Archive | May, 2009

According to these statistics, u.s. voters are becoming increasingly anti-abortion.

If that’s true, I suppose there’s at least some comfort to be derived from the fact that it’s Obama who’ll be picking Souter’s successor.

Still, the most reliable defense of abortion rights will ultimately have to come, not from the permission of judges and electorates, but from direct action. As Sonia Johnson wrote in 1989:

So the men let us have legalized abortion, and almost instantly the energy drained from the movement, like air from a punctured balloon. Instead of the Women’s Liberation Movement, we became simply the Women’s Movement, because liberation is antithetical to letting men, depending upon men to, make the laws that govern our lands. For the last 15 years we have been nailed to the system by Roe v. Wade, our mighty energy and hope and love channeled into begging men in dozens of state and national bodies not to pare away cent by cent the truly miserable allowance they promised us for abortions for poor women.

If we hadn’t trusted them again, if we had kept on going in the direction we were headed, with the same time and money and energy we have since expended on groveling, we could by this time have had a woman on every block in every city and town who is an expert on contraceptives, women’s health, birthing, and abortion. We could have educated the women of this country in countless creative ways about their bodies and their right to rule them. We would have learned how to govern ourselves, discovering a whole new way for women – and therefore everyone – to be human.

And, significantly, a Bork could have been appointed to every seat of the Supreme Court, men could have been spewing laws aimed at controlling our bodies out of every legal orifice, and all their flailing and sputtering would simply be irrelevant.

This moral of course generalises to further rights besides abortion. As La Boétie long ago advised us (unless it was Montaigne):

I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

While I’m at it, here’s another great quote from Sonia Johnson:

I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: ‘Of course our government isn’t perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system (husband) in the world.’ Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant questions: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, at all?