Thirty years ago American feminist, journalist and author Susan Faludi made clear the connection between a war on women and the attack on reproductive rights: “It is inevitable that even the most modest efforts by women to control their fertility spark a firestorm of opposition [because] all of women’s aspirations — whether for education, work or any form of self-determination — ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.”
So why is it that when the reproductive future of American women has never seemed darker, many seem unable to articulate what’s being done to them in a way that packs an emotional punch?
The problem is the loss of feminist language and with it the centuries of feminist analyses of precisely the social, political, legal and medical fertility predicament we face now.
In Pro-Publica’s piece about men using the fall of Roe v Wade to coercively control their former partners by suing them for long-ago abortions, Nicole Santa Cruz dryly notes: “The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation … suggests that people who have had or have sought to have an illegal abortion, as well as the expectant father and the parents of a pregnant minor, be allowed to pursue wrongful death actions.”
When Texas passed a law that allows armed citizen vigilantes to collect bounties for turning in anyone helping a Texas woman to access abortion, US President Joe Biden’s immediate but uninspirational tweet read: “Texas law SB8 will significantly impair people’s access to the health care they need — particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes.”
Even MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace’s expert reporting on the forced border crossing of a 10-year-old rape victim to get an abortion was defanged and became hard to follow when the highly gendered nature of what had befallen a little girl with a woman’s problem was stripped from the frame.
Wallace: “The vitriol, the disdain for the truth, and the willingness to sacrifice the youngest victims in our country, a rape victim who is 10 and a half years old does represent a terrifying low.”
Mini Timmaraju, president of pro-choice body NARAL: “There is a girl within this story who deserves to be treated with respect. She deserves to be cared for. There are pregnant people across the country who deserve the same. But this extremist GOP does not want to acknowledge that.”
Wallace: “This feels like it goes beyond disinformation to erasure.”
In fact, what both Wallace and Timmaraju erased when talking about this case, and denials of service across the country, is the highly gendered context in which abortion rights — rights that only one half of the population need — are withdrawn. To put it simply, no country that truly accepts the equal place of women in society continues to attack the right to abortion.
But when little girls become pregnant people, and pregnant people are the ones at risk, the assault on abortion rights as a tool to degrade, repress, insult and ultimately enslave the female half of the species is lost. Indeed the non-gendering of the term was the point, to allow discussions of pregnancy, lactation and childbirth to be more inclusive.
Which is fine and nice in a society where the worst thing that can happen to a person is that they feel hurt or excluded by reproductive language that isn’t gender-neutral or non-binary. But is bat-crazy in a society in which the assault on women because they are women is being conducted by the same conspiracy-fattened, armed and dangerous white supremacists who are assaulting the democracy on which everyone’s rights depend because they can’t win playing fair anymore. With, the evidence suggests, considerable success.
You can’t fight what you don’t understand. You can’t explain what you’re unable to name. How can we expect the global sisterhood to rally around the religious and racist assaults on American women as if their own status as full citizens depended on it if the best American women do to explain their plight is bleat about abortion as a medical procedure and “people’s” rights.
The assault on abortion rights is always and forever an assault on women. If Americans are too busy minding their pronouns to properly raise the alarm and repel it, then the rest of the world’s women can bet their bottom dollar that the same reactionary forces in our own countries will be coming for us, too.
“The assault on women because they are women is being conducted by the same conspiracy-fattened, armed and dangerous white supremacists who are assaulting the democracy on which everyone’s rights depend because they can’t win playing fair anymore.” Well, they never played fair, did they? But, certainly, any gloves they might have worn while pursing their self-serving nefarious aims have been violently binned and everything and everyone who is perceived to be in their way is now viciously targeted. And when I say “they” I refer to all the billionaire white, male media owners, the other billionaire white, male corporate monopolists and oligarchs, and all the like-minded male – not necessarily white – politicians looking for ways to increase their own wealth and power. Then, of course, there are the conspiracy-fattened, armed and dangerous women who choose to join this appalling, reactionary, neoliberal fray, willing to throw their sisters on the pyre presumably for some sort of personal gain. As a woman and a proud feminist, I reserve my greatest contempt for them. I’m past it now, but ejecting an unwanted, unplanned, cluster of cells from my body is my bloody right and my bloody business and absolutely no-one else’s business.
Its a control thing. Conservative men think they own women, the bible tells them so, and therefore they want to control them. This means making their decisions. Hence there most certainly is a war on women.
Not all conservative men believe in the bible. Some of it is entrenched patriarchy and misogyny.
Identity politics, particularly the US variety, has led to this mess by appropriating the words men and women to refer to gender rather than biological sex. And then to conflate gender and sex, so there is endless confusion about what the words refer to. If man and woman refer to gender, what two words can we use to refer to biological sex now (at least for the 99% who fall into the two prevalent categories)? For issues such as abortion, we need to refer to the biological sex, which is the relevant category for all things reproductive. Man and woman continue to be the words used by the majority of people, but their use is enough to get them vilified by people like some of those appearing in the comments below. So discussion on the actual issue, of existential concern to women, gets derailed constantly. Good on Leslie for having the courage to call out this issue publicly.
In recent decades both the left and right sides of politics seem to have lost their minds. The left is largely preoccupied with identity politics with its never ending noisy squabbles over which largely irrelevant minority has the right to greatest victimhood.
The right is largely preoccupied with god, encouraging big business to run riot and blaming minorities for everything that goes wrong.
The left’s identity politics quagmire has now reached its inevitable destination of absurdity, irrelevance and impotence. Now that there is a matter of real concern affecting women, the left has become so far removed from reality it is no longer able to say anything about women having spent the last decade doing its best to convince the world that women is a word that can’t really be used any more.
This has brought into focus one of the main problems with the left – its abandonment of the interests of the majority in favor of a victim / oppressor narrative involving a lot of convoluted, self contradictory noise concerning largely irrelevant minorities.
The right side of politics is essentially beyond redemption, the left is hopeless. There really is a need for a grass roots representation of the sensible center of politics in most western democracies with the creation of new centrist political parties.
I would love to think that it was the right that first started using the strategy “Just Say Words! It doesn’t matter if they correspond to actual reality! If they’re nice words, people will vote for you and you can say different words tomorrow!” But in any case, both sides know how to use the tactic now. We need to fix both left and right because while either side remains crazy there’s no incentive for the other side to do better
Luckily for us, the crazy epicentre is still in the US. But it’s coming for us one way or another
Yes. The left have abandoned the working class and poor in favour of ‘identity’.
But identity does not explain anything and encourages certain “love to play a victim” types to claim ‘minority’ identities in order to claim the pity/victimhood/gain the spoils.
Thank you Leslie. Next article: explain why “birthing person” is used by so many, including now, our very own Medicare.
And who is behind this?
You’ve touched on it, now go the whole hog.
A hint: it’s the “penis havers” and the “prostate havers, regardless of their pronouns and their clothing.
Why are young people, especially, so taken with this? And some rather prominent Australian feminists, too.
Sincerely, an adult human female, still a woman.
Do you think it’s the ‘penis havers’ though?
I am not convinced at all.
There are so many “non penis people” in academia, in power, and what do they do for the birthing people? What do they care about? What have they pushed for the last fifty years?
That’s right: non-penis people want abortions and careers. Non-penis people are the same as penis people. There is no difference between non-penis people and penis people: except for the nasty business of birthing.
So if there is no difference between humans, none at all, then all of the people should be happy once there is “equality” written into the law, right? All the non-penis people should be happy once they can take their rightful place (after an abortion or five) with the penis people – at the head of this or that company, right?
All those people with wombs and two X chromosomes that are in power, they aren’t doing anything for the people using their wombs.
Julia Gillard: misogyny speech extraordinare – stopped the sole parent pension for those grandfathered when Howard cancelled it for those with children over 6-8. Gee, thanks Julia – sorry I didn’t get four abortions and become a PM like you.
I’dve thought the birthing person was the person being birthed i.e. the baby. Of indeterminate sex?
I have never heard of this term being used in Australia, and I’m a little sceptical of your claim that it is used by Medicare. The only references I can find are from the US.
It’s a recent addition
While I’m not your research assistant, I refer you to @salltweets on Twitter.
A tweet is not ‘research’. Those who make the claim should support the claim. Here’s the medicare website, show us where the term is used. Of course, it could be on information to doctors not available on the medicare website, in which case you should provide it as you are the one who says it exists. https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/most-viewed-payments-for-having-baby?type%5Bvalue%5D%5Bpayment_service%5D=payment_service
The leading Worm article recently (July 3) referred to ‘anyone with a cervix ‘ & ‘people diagnosed with cervical cancer’.
Another obvious example of obliterating women and girls with language.