On Bodily Autonomy and the Battles Ahead

There’s a blight that has long infected our nation. It has spread itself in various ways throughout our country’s painful past. It hollows out the souls of the ruling caste by reinforcing a dangerous and false idea: that their own power and station somehow derives from the loss of others’ autonomy. That idea has driven us into conflict and ruination.

The ultimate loss of autonomy manifested as slavery, the original sin of our founding, over which we ultimately fought a civil war. But there are its cousins, too, with wives seen as property of men for centuries, or the mass incarcerated treated as the effective property of the state.

As today’s Supreme Court proved yet again, we are still battling for autonomy and agency over our own bodies, from the right to reproductive choice stripped so coldly away by the opinion, to the right to gender identity and gay intimacy and love that are its likely next targets.

The powerful understand bodily autonomy in stark terms. And if there were ever doubts as to its value, the “anti-maskers” dispelled them. In their world of least infringement, they could not be so much as inconvenienced to cover their faces for the sake of others. Yet many of these same elements now demand unconditional surrender of the uterus by others.

Underlying our fear is the shattering realization that our bodies may not really ours to control and inhabit at all. That right belongs, it now appears, to the ones in charge, mostly men, mostly white, who might soon dictate all that we must or must not do with them.

They act with impunity because they believe they have ensconced themselves into permanent power. In that they are mistaken. In this more modern and liberated world, no one can maintain final say over other bodies as long as other spirits remain strong and free. The power of their caste has been fading fast. They understand, with no small amount of panic, that this is their final, gasping assault.

And so I can sleep tonight, in this body that’s mine because I know it to be so, and because our Constitution after a bloody civil war confirms it to be. Tomorrow, and the next day and the next, that fight continues on behalf of all who are also guaranteed liberty and autonomy, even if six robed henchmen of the right have decreed otherwise.

So I advise this as medicine for the soul in these difficult times: Think about the body that is yours. Sense its inherent power and strength. Assert its clear and legal autonomy. And take that energy to the battles ahead and to the ballot box in November.