Body Control
What *if* they gut Roe v. Wade? Well, abortion access in the country already stinks. So does the rest of the way America treats most people's bodies.
A few nights ago, I had a dream that my sister and I were at an amusement park. This place had a theme, beauty, and we were instructed to go as part of a job orientation. There, our lips were pumped, eyebrows microbladed, cheeks stuffed and sculpted with silicone. At last, we were offered a very specific kind of rejuvenation that we both rejected, only to be told that the man who had been paying for our Kardashianification wouldn’t hire us (for what????) if we didn’t fix everything. I have nightmares all the time, have them every night for months-long stretches, but they are usually more traditional—falling, being chased, monsters—and not so explicitly an invocation of deep-seated societal swill.
Body-control feels like the theme of the year—it’s probably the theme of most of our lives.
There is a public health crisis, a lifetimes-overdue reckoning with the treatment of Black people in the United States, and, now, a bubbling fear about the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light the deficiencies of healthcare and absence of economic safety nets in this country; the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have finally made the message of Black Lives Matter more potent to the larger population. Now, with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I’m wondering if there will be a more prevalent understanding of just how undermined Roe has already been for decades.
In 2018 I helped lead in teach-in called Beyond Roe. I’ve always been pro-choice but had become additionally radicalized about reproductive freedom when I learned the Supreme Court was going to hear a case to repeal a California state law called the Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act, or the Reproductive FACT Act.
The FACT Act required that any clinic in California providing pregnancy-related or family planning services give clients notice of state funding for birth control and abortion; any facility that provided pregnancy tests without licensed medical professionals on the premises had to be transparent about it. The law provided protection from Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), Evangelical-run anti-choice facilities set-up to dissuade abortion-seekers from terminating their unwanted pregnancies.
Here is a very comprehensive segment on CPCs from a 2018 episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
In the summer of 2018, the Act was repealed, deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment in the case NIFLA vs. Becerra. They reasoned, if abortion goes against your religion, you should not have to advise the people you’re treating about getting one, even if you’re running a facility that exists only to manipulate the pregnant with ambiguous information.
SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy compared California to an authoritarian regime for the FACT Act and, after its repeal, resigned with a hearty endorsement that one of his former clerks take the open seat. That guy’s name is Brett Kavanaugh.
A second Trump-appointed Justice, especially one as conservative as Kavanaugh, spooked a lot of women about the possible repeal of Roe v. Wade, which was why we created the teach-in. (s/o to super-organizer, super-feminist Carley Towne who was the heartbeat of the whole thing.) We called it Beyond Roe because access to abortion in the context of the law goes a lot deeper than just that case.
The Fourteenth Amendment says American citizens have a right to privacy and Roe v. Wade ruled that, in essence, deciding when to be a parent falls under your right to privacy. In 1992, the SCOTUS case Casey vs. Planned Parenthood ruled that states can determine the circumstances in which abortion can be sought as long as it does not cause an undue burden—basically, significant expense or difficulty—to the seeker.
There are many states that streeeetch the definition: In Texas, abortion-seekers are given compulsory information about adoption and paperwork about fetal development stages, which the ALCU says includes false information. Utah requires a 72-hour waiting period between consultation and appointment, at which time you must attend a state-mandated lecture which includes information about all of the financial resources available if the pregnancy is not terminated. TRAP laws abound throughout the nation.
The tl;dr version: Abortion access is a shit-hot mess in America and, just like everything else, goes way deeper than what most of us in this country were taught about history and the law.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has abortion access on a lot of people’s minds. I am grateful for so much of the work she did in her life and also extremely suspicious of her deification in the context of the buzzword Feminist™ cottage industry. I’m even more suspicious of the searching-for-Pepe-Silvia of it all that found people blaming Anthony Weiner, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ginsburg herself, for the precise shittiness of having her seat open at this tenuous moment.
But maybe all of it is kind of shitty, no matter what.
It is staggering how infrequently women are allowed to make up their own minds about their bodies. Maybe you’ve already heard about the essay model Emily Ratajkowski wrote for New York Magazine about losing control of her own image.
Yes, that Harvey.
It’s centered on the photographer Jonathan Leder who photographed her when she was just starting her career and then capitalized on her fame by profiting off those images, many of which are explicit, in gallery exhibitions and self-published books.
According to the essay, Leder sexually assaulted her, too.
Ratajkowski says neither she nor the woman who was her agent at the time of the initial photoshoot had any evidence or reference to either of them signing an image release for Leder but one, possibly forged, was presented by the first host gallery to the New York Times. Leder doesn’t seem to give a shit, either way. He has described Ratajkowski as attention-seeking, says that she deserves this treatment and can’t be taken seriously because she’s otherwise posed nude.
Fuck all that. Fuck the mechanisms that prescribe how a woman is supposed to use her body. If Emily Ratajkowski wants to commodify her own nudity, that’s her business—business as trade, business as in mind your own.
It all makes me think about how “Believe women” has become a pervasive catchphrase in the last few years and how it can be better used. For some, it’s a rhetorical devise to combat backlash against people who come forward about their experiences with rape and sexual assault. Like everything else, it has to go deeper than that. It isn’t just that we should be more attuned to believing that rape and sexual assault really happen and that those coming forward are usually telling the truth. There needs to be more emphasis on a woman’s ability to tell her own story, to say this happened to me, this is my experience, this is what I know to be true about me, my body, my life, whether what she’s saying is about abuse or mistreatment in the workplace or her gender identity or that defunding the police will decrease the possibility of her children being killed by a racist. These things shouldn’t compartmentalized. It is all part of the same conversation.
There is another dream I’ve had recently, one that’s come back a couple times, where I am in palatial Korean spa, packed to the brim with other women all dressed in a sage-green uniform of shorts and baggy t-shirts. After completing rounds of sauna rooms and ice baths and skin-sloughing scrub-downs, you take your leave by a lengthy waterslide exit. There is a pervading air of freedom when you are sweating out your stress in a space where critical eyes on the body are almost entirely absent. It is sublime.