US abortion laws are closer to home than you think
These senators claim to honour life… but then disregard it once it has been born
Women do not exist solely to be chattels, or vessels, or adornments. In the year 2019, this should hardly need to be said, but here we are, looking back on a week where two American states voted to outlaw almost all abortion, and so I feel compelled to write it again and again: women do not exist solely to be chattels, or vessels, or adornments. WOMEN DO NOT EXIST TO BE CHATTELS, OR VESSELS, OR ADORNMENTS. And so on and so on and so on.
It is time to say this. It is time to shout this. It is time to scream this, without fear of being labelled hysterical, or hormonal, or whatever other insult we like to throw at women who dare to try to live a life full of the freedoms that men have long taken for granted. And while we are on the subject of hormones, please can we stop dismissing women when they are affected by them. Hormones are the most powerful chemicals known to humankind, and I’m sick of being told to ignore the ones that happen to be considered exclusively female.
Senators in Alabama have passed a near-total ban on abortion, making it a crime to perform the procedure at any stage of pregnancy unless the woman’s health is at serious risk. I am mystified by these humans who claim to want to honour life, only for them to disregard it once it has been born female. And I am equally as confused by a constructed value system, which appears to value only 50 per cent of the population. Oh, I know – God moves in mysterious ways! And none are more mysterious than dismissing the needs of women who have been made pregnant by their rapists.
This is not an attack on
all men; just the regressive throwbacks, the ones who seek to legislate what women do with their bodies. And while this reallife version of Gilead may seem far away, it should be noted that it also exists right here, right now – in Northern Ireland.
On a more mundane, dayto-day level, it also exists in the head of any female who has ever stood in front of a mirror picking apart bits of her body in the endless quest to be aesthetically pleasing, to be pretty. So much of our self-worth is rooted in how our bodies look to the outside world, and at the core of that is the long-held belief that the most important part of a woman’s body is her womb, followed by her boobs and her bum, and then, at the bottom, her brain.
Alabama is merely the tip of the iceberg, the visible evil that celebrities can protest against while conveniently forgetting the Photoshopped, filtered pictures they present to the world on their Instagram – the pictures that are themselves the result of centuries of patriarchal conditioning that tells us to have cellulite is to fail. If this sounds dreary and preachy to you, then perhaps you haven’t ever felt the cold, hard stare of scrutiny on your body, the one that makes you feel like a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop. Or perhaps you have, and found you are too exhausted by this endless aesthetic appraisal to ignore it, instead choosing to try to appease it.
I am so angry right now, for the women in Alabama and Missouri and Northern Ireland and all over the world. I am angry on behalf of myself and my friends and the girls I meet who have found that shame has been normalised, repackaged, dressed up and sold to us in the form of a frock which hugs the body in all the “right” places. What are we? Christmas baubles?
I was recently told on Instagram that an inoffensive and comfortable dress I was wearing to a party was unflattering, and that I would have done better to have worn something that “showed off ” my “lovely” curves, rather than swamping them. “You’d look amazing in something more low-cut,” said this person I have never met before, as if this, THIS was my job: to look amazing rather than just be amazing, which ALL of us are, whatever we happen to be wearing.
Do not get me wrong: it is more than OK to like fashion and make-up, as plenty of women (myself included) and men do. What is not OK is to believe that we will find all our value in it. Our bodies do not exist to serve others. Our bodies exist to serve us. We must remember this at all times: we are women. Not chattels, or vessels, or adornments.