Thread by @mcjulie

This essay lays out a point I’ve tried to make a lot in the last few months: Americans lost the right to an abortion because the people who supported it didn’t care that much and the people who opposed it cared a WHOLE lot.

https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/1466771149694676996

It’s like in the poem. The best lack all conviction, while the worst
re full of passionate intensity.

For the entirety of my political awareness — from Reagan’s first term until now — there’s been an obvious anti-abortion bias in this country, and it really DOES come from both sides, because it’s one of the topics the “balancers” try to keep us “balanced” about.

Because in the right wing press & among Republican politicians, it is axiomatic that abortion rights are THE GREATEST EVIL IN HISTORY, while the mainstream press & Democrats take a “both sides, complicated” approach.

My go-to example for how that works is this Atlantic article from just after the 2016 election. I will go to my grave pissed off that somebody came out with “you have to not be so in love with how pro-choice you are” thinking that was good advice for Democrats.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1440812027174215681

Because I swear to God, this dude I never heard of before or since, in the pretext of giving good advice to Democrats, actually explained ***what they have been doing the whole time***

Supporting abortion rights but being kinda, you know, discreet about it

Where supporting abortion rights gets treated in the same way as abortion itself: something that happens quietly, behind closed doors, and if you’re not directly involved you never know it happened at all.

And, in a way, it makes sense — Roe was decided in part on an assumption of a right to *privacy* — which we do in fact have, no matter what the current SCOTUS says, but also, it was always kind of a weak justification and it played into what I’m talking about.

This idea — which dominates even now that Roe is, in fact dead, it was killed in the dead of night by a SCOTUS 2/3 full of religious fanatics — is that everything we see as “a thing women do” is expected to be done discreetly, behind closed doors, with a polite cough.

Everything that we associate with women — every kind of labor, from housework to actual birthing-a-baby labor — is assumed to be accomplished by individual women, somehow, we don’t really know how they do it, stuff just gets done.

There’s a really pervasive idea that women & anything associated with being a woman must be veiled, obscured, hidden, invisible. From high school dress codes to the Taliban: the female body and its functions must be kept well out of sight.

A pervasive idea that the world of women is a completely separate sphere from the world in general & that men (the world) must be kept away from it and it must be kept away from them in ways both symbolic and pragmatic.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1442509861346897925

And all of this conspires to make any kind of problem that mostly affects women — such as, how to prevent a pregnancy, end a pregnancy, carry a pregnancy to term, birth a baby, take care of a baby, take care of a young child — gets veiled, obscured, hidden, falsified.

ACB has had children herself, she knows better, but she plays along, perfect handmaiden of the patriarchy that she is, and in a court of law, the highest court in the land, she acts like pregnancy & childbirth are no big deal, they just sort of happen.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I am generally of the opinion that any law or legal judgment that derives from an objectively false premise is inherently invalid.

I mean, the Supreme Court could rule that PI = 3.14, that the earth was created 10,000 years ago, that gravity reverses itself on Thursdays, it wouldn’t make any of it true.

Yet everything about reproductive health is subjected to that kind of bad judgment — laws based on false medical premises about how pregnancy works in a biological sense, problematic & bizarre assumptions about what pregnancy means to the person who actually IS pregnant

Coming from the right, these bad judgments usually come wrapped in fairly explicit Christian patriarchy, but they seem to be tolerated on the left because of that “black box” principle.

Everything that we think of as “what women do” is just assumed to take care of itself somehow, meaning, it’s ROUTINELY left out of policy arguments, political theories, economic plans, etc.

And that’s why we’re here, with a SCOTUS full of religious fanatics who are about to make a very bad judgment based on the false premise that forcing a person to remain pregnant & give birth is no big deal

A bad judgment based on the monstrous premise that the suffering of women is not only no big deal, it’s actually a social good.

A bad judgment based on the bad, monstrous, and entirely fascist premise that the state has a legitimate interest in forcing people to give birth.

It’s dystopic tyranny, a complete fascist takeover, but because it is seen as “happening to women” it’s hardly seen at all.

Addendum: abortion bans are also incredibly racist.

https://twitter.com/izzyvonghoul/status/1466684177756016643

Handmaidens of the patriarchy like ACB are usually handmaidens of explicitly WHITE patriarchy.

https://twitter.com/monaeltahawy/status/1466442558981169154

Accumulating evidence that a bunch of these ostensibly liberal dudes spent the last 40 years JUST NOT PAYING ATTENTION

https://twitter.com/katelyn__ann/status/1466743131819417610?s=20

Because Roe was settle law, right, who needs to worry about that stuff

https://twitter.com/lyzl/status/1466778083575410698?s=20