When talking about abortion, say the word “abortion”
The ACLU has an article (which it shared on Facebook) by a clinic escort on why abortion rights matter.
Last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, upending 50 years of legal precedent and sparking protests across the country. It’s easy to think Roe fell with the stroke of Justice Samuel Alito’s pen, a legal battle lost in a courtroom. But as a clinic escort for the last decade, I’ve watched the fight for abortion access play out in real time on the sidewalks in front of abortion clinics in Missouri and Illinois.
As a volunteer clinic escort, it’s my job to help patients get from their car door to the clinic door safely; to provide a shoulder to lean on and a gentle, welcome distraction. It might seem strange that a person would need accompaniment when walking such a short distance across a parking lot, but patients seeking health care from these clinics endure a lot of hostility in just a few yards. Anti-abortion protesters do everything they can to discourage patients from getting the care they need: yelling, pleading, praying, and even posing as clinic employees at the front gate of the clinic, next to a sandwich board that says “Check in here.”
Well done her for doing the work (her name is Mariceli Alegria), but you know what’s coming. The answer is no: the word “women” is never used to name the people who need abortion rights. Not even once. It does appear once in the article, but not to name abortion-needers.
The first time I encountered the roar of anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic, I wasn’t an escort. I was going to a Planned Parenthood in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I’m from, for STI testing and birth control. The clinic I went to didn’t even provide abortions; those were few and far between, even 11 years ago. Still, there they were on the sidewalk — little old ladies, holding signs and angrily yelling. I didn’t understand why they were screaming at me just for being there, just for getting birth control. It’s worth noting that those women were white, while the Rio Grande Valley is almost 94 percent Hispanic/Latino.
That’s it, the only mention. Apparently it’s ok to use it to name the villains, but their targets are “patients” and “people” only. “Women” is a forbidden word, even at this moment when we’ve lost a crucial right.
The ACLU does this even as it emphasizes the importance of saying the words.
There’s also something very simple that we should all be doing in this moment: When talking about abortion, say the word “abortion.” Shying away from the word only perpetuates stigma. No one should feel shame for seeking abortion care, but that’s exactly what those protesters outside the clinics are trying to do. They’re not just trying to prevent patients from getting to their appointments — they’re trying to perpetuate abortion stigma that enables bad policies, harmful rhetoric, and misinformation. Exacerbating abortion stigma was a key tactic anti-abortion actors used that has led to this terrifying ruling from the Supreme Court. But we don’t have to stand for it. Abortion is health care, and we should talk about it like we would any other kind of health care we seek.
Absolutely, and you know what else we should talk about as we would any other kind of human being who needs rights? Women, that’s what.
In the almost decade that I’ve been escorting patients, I’ve occasionally encountered folks coming from other states. But in more recent years, and especially in the last six months after Texas passed SB 8, it’s become much more common. Now, those numbers are going to climb even higher, as people get pushed out of states that ban abortion and are forced to travel long distances for care. Regardless of how far people have to travel, Pro-Choice Missouri clinic escorts will continue to support patients in Illinois, now and always. I don’t get the chance to say this to patients while I’m escorting them into the clinic but I want them, and all abortion supporters, to know this: We love you, and we aren’t going anywhere.
We love you, but we’re for damn sure not going to use the word that names you. We’re going to call you folks and people and patients, but never ever ever EVER that word that has now been reserved for men in skirts. Mwah.
TRAs are actually fine with the word “woman” — until it’s connected to anything sex-related. Only then do they go on high alert. They want to include the women with uteruses, cervixes, etc who have rejected their sex and consider themselves men. The TIFs. So it’s either a over-vague “people” or the over-specific “uterus-havers.”
These little old ladies are “white” in the 94% Hispanic/Latino Rio Grande Valley… Yes, it’s the white ladies that are the villain. Abortion rights are definitely something Latinos (shouldn’t it be Lantine/Latinx?) are well known for being in favor of… White ladies of course are very much anti-abortion as we all know.
Apologies if I saw it on this blog, but I’ve seen a couple of people (women, probably) point out that it’s perfectly acceptable to use ‘women’ to criticise women. ‘Karens’ are still always referred to as women. No one writes ‘rich white uterus-havers/rich white people can still travel out of state to get abortions.’
They’re fine with the words “woman” and “girl” so long as it is used for those who were born – and remain- male. They’re more than happy to bestow the words upon male athletes forcing their way onto women’s and girls’ teams. They’re fine conflating sex and gender (or replacing sex with gender) in these cases.
This lets them say that “men can give birth,” but only in order to muddy the definition of “woman” itself. It’s a rhetorical maneouver in the ongoing custody battle over the word “woman.” They are policing who is and is not worthy of being a woman, which is something trans activists accuse feminists of doing. They are attempting to deny women the words, experiences, and realities that are exclusively, materially, female. Decoupling the word “woman” from its physical embodiment in the flesh and blood of female humans allows it to be appropriated by, or given to, men who claim it’s nothing but a feeling or idea. If women are not entitled to use it for themselves, then it is avalable for non-women to use. And there is no equivalent movement to erase or redefine “man” in the name of “inclusivity” because inclusivity is not the point, just a pretext and a smokescreen. The goal isn’t “equality” or “inclusivity”, but the colonization of the idea of “woman” by men, once “woman” has been reduced to nothing but an idea. The possesion and control of the idea of “woman” is important, (too important, in fact, to be left in the hands of women) but women themselves? Not so much.
Women are now supposed to ask for permission to use the word “woman.” It’s now to be kept kept under lock and key, for the exclusive use of those who deserve it, those who’ve earned it, those who’ve chosen to be(come) women. What better way to show this presumptive ownership than to studiously refuse to use the word “woman” in discussing the single most important political and legal story affecting women? And to rub women’s noses in it by cruelly, calculatingly saying
All while doing their damnedest to instill a sense of shame and stigma in women who would dare insist on the use of the word “woman” in the fight for abortion rights. If that’s not a power play, dominance display, and punishment all rolled into one, I don’t know what is.
These would-be tyrants are going to be in for a shock once they discover that their writ does not extend very far at all beyond their self-praising, self-righteous, holier-than-thou, social media bubble.
#3 guest
Now that you mention it, I don’t recall any instance of a trans woman being called a karen, or any related venomous name.
Holms
It’s definitely happened at least once. Danielle Muscato put a picture of a Kroger employee on Twitter after he refused to make another customer put a mask on.
https://www.ibtimes.com/danielle-becomes-new-karen-after-kroger-store-incident-3025036
YNNB #4 wrote:
They’re now using 2 tactics to replace sex with gender:
1.) Arguing that sex is so complicated & confused that only the gender in our brain offers a fixed point of reference. TIMs are the gender “woman.”
2.) Insisting that TIMs are, in fact, female. Many dictionaries are now going along with this, defining “female” first in its reproductive meaning, and then as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”(“males” are also defined as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of female.”)
Sastra #6
Except for the “fixed” part and the “point of reference” part. When I read things like that I’m always reminded of philosophical pseudo-profundities like “what If you see red the way I see blue?”. Even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that TIMs know themselves to be something that they call “women”, how can they possibly know that the thing they know themselves to be is the same as the thing everyone else who call themselves “women” know themselves to be (hence making them the same “kind” of people who belong in the same toilets, the same sporting events, the same jails etc.)? Especially if the experience of being a “woman” is as subjective and incommunicable as my perception of red or your perception of blue?
This is the point at which trans activists have to rely on reified sexist stereotypes to differentiate their concept “gender” from being nothing but “personality.” Remove those traditional patriarchal “sex roles” and they’ve got nuthin’.
The strength and weakness of trans activism are one and the same. They saved a lot of energy avoiding actual argument. It was a short term strategy that depended upon swift backroom capture of institutions.
Not having come up with actual arguments, they are woefully unprepared when they are forced to debate their cause.
Trans activism is not based on anything logical, coherent or consistent. They can’t argue their points because the points weren’t ever supposed to be argued. Their “arguments”, such as they are, are little more than a facade. They’re like the dummy army created in England around the time of Operation Overlord, which was intended to fool the Germans into thinking the invasion of France would be launched across the Pas de Calais, rather than in Normandy. Inflatable “tanks” and “airplanes” were massed in convincing formations that would show up in aerial reconnaissance as an invasion force ready to cross from Dover. Similarly, the talking points of genderists only look like arguments from a distance. Put into actual debate, they’re about as combat-ready as the rubber tanks and trucks the Allies used to fool the Germans.
But trans activism’s target audience for their slipshod pseudo-ideas is not their feminist critics and opponents, but the “allies” they hope to win over to their cause. They pick up and use these sub-standard “weapons”, and keep on jabbering on about “intersex,” and “clownfish,” and “most marginalized group ever” long after feminists have punctured these tropes and moved on. Debate was to be avoided because the arguments weren’t there, which is something that feminists have known all along. The posturing and brandishing of bullshit was never going to fool them. But it did fool the useful idiots who took up the cause and carried the “NO DEBATE!” cry into battle, not realizing that the real war was being waged in backroom deals, where institutions quietly surrendered their legal and moral responsibilities to Stonewall without firing a shot.