Three Signs of Surrender

Clues to the Lack of Proper Outrage

“You want a woman to carry around a dead fetus as she goes septic? That’s your vision of freedom for the state of Florida? That’s despicable…Where is the uprising? Where is the outrage? Where are people…Why aren’t all the women walking out and saying ‘fuck you’?”

-        Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book

The outrageousness of the ongoing Christian fascist war on abortion – a war that predated last summer’s women-hating Supreme Courts Dobbs v. Jackson decision[1] but that has accelerated on sexist jet fuel ever since – seems endless.  I won’t try here to properly document the horror of this ongoing attack here. Doing that is something like a full-time job and the assignment is already being performed with admirable skill and passion by Jessica Valenti in her indispensable “Abortion Every Day” blog. 

It’s not for the faint of heart. New vicious state-level policies and practices meant to re-impose the de facto female enslavement of forced motherhood are being enacted and carried out on a regular basis. Meanwhile we wait for Matthew Kacsmaryk, a far-right federal judge in Amarillo, Texas to issue a ruling ordering the Federal Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of mifepristone, a safe and effective medicine that is used in half the nation’s abortions.

(I remember the “repro” activists who last year insisted that Christian fascist courts and legislators “can’t stop abortion because we have the pill.”  This was a key part of their argument for not taking to the streets and joining a powerful women’s social movement in response to the Supreme literally Medieval Dobbs ruling.)

It’s not just people – women very predominantly, to say the least (it’s odd that I have to add that – more on this below) – with unwanted pregnancies who are suffering from the revanchist war on abortion. Non-pregnant people with conditions that require drugs and procedures also used in abortions are being denied proper care.  Doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel and counselors are being threatened with severe criminal and civil penalties for actually or allegedly providing abortion services (and even just abortion information).  Texas’s draconian Senate Bill 8 (SB8) exposes anyone who helps someone else have an abortion to crippling lawsuits by right-to-life vigilantes (three women in Texas have recently been sued for more than $1 million each for allegedly helping another woman get abortion pills.)

There’s another victim worth mentioning here – what’s left of popular faith in what’s left of functioning “democracy” in the United States.  A solid majority of the nation’s citizens support  woman’s right to end an unwanted pregnancy. But, as with so many other issues – gun control is an especially graphic example – the US Supreme Court and many of the nation’s state governments say, in essence, “who cares? Fuck you!” Any day now, we can expect Judge Kacsmaryk to remind us that the Christian fascists want to end abortion nationwide, not just in  Republican-controlled prohibition states.

Where is the mass feminist uprising this moment still requires?  As Florida Senate Minority leader Lauren Book recently said to Valenti: “You want a woman to carry around a dead fetus as she goes septic? That’s your vision of freedom…? That’s despicable…Where is the uprising? Where is the outrage? Where are people…Why aren’t all the women walking out and saying ‘fuck you’?”

Good question. By way of reaching for an answer, I want here merely to suggest that part of the missing protest is explained by some very wrong liberal thinking – false consciousness, if you will – that is nicely embodied in three signs I recently saw on the lawns of two houses and in the window of one apartment in the bright blue (Democratic) and super-liberal campus town of Iowa City, Iowa. 

Voting for Dismal Democrats as the Solution

The first sign, expertly hand-painted and lit up at night during the weeks leading up to and a bit after the 2022 mid-term elections, proclaimed this: “SAVE ABORTION RIGHTS , VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS!”

My neighbor Jim, the veteran labor Democrat who put up this sign, surely knows that the lifetime-appointed far-right US Supreme Court and the broader fascist-stocked federal court system are unelected bodies. Did he seriously think the Democrats would keep the US House and achieve a 60-vote majority in the US Senate, both of which would have been required for them to act on Joe Biden’s preposterous, disingenuous, and manipulative pledge to sign a bill “codifying Roe v. Wade[1] as national law”? If Jim actually believed that and/or that the Democrats were going to take back the state legislature in the bright red state of Iowa, then he is totally out of it. (Bear in mind that this is a guy who “crossed over” to caucus for Donald Trump in 2016 on the theory that Trump’s nomination as the Republican presidential cansdidate would gurantee a victory for the Democrats.) The Democrats had no real chance of keeping the badly gerrymandered US House. The absurdly powerful US Senate is absurdly mal-apportioned in ways that drastically over-represent the most sexist and racist “interior” regions and states (Iowa is one of those now) in the nation.

My pro-union neighbor’s yard sign was a call for surrender. A far better and properly militant sign would have moved off the electoral killing floor and joined Rise up for Abortion Rights (RU4AR) in calling for mass action in the streets and public squares:

FORCED MOTHERHOOD IS FEMALE ENSLAVEMENT!

ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY!

UNLEASH THE FURY OF WOMEN!

TAKE TO THE STREETS TO DEMAND FREE AND LEGAL ABORTION SERVICES ACROSS THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES!

While cynically promising something he knew very well that he and his party had zero chance of delivering in the wake of the mid-term elections – a bill to “codify Roe” as federal law – the longtime US Senate veteran Biden had last year and has this year the power to issue an executive order proclaiming the war on abortion a public health emergency and directing the provision of free, safe, and legal abortion services on federal properties across the nation. Pro-choice Democrats seem pathetically unaware of this basic fact – and of how little their strikebreaking and war-mongering president actually cares about abortion rights.  The “commander in chief” who cynically promised to sign of a bill making Roe the law of the land this year granted a mere thirty seconds, a paltry half-minute, to abortion rights in his 2023 State of the Union Address!   

What’s Patriarchy Got to Do with It? It’s Just “Health Care”

A different liberal yard sign I’ve seen on numerous lawns in Iowa City reads as follows:

“ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE. HEALTH CARE IS A RIGHT.”

Excuse me? Health care should be a basic human right.  It is such a right in many countries, including one just 90 miles off the tip of Florida (Cuba), but it is not in the militantly capitalist United States.  And that’s a disgrace.  And yes, of course, there’s an obvious strong health care dimension to abortion.

At the same time, however, this sign misses, really deletes, the core question of gender oppression when it comes to understanding the war on abortion.  This is important to grasp: the lethally over-empowered fetal personhood right-wing doesn’t seriously oppose abortion on medical grounds[2] or out of hostility to health care either in itself or (despite the Republi-fascists’ opposition to supposedly “radical Left” national health insurance) as a human right.  And it doesn’t care about “the babies,” who they are perfectly happy to expose to extreme poverty (the right opposes social welfare safety nets for the poor) and to school shootings (the right opposes elementarily sane gun control).  No, the war on abortion is all about rolling back the gains US women and girls have made since the 1970s.  It’s about keeping women as pregnant, homebound, and powerless as patriarchally possible. It’s about putting females “back in their place.”

And no, by the way, acknowledging this very basic fact does not mark one as an opponent of transgender rights, as is absurdly suggested by certain “repro” activists who oppose the use of the words “women,” “females,” and “girls” in abortion rights activism. The notion that one can’t simultaneously oppose the Christian fascist war on women – by far and away the driving force behind the attack on abortion rights – and the Christian war on transgender people – seen in recent Iowa laws that prohibit transgender health care and school bathroom access to transgender minors – is ridiculous and needlessly divisive. This idiotic “woke” opposition to reasonable acknowledgement of women-hating patriarchy has had a destructive impact on the abortion rights movement in Iowa City, leading many women there to stay home rather than protest alongside preposterous “repros” who instruct them not to speak of women and girls and to refer only to “pregnant people.”    

I’ve been saying for years that dentistry is health care and that dental care should be included in the medica treatment to which all people should be entitled as a human right. This is very different from saying that “abortion is health care.” Tooth pain and gum disease are fairly evenly distributed across gender lines. Unwanted pregnancies are not, to say the least.

Podiatry is health care.  Cancer treatment is health care.  Setting a broken leg is health care.  Diabetes medicine is health care. 

Abortion is more than health care: it is no small measure of freedom and opportunity for women and, yes, of course, transgendered people who want and need the elementary right and personal autonomy to end pregnancies.

“No Politics, Please – it’s a Personal Matter”

The third surrender sign I recently saw was posted in a student apartment.  It said this:

“ABORTION IS A PURELY PERSONAL MATTER AND SHOULD NOT BE SUBJECT TO POLITICAL AND LEGAL DEBATE.”

Huh. Yes, the decision to end a pregnancy is a profoundly personal matter, of course.  And yes, it should be purely up to the pregnant person.

But, well, too bad. Like it or not, the Christian fascist anti-feminist revanchists, including most of the elected officials in the far-right government of Iowa, have made this personal matter highly political all over again – in a very bad way.  The only way abortion got legally established as a matter left mostly up to “pregnant people” and their care providers during the Roe era (January 22, 1973-June 24, 2022) was through a militant feminist social movement whose leaders proclaimed that “the personal is political” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Triggered liberals and others may understandably cringe over the disgusting right-wing politicization of women’s reproductive lives but refusing to engage in the “political and legal debate” over abortion leaves the matter entirely up to those who want to enact The Handmaid’s Tale in real life.

Those women-hating Christian fascist patriarchs aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact they seem well positioned to take full triple-branch control of the federal government in 2024-25. They have to be struggled against and vanquished on a public and political level. They can’t be effectively and properly fought and defeated just within the killing confines of the reigning elections and party system or on the sexless terrain of gender-blind “health care” or in purely private and personal spaces. What’s required will have to take a page from recent mass feminist struggles in Latin America and Iran and popular mobilizations in France and Israel.  It will have to shake the nation to its foundations with a message to the rulers: end this vicious war on women or we will shut this country down.  

Notes

+1. The Supreme Court’s June 24, 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision ended women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion, previously attained with the Court’s January 22, 1973 Roe v Wade decision.  The Handmaid Supremes’ Dobbs ruling returns abortion policy to the states, but the anti-abortion right clearly wants to ban abortion nationwide and the sick “logic” of Dobbs suggests strongly that the current Trump- and Mitch McConnell-made High Handmaid Court would rule in favor of a future national ban. 

2. In the Texas case before the Amarillo-based federal judge Kacsmaryk, to be sure, the right-wing groups pushing for the banning of mifepristone have presented deeply flawed fake-scientific and fake-medical arguments falsely claiming that the drug is unsafe. They are relying also on an obscure 19th century law, the 1873 Comstock Act, which criminalized the “publication, distribution, and possession of information about or devices or medications for ‘unlawful’ abortion or contraception.” But the real of the attempt to ban mifepristone is of course the sexist war on women. The right’s “scientific” and “medical” argument is mere and pure pretense.