A Dyke A Broad #82 Notes on Abortion and language
Thoughts on #abortion, the nonconsensual un-naming of women, and how it both hides the men who benefit from the patriarchy, and silences their victims.
Hello from Paris!
Saturday, I hung out at a café with a Turkish friend on the part of rue du Faubourg Saint Denis where the air is scented with the grilling meat from kebab places squeezed in between the chic or grungy cafés. A couple of fancy pizza places have sprung up, too, along with an overpriced taco stand in which the tacos really are tacos, with birria, or deep-fried carnitas, and not the weird French tacos which are more like giant burritos stuffed with every kind of meat and cheese you can think of from a chicken cutlet to a hamburger, then vegetables, raclette, reblochon, or whatever, and grilled like an Italian panini until the cheese melts.
We were drinking coffee and talking about the fate of abortion in the U.S. She’d been reading headlines that implied overturning Roe versus Wade would outlaw the procedure nationwide, when in fact the 1973 decision just overturned existing bans. That means reversing the decision wouldn’t itself outlaw abortion, but send decisions about it back to each individual state. (Several states have bans waiting to go into effect the moment the new decision officially hits the streets).
While some congresspeople are working on a federal law that actually would ban abortion (it may not pass because the majority of Americans, including Republicans, support at least some form of abortion), overturning Roe won’t change as much as you’d think for many women. Not in the states where abortion will remain legal. But also not in the states where it will be completely banned, because there are already so many restrictions that it is nearly impossible to get one. In Kentucky, there’s only a single clinic left which has the resources to jump through all the necessary hoops to keep their doors open. Which means that it won’t be anything new for poor and rural women, often women of color, to be forced to bear unwanted children if they don’t have the money—or time— to travel, assuming they can get an appointment at all with the handful of doctors willing to risk their lives and those of their families to perform abortions.
In short, we’re already far worse off than in the 1980’s when the right to abortion seemed safe and my grandmother confessed to me once, when she was picking out a knitting needle from her sewing basket, how terrified she’d been to die in a bloody bed like so many women did, especially out on farms where she came from. She’d seen how their husbands would quickly replace them with another girl who would fall pregnant immediately, and stay that way, taking care of all the children, until she died, too. My grandmother got her tubes tied after four kids and was so relieved.
Hell, even my own conservative mother whispered to me once she was pro-choice, because “Women are more than just baby-machines.” She’d even arranged to get her own tubes tied after I came along—without her Catholic husband’s consent. Five decades later, and almost forty years after their divorce, my dad was still furious he hadn’t been asked.
The unravelling of Roe has been going on so long, and so unremarked, that all the current gnashing of teeth feels largely like crocodile tears, an excuse to rage at Republicans. But will the new outrage burn out briefly, while the Republicans pass even more onerous laws? More punitive ones? Or will it turn into a movement? Can it? While many of us believe the right wants to keep women barefoot and pregnant, or at least submissive and compliant, it’s hard not to notice the left seems to despise us just as much, treating ordinary women as disposable, irrelevant. Shaking, not stirring their usual misogyny into such a tasty cocktail with gender theory, that in the name of trans inclusion groups like the ACLU don’t even have to say the word, woman, ever again.
When they post things like that, that abortion affects half the nation, does anybody really wonder which half of the population that is? Or if they have a name? Or how on earth we could determine who is who and which is which? Perhaps we can ask the Taliban which has no trouble deciding whose terrifying bodies should be covered head to foot, imposing new restrictions on women this week in Afghanistan.
It’s like trying to talk about racism in the U.S. without acknowledging there are white people and people of color. Vague statements about “people” undermine any possibility of creating the solidarity of a class, of organizing based on what we share under the banner of a name. Nevertheless, groups like the ACLU commented on the decision without daring to use the word woman, or worse, calling us things like “birthing bodies,” gestational somethings or others.
A lot of women noticed.
It is… I don’t know how else to say this… offensive? Delusional? Just because trans people exist who identify as the opposite sex (or none at all) doesn’t mean that sex and sex classes have disappeared. Sex, in fact, is an immutable element of human existence. And while I wish it would go away, the discrimination based on it is alive and well with males as the beneficiaries, if not usually the perps of the inequalities.
Who, in our male-default world, never receives medicine that is not tested on their bodies? Who almost never dies during domestic violence, unless they were first abusing their (female) partners? Who almost never gets trafficked for sex? Whose bodies, whose lives are not affected—at all—by heterosexual sex? Men.
No males at all, even those who identify as women and have legal status as women, can conceive and bear a child. No male can be forced to bring an unwanted baby to term. Not a single one.
The nonconsensual un-naming of women doesn’t change this fact. In fact, it seems designed to enable the patriarchy to operate with impunity, hiding both the men who benefit from discrimination, but more importantly making invisible the women who are its primary victims, and shutting them up. By erasing the word, women, you erase the class, you disarm them, because the primary weapon in a democracy is language. Without that word, there is no movement, no feminism, no history (or herstory), no guidepost to the characteristic shared by those denied not just reproductive rights, but the right to vote. To wear pants. Uncover our heads. Own property, and not be owned ourselves, chased down if we tried to flee from abusive husbands and unceasing childbearing.
As for the small minority of females mostly in developed countries that have the privilege of not identifying as women, there’s no reason not to add language that acknowledges them. Yes, transmen occasionally get pregnant, along with those who identify as nonbinary. But it is shameful, misguided, and counterproductive to use trans inclusion as an excuse to erase the vast, overwhelming majority of garden variety adult human females represented by that word women. It’s like instead of constructing a ramp to make a building accessible, you spitefully decide to burn the whole thing down with the inhabitants in it.
Fuck that.
As Sally Rooney wrote, commenting on the Irish abortion ban in 2018:
"Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body.... In the relationship between fetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse."
At issue, is not just women being in control of their reproductive lives, but women being in control of their lives, their bodies. Which means reclaiming their names. As Suzanne Moore said, “You cannot defend what you cannot define.”
Happy Birthing Parent’s Day
“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde
That’s it for this week,
Disgruntledly yours,