Abortion-rights activists demonstrate against the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion, on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 30.J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press
Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer.
I would rather not be tasked with stating the obvious, but the quiet thud that followed last month’s momentous U.S. Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade is still deafening.
Truthfully, it was a slow drip: The signs that a major backlash against women’s hard-won rights was afoot were all around us. Like many, I was concerned about what might happen once conservatives in search of voters began craftily courting the Evangelical wingnuts and Tea Partiers by seizing on abortion as a wedge issue. The creepy, deadening ubiquity of lacquered, lying Fox News anchors and vicious online harassment of female public figures should have been a wake-up call. That the godly accepted the grifter Donald Trump as their Messiah seemed only ridiculous until the joke turned on us. The stated aims of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and his henchmen on the U.S. Supreme Court – those culture warriors Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and particularly the loathsome Brett Kavanaugh, whose dangerous brand of male entitlement was on full display in his confirmation hearing – were all too chillingly clear.
But last month, when the worst did actually, finally happen, and the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the 50-year-old ruling Roe v. Wade that protected a woman’s right to choose between bearing a child or ending a pregnancy through abortion, it still hit me like a sucker punch. I spent that weekend after the decision was released (extra weaselly, opting for a Friday, in June) trying to regain my breath and texting with female friends in a similar state of shock and despair.
Now, I am Canadian, not American, and no longer of child-bearing age. I am also lucky: I have two grown children, and I never found myself in a situation where I might have considered an abortion. Like many people, I never particularly relished the idea, as much as I was grateful the option existed and would never judge another woman for exercising it. And yet, this decision is still profoundly affecting.
I should not have to explain why this is so earth-shattering, except that the response has been so disappointingly muted.
All discussion of protecting access to the morning-after pill, the ability to travel freely to seek an abortion in another jurisdiction – even President Joe Biden’s toothless and performative executive order – amount to mere capitulation. We were given full advance notice that stripping women of their rights was the plan, and yet it would seem that no particular measures were taken to protect us.
Because that is the problem: We are still in need of protection from the powerful, because they are still not us.
For pretty much the entirety of human history in every corner of the globe, women have been deprived of the human right of agency. Even here, in this “enlightened” part of the world, women were legally chattel long into the 19th century, which is to say, living and breathing but in the possession of our fathers or our husbands, even our brothers. To be perfectly clear, the other chattel in the possession of men were enslaved people and livestock. Slaves and livestock do not get to decide what happens to them. They don’t even own their own bodies. Their very selves are the property of men.
What this Supreme Court decision has done is strip any agency or autonomy from half of the human population of a nation. Its population is now made up of two distinctly different categories: men, who own all other life forms and can decide what to do with them, and another, lesser category of human being. One which, by virtue of its chromosome structure, does not share the full autonomy and freedoms that can be enjoyed by men.
All discussion of the viability of the fetus at different stages – whether underage rape victims should be exempted, or whether it’s the mother or her unborn child who should be saved in an emergency – pale and wither in the face of this one grave outcome. Women are now, and once more, relegated in the eyes of the law to the level of domestic pets.
So don’t tell us we are overreacting. Having trusted in the advancement of progress, our human dignity, autonomy and agency were traded away like worthless trinkets in the pursuit of power. What is perhaps even more galling is that for those who made the deal, throwing women’s rights under the bus came so cheap.
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