Access to Abortion is Political Freedom

I am grateful to Scott for his continuing posting of atrocities against women experiencing failed pregnancies. Often, I’ve thought “I should post that,” and Scott had published it already.

Something that has come home to me more vividly than ever since Dobbs is that the availability of reproductive health measures is central to women’s freedom. Because we bear the next generation, our political freedom is tied to our physical selves in a way that men’s can never be.

The fight to destroy women’s freedom identified abortion and contraception early on as pillars of their political freedom. All of those freedoms were hard-won. Formerly enslaved men were given the vote before women, and women had to fight and be jailed for it. The Comstock Act, newly resurrected, policed contraception and abortion, including information about such things. Roe v. Wade made abortion a right, and Dobbs took it away.

We see in the states with legislatures (mostly male, mostly ignorant of human biology) willing to criminalize the provision of measures relating to human health that when abortion is forbidden or criminalized, so are most measures relating to reproductive health. Those prohibitions further open the way to removing freedom of movement and a regime in which people are encouraged to denounce each other

As their God says,

I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

And they have multiplied the pain.

Kamala Harris is addressing this directly. Michelle Obama did, too, in her speech this weekend. The New York Times printed part of it. (gift link)

Even so, this is a cleaned-up version of the realities we face regularly of blood and discharge and cramps and nausea. Nor does she connect reproductive health care to political freedom in the way that has come home to me lately. She connects the many things that can go wrong to the care and love one feels for a partner.

I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.

And on our freedoms. It’s harder to have a job outside the home if you can’t control getting pregnant and worse if something goes wrong with that pregnancy. And that can throw a woman into dependence on a man who doesn’t deserve her or might even kill her.

This is why women are furious about Dobbs. This is why we will crawl over shattered glass to vote for Kamala Harris against Donald Trump and his misogynists.