Dispatch #89 White Lesbian Age 69 Considers That #Me Too Abortion Is Not Speaking Truth to Power

February 24th 2022

399 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

696 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

I just received the Winter 2022 Ms Magazine whose cover declares ‘We Have Had Abortions’ and whose contents herald a ‘campaign for honesty and freedom’ fueled by a national We-Have-Had-Abortions petition – a self-described campaign to ‘help eliminate the stigma of abortion.’

Hmmm, is this the point/purpose for public statements by prominent and accomplished women recounting their abortion stories? These stories feel confessional – when, how, why, and so forth – justifying abortion, legitimating abortion, explaining abortion.  Is the implicit message that women who have had abortions are really good regular women? Is the implicit purpose to counter the notion that women choosing abortions are careless or lazy or uncaring or selfish or worse, fundamentally flawed?  

I am profoundly disheartened by this emerging #Me Too Abortion strategy.  Advocates and activists claim this strategy is “speaking truth to power.”   Are you kidding?! Eliminating the stigma of abortion?!  NO! I reject this ill-conceived strategy that amounts to a defensive reaction to the white supremacist Christian nationalist patriarchy War on Women.  

Speaking truth to power in the fight against the War on Women is this: 

WOMEN ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS POSSESSING HUMAN RIGHTS PREMISED ON BODILY AUTONOMY.  WOMEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO CONTROL THEIR BODIES.  WOMEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO DECIDE WHEN TO HAVE CHILDREN.   

We must demand that the language of public discourse be changed.  Speaking truth to power means calling out the exploitation, misogyny and poverty that are fundamental to patriarchal global capitalism in the 21^st century.  

Speaking truth to power means explicitly identifying and renouncing the premise that the primary value/worth of women comes from (re-)producing more humans.  Women can choose to reject the (re-)production mandate.  Women control their (re-)productive lives.

Speaking truth to power means explaining why Roe v Wade is not the holy grail.  Instead, we demand that REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE provide the foundation for new legislation that codifies and protects women’s human rights.  

Reproductive Justice encompasses the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent children in safe and sustainable communities. (www.sistersong.net) Drawing on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Reproductive Justice also insists on the responsibilities of government to protect those rights with policies based on economic equity and social justice, i.e., fair wages, family leave, national health insurance, universal child care, affordable housing. 

How have we come to this moment in the third decade of the 21^st Century where state legislatures are negating women’s rights to bodily autonomy and expecting approval from the Supreme Court?  Where women’s human rights are being erased/redefined by the hierarchy of (re-)productive dominance promoted by white Christian nationalism. Numerous scholars/historians have identified the steady and stealthy work of conservatives over the past 60 years to seed their patriarchal capitalist values in school boards, state legislatures, judicial system, state and local officials. The Republicans who were Planned Parenthood board members in the 1960s now champion white grievance polarization and religious extremism, and seek power at any cost.  

Consider this comment during oral argument from Justice Sotomayor:

How is your interest anything but a religious view? The issue of when life begins has been hotly debated by philosophers since the beginning of time. It’s still debated in religions. So, when you say this is the only right that takes away from the state the ability to protect a life, that’s a religious view, isn’t it?

The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.  In her recent article in The Guardian titled “White nationalists are flocking to the US anti-abortion movement,” Moira Donegan provides compelling history for their inherent symbiosis:

Explicit white nationalism, and an emphasis on conscripting white women into reproduction, is not a fringe element of the anti-choice movement. Associations between white supremacist groups and anti-abortion forces are robust and longstanding. In addition to Patriot Front, groups like the white nationalist Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party have also lent support to the anti-abortion movement. These groups see stopping abortion as part of a broader project to ensure white hegemony in addition to women’s subordination….

The link between the anti-choice movement and white supremacy is much older and more fundamental than this recent, superficial social justice branding effort. Before an influx of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception had only been partially and sporadically criminalized. This changed in the early 20th century, when an additional surge of migrants from Asia and Latin America calcified white American racial anxieties and led to white elites decrying the falling white birth rate as “race suicide”.

In the current anti-choice and white supremacist alliance, the language of “race suicide” has been supplanted by a similar fear: the so-called “Great Replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that posits that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color… The way to combat this, the right says, is to force childbearing among white people, to severely restrict immigration, and to punish, via criminalization and enforced poverty, women of color. These anxieties have always animated the anti-choice movement, and they have only become more fervent among the March for Life’s rank and file as conservatives become increasingly fixated on the demographic changes that will make America a minority-white country in the coming decades. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/24/white-nationalists-are-flocking-to-the-us-anti-abortion-movement  

Disguised as pro-life/anti-abortion movements, the War on Women is waged by patriarchal capitalism bent on appropriating/colonizing the power to control (re-)production. We Women Warriors Who Rise in Resistance to take back our bodies shall not be stigmatized. We celebrate claiming our humanity and rejecting appropriated (re-)production.

Shout out to Brazilian-Billionaire-Shero Luiza Trajano, who turned a small family business into a retail behemoth and then decided to limit its executive training program to Black applicants.  Receiving both public praise and outrage, Ms Trajano, age 71, sees her decision as necessary and overdue step to atone for the brutal legacy of racism in Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888. “Beyond the economic and social aspects, slavery left a very strong emotional mark, which is a society of colonizers and the colonized. Many people have never felt that this is their country.” www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/world/americas/luiza-trajano-brazil-magalu-racism.html