I think the thing I’ve identified with the most since Monday night is Jessica Valenti’s newsletter, where she describes the imminent demise of legal abortion as “humiliating.”
It’s humiliating for people – mostly men, but not only men – to reduce me to a vessel, one that outlives its usefulness as a fully human person should pregnancy occur. Of course, they are not really talking about me…but also, they are talking about me.
I would like it if a right I have enjoyed the entirety of my life on this earth was not about to be rolled back, making me a second-class citizen unable to exercise free will and bodily autonomy.
I have seen a number of people say that this time is different, this time our anger will change something. I’ve been angry for most of the last six years and it never changes anything.
I once dated a guy who asked me how I could be pro-choice and against the death penalty, and the answer is because neither issue has anything to do with “the sanctity of life.” Both issues are about state control of marginalized people’s bodies. I am anti-that.
When will women stop having to pour out oceans of pain – their rape, their poverty, their violent marriage, their ectopic pregnancies, genetic anomalies, loss, grief, being turned away from hospitals, being denied medical care, harassed at clinics, treated as monsters or killers or whores or all of the above – and watch the oceans evaporate as if they never existed? Not one drop of that humanity has ever interfered with a state legislature determined to remind us who is really in charge here.
Unremarkable men make these rules. For the likes of me. It is not to be believed. It is beyond my comprehension.
The next letter will be funny again. This one had to come first.