OPINION a
I DREAM OF BODILY LIBERATION
By Leah Cohen
I
n Texas, your iPhone might as well be an ankle bracelet. The Guardian recently noted that Texas county courts can subpoena your smartphone’s geolocation history if you are unlucky enough to be sued for aiding and abetting an abortion. The Supreme Court hasn’t decided yet who has standing as a plaintiff in civil lawsuits under SB 8, a law in Texas banning abortions at six weeks gestation, so in theory, anyone could sue you—for example, a prisoner in Arkansas, or a lawyer in Chicago. In this online world, we are constantly watched, but under SB 8, we are explicitly criminalized by the technocratic surveillance state. In summary, we live in hell. 8 TUFTS OBSERVER OCTOBER 11, 2021
Before I joined the board of the Reproductive Freedom Fund of New Hampshire, I did not consider myself a “pro-choice activist.” Frankly, I felt turned off by a movement dominated by white, millennial/middle-aged, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual women in pink pussy hats marching on Washington holding cringey #Resist signs with Gadsden flags shaped like uteruses and effigies of The Handmaid’s Tale that would make Margaret Atwood spontaneously combust. There’s an exclusionary culture within the reproductive rights movement, and it’s by design. Largely dominated by organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood, the mainstream political culture of the movement was built by racist, homophobic, ableist eugenicists. While there have been massive strides to reconcile that torrid history with the present-day battle for liberation, there remains a huge amount of work to do on inclusivity and equity within the movement itself. For many femmes, women, trans, and non-binary people who possess uteruses, the movement for bodily autonomy is one of the earliest political inflection points in which we become acutely aware of our own systemic subjugation, on account of the gender we were assigned. Eventually you become numb to it. Until it becomes a death sentence. When I was 17, I lost my health insurance. Suddenly, the oral birth control I took to regulate my period was an out-of-pocket cost. This happened about six months after Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. I had been considering an intrauterine device (IUD), largely as a joke, which now suddenly felt like a serious option—and also a necessity. I say it was a joke because at 17, I had that implicit understanding of my own positionality that you develop with a political consciousness—that as a white woman who did not consistently experience economic precarity I would always have access to abortions in a way Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and impoverished people do not. I found my way back into the movement that had drawn me into political organizing in the first place. Right as I hit my stride, Roe v. Wade was effectively nullified for 13 million Texans. Roe v. Wade is a landmark civil rights case that in 1973 put forth a new court precedent—that pregnant people retain their individual bodily autonomy until the point of fetal viability. Something that gets lost in conversations about Roe is that it didn’t just strike down abortion laws—it also guaranteed pregnant people the full suite of civil rights that conservatives have tried to deny them. Without the precedence of Roe, not only can lawmakers outlaw abortion—they can also make it illegal for pregnant people to drink wine, eat sushi, walk on treadmills, or own a microwave. Roe is situated in a matrix of cases that guarantee marginalized people unenumerated civil rights—gay marriage, birth control, and decriminalizing homosexuality, to name a few. These
