Violence is Never the Answer Unless Women are the Question: What 2022 Has Taught Us So Far
By Melissa Petts
A certain notion has ailed women since the beginning of time. It is the reason we call partial holidays and contingent events ‘Eve’ (be it: Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve). It is the reason women are still antagonised for the apple Adam lodged in his own throat; the reason Adam was made exempt from ‘the first pancake’ rule and instead promoted from being a rough draft of mankind to the face of the elite.
The notion? That women are anomalies in God’s creation, outcasted for deviating from the biological default. Women are secondary beings.
For millennia, men have been jabbing more than just their ribs into women, but it is women that were made culpable for having their flesh exposed in the first place. Owed to this biblical distortion of reproductive justice, women are valued as nothing more than incubators.
Childbearing was subsequently made the automatic penalty for women with sexual liberty; it denies a woman’s full potential and disposes of her creative energies through unpaid daily household labour. Conservatives coerce children into life to domesticate women, ultimately forming a sadomasochistic maternal bond that psychologically torments both mother and child.
Womanhood is falsely seen to be actualised in motherhood. This destiny becomes even more fraught, as Simone Beauvoir observes, ‘the more [a woman] rebels against it by affirming herself as an individual’. In fulfilment of their own femininity, women are encouraged to ‘ignore the question of their identity’.
Their self-image is rendered into a trap that has them denying vaccines and life-saving treatment in fear of infertility, for that is what they have been taught their main purpose is. To that end, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade can safely be assumed to be a reluctance to acknowledge women as complete human beings outside motherhood.
Conservatives do not care about the maltreatment of children birthed in unwanted conditions or that the Supreme Court has moulded America into a sterile hell. Indeed, as recorded by ECONOFACT (2022), ‘The US birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007’, which will inevitably be affected by the recent ruling.
To make America closer to the one shown in The Handmaid’s Tale during a birth rate decline is to prove that you are not pro-life for the protection of children but for the preservation of capitalism pipelined through nuclear households. They sanction violence on unmaternal women because a foetus whose gender is yet to be established is considered male (the default), granting it more human rights than women (the other).
This became most apparent when Conservatives preached ‘violence is never the answer’ only in regard to a Black man reacting to an ableist comment that was masked as an Oscar’s joke. Evidently, the Twitter word limit prevented them from adding ‘[…] until it comes to femicide, colonialism, police brutality, gun violence and forced childbearing’, which they have consistently made allowances for.
Despite the mass school shootings, the formula shortage, the economic crash, a continuing pandemic and the fact that the US has the worst maternal mortality rate in the world, the consensus is that population growth supersedes quality of life.
It is scarcely open to doubt that the system will punish those that lack the money and resources to defend themselves, namely women of colour, lower-class people and transgender men. Furthermore, race and wealth will always override policy. Ergo, the Patriarchy disproportionately harms developing countries that depend on non-profit services funded by the West for fertility management. These truths are what lead Beauvoir to identify abortion as a ‘class crime’. She states: ‘children are less of a burden in [bourgeoisie] households’, and thus are less likely to be aborted.
Historically, countries with severe abortion restrictions show an increase in abortions by 12%. Evidently, the overturning of Roe v Wade will not prevent abortions but rather only encourage unsafe practices. With the maternal mortality rate already at 55.3 among non-Hispanic Black women, I dread to see what this means for women of colour and those that do not wish for an abortion but require one.
We are already witnessing this reality unfold. A tourist was recently denied an abortion during an unreleased miscarriage at Malta hospital, resulting in a flight to Spain to terminate her pregnancy. What was already a traumatic experience became one that could have incarcerated her, which America has already seen a three-fold increase in since 2006. What the Court has failed to consider, besides the fact that life continues after birth, is that it ends with its rights.
At a recent press conference, Boris Johnson hesitantly declared that he respects a woman’s bodily autonomy, signalling that it is why the UK has the laws that it does. If the law he is highlighting is the one where two doctors need to approve of your reasoning, which you are required to give if you want to terminate your pregnancy, then we ought to question why someone’s privacy is invaded and their sex life interrogated if not to police their every move.
Boris inadvertently exposed that women are only given the power that they have the right to but seldom granted the power to assert their own rights. Mills believes that such a system will remain ‘wretchedly imperfect and superficial until women themselves have told all that they have to tell’.
With the above in mind, it is with utmost confidence that I conclude that the vessel of reproductive sovereignty is decolonisation.
Works Cited
“Abortion and Your Rights.” MSI, https://www.msichoices.org.uk/abortion-services/abortion-and-your-rights/
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, Vintage Classic, London, 2015, pp. 5–540.
Criado-Perez, Caroline. INVISIBLE WOMEN: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Abrams Press, New York, 2021, p. 70.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, Penguin, London, 2010, p. 30.
“Invisible Women: Roe v Wade.” Revue, https://newsletter.carolinecriadoperez.com/issues/invisible-women-roe-v-wade-1240290
Kearney, Melissa, et al. “The Mystery of the Declining US Birth Rate.” Econofact, 4 Apr. 2022, https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate
Lorde, Audre, and Roxane Gay. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2020, p. 12.
“Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2020.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 23 Feb. 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2020/maternal-mortality-rates-2020.htm
Mills, Jen. “Boris Calls US Ruling Ending Guaranteed Abortion Right ‘a Big Step Backwards’.” Metro, Metro.co.uk, 24 June 2022, https://metro.co.uk/2022/06/24/boris-johnson-calls-roe-vs-wade-abortion-ruling-a-big-step-backwards-16887722/
Sojourner Truth Ain’t I A Woman?, Paw Prints, 2012, p. 4.
“US Woman Left Traumatised after Malta Hospital Refuses Life-Saving Abortion.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 June 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/22/us-woman-left-traumatised-after-malta-hospital-refuses-life-saving-abortion?utm_campaign=Invisible+Women&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue+newsletter