Why I won't mourn Roe v Wade
Roe has become a shibboleth that elite progressives use as fundraising tool, and to whip up the base. It’s time we stepped away.
On Tuesday, the American liberal-left erupted in horror, tears and outrage after a draft Supreme Court ruling was leaked, showing that America’s highest court might be on the verge of overturning the 1973 ruling on Roe v Wade, and thus ending the federal legalisation of abortion.
I say to the American liberal-left: you reap what you sow.
I have been in favour of abortion rights my entire life. I was raised in a family in which the right to chose is considered sacrosanct. I marched at pro-choice rallies, I volunteered to stand outside abortion clinics to shield women from protestors. And I have lived my values in even more personal ways, when as as university student in Ireland in the 1990’s, I travelled to England to terminate an accidental pregnancy at a private abortion clinic.
But the mainstream liberal-left, including most of feminism, has abandoned vulnerable women so thoroughly that, should it come to pass, they will deserve this loss.
I know that among my readers are ardent feminists who hold this ruling dear, as I once did. So I understand that position. But Roe has become a shibboleth that elite progressives use as fundraising tool, and to whip up the base. And elite progressives do not have our best interests at heart. It’s time we stepped away.
If overturning Roe vs Wade meant that no woman in the United States would be able to terminate a pregnancy ever again, this week’s development would give me pause. But that is simply not the case here. Sixteen states plus Washington DC have already have laws to carry on giving women the option to terminate regardless of the federal status of abortion. And, to those people concerned about women in the conservative thirteen states that have so-called trigger laws, let me assure you: if a woman really, really wants an abortion, she will find a way to travel to obtain one in spite of the obstacles, just as I did. The convenience of abortion access — while not without its uses — is not most pressing issue American women today face. It’s just not. Even without Roe, women will still have options when faced with an unwanted pregnancy.
At the risk of sending every liberal I know into a rage spiral, this has to be said: the progressive left’s wholesale embrace of gender self-identification is an existential threat to women. Ending Roe v Wade is not. And performative emoting from political hacks like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris is not going to change that. If this draft decision is in fact what is handed down by the court, it will send the issue back to lawmakers in individual states to determine, in accordance with their electorate.
Allowing men to simply self-identify as women causes real and material harm to women and girls in sports, women in prisons, women in homeless shelters, and, yes, also to women and girls in public bathrooms. But it is more sinister even than that. It is a psychological attack on all women, on a profound level: it demands that every one of us accept a lie about our most intimate selves: that having a woman’s physical body and all its attendant responsibilities, including pregnancy, is not as real as man’s idea of his identity. A man’s feelings trumps our bodily privacy, personal dignity and our medical reality.
So for these liberals to come along now and rage about women’s bodies being infringed upon — they do not have a leg to stand on. They abandoned us at the NCAA swim championships. They abandoned us when California passed a law allowing men in women’s prisons in 2020. And they abandoned us when they cheered on Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson despite her pretending she did not even know what a woman is, just a few weeks ago.
If you cannot define what a woman is, you do not deserve to claim that you fight for women’s rights. End of. The cataclysmic loss of Roe v Wade will be the final nail in the coffin of the credibility of a deeply corrupted, even deranged, liberal worldview that says men can get pregnant. This needs to happen if we want to build a new movement that actually protects, respects, and elevates women.
But that’s only one of the hypocrisies of the liberal left on this issue. They made a mockery of bodily autonomy and "my body my choice" by supporting vaccine mandates. So many "pro-choice" women vociferously advocated for people to be forced by the government and corporations to have their bodies injected with a substance they did not want. Many of these same women are now hysterical about “forced birth” — which is just the kind of overblown and unreasonable rhetoric that makes women who use it look like immature fools.
There is a moral case that can and must be made that women have the right to end a pregnancy. But that moral case is not served by the current pro-choice movement’s adolescent refusal to accept the gravity of the decision to end a pregnancy, nor is it served by claiming there is no moral problem with ending a late-term pregnancy unless there is a threat to the life of the mother. Movements like Shout your Abortion, which sells abortion-themed jewellery, make a mockery of women’s wisdom when choosing whether or not to keep a pregnancy. And elective second and third trimester abortions — carried out for reasons other than the health or life of the mother — are just wrong. The pro-choice movement would do better to acknowledge the obvious difference between a termination at 8 weeks and a termination at 28 weeks. Denying it is tantamount to denying women’s biological reality in the face of male encroachment.
Far too much of the pro-choice movement has been taken over by unserious, immature people, just like the rest of the liberal left. The abortion question — laden with moral significance — has ceased to be moored to reality. One way to force the pro-choice movement to grow up is to hand them a terrible defeat. They deserve it.
The left today calls themselves liberal, but they clearly aren’t.
Based on what Bari Weiss printed this morning, the majority of countries in Western Europe ban abortion on demand between 10-12 weeks. Most in the US could live with that. It’s is reasonable.
I was once much more pro-choice than I am today. Having children, and watching their development on a high definition ultrasound screen, made it impossible for be to ignore the humanity of even very young fetuses. Today I uncomfortably sit in a place of early choice (for bodily autonomy), but not ripping a living human apart limb by limb (it’s gruesome a cruel). It terrifies me that people are acting like the world is coming to an end if they can’t kill a 32 week healthy baby. What is wrong with them?
Your comments in this article are so well articulated overall. How can I believe a people who can’t even define woman remotely care about the most basic biological reality for women? How can people who by law let full grown men prance around Women’s private spaces naked - like in spas while they are naked and erect in front of young girls claim to care about privacy? Or let men into women’s prison where several female inmates have already been impregnated by their “woman” with a penis cellmates (with zero concern for exactly how consensual the sex producing the pregnancy actually was). How can the party of forced experimental vaccines claim bodily autonomy as a motivating factor in being pro-abortion?
Honestly, I’m terrified of the far left moving the needle even more from “abortion on demand at any point in pregnancy” (or post birth now in CA), which is already inhumane, to claiming “equity” or “climate change emergency” or some other narrative justifies the government or universities or employers being allowed to coerce abortions on those of us with “birthing bodies.” They certainly showed no restraint in requiring young people who didn’t need them who already had natural immunity to be coerced into THREE experimental mRNA shots with ease....................
Absolutely spot on for every point, Jenny. The movement masquerading as the "liberal left" in Western countries is in fact the grotesque spawn of Nietzschean Nihilism filtered through Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Post-Modernist Deconstruction. The only goal of the Nihilist movement is the rejection of everything that came before. It is very sad that after thousands of years of bitter struggle, issues such as women's rights, sexual rights, civil rights, and equality between all human beings have been hijacked by the Nihilist movement.
As you made clear in this article, abortion rights in most industrialized nations are no longer about legal vs illegal but rather about how far into the pregnancy does a woman need a health related reason to terminate the child. In most European countries it is around 17 weeks. However, in the US, some jurisdictions like CA and Washington DC allow abortions right up to week 40 without cause. In Virginia, former Governor Ralph Northam had recently stated the following in January of 2019 about late term abortions:
“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
From these statements we can infer that Nihilists cannot understand the difference between abortions and executions. Nihilists only push feminism to the extent that they can destroy families and traditional values. However, when a new movement comes along that is an anathema to clear distinctions in all human societies, such as the difference men and women, they are more than willing to trample all over women to antagonize supporters of accepted norms. So yes, "abortion rights" are just another tool for the Nihilist movement to attack long held beliefs among human beings in order to create a monstrous new world where ANYTHING goes!