse lives that abortions would allow will instead be forced to live other lives, lives that are lesser precisely because they are not chosen.
The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are – less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.
The real story is not this order; the real story is these people’s unfreedom – the pain it will inflict and the joy it will steal. The real story is women, and the real story is the impossible question: how can we ever grieve enough for them?”
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2022, The Women’s March for Freedom; Throughout America today women have seized the streets in mass action for the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property and the defining quality of citizenship, for without ownership of our own bodies there is no freedom, and we are all made property of the state.
Democracy and dehumanization hang in the balance in the issue of women’s reproductive rights; but also life itself, for access to healthcare is a precondition of the right to life and thus among the first of all implied rights guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without this, no other rights are meaningful.
This is a fight against enslavement and death, and for our equality as human beings and liberty as citizens.
How shall we give answer to our dehumanization and the theft of our citizenship?
Let us say to Gideonite patriarchy and to fascist tyranny with Dylan Thomas;
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom versus dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth.
Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers, and hers is the only legitimate voice regarding one’s own body as the primary right of property from which all others derive. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts and manicures are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2022, There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion; There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
Our Supreme Court just declared half of humankind to be less than human and property of the state, not merely as patriarchal enslavement but also as dehumanization and theft of citizenship. Next will be the right of women to vote, then of all nonwhite persons, then the right to own property and act legally in one’s own name will be restricted to white men as it was at our founding; no matter where it begins with subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Women’s reproductive rights exhibit dual aspects as both an issue of liberty, our freedom to choose our own identity without coercion by the state, and as a healthcare issue, as universal free access to healthcare is a precondition of our right to life and therefore a Constitutional guarantee upon which none may legally infringe.
This is a direct attack on the idea of citizenship which is central and foundational to democracy, on the personhood and self ownership of all women, and on our values and ideals of freedom and equality.
It is a telling sign of intent that Alioto has cited as precedent the law which legalized witch burning centuries go in his opinion claiming that the right to abortion is unconstitutional, as MSN has pointed out.
Once again, unequal power has been captured and institutionalized by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as a fascism of weaponized faith and systemic Patriarchy.
America’s Supreme Court, now a political bureaucracy of authoritarian power and without legitimacy, and which has delegitimized all law in America and subverted our courts as instruments of repression of dissent and the carceral state, the true goal of the Fourth Reich in the capture of our institutions and systems of Justice, has outlawed the universal right of abortion and given a woman’s power over her own body to the state.
Yes, we all knew this was coming but it is a life disruptive event and a point of fracture in our history. This we must resist with mass action and legislative judo, but the forces of patriarchy and fascism are enormously against us. What happens next, if half of humankind can be dehumanized as property of the state and citizenship with our universal human rights becomes meaningless? In this moment, all is in motion and chaotic change, but this is also a chance of action and a measure of the adaptive range of our system. Patriarchy has made a move which is irredeemable and cannot be walked back, and they are exposed; its our move now.
If we want to keep our system of Justice as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens, and the meaning of citizenship itself, we must reform the Supreme Court. I suggest limiting terms to that of the President who appointed each member, or limiting terms and holding a vote to elect Justices on a one citizen one vote basis so that it is no longer a political appointment.
This must be part of a Restoration of democracy which redesigns our system to guarantee majority rule. We must abolish the electoral college and the parceling of votes by state, and change to a one citizen one vote direct electoral democracy.
The blindfold of Justice has slipped, and we must restore her impartiality to divisions including those of gender and race.
As I wrote in my post of October 3 2021, Women’s March for Reproductive Rights and Freedom of Bodily Autonomy; Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action yesterday throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Roe v Wade: US women win abortion rights – archive, January 1973
The fight for abortion rights: what to know going into 2024
Kamala Harris kicks off abortion rights tour on 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade
Witness of History: Pramila Jayapal
Witness of History: Barabara Lee
Witness of History: Cori Bush
Here is the original document published by Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473
Elizabeth Warren Speaks Truth to Power:
Kirsten Gillibrand Speaks Truth to Power:
Hillary Speaks Truth to Power:
Thea Paneth’s Call to Action in Common Dreams:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/05/05/those-who-love-and-respect-women-country-will-rise
Abortion is a winning issue’: rights victories in 2023 US elections raise hopes for 2024
Abortion rights and historic wins: key takeaways from the US’s off-year elections
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, by Mona Eltahawy
The Handmaid’s Tale and Philosophy: A Womb of One’s Own, by Rachel Robison-Greene (Editor)
The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, by Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Editor, Contributor), Janis L. Goldie (Editor, Contributor)
https://jacobin.com/2022/02/judicial-review-democracy-liberals-minorities-breyer-warren-biden
Torch of Liberty 
