A Birthing Body Speaks: You Can't Defend What You Can't Define

This birthing body is almost to angry to speak. Almost.

Thank god, this body can no longer birth, it’s been there and got the scars. Thank god this body has a mind all of its own. This birthing body has been pregnant a number of times. Three times children were born of it.

Other times there were miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy and there were abortions. There were times when this body did not want to birth at all and this choice was available. My children were desperately wanted.

I am not ashamed of my terminations. Indeed in 1993 I wrote a piece in The Guardian about this. Certain women were going public, and I felt I should too. I chaired many “speak-outs” where women would talk about their abortions. Some of them were emotional, confessional really with tears of sadness, confusion and many unresolved feelings .

(Column from 1993 from The Guardian reprinted in my book Head Over Heels)

Things changed by the time I was involved in such meetings at the House of Commons, women spoke up confidently. The regret they often voiced was that that they did not feel regret. They felt nothing but relief.

They could not be shamed. It was all a long time from the days of marches where we used to protest against the proposed Alton Bill in the late 80s. David Alton wanted to reduce the time limit on abortion. All efforts that talk about late abortion are in the end, anti-abortion.  Very few abortions in this country are carried out after 20 weeks and if you have a strong stomach I suggest you read the literature on why: from severe foetal abnormalities to domestic violence , women in pregnancy being hit in the stomach with iron bars.

“Alton withdraw like your father should have done”  we chanted. “Get your rosaries off our ovaries”. There is always a threat to women’s autonomy and yet in this country, the majority of people support legal abortion. At least one in three women will have one though I suspect the figure is higher. Abortion pills in early pregnancy have also changed the situation.

In the States though it has always been different. I lived in a house in New Orleans with a friend who worked in an abortion clinic and a housemate who worked with prisoners on death row. He was up at all hours for stays of execution. She would come home with extremely weird stories. At the time I was too young to even see the irony of this. I just always knew that America was a very different country to ours.

POLITICO’S leak that Justice Samuel Alito wants to strike down Roe v Wade, the federal constitutional protection of abortion rights is no huge shock. Biden won the election, Trump won the Supreme Court.

Trigger laws are already in place to ban abortion if Roe v Wade is overturned in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Another 13 states are poised to act. This will affect primarily poor and ethnic women, those least able to travel to get an abortion.

This fight has been a long time coming and a long time predicted and yet there is a huge messiness around the politics of talking about female autonomy. Once upon a time there were bad right wing people, often religiously motivated, who like all fundamentalists want to limit female sexuality and female autonomy.  Now though, the left or liberals or whatever many fools self-ID as, cannot begin to fight the backlash against women’s rights because no one dares define womanhood.

You cannot defend what you cannot define.

The new cult of gender ideology which wants to dematerialise the body is absolutely useless here. It is women who need abortions not “pregnant people” and not transwomen though transwomen may often fight alongside us.  Please, I know many do. But for the ‘grow your own cervix ‘brigade though, restriction to abortion may come as a nasty shock.  

Reproductive rights are the absolute bedrock of any women’s liberation movement worth having. To keep them, to fight for them , then I am afraid you can’t opt out of biological reality because of “feelings”. You can fuck about all you like and some of us  will get pregnant as the result of that and some of us won’t. Play with gender to your heart’s content, you won’t stop that reality.

I have been in desperately poor countries where women have 7 kids by the age of 30 and I have seen them walk very many miles to get a contraceptive implant. Please don’t talk to me about intersectionality unless you are going to talk about class, about poverty, about the plight of women globally. Don’t hand this stuff over to the right by dismembering women into “neutral” body parts.

 Language matters if we cannot talk about sex- based rights because we cannot talk about sexed bodies. Democrats talking about ‘birthing bodies’ and ‘gestational carriers’ and ‘pregnant people’ are pathetic. Who and what is this language for? Does it advance the day to day lives of trans people? It is a performative liberalism that is puny when it comes to women’s rights. It is not progressive to undermine sex-based rights , it aligns horribly with the worst the right will do.

To stand up and fight for women you have to say and know what a woman is. Liberal American feminism is so transfixed by some idea of inclusivity, it might as well not bother. Many, here are as well but hopefully they are waking up,

Being pregnant and growing a child inside you is not a matter of identity and ideology, it materially changes one’s existence. Do I really need to explain the facts of life to you?

There are many battles ahead and this one is the ongoing fight for women’s rights. So many have taken their eye of the ball with the ludicrous idea that women hood is now some mystical mix of hormones and pronouns.

Some times, and now is one of them, to advance the interests of women, we have to own and name our experience in order to keep our hard-won rights. Reproductive autonomy sets women free ; women as a sex, not women as some ill -defined gender of frilliness.

There is nothing feminine about giving birth or having an abortion, but it is something ONLY women do.

To pretend otherwise helps no one. Fight with us and for us. For women.