Dispatch #103 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers Reproductive Narratives

April 10th 2023 

779 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

316 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

292 Days Since Supreme Court Ruled Women’s Human Rights Don’t Exist

“Abortion Wins Elections The fight to make reproductive rights the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s 2024 agenda.”  

Fabulous favorite woman warrior Rebecca Traister published this piece in The New York Magazine & The Cut March 27, 2023 Issue. www.thecut.com/article/abortion-democratic-party-2024-elections.html    

Traister provides a virtual tutorial addressing the questions raised in Dispatch #102 about the power of narratives.  How do we identify existing narratives that nourish dominance and oppression?  What strategies can dismantle these toxic narratives?  What new counternarratives can create revolutionary change toward liberation?

Excerpts from Traister’s article -- shown in Arial Black -- comprise this 103^rd Dispatch.  (But, if you can, do make time to read the entire piece.) 

The question,” New York representative Shirley Chisholm declared in 1969, “is not: can we justify abortions, but can we justify compulsory pregnancy?”   

In her 1969 speech, Shirley Chisholm cited a poll showing that 64 percent of respondents were in favor of abortion decisions being made between a woman and her doctor. After Roe, survey after survey turned up a nation irrevocably divided on the issue: 50-50 for and against. It got embedded in the very psyche of the Democratic Party that abortion was a lightning rod and that to come too close to it was to risk electrocution.

Only in the past decade has a new and more diverse generation of pollsters begun asking questions about abortion differently. As Undem has explained, when surveys asked first whether respondents personally supported abortion and then whether they believed the government should be making decisions about it, it became clear that 60 to 75 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal. In other words, it took more than 50 years to get back to where Chisholm said we were in 1969.

Chisholm also saw the links between gender, racial, and economic inequity. “The poor rely most heavily on the contraceptive methods which have the highest incidence of failure,” she said…. Chisholm was trying to normalize reproductive health; she was acknowledging the quotidian human experience of people with the capacity for pregnancy. When abortion is integrated into our lives, when it is not placed into its own special and highly charged category, when it is based on real stories of real people, a subtle shift occurs, as if we’re cocking our heads to see a 

photograph in a different way. 

Creative strategies and political practices that the Democratic Party failed to develop over the past 50 years have blossomed elsewhere. The most successful of them have been holistic, connecting the dots between health care, good governance, maternal mortality, workforce participation, climate justice, economic inequality, and criminal-justice reform…. One lesson from [recent election victories in] Michigan is to make the connections between abortion and health care, child care, economic opportunity, affordable education, and democracy itself.

Catalina Martínez Coral, regional director at the Center for Reproductive Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean, wrote last year after the victory in Colombia, “It wasn’t enough to change our laws. How people thought and talked about abortion had to evolve too.” However long it may take to undo the damage of Dobbs and the decades of erosion that preceded it, the longer and deeper project — of revising not just the way we legislate but the way we think — will remain.

To truly reframe the issue moving forward might mean moving away from one old frame: Roe itself. Activists have long argued that it should never have been the ceiling but the floor. Now that it’s gone, those mourning its demise can strive to build a more expansive, less vulnerable model dependent not on legally precarious notions of privacy, and not tied to gestational age in a way that permits restriction, and not as exposed to limitations that hurt the poor most. Whatever comes next, multiple Democrats suggested to me, should not be modeled on Roe or try to recapitulate it. “We have a chance to imagine something much more fundamental to women’s futures and rights than we’ve ever had before,” Jayapal said.

Elected officials at the forefront of this fight, like Whitmer and Jayapal and Lee and Pressley, are asking us to conceptualize abortion as part of the complex but ultimately ordinary warp and weft of everyday life. What if business development necessarily entailed abortion protections? What if family values meant families being able to make choices about how and when they form and having access to the health care they need? What if the protection of democracy were very clearly tied to access to reproductive care?

Perhaps this sounds like a stoned conversation in a dorm room, but then again, the kind of strategizing the right has done since the late-20th century has also sounded like a stoned conversation in a dorm room. What if we said the clinic hallways had to be a certain width, dudes? What if we force doctors to tell patients there’s a link between breast cancer and abortion? What if we behaved like second-trimester fetuses had the chubby cheeks of 6-month-olds?

Narratives and Ideologies, symbiotic collaborator-enforcers, are designed to determine how we think when we do not know that we are thinking.

Narratives powering the Toxic Premise of Patriarchy – that is, women are valuable only as the means of human production – create and sustain ideologies of dominance and oppression, hierarchies of owners and the owned.   

Narratives powering and celebrating Women’s Human Rights will create and sustain ideologies of liberation, reproductive justice, social justice, and equitable communities.