I’m Not Going to Ask The Supreme Court for Permission

Kathryn Dickel
Pollinate Magazine
Published in
6 min readOct 20, 2020

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It’s time for women to reclaim their ancestral power and stop asking others for permission to control their bodies.

Photo by Sebastian Pichler on Unsplash

The text spread through my phone like wildfire. One after the other… “RBG is gone.” I’ll admit I’m not an aficionado of text speak so I stared at RGB. What is RBG? Then it hit… Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That’s when everyone on the thread started responding in horror. Their fear was palatable, and it wasn’t just women. Perhaps the most poignant of all the texts I received was from a father-friend of mine who was suffering from a feeling of utter powerlessness for his beloved, young daughter who was too young to know his fear that she would grow up into a world that would control her humanness by controlling her body.

Although the fears of what impact a conservative-majority Supreme Court could have on women’s bodily sovereignty seem to be manifesting with the leak of Alito’s majority opinion document responding to the Mississippi law severely curtailing access to abortion, which the court heard in December 2022, I am personally not fearing how this decision will impact a woman’s right to choose an abortion, and here’s why.

Abortion is an Ancient Practice

As a woman, who has now learned about the power of intimately knowing my body, as well as the…

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