“Women will run the 21st century. . . . This is going to be the women’s century and young people are going to be its leaders.” — Bella Abzug (1997)
The U.S. Supreme Court always rotates back to the norm of America’s original unequal society rooted in white male supremacy. It is not just racial inequality built into the system but sexual inequality. The oppression and subjugation of the rights of women.
Women are central to maintaining that dynamic and the abortion decision last week cuts to the heart of this nasty history. The rulings was consistent ideologically: women belong to men. What men say goes. Men own them and their bodies.
We have to get back the equality of women. This is the issue that never was discussed or has been dealt with in this society. The sexual equality of women. Even Roe v. Wade is not about sexual equality for women.
If a woman wants to have a child, carry a baby to term, she should be able to do that. If a woman gets pregnant, and does not want to carry the pregnancy to term, she should have that choice as well. Let the woman and the medical professionals decide what’s best based on her choices, not some random political motivated fanatics.
For most of American history, there were no choices for women. Roe, for 50 years, provided a choice. Now, that is over again. The battle is joined though. And this time, the goal is choice rights again but something much bigger: true sexual freedom and equality for women.
Just because a woman wants to have children, that should not affect her job or income status. That will be fixed. Women one day, in America, will control their bodies again. Say that. Bring that into existence in your mind every day now.
The goal is not to aim low this time. When Harry Blackmun wrote the famous Roe decision, he was really protecting doctors by legalizing the procedure. But the Roe v. Wade decision never addressed sexual equality or the equality of women in society. It was not about women. It was about the abortion procedure and was it legal to perform it.
I even remember from law school reading the case. It is a case about criminal state laws for providing abortion. By providing a legal right to the procedure for women, the physicians were afforded a safe harbor.
But what about the issue of women’s rights and sexual equality? While people debated viability, women were somewhere in the background, ignored.
Judge Samuel Alito and five other justices ignored women again last week with their abomination of a decision. They forgot there is an actual person who is alive and breathing right now who deserves their human rights as a full person in this world.
White male supremacy has no time and space for the humanity and equality of women. It is an ideology that is too focused on maintaining power and control.
Alito even admitted in 1985 this was really for him a question of his own personal view, not the law. He said back then that he felt women had no right to abortion because that was his moral view of abortion. Like the others, he was/is unfit to be a judge.
A judge can be influenced by personal experience but his or her personal moral views are off limits. Alito won this small skirmish over the right of women to have abortions but he will be gone from the world stage soon.
He will lose this one. There is no compromise on and for the equality for women. None, at all. The battle has only just begun. And, in the end, women will win.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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