Fifty years free
Last weekend was the anniversary of Roe v Wade, which got me thinking of how easily rights can be taken away
The day Roe vs Wade was overruled in the US Supreme Court, I’d woken up with a foggy head, landing into Heathrow from Nairobi having spent two weeks speaking to inspiring pro-abortion activists working to improve access to reproductive rights.
That morning, the Conservatives had lost two by-elections and I was feeling pretty smug about it, even through my jet-lagged haze. But by the afternoon, I was shattered. My mind was filled with those images of Savita, Izabela, and Agnieszka – women who had died in Ireland and Poland after being denied access to abortion. My ears were ringing with the frightening words Quin, a young reproductive rights activist in Nakuru, Kenya, had told me: “I knew girls who drank disinfectant to end a pregnancy”.
This is a photo of the street where the organisation she volunteered with is based:
That was the Friday. By Monday, nine states had implemented abortion bans. More have joined them since. 24 in six months. Millions of women and girls stripped of their human rights by mostly male legislatures.
The impact was of course immediate and completely expected. Girls who had been raped were told to continue their pregnancies. Women in need of urgent medical intervention following a miscarriage were suddenly refused help, in case the law interprets it as the doctor providing an abortion. Women were denied medication that contains chemicals linked to abortion drugs. The anti-abortion movement has even been gearing up for the first death, preparing rhetoric to insist that abortion bans don’t kill, that the laws allows for intervention to save a woman’s life – but as we know from Savita, Izabela, and Agnieszka, those laws do not save women’s lives.
It’s frankly chilling, to watch in real time, how a movement that claims to be ‘pro life’ is getting ready to defend itself when the inevitable deaths happen. They know why and how abortion bans kill women. They know the fear they have created in healthcare professionals – the fear that means a doctor cannot feel confident they won’t face court and prison if they perform a surgical miscarriage. They know the fear they have created in women, too scared to ask for medical help in case they are accused of forcing a miscarriage. They know.
Speaking of the anti-abortion movement, last week I got an email from them about the success of a ‘baby box’ outside a fire station. It’s a box in which desperate mothers can ‘safely’ abandon their babies. The antis see this as a success.
Last weekend was the 50 year anniversary of the original Roe vs Wade ruling that allowed for nationwide safe, legal abortion in the US. It came after a century of criminalisation, when abortion laws were written from the same combination of racial and sexual anxiety that we see today.
The anniversary made me think about how, for 50 years, women and girls had been allowed a degree of freedom. I kept re-writing the Ta-Nehishi Coates book title in my head: we were fifty years free. Silly, I know.
And how easily that freedom was taken away. How easily rights can be eroded, when we decide that some people are not worthy of being seen as fully human. When one group of people can be treated as exploitable objects – as reproductive vessels designed to serve patriarchal authority, the nation state. And how important it is that we name the problem of women’s oppression as a class by men as a class – how vital it is that we don’t shy away from calling white male supremacy what it is.
I attended a roundtable organised by the reproductive rights charity Ipas recently where they discussed how telemedicine is becoming the future of abortion care, and how activists are working hard to post pills to women in need. “Similar to what we saw in the 1960s,” said the speaker.
It’s so brave and inspiring, what those activists are doing. But my God! The pain and horror of women’s rights being rolled back 60 years. And what next? Which rights do we lose next? We know sex and contraception is already in the firing line. Trump already attacked domestic abuse protections. What is next?
The anniversary also got me thinking about a conversation I had last year with two friends of mine. We were discussing how terrifying it must be to raise a girl in the US right now – to have to raise your daughter telling her that she has fewer rights than you did growing up, and has fewer rights than her brother or her male schoolfriends.
I am not from the US. I live in the UK, where abortion care is fairly easily available, despite the outdated laws. But the lesson from the US impacts us all. Women’s rights cannot be secure in a capitalist, patriarchal society that demands our bodies are put up for use. Women’s freedoms can always be rolled back, unless we fight for women’s liberation from these structures that oppress us.
Until then, our rights are always borrowed. They are on loan from male supremacy, and male supremacy can take them back.
We were fifty years free.
Obligatory book plug
I tell you what, every time you think you are finished writing a book, another task appears. Last weekend I checked my PDF proofs and discovered that on one page I had spelled ‘feminism’ wrong. God knows how many times I have read that page and just gone, “ahh yes, ‘feminim’”.
Anyway it’s available for pre-order on Verso’s website now. The launch is taking place in Bristol on Wednesday 7 June. Order your copy now!
What I’m writing
I was off sick on Monday and yet somehow still managed to file five articles, half-draft two more, and get four published. This girl is on fire!
The published four looked at the case of a serial rapist who was reported to the Met on numerous occasions in 2015 and 2018, but not arrested until 2021. How many more stories like this will we have to write and read? I also reported on Mark Rowley saying that there are two or three officers in criminal court every week, but we won’t see the results in criminal courts of the current investigations for a couple of years due to the justice logjam. There are so many things wrong in that sentence, aren’t there?
My reporting on the cost of living crisis continues, this time looking at new data from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on child poverty in early years. It’s heartbreaking.
Last one – this time on how the Government is taking a hardline against both the Iranian regime and Iranian asylum seekers, because nothing makes sense in Tory-land.
Also I got my haircut. I considered getting a fringe. Instead I got ‘side bangs’.
What I’m reading
I finished The New Life which I thought was great. One thing I found particularly moving was the narrative of John’s wife, who risked being a caricature or a cutout and was instead drawn with real depth and empathy.
I also finished Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey which I enjoyed because I do love a good War of the Roses yarn, and the conceit was so clever. I found Tey’s The Franchise Affair quite difficult at time due to the classism and misogyny, but what I liked about it was how the villain of the piece was not a killer. Instead she was psychologically terrifying while inflicting no physical harm to anyone. In this way, it reminded me a bit of Gaudy Night by Sayers, although it’s not as good as that.
I’m now reading Victory City by Salman Rushdie, for an event I am doing with Bristol Ideas, and continuing my thriller trip with Val McDermid’s 1989. Is that a version of Robert Maxwell I see before me? It opens in 1989, with the Lockerbie bombings, a town close to my family history. Oh! And I finished Amina Cain’s A Horse At Night: On Writing which was a marvel. I’d really recommend it to writers and readers alike.
What I’m watching
Over the weekend I watched Bombshell (not the one with Jean Harlow but the one with Margot Robbie) which I thought was good – a bit Hollywood but an interesting look particularly in my view of how right-wing, anti-feminist women deal with patriarchal power and abuse. I finally saw Love and Friendship which was a frothy, funny delight.
Other than that I’ve been enjoying A Spy Among Friends on ITVX which really nails that early 1960s aesthetic and is such an interesting look at upper-class male power. The soundtrack is great too. Plus Modern Family, for my love of Gloria is unending and boundless.
That’s it for today! I’ve got an article coming out on Monday that I worked really hard on, so watch this space. And please subscribe to Sianushka Writes, send to your friends, your enemies… get them to subscribe…
Adios!