"We can't power-pose our way to a safe abortion in Texas."
Rather than seeking the approval and validation of an unjust system, what if we rejected the system's legitimacy and worked from there? |
 | | Illustration by Tatjana Prenzel |
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It was the case of the 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who traveled to Indiana for an abortion that ultimately pushed me over the edge. President Biden mentioned her story this month, after it first appeared in The Indianapolis Star, and the anonymous girl was quickly cast into the center of the national abortion debate, with some right-wing media and national news publications questioning if she even existed. |
But this vindication gave me no solace. Sure, it had been "proved" that a six-week abortion ban had forced a child to endure unnecessary pain and horror. But who had been helped by this fight? Not the girl, who was already under enough stress without becoming a national figure. Not her medical provider, who's been subjected to extensive harassment ever since. And not the many other people who, like this child rape survivor, find themselves in need of an abortion and out of options. |
As I argue in my essay for Times Opinion this week, modern feminism has suffered many such pyrrhic victories, technical wins that have somehow managed to leave us on the losing end all the same. The survivors who, by sharing their stories, put their abusers behind bars — but found that the criminal justice process inflicted its own trauma, in some cases worse than the abuse itself. The #MeToo accusers who ousted their serial harassers from power, only to see them quietly reinstated, in many instances, in new jobs not long after. The abortion-rights advocates who did their part to elect politicians who ultimately let access get whittled away, despite the fact that a majority of Americans want abortion to be legal. |
It seems clear that what we've been doing isn't working. Now is the time for a radically different form of feminist organizing and activism, one that refuses to play by the rules in a rigged game. As I write in my essay, liberation movements in other places and times have shown us how to fight for freedom in this way, if we care to look. |
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