The Erosion of Our Reproductive Rights: A Nightmare Coming to Past

(First a word, this weekend I should be celebrating the official holiday of my country’s birth.  But this 4th of July, I am not in the mood to celebrate.  My rights, and people like me, are seeing their rights being slowly taken away.  I will drink and barbecue and drink, but I will be only too glad that I am still on this planet.  But this country was never really completely free for the rest of us.  To say so would be lying to myself.  A country started by wealthy, hetero-white cis men seems to only be for them. Class, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. are our divisions, remember that. The following righting are my thoughts from last Friday.  If I can, I am going to try to get a protest together for the 4th, because we are not a free nation until we all are free until ALL our human rights are protected.)

F*ck, I can’t believe this! I don’t understand, they actually overturned Roe!”

I couldn’t comprehend what I was reading.  I received news notifications at 9:30 AM from Reuters, the AP, and local resources, all stating the same nightmare: The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade. After almost 50 years of being the law of the land, we saw our worst nightmare come to fruition.

This writing is tame to what I am really feeling.  I am so very angry. I am so angry that it is just building up inside.  Nothing is helping.  The people I know are too inside themselves to really protest, to really get all our anger out.  Nothing worse than seeing cis men taking over the conversation on social media.  I want to scream, I want to punch some people in the throat every time they say something ignorant.  I want to ask the white cis women in 2016, why not her?

The anger that I feel is immeasurable. I feel betrayed by those who should have done something years ago to protect our rights.  I am angry at my white cis sisters who seem to side with the patriarchal systems that allow this type of oppression to continue.  I am angry at the pro-choice politicians that could have codified it all these years.  Angry, betrayed, and tired.  But not so tired that I will not continue to fight for human rights, including reproductive and especially, abortion rights.  I will not let Christian Nationalists win.  Their religions are consumed with men being on top of the societal hierarchy. I am in no mood to hear or tolerate this any longer.  Since six people, including one white woman, decided that they will let the states decide what those of us with uteruses will do.  Alito’s opinion was that these rights weren’t protected by the Constitution, and made that clear:

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

"Even though the Constitution does not mention abortion, it is a moral decision by the state to decide what is best for its citizens."

(https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473)

Well, I guess the 13th and 14th Amendments wouldn't cover my body's autonomy. 

I beg to differ, but I am not in the mood to argue that at this moment. I will let the ACLU do that.  So our bodies belong to the state, so much for liberty.  What’s next, birth control?  Repeal of the 19th Amendment?  What about racial segregation?  How far back do these regressives want to take us?  

What really pisses me off is that a lot of the regressive (Republican/Rightwing) women, especially the white ones, step on the necks of their feminist sisters both past and present to do things such as Justice Barrett did.  I was 10 when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in.  For a young girl, it meant a lot to me, even though at 10 I hated Reagan. But that was one good thing Reagan did.  Then Clinton put RBG on the court, and Obama with Sotomayor and Kagan, all this during my lifetime, women being placed on the highest court of the land. Until last year, when this woman literally fucking over all the women before her and the generations after, taking the freedoms she enjoyed from the feminists that fought so hard so she could be where she is now.  She and other regressive women love to step on the necks of feminists for their own gain and destroy the future of younger feminists.  They love to prop up the patriarchy. I am embarrassed to say this but she is of my generation, and so are the other two that Trump was allowed to seat. My passion for following the Supreme Court died in 2016 when the Regressives managed to stop Obama from filling an empty SCOTUS seat.  Now, this backward move on human rights.

Now, we have the Senate filibuster to contend with…we can’t pass DACA (in 20 years) or legalize abortion through legislation.  

Though on Friday, we did pass a gun reform bill and Biden signed it, this victory was overshadowed by the SCOTUS ruling.  Mixed feelings?  I can’t process that right now.

Lately, I have been volunteering for campaigns and human rights organizations. But I am not sure if this is the correct path, for getting to know a few politicians (and wannabes), they all seem to be narcissistic, and with messiah complexes.  Pretending they are doing this for others and the common good, but really for the power, the attention, or worse, money.  But I support a few anyway because what choice do I have?  What power do I have, but to keep voting and moving forward?  At least that is what I am telling myself.  It is with a heavy heart that my idealism must continue, even at 51. But reality has hit me over and over. Yeah, trust me on this.  But that is a subject for another writing.

As a woman who lived most of my life with the protection of Roe vs, I was born in 1971, I never took it for granted that it could be overturned, but I really thought after 50 years we were safe.  My regret is that we never pushed our pro-choice politicians to codify it.  The generations of feminists that fought to legalize it, the ones before me, and now the ones after me no longer have it.  When I went to a protest last month after the Politico article reported the leaked draft, I saw women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, marching once again. (Though the protest was the most sanitary “march” I ever attended, I was more apt to be supportive of everyday people speaking than politicians, especially cis men, so I was disappointed in the “March”.)   But I did ask myself where are the feminists in their 40s and 50s?  All I saw were a generation or two younger, and a generation or two older. How could we fail so tremendously? And then I thought of my history classes in gender studies in undergrad, reading about white feminists betraying their sisters over and over again.  White women who are willing to strengthen a patriarchal white supremacist system, under the guise of various political ideologies.

What do we do now? We demand that our politicians federally protect human rights, including abortion rights.  We stand up and say, “We won’t go back! Not in any state, not anywhere!” The state controlling of our bodies is a form of oppression that I have fought for, all over the world. Now, in the United States, my country, this shit has happened in a lot of states.  Strangely, we are going back to the idea of “states' rights” when it comes to oppression. Now, I am afraid about how far back we are going to let them go. As for me, I am a lucky one, living in the state of Illinois where the Democratic state government protected our rights. I plan to keep it that way and fight to keep it legal in other states that want to ban it.

There seems to be no bottom for the regressives.  I no longer believe that it is hyperbolic to say that they are willing to set us back 100 years or more in human rights, all in the name of power and control.  We can’t take any of our rights for granted, we shouldn’t have taken them for granted in the first place, and we won’t do that again. 

After I wrote this, my niece, who is 30 and a mother of three small children, called me the other day.  She was upset to learn what happened, and because of the panic online, she asked me, “How far back is the Supreme Court willing to court? How did this happen?  I thought if Biden was our President, we’d be ok.  How could he let this happen?  And are they going to bring segregation back?”  I consoled her and said, “No, none of that is going to happen. We’re going to keep fighting. We won’t let them.”  I explained how SCOTUS works and why.  I explained that Illinois was safe because the ruling left it up to the states.  She then said that she always wanted to move from Illinois, but now, she thinks she is going to stay.  None of us should have to live that way.

Meanwhile, fuck this violent, classist, racist, phobic, and sexist society.  I give up on “reforming” it.  I really do feel this way right now and this 4th of July.  Maybe I am just angry right now. But I am going to stay angry.