When the Personal Becomes Political
Ask a reproductive rights activist what the goal of their activism is, and they might say that it is the achievement of full bodily autonomy and safety for womb-bearers, in the form of abortion and contraceptive access, legally enforced sex education, planned parenthood counselling, and so on. Reproductive rights activism seeks to bring change within the existing framework of laws and regulations. The goal is to establish reproductive rights to be as alienable as the fundamental right to life, but all that reproductive rights activism asks for is the right of a womb bearer to have full autonomy over their body with respect to its sexual and reproductive aspects. Why should we require activism to establish that a human should have complete control of their own body? The term “activism” has undeniable political connotations, indicating a conflict between what is the current system, and what it ought to be. Despite the liberal policies existing all across the world with regard to abortion, contraception, and sexual and reproductive healthcare, these are rights conferred by policies emerging from political discourse deciding to confer them upon womb bearers. In other words, it is politics that decided to grant this so-called fundamental, inalienable right.
Why should one care where the right comes from?
Because what politics can give, politics can take away.
It’s been several weeks, since the Roe v. Wade judgment, one of the United States’ most prolific landmark decisions that legalized the right to have an abortion, was overturned by the Supreme Court. The decision came as a shock to reproductive rights activists and in fact to everyone else too, that a landmark judgement such as this one, which stood by its very nature as precedent to significant following decisions in several cases, could, fifty years after it was passed, be reversed. As the news itself broke the internet, political pundits in the US and abroad as well began releasing opinions on it, and the debate on sexual and reproductive rights thus regained traction. But well before that, it has been a political hot commodity for quite a few decades, and in the United States, just like guns and drugs, it’s one of those issues that further polarizes the Republican and Democratic parties. So once again, those fighting their whole lives for reproductive rights need to ask themselves this pertinent question — why should the bodies of womb bearers be a political battlefield in the first place?
The political fight for women’s bodily rights in the Western world emerged in the 1960s when a simple yet provocative slogan came up among the second-wave radical feminists protesting for women’s rights: “The personal is political”. In hindsight, one could perceive it as an acceptance of the fact that a woman’s body, among other social structures presumed to be ‘personal’, was inextricable from politics. The idea was that all of the issues once assumed to be within the purview of personal, family, or household issues were in fact political in nature. Whether intrinsically political or made political by other factors, these issues could not be viewed as merely personal issues anymore. These were systemic, and required political action to tackle.
Now that the right to an abortion has been legally dismantled in the United States, which arguably holds a significant influence over law and policymaking in much of the Western world and beyond, this could have ripple consequences over reproductive rights in the rest of the world. Advocates have good reason to fear that an overturn of reproductive rights in the US would serve to embolden anti-choice movements, strengthening their voice in coercing government and judiciary action to reverse the crucial gains made in the field in the last few years. This isn’t some hypothetical theory, it has already happened in the case of Poland and Malta, and is happening in Croatia, Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia. Within its neighbourhood, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic have complete bans on abortions, and the scales may soon tip in the favour of those seeking to dismantle reproductive rights in Brazil and Mexico. When Colombia loosened restrictions on getting an abortion in 2006, the court actually cited Roe v Wade and did so again in 2022 when it further decriminalised abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Another unnoticed, yet significant impact is due to the “global gag rule”, revoked by President Biden, which restricted American funds used to support abortion providers in poorer regions of South America and Africa. The revoking of Roe v Wade is likely to make donors take a step back from supporting abortion access in these regions, fearing criminal repercussions.
The reversal of such a significant and consequential judgement is nothing short of an international catastrophe. Data overwhelmingly states that banning abortions never leads to fewer abortions, just more unsafe ones. Estimates suggest that banning abortion leads to a horrific 21 per cent jump in pregnancy-related deaths. So the reversal of Roe v. Wade — done to “save” the lives of a humanized foetus — will take more lives of those carrying the foetus. The financial security of women denied abortions is also projected to be on the rise, as the cost of spending to travel further to seek abortions, or alternatively, bearing the cost of an unwanted pregnancy will add to their financial woes. The fight for global reproductive rights just got a lot harder. Because as the saying goes, when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. While we can no longer extract reproductive rights from politics, it is more challenging than ever to get politics to empower reproductive rights.
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Writer: Shruti Bhat
Editor: Arushi R.V
