25/06/2022
Forty-nine years ago I was twenty-two, newly immersed in the feminist movement’s upsurge in the early seventies, helping to organize our local women’s center, going every week to my consciousness-raising group, participating in self-health sessions where we learned to examine one anothers’ cervixes with a speculum and how to perform menstrual extraction, and supporting all the organizing and agitation to advocate for the right to control our own reproductive capacities.
When the Roe vs. Wade decision came down, it was a moment of jubilation—and relief! We still had so many things to fight for—but this was one battle that we’d won.
Now, almost half a century later, comes this huge setback. I am so angry that I actually find it hard to write, hard to even say anything without just ranting and screaming.
But one thing is clear to me—we have work to do!
We need to do the long, hard work of building a pro-life movement. Not the anti-abortion, anti-sex, anti-woman movement that has co-opted the term, but a movement that is truly pro-life, and capable of creating a pro-life nation, a pro-life world.
What would that look like?
Life is embedded in bodies, bodies that are complex and unique, resilient and fragile, prone to many mysterious conditions, capable of producing both immense pleasure and extreme pain. Some of those bodies are female, capable of harboring and nurturing new life, and a pro-life movement would honor and cherish all those capacities.
A truly pro-life nation would care for bodies and provide health care for all, including the spectrum of care we need for safe expression of sexuality.
In a pro-life world, it would be utterly unthinkable that someone might go hungry while others are fed, or that some would be unsheltered while others have homes. Access to food, shelter, and education would be human rights—not access to assault rifles.
Living bodies contain living minds, hearts, spirits, the capacity to reason, the ability to feel compassion, the urge for agency and dignity—all those things that make us human. So a truly pro-life movement would support each person’s right and responsibility to make the key decisions that impact their lives, to have agency over their bodies, to make their own medical and moral choices according to the guidance of their own conscience.
A pro-life movement would hold that pleasure is a good thing—especially sexual pleasure in all its various forms, so long as they manifest with mutual consent. Sexuality would be seen as a sacred gift. Yet we could also acknowledge that any force so powerful can also be an arena of wounding and hurt. In a pro-life world, we would be allies for one another in healing the wounds, weathering the disappointments and celebrating the joys of being sexual creatures.
Life exists on a living planet, so a pro-life world would tend and cherish the web of life in all of its complex interrelationships. A truly pro-life movement would be marshaling all its power to halt climate change and repair damaged ecosystems, to protect biodiversity, care for the life-support systems of the planet, to build soil, protect water, conserve old growth, plant trees, to teach the science and skills of regeneration and honor of the spirit of interconnectedness.
Life is messy. When we’re truly alive, we make mistakes. We are faced with choices and sometimes make the wrong ones. We do unwise and foolish things, and face unexpected consequences. A movement that is truly pro-life is all about accountability but also second chances, ways to make amends when needed, pathways back to rebuild trust. It’s about nuance and complex questions, not simple answers.
We have many, many movements advocating for these goals. But now is the time to come together, to build coalitions, practice solidarity, and be more welcoming and more strategic than ever while we build for the long term.
Because only a powerful, broad-based movement can counter the right-wing, anti-sex, anti-pleasure, anti-democratic forces that seek to impose theocratic rule.
One more thing about life—life resists control. Life is resilient, endlessly creative, and so are we when we work in its service.
