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Press: On June 24, local time, the US Supreme Court ruled to overturn the "Rowe v. Wade case". In this regard, the legalization of abortion in the United States since the 1973 ruling pressed the pause button, and the question of the legality of abortion will be left to the states of the United States to deal with on their own. More than a month ago, Interface Culture wrote an article discussing the event, and now at a new point in time, we are republishing this article to share with readers.
"This is a crisis moment for reproductive freedom in the United States," The Guardian senior reporter Jessica Glenza claimed on a recent podcast, "and right now, the rights that a generation of women take for granted are on the verge of being revoked, and more importantly, the decision seems to be just the beginning of Republicans' repeal of a range of other civil rights, and the next threat is most likely the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage, and so on." In early May, politico news network Politico leaked a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion written by suspected Justice Samuel Alito, which showed that the Supreme Court intended to overturn the Roe v Wade precedent that has provided constitutional protection for women's abortion rights for 50 years and leave the issue to state law for its own decision.
A few days ago, The Guardian published a passage in her new book Burning Question, attacking the intention of the US Supreme Court to further restrict women's reproductive freedom. Atwood claimed that forced fertility was a form of slavery whose essence required the possession and control of a woman's body and profited from it: "A child is a gift, given by life itself. But this must be based on free giving and free acceptance... A gift that cannot be rejected is not a gift, but a sign of tyranny. At the same time, more female activists and creators are speaking out for the endangered right to abortion, and in the first moment after the draft was leaked, 9 leading U.S. feminists jointly published their views in The Guardian and tried to pressure the Supreme Court with anger and resistance.
For decades, the ongoing political struggle has made women's abortion rights at the center of the political storm in the United States, and for women, the tightening or liberalization of abortion rights is not only a barometer of political life and partisan struggles, but also the most direct encounter that the body and mind may face. Perhaps, as the writer Cassa Pollet had hoped in Support: Restoring the Right to Abortion, putting the situation of women themselves at the heart of this debate, transcending all ideological debates and games and truly entering the realm of individual experience is an important step in understanding the cultural issue of abortion.
First "Rowe v. Wade", and then what?
In Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, published in the United States in 2015, American writer Katha Pollitt wrote: "The legalization of abortion has changed women's perception of themselves that motherhood is a choice, not an inevitable fate. A few days ago, Pollett said in a joint statement published in the Guardian that the "Rowe v. Wade" case was once a decision that changed women's lives, and from the grassroots point of view, it may be one of the most important decisions in the history of the Supreme Court: it means that women no longer have to be forced to drop out of school because of pregnancy, can plan their careers, leave the partners who abused them, and refuse to marry irresponsible men who let them have unexpected pregnancies. Today, this "right of mothers and grandmothers to fight for" may no longer be protected by the Constitution. Pollett argues, "It's no longer just a matter of abortion or not, it's basically saying that you're here to have children, and we don't care if there's a health problem, rape or incest... If a man makes you pregnant, you have to have that child. It's a 'remarkable' resolution, and women no longer have this human right. ”
It is worth noting that when women are unable to make these basic choices about their bodies, it also means that other potential choices bound to them are also being confiscated by the state. Jill Filipovic, a female writer and lawyer, noted in a statement that "if women can't control their bodies, they can't control their own future." Judges are not stupid people, they know it. Gill denounced the Supreme Court's draft "will open a giant worm can and throw the whole country into chaos": social activists who support and protect abortion rights have frankly claimed that they will continue to protect women's abortion rights at all costs, whether legal or not, and the serious polarization of law and public opinion has posed a serious threat to democratic norms in the United States, and this storm will lead to another wear and tear and destruction of democracy. In Gill's view, the draft is not at all fidelity to the law, not even respect for the value of fetal life, but an extremely misogynistic worldview—"it seeks to restore traditional gender roles, to restore men's dominance over public economic and political life, and to women's subservience and dependence." ”
Even more worrisome for female activists is the temporary restrictions on abortion that states have added during the pandemic may be used as an excuse to ban abortion for long periods of time. According to The New York Times, some Republican-led states have listed all abortions as "non-essential medical procedures," canceled or postponed, and some doctors have even been barred from offering "medical abortions." Although many of these injunctions have been lifted by the court, the news of the overturning of Rowe v. Wade has once again led women to be held hostage to a variety of potential threats that may arise. Playwright Eve Ensler warily points out that the denial of women's reproductive freedom means that other misogynistic actions by right-wingers will also be further catalyzed, "Now that these action plans for women's rights have escalated during the pandemic, if we allow this core right of women to be erased, then the action to erase all people will escalate." ”
"Reproductive freedom" as a privilege
In the view of many female activists, although the 1973 Roe v. Wade case protected women's right to abortion to a certain extent, it had procedural irrationality and logical inequality in practice, and overturning the Roe v. Wade case would further deprive American women of their already tense reproductive freedom. In a joint statement, Dr. Sydney Calkin, a humanities scholar, admitted, "For many people, the rights protected by Rowe v. Wade do not mean much in practice, because the states that oppose abortion can still make abortion almost impossible, and many states have onerous laws that make abortion logically or procedurally impossible, or very expensive." Writer Mona Eltahawy further argues that overturning Rowe v. Wade will only exacerbate the inequalities that already exist in the abortion process: Regardless of the Supreme Court's final ruling, those who can afford to travel abroad will continue to travel to other regions to seek safe abortions, while most black, Indigenous, brown, and working-class women are unable to do so, a reality in the United States for years.
"If the state makes birth compulsory, then why doesn't it pay for prenatal care, childbirth, postnatal care, and child support?" If the state is very fond of babies, why not respect the women who have the most babies and lift them out of poverty? Margaret Atwood questions in her new work, "Rather, it's just trying to reinforce the usual clumsy tactic: forcing women to have children and then making them pay, pay, pay again." If, according to Atwood, forced reproduction is the return of slavery, then the groups most deeply enslaved will be the women at the bottom who have the least say.
For half a century, the situation facing women at the bottom of the United States has not been as bright as the Constitution claims. Even during a time when abortion rights were constitutionally protected, dozens of Texas abortion clinics were forcibly closed, and Lawmakers in Missouri added requirements such as a "72-hour waiting period" to the few remaining clinics that could have abortions. As more clinics disappear, more and more women will have no choice but to resort to the same tough medical abortions. In Support: Restoring the Right to Abortion, Cassa Politt writes: "Some people will end up in the emergency room, some will be injured, some may die, and this is the result of the so-called law designed to protect women from 'dangerous clinics', and this is what the so-called pro-life movement does for life." ”
Activist Mara Clarke, founder of the charity Abortion Support Network (ASN), observed that "until 2010, 87 percent of U.S. counties had no place to provide abortion support to women at the bottom." In 2017, this proportion further deteriorated to 90%. Clark claims that some Britons and Europeans are extremely prone to take abortion for granted as an American-style problem, but they do not know that the reality in the United States is also prevalent in many parts of Europe: Northern Ireland still has no commissioning agency that can provide abortion support; Last year in Europe, Poland banned abortion almost completely, "where women die because doctors don't want to give them abortions"; There are no legal abortions in Malta and Andorra in southern Europe, and abortion is strictly restricted in Liechtenstein, "if the reality of the global South were also taken into account, the situation would only get worse." ”
Despite the difficulties, the women have been working hard: "They save on rent or utilities, desperately scraping together $500 for abortions; They drive across the state to clinics and sleep in their cars because they can't even afford to pay for a motel. Cassa Pollett defends these low-level women not because they are sluts, nor because they hate children and refuse to be a mother (on the contrary, many women who choose abortion are already mothers), but because they value their future possibilities and their right to choose life, even if the cost of such a choice is very expensive for them.
Break the silence and present abortion in precise language
If the freedom of reproduction cannot be completely controlled by the woman herself, if the promising life may be interrupted at any time by an unintended pregnancy, pregnancy becomes a "disease": "a disease that only attacks women and turns them into housewives." In the 2021 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion Award-winning film "Happening," said Anne, a college girl who has suffered physically and mentally from illegal abortions. Recently, the film directed by Audrey Diwan is being fully released in British theaters, the film is adapted from the autobiographical work of French female writer Anne Eno, the narrative is set in France before the legalization of abortion in the 1960s, and the story focuses on the physical and mental trauma suffered by female college student Annie during the illegal abortion. When the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, critics immediately linked Annie's plight to tightening abortion policies around the world.
In an interview with The Guardian a few days ago, Audrey Divan said, "Telling stories in the past tense may give people the feeling that the problem has been solved, but I want to point out the contemporaneity and persistence of the problem." "In interviews, both Divan and Rachel Goldenberg, the female director of Not Pregnant (2020), admitted that their own experiences with abortions have made them more interested in film projects related to abortion, and that women creators should strive to break through the stigma about abortion in the current culture." When I had an abortion a few years ago, I barely told anyone," Goldenberg said, "but once I realized that my own silence had increased the stigma, I started talking to everyone about abortion again — I wouldn't shut up!" Devan also sees the production of "Happening" as a valuable opportunity for more people to see the real situation of women: "Shame keeps everyone silent, and this silence makes everything not change." ”
One of the ways in which these films from the perspective of women critique existing laws and ideologies is to faithfully portray the lengthy and onerous abortion procedure itself. However, rather than the exhaustive restoration of the process itself in Not Pregnant (2020) and Jenny Hotline (2022), Divan is more devoted to depicting the bloody truth of illegal abortion on the physical level in "Happening". In the cruelty of most directors choosing to move away from the camera, Divan let the camera continue to run, and it is through these shots that make the critics "physically uncomfortable" or even "faint on the spot" that "Happening" acknowledges an accurate, painful reality that is usually hidden from view. Kasha Pollett also believes that it is necessary to make the most accurate depiction of the flesh in presenting the truth about abortion for women, observing:
"With a few exceptions, abortion is often only a symbol in men's work, for example symbolizing modern alienation, a more macroscopic form of cultural infertility. Only female writers give this subject a bloody realism and emotional, social complexity. ”
Abortion is one of the most shocking experiences in the lives of countless women, and it is this shock and loss that is blank and silent in literature about women's own feelings, experiences and descriptions of abortion, which prompted the female writer Annie Finch to write the book Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. In the book, Anne Finch spent 20 years searching for depictions of abortions by hundreds of female authors spanning five centuries, including an accurate list of herbs, the color of the pregnancy test stick, the cold sensation when clutching the operating table with both feet, the sound of metal instruments, unbearable cramps and pain, the look of blood flow and clots... Anne Finch argues that women cannot break their silence about abortion without the use of this precise language of body, psychology and morality, and that precise depictions will evoke pain and engrave scars, but it is also a healing of memory and trauma, a necessary path to a community of shared perceptual experiences.
Is abortion legal in the interest of privacy or the pursuit of equality?
If breaking the shame and silence and regaining the right to express experience is the starting point for reproductive freedom, then the struggle to regain the "body" is a more difficult and long journey after the starting point. In 1972, when Rowe v. Wade was in court, states had begun to reform their abortion laws and allow women to have abortions for reasons of rape, incest, fetal deformities, etc., while radical feminist activist Lucinda Cisler warned her fellow women at a time when many thought they had a good chance not to accept any "half-hanging reform" that would subject women's bodies to state regulation. At one meeting, she held up a piece of paper representing the ideal abortion law, which was blank. Seeing that the freedom women gained in Rowe v. Wade was incomplete and that the "victory" of the case was a failure, Heathler feared that the restrictions on women's bodily rights contained in the case would only intensify in the future and would never be abandoned by legislators. In Support: Restoring The Right to Abortion, Cassa Pollett writes, "Maybe she [Heathler] was right. What at the time seemed like "small details" of rights restrictions have now proven to be key faults in the women's movement. ”
"Judge Blackmun's majority opinion in Rowe v. Wade was about the right to privacy, but paradoxically, in reality, the most intimate parts of a woman's body and the most intimate decisions she would make have never been so public." Pollett argues that the failure of Rowe v. Wade is, first and foremost, that it did not make abortion part of a woman's right to privacy, as it promised. "The truth is that everyone can be involved in this trade-off against a woman's body, even her employer."
"They can't completely push down women's reproductive rights, but they can put women's bodies under surveillance and control," Pollett noted. If a business owner thinks that emergency contraceptives and IUDs are "abortion pills" and banned by God, he has the right to exclude them from the health insurance of female employees — and indeed there are people who do, such as Hobby Lobby. In the spring of 2014, the Kansas legislature introduced a law requiring all doctors to report every miscarriage, regardless of the length of a patient's pregnancy. Politt pointed out helplessly, "It is so difficult for women to see the body as their own. "The reality is exactly as Atwood reveals, that women cannot decide for themselves whether or not to have children, and that ownership of their bodies belongs to the state.
The larger limitation of Rowe v. Wade has been pointed out by Justice Ginsburg and other feminist legal scholars that the Supreme Court should legalize abortion on the grounds of "equality" rather than "privacy." In fact, women's right to privacy is rarely bought into in the abortion debate, and equality is a luxury. The recognition that abortion was lawful under extreme physiological conditions was decided in part out of respect for the judgment of doctors and medical institutions rather than respect for the woman's body itself. "It seems that a woman's desire to refuse to procreate is not convincing enough in itself, and it must be approved by a respectable authority figure who at that time was almost always a man." And the root of it all, Pollett writes, "perhaps because they believe that women should live for others... Maybe it's because they don't think women have self-rights. After all, only the "self" can have privacy, and only the "self" can have equality.
We live in a society "hostile to women's desire for a better life", in which women who have accidental pregnancies face a terrible loss of control over their fate, and as a result, Pollett further concludes that "abortion is an act of self-defence ... Why can't a woman say that this is not the right time for me? Or two children (or one) is enough? Why does a woman have to apologize for not having children just because she happened to be pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman from her first period to menopause. "Pollett's powerful questioning makes us realize that the deprivation of abortion rights is a deep disregard for female subjectivity, as well as a contempt for the seriousness of motherhood.
Resources
Katha Pollitt.Pro:Reclaiming Abortion Rights.Picador.2015
Annie Finch. Choice Words:Writers on Abortion. Haymarket Books.2020
‘It’s a hell of a scary time’: leading US feminists on the threat to Roe v Wade
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/04/its-a-hell-of-a-scary-time-leading-us-feminists-on-the-threat-to-roe-v-wade
‘Silence guarantees nothing will change’: film-makers challenge the anti-abortion movement
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/22/silence-guarantees-nothing-will-change-film-makers-challenge-the-anti-abortion-movement
‘Enforced childbirth is slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the right to abortion
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/07/enforced-childbirth-is-slavery-margaret-atwood-on-the-right-to-abortion