NewsUSAThat body

That body

Let us not be deceived with concepts and files, with articles and words that hide reality. The ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States against abortion is this: some judges in an old room have voted to put a flag back on the navels of women, a flag that claims that female bodies are owned and usufruct of others.

Perhaps these judges consider themselves viceroys of the world, or bearers of the word of God. But they are people lost in the old concept of purity —of race, sex, class and religion—, oblivious to the daily life of their contemporaries. They are people who do not care about the social reality of millions of women: 17-year-old teenagers, 44-year-old lawyers, mothers of four children in their thirties, sick actresses in their 40s or unemployed shop assistants in their 20s, raped or not. They do not understand that they are all people with the right to do what they want with their own body and decide what happens inside it.

These judges have arrogated to themselves the power of intervention on a fundamental issue —allowing an embryo inside the womb of a woman to become a living being, or not— that affects half of the population of their country. Enclosed in their decrepit labyrinth, they attribute to themselves the ability to administer those bodies, to protect their destinies, to command their sexuality and their ability to reproduce. They are viceroys without crown or castle, eager to rule the bodies of women. That body.

This movement backwards, this frontal attack on people’s rights has a name: it’s called biocontrol, and it takes place within a biopolitical system that wants to retain what is already slipping away: control over the female body. That body that must be governed on behalf of others, as if the person who inhabits it —a woman— were incapable of ruling her own existence. As if it were an extension or an appendage of another. She has been warning about it for a long time, and the American journalist and writer Gloria Steinem, 2021 Prince of Asturias Award winner, repeated it in this same newspaper: “authoritarianism begins with control over women’s bodies.”

The Supreme Court ruling is a triumph for those who believe they can decide and make use of these bodies whenever they want, those who consider them containers, objects of use and enjoyment on behalf of others. It is a triumph of archaic people, body and soul. A triumph, too, of those who talk about taking the pussies from behind, of those who want women dressed as bunnies because perhaps they would like them to be. Of those who consider that they have something to say —and that everything they think and say is important— about those who make those bodies that belong to people who are not them. It is the triumph of some poor men.

In this new world that is being born, cloudy and shiny, where the servitude of so many under the power of a few is beginning to be questioned and, at the same time, in a world that moves towards infinite distraction, this sentence is not news plus. It’s a real hit. A hard, leathery blow. That’s why now is the time not to let yourself be distracted anymore. You have to pay attention and concentrate. We shouldn’t take our eyes off that blow and we shouldn’t let it just pass by.

This statement is also a neon sign that says: never lower your guard, and always fight for the obvious. Because in this post-Roe world the door is opening to cut other rights, with a radical difference compared to previous times: there are now technology companies with the capacity to monitor, detect, collect and report on any type of data. Also related data, for example, with early pregnancy and its possible interruptions.

This supposedly legal earthquake — riddled with moral loopholes, such as a handful of ultraconservative judges forcing the technical reversal of a historic social agreement among the American population from more than 50 years ago — has a not-so-funeral aspect. It is a blow that wakes up. It is a stone on the road to freedom, a very specific freedom, denied again and again throughout the centuries: the freedom of women’s bodies, souls and pussies. This is a long fight, but it is one of those that is worth it. And we are millions of people, of all types and conditions, who believe in it. Almost a hundred years ago, the wonderful blues singer Bessie Smith explained it very well to all of us in her song Ai n’t nobody business: what I do is nobody’s business.

Source: EL PAIS

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