the october roundup: bodily autonomy, the real world, and the right to be a fuck-up

help! i'm twenty-eight and chronically maladapted to society!

i’ve been returning to the podcast you're wrong about with journalist sarah marshall, and in particular, given the political moment we’re in and the election about to take place next week, would highly, highly, highly recommend the episode about the jane collective, a group of chicago feminists in the 1960s and 70s who organized access to — and eventually taught themselves to perform — low-cost abortions at a time when abortion was still federally outlawed.

i’ve had an abortion; one in three american women have. and while i don’t have the clout that stevie knicks has when she says if she hadn't had an abortion, there would be no fleetwood mac, i would not have my life today if i hadn’t had one — as messy and occasionally miserable and all over the place it may be, i would not have my life as i know it today. and women and people should not have to justify their abortion by creating something spectacular and culturally significant and artistically revered.

my life deserves to exist as it is without the government forcing my twenty-one year old self to carry a child to term that i had zero resources, desire, or mental stability to carry. no woman should have to offer up some grand accomplishment that she’s achieved to justify exercising bodily autonomy. people deserve bodily autonomy by virtue of being people. if i go on to do absolutely nothing of value with my life, that still would be more than enough justification for having had my abortion — because i was able to live my life on my terms.

people deserve to decide for themselves what they do and do not do. we are all borne to various systems and structures which we must participate in, to varying degrees, at varying points in our life — family, school, politics, community, whatever. all of these structures are opportunities for our bodily autonomy to be affirmed, or for our bodily autonomy to be stolen from us. consider the bodily autonomy aspect of the nuclear family: a full 34 percent of sexually abused children are related to the perpetrator (a whopping 93% of all sexual violence against juveniles is committed by someone the juvenile is acquainted with). the same political party that wants to ban abortion also wants you to believe that gay and trans people are grooming children for sexual abuse. the fact that i have both had an abortion and been sexually abused by a family member means little in this moment compared to the fact of statistics, which is that bodily autonomy is safeguarded by children having healthy, equitable relationships with adults outside of their immediate family, so that children being abused will be safe enough to inform a trusted adult. i was not kept safe by my family. i was not protected by anyone when i was very young. my family was conservative and christian and this election, like the last two elections, my mother and my grandparents will all vote for trump. none of them understand why i don’t speak to them anymore.

make no mistake — abortion is about bodily autonomy. not the unborn, not the right to life, not the right of the fetus. abortion is about the most fundamental human right, which is to determine what happens to your own body on your own terms. if we do not have bodily autonomy, we have nothing. there’s much to said about the colonization of the mind — how megacorporations and the tech industry have coalesced to colonize the last remaining “free” space, our inner lives — and about the reactionary swing back toward 1950s gender roles, and how both of these things are a form of encroaching on bodily autonomy by seeking to monopolize the minds of young people. but direct bodily autonomy is under threat, and if you think they’ll stop at women and abortion issues you are lying to yourself. the bans on trans people accessing healthcare and young trans people from accessing hrt, bathroom bans, proposals to “verify” children’s stated biological sex via physical exams — an opportunity which is itself rife for abuse — all of it is about bodily autonomy.

human beings deserve the right to decide for themselves how their lives will go. this is encroached upon daily by capitalism, by the police state, by the surveillance state, by state-sponsored propaganda, by corporate-sponsored propaganda, by climate change. how can we claim to be advocating for bodily autonomy when the rest of the world labors in sweatshops and in cobalt mines for us to have bananas and iphones year round? how can we claim to be advocating for bodily autonomy when we allow these systems to rob the majority of the world’s population of their right to a dignified, safe, significant way of spending their lives upon this one great blue-green earth?

how can we claim to give a fuck about bodily autonomy when we are condemning the future generations to live in sweltering heat, and unspeakable cold, and typhoons and hurricanes and forest fires and burning plastic and burning rubber and wars over water?

i don’t know. i don’t know, i don’t know, i don’t know. i’m only twenty-eight. i can barely get out of bed and brush my teeth most mornings, let alone atone for the sins of the global north. i am trying. i am failing. i am flailing. i am falling. i am not doing well. i am not doing well at all.

i am not stevie knicks. i am not anyone special. i may never have anything to show that will, to someone determined not to see my innate worth and humanity in the first place, justify what i have done and not done with my biological body.

but i’ll be damned if i let someone else decide what i’m going to do with my life.

maybe i’ll never do anything with my life! but at least i didn’t unnecessarily fuck up some newborn child.

if nothing else, that makes me better than my parents.

sorry stevie knicks i am not a #girlboss