[Act-ma_discuss] A serious talk about abortion... Daily KOS -- Women, you've had a good run, now prepare to be reduced to incubators

[Amy Hendrickson]

 <https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/11/30/2066900/-Women-you-ve-had-a-good-run-now-prepare-to-be-reduced-to-incubators-Alexandra-Petri-for-the-WAPO> Women, you've had a good run, now prepare to be reduced to incubators

 



 <https://www.dailykos.com/users/dartagnan> Dartagnan

Community

Tuesday November 30, 2021 · 8:09 PM EST

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 <https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/11/30/2066900/-Women-you-ve-had-a-good-run-now-prepare-to-be-reduced-to-incubators-Alexandra-Petri-for-the-WAPO#comments> 211 Comments 211 New

 

 

Alexandra Petri, a writer for the Washington Post, is usually pretty humorous. She writes good, biting satire on current political events, mostly spot on.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/30/supreme-court-abortion-mississippi-case-satire/> But this column, her latest, is not particularly funny. Nor is it intended to be.

She begins by acknowledging it’s been a great 49 years for women wanting to be taken seriously as anything other than a vessel to birth a child. To be seen as someone with “autonomy over her own body,” an “ability to make choices for her own future.” Someone “with rights to be respected in her own right.” Alas, that time appears now to be coming to a close, at least in this country.

Those 49 years had flown by. But when the court’s clock struck, her run would in all likelihood begin to end. She would stop being a person with autonomy over her own body that the law was bound to respect. She would go back to being a vessel that might potentially contain a person, a vessel whose rights ended once that possibility was considered.

All things must pass, it seems. All of the amazing choices that were part of being a real person. The vote! A job! An opinion that meant something! So wonderful to be able to make those decisions, like someone who mattered, not someone reduced to a decision forced upon them by someone else!

It had been so nice, thinking that she could go anywhere in the United States and the laws would have to acknowledge her right to decide whether she wanted to be pregnant, that any doctor who treated her could give her correct information about what risks she faced, that if her life were threatened, her life would carry weight.

But now she admits it must all have been a mistake, a misunderstanding: “Her rights were all the alienable kind, it turned out, and she was nothing more than a sort of empty clay jar into which, if she were sufficiently blessed, a person might one day be deposited.”

She says it was wonderful and fulfilling growing up in a time when she was considered a real person. You sort of get used to it, after all. But she reflects on those young women and girls who, having known nothing other than being a real person, were now going to have to face a rude awakening.

It would be hardest for them, to be so forcibly reminded they were not. To have their autonomy wrested from them. Not only women, either — plenty of people who would be shocked to find themselves downgraded because they possessed parts the state felt were public domain.

And she marvels at the gall and chutzpah of those who stand poised in their judgment, ready and eager to devalue every woman’s life, all of them gleefully “salivating already at the prospect of having so many people transformed so quickly, and overnight.” As if with a wave of their little magic gavels they could transform all women into mere vessels for their holy incubation fantasies. 

They think that women will accept whatever they decide, like good little vessels should. She thinks they’re terribly, shockingly and grievously mistaken in assuming that.

The most misogynistic United States Supreme Court in living memory will hear oral arguments on Wednesday about the future of Roe v. Wade.

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