Mother’s Day is this weekend, and all I can think about is how incredibly lucky I have been to become a mother when I wanted to.
How fortunate I’ve been to have access to medical abortion when I needed it.
How I can enjoy my children, knowing that I wanted them. That I wasn’t forced to carry on pregnancies I didn’t want. That I don’t resent them for existing, the way I would have had I been left with no choice but to bring them into this world. There may be little by way of supportive policies for parents, but at least no one forced me to undergo a potentially lethal 9 months invasive experience where I threw up every day.
But I’m not lucky. I’m not fortunate. Or at the very least I shouldn’t consider myself to be. I am a human being with the capacity to get pregnant. The pregnancy happens in my body, to my body. Don’t I get to decide what I do with my body? Isn’t that a basic human right rather than something to feel grateful for, as if States bestowing this right upon us are doing us the greatest favour?
Mother’s day is this weekend, and I usually feel the breaks in my heart creak and widen as I think of my own dead mother, this deeply faithful, deeply Christian Lebanese woman who never really understood what the fuss was around abortion. ‘Pfff what’s their problem, it’s just a clump of cells, of course women should have the choice’. That was it really, the extent of our conversations on the subject. My mother didn’t embarrass herself with unnecessary chatter, and I grew up with the iron-clad conviction that my body was mine. In no ambiguous terms, gloriously mine.
Legal development on abortion over the past 25 years had accustomed us to an overall positive trend towards liberalization of abortion laws. We cried tears of pure, unadulterated joy with the feminists of Argentina, Chile and Colombia, wrapping that green bandana around our neck and wrists in all corners of the world, buoyed by the hope that mass mobilization, strategic litigation and advocacy could bring about change. That we, as activists, could bring about change. That we had to scream and shout and get arrested and teargassed to be seen as people with rights, but that we could march our way into liberation.
We share the wrath of the women in Poland, forced to bury women whose death could have been entirely avoided had different abortion laws been in place.
We’ve plotted to start talking about abortion in contexts where we knew we’d have everyone and their holy mothers hate on us for merely bringing up the subject.
In the U.S., reproductive justice activists have been sounding the alarm for decades, calling on how barriers to the full realization of reproductive rights disproportionately impact women and communities of colour, communities for whom Gilead has been a reality for a while.
Alito’s draft opinion isn’t a decision of the Supreme Court. We still don’t know what the U.S. Supreme Court will decide, although the Politico leak is a good in indication of what we might be facing. 13 states that will outright ban abortion. Less than half that will allow it. No right to abortion guaranteed at the national level. Scared people trying to garner enough resources to cross over state lines to access abortion. Even more profoundly unequal access to health. Intimidation. More laws encouraging people to sue and persecute persons suspected of seeking abortion. Chilling effects on health providers.
Back-alley abortions. Deaths.
To those who would like to shrug and pretend it only concerns people in the U.S., I would urge you to do a double take. Not only because solidarity must know no borders and that our U.S. comrades can use all the support they will ask her and can get, but because the groups and organizations that have brought about this situation don’t know any borders themselves.
They are conservative networks and organizations who are working with Churches, religious and community leaders, politicians and right-wing political parties. They are extremely well-resourced. They know how to navigate advocacy and human rights spaces. They have national, regional and global presence. They support right-wing’s governments accession to power, shaping and supporting their anti-abortion agendas. Their transnational approach means that what is happening in U.S., in Poland and elsewhere might very well be knocking on your door.
A success for them at the U.S. Supreme Court would only embolden them and put reproductive rights at even greater risk everywhere else.
This is not a culture war, this is a defining moment for all to assess how much value societies put on gender equality, and on the lives of people who get pregnant. We can’t look away from the U.S.
Our only hope is to strengthen progressive movements, not weaken them. Now is the time for massive demonstration and mobilization. Now and tomorrow and the day after, until we do not have to protest this shit anymore.
Myrrh and Mint 