Whole human beings

The Guardian talks to some actual women about the abortion ruling:

Bonnie Greer:

As someone who had an illegal abortion – in my home town of Chicago in 1969, four years before Roe v Wade – I was very angry when I heard the news. I am very angry. For women, our destiny has always been our biology, and we’ve fought for ever to change that, to ensure that we’re respected and protected as whole human beings, equal to men under the law.

Now we’re fighting just to be mentioned in news stories about the loss of our rights.

Know this: women will always get abortions, and the overturning of Roe v Wade would mean we will once again be at risk.

It means that men and women are not equal under the law, based on our biology. It’s the same thing as saying that a human being is not equal under the law based on the colour of their skin. Both are things that cannot be altered. I hope that the US people will vote out of office the Republicans who have pushed for this to happen.

Greer doesn’t change the subject to trans women. The next interviewee, Judy Chicago, does.

The fight for women’s rights is a long historic struggle against a set of values that restricts the rights of, not only women, but LGBTQ people, trans people and people of colour.

Must change the subject. Women are the deferential sex, so we’re not allowed to focus on our own rights. It’s shocking that the Guardian allowed Bonnie Greer to get away with it.

Mona Eltahawy defers:

I had an illegal abortion in 1996 in Egypt and a legal abortion in the US in 2000. I can’t believe that my past is becoming the present in the United States. This is the most powerful country in the world, and this fundamental right for pregnant people is being stripped away.

Those who can afford to get a safe abortion will continue to do so, and mostly Black, Indigenous and Brown people, and working-class people, will not. But that’s been the reality for many years now. Texas had already shrivelled the number of abortion clinics it had.

People people people. But she does use the word “women” in the end – just long enough to blame them.

As an Egyptian feminist, I have to call out the role of women in creating this theocracy. Look at supreme court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is not just men taking away our abortion rights.

Robin Morgan is with Bonnie Greer: not ashamed to use the word.

There will be marching, demonstrations, sit-ins, petitions. Women will go ahead and disobey the law. What are they going to do when half the population is in revolt? Not 20%, not the ultra right wing, not the evangelicals. Women are going to control what happens to our own bodies. No matter how many thousands of us have to go to jail. We are not turning back the clock. No way.

Katha Pollitt, of course, doesn’t mess around.

Roe v Wade was a life-changing ruling, probably one of the most important – from the ground level – supreme court rulings there has ever been. It meant that women could stay in school. It meant women could work in a consistent way. It meant women could leave abusive partners. It meant that women didn’t have to marry the man who got them pregnant.

I felt horrified when I found out it could be overturned. This really allows states to do whatever they want with abortion, and 26 states is a lot of people. This is going to affect women whether or not they have an abortion, because it says, basically, you’re here to procreate, and we don’t care if there are health concerns, or rape or incest.

If a man can get you pregnant, you have to have that child. I think that’s a tremendous statement that women do not have that human right any more.

Katha literally wrote the book.

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