Women’s bodies have become a war zone

Abortion rights demonstrators gather near the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on June 25 as state US state after conservative state moved swiftly to ban the procedure. Picture: AFP

It would be comfortable to think that a US Supreme Court ruling has little to do with us. Why does it matter to Britain if Roe v Wade is overturned by virtually irremovable judges nominated by the regrettable Donald Trump? As with the enduring laxity of America’s gun laws, we might shrug in sympathy and turn away. Away, that is, from the fact that 26 states of the union can today remove women’s choice to terminate pregnancy; even a weeks-old pregnancy, even one caused by rape and incest, even when an infant will be born with disability or into hopeless poverty in a nation without universal healthcare, childcare, medical and family leave.

It’s not about us. We have comparatively decent welfare, and legal tolerance of even the most “social” or irresponsibly repeated abortions. Surely only the paranoid ("Boris is Trump") left draw parallels between our tiny, idiosyncratic country and every huge American psychodrama? It is even more tempting to turn away because abortion is never fun to argue about. With the rarest of exceptions women shudder at the word (so do many men, especially after fatherhood).

We are not mere containers

Conception is a natural marvel, life triumphantly asserting itself; pregnancy is a pride, newborn babies a delight. But this marvel takes place inside the individual bodies and lives of women, and we are not mere containers. Since 20th-century medicine made termination safer, faster and earlier, and civilised countries acknowledged female equality, that choice has been ours.

Abortion rights demonstrators hold signs at a protest in Texas. Picture: AFP

It needn’t mean we want or like it, or think about it all the time. Many of us are faintly repulsed by the small coterie of women who boast of their abortion as “empowering”, devoid of emotion, regret or sad responsibility. It is always easier to swerve away from the arguments than it is to speak up for the grim, nature-defying business of chemical miscarriage, vacuum, forceps, curette.

Yet because freedom is indivisible and women are not brood mares or incubators, sometimes we do have to talk about it, and side with appalled American sisters. Enforcing pregnancy can itself be a violence. There will be women who can’t flee across state boundaries to terminate, or may not be allowed to (Missouri may be considering criminalising it). In effect, the Supreme Court rules that in such states, any male rapist or seducer, inside or outside the family, can condemn an under-age girl to nine months of intimate physical burden, shame, medical jeopardy and a finale of heartbreaking loss or unsupported parental struggle. He can do this without, in most cases, suffering the slightest penalty himself.

Changes in sexual mores and female freedom have pretty much put paid to shotgun weddings, and the horrifying death penalty for rape, even of a child, was abolished in 1977 by the Supreme Court as “grossly disproportionate”. Time’s arc bends, and not always towards protecting the weakest.

Abominable doublethink

There is abominable doublethink in Justice Samuel Alito’s crucial ruling that simply because abortion rights were not mentioned in the 200-year-old constitution, they can’t be “deeply rooted” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty”.

Equal doublethink, very lawyerly, is found in his statement that “even if we could foresee what will happen we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision”. They damn well know that “what will happen” is not only an explosion of dangerous illegal abortions, but a surge of unwanted infants in dreadful conditions.

All this because across half the country women may not quietly, sadly, thoughtfully take ownership of their own bodies.

But again, why should this affect us? America’s puritan-collar authoritarianism is not reflected here, but the 26 states’ attitude to female autonomy is echoed in a vicious new post-liberal insouciance gradually taking root here.

Nadine Seiler attends a rally in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on June 25, 2022, a day after the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

Back in the days when the US constitution was being written and Mary Wollstonecraft was being called a “hyena in petticoats” who deserved death for her “licentious love”, women had at least a degree of generally understood protection. They might be chattels with no property rights, traded in marriage or prostitution, but at least that attitude presumed that their physical difference had value and vulnerability.

That flawed protectiveness has almost vanished now, except in the most heavily veiled and repressively atavistic religions. Old times were certainly not better times, but they did at least accept simple biology.

Reducing women to womb-carriers

With liberty, equality and an individualistic and technological world grows an illusion of robotic uniformity, allowing ever less for physiology or the fragile mystery of reproduction. Health authorities, schools and other public bodies are falling readily for the nonsense of a minority of activists, not only prating lunatically about “130 genders” that you can choose yourself, but verbally reducing women to messy biologies: womb-carriers, ovary-heavers, menstruators, oestrogen-factories, testosterone-lackers, who deserve to lose sporting competitions.

A handcuff hangs from the wrist of an abortion rights activist. Picture: Alex Kent / AFP

The ancient idea of protecting women’s private spaces is absurdly guyed as an attack on the rights of one particular, infinitesimally small, minority, with the justification that trans people have sometimes been ill-treated by another minority: stupid thugs, who should rather be the business of police.

Thus post-liberal society can erase the idea of womanhood while pretending compassion, whether for undeveloped foetal cells or a minute but vocal minority-of-a-minority (not all trans people are campaigners). Even some doughty pro-choicers in the US talk about the rights of “people”, reluctant to use the W-word even about this intimately female need. America’s absurdities, as well as its glories, always reflect here. So even beyond simple sympathy we should shiver at straws in the transatlantic wind.

The Times