Reproductive Rights and Red Shoes

Reproductive rights, in the US and everywhere else really. A few short things and then a longer one.

Firstly. Good men, you are there, we see you, we know you, I raised two. This is not an attack on men.

Stop referencing The Handmaids Tale, in that story WOMEN let down other WOMEN. And it’s not a great book anyway.

Would-be allies please stop using that song ‘if we go down, we all go down together.’ No one is going down, we are rising.

Without body autonomy, any person of any gender or race is a slave. If your body is not your own to control then you have no real freedoms. This is not about babies. If these law-makers cared about babies, we would see health care, gun control, education, food programs … I could go on.

It’s not about religion, being a jurist does not give you the right to overlay your own faith on the law.

I have been pondering this over and over, from my relative safety of an Australian women who is done having babies.

Co-incidence? Serendipity? Synchronicity? For a few weeks I’ve been playing the new album by Florence and the Machine, in particular Choremania.

"I don't know how it started

Don't know how to stop it

Suddenly, I'm dancing

To imaginary music

Something's coming, so out of breath

I just kept spinning and I danced myself to death

Something's coming, so out of breath

I just kept spinning and I danced myself to death."

And then because I am me, The Red Shoes, the story by Hans Christian Anderson, an obvious link to these lyrics also merged. A woman who puts her pleasure before doing the right thing as decided by her betters. Her punishment? She cannot take the beautiful red shoes off and must dance until she drops dead. (And let’s not forget The Little Mermaid, who must give up everything that makes her who she is, for love of a human man, always the payment and then the punishment.)

A woman chooses herself. She chooses her mental health, physical health, financial situation, whatever her reason to not bear a child, therefore she is sinning in the worst possible way. A woman who chooses herself before her (unborn) child.

So let's take that back a step, and yes activate some male thinking. If she can do the unthinkable and put herself first in that situation, that means …

she would put her own wants and needs before ours (men) as well.

And that is not acceptable to some people.

My take is that this may be at the heart of it.

But if you come after women, what happens in this world of ours?

Why be at war with the bodies that made you?

Which leaves me with the allies and helpers. You are all beautiful. If we provide weekend escapes, send “medicines”, park our car outside abortion clinics to muddle the tracking, we are bandaging the problem and not solving it. Please do help where you can, be supportive, be a protector or a shelter. But we have to also find ways to correct this at the highest levels and in all countries where we can, make the law-makers pay attention to what is right, every women’s right to body autonomy.