They want us out of control

Yeah that's a metaphor for bodily autonomy

This month’s theme is “They want us.” I hope you’ll find the current day, historic, and ancestors’ resistance segments helpful! And if you’re looking for ways to support local communities of color build power this election season, check out Seed the Vote as a great organization to volunteer with.

The Issue Today:

This week I want to talk about how some folks want us “out of control,” by which I mean they don’t want us to have control over our bodies and our movement. This has come up for me because the same small handful of organizations who pushed the trans bathroom bans in local and state legislatures are also behind a lot of the state and local anti-abortion laws; in particular, the Alliance Defending Freedom, who Republican congressional leader Mike Johnson used to work for.

They’re also behind the bans on trans youth getting the care they need. And here's where those things tie together: they both disrupt doctor-patient confidentiality by placing the government in a deciding role, and they are also both increasingly tied to states’ efforts to ban people crossing state lines to get the care they need.

I’m a fan of the writer Rebecca Solnit, and back in 2020, Solnit wrote an article calling for solidarity between pro-choice and pro-trans advocates. It was prescient, given that last year, the Nebraska Legislature tried to create a bill that covered both a ban on trans-affirming care and abortion after the 6^th week after fertilization. The thing she said that feels particularly important today is

“It’s no coincidence the American right is obsessed with border walls and with airtight gender definitions and racial discrimination to keep others in their places.”

-Rebecca Solnit

As I think about the agenda that is driving so much legislation today, it has a lot to do with who has control of what, and I want to invite us to sit with that today.

How this came up in the past:

So some people don’t want us to have control over our bodies and our ability to move freely. You may already know this, but I learned back in 2022 on NPR that abortion rights weren’t a new battle in the 1960s; it turns out that for the first half of the 1800s, abortion was not uncommon.

The general consensus at that time was that life began when the woman could feel the baby move, called “quickening,” and midwives and women might consider abortion as needed prior to that moment. But by 1860, the American Medical Association existed, and doctors did NOT love that midwives were managing an element of the medical arena. Additionally, a guy named Horatio Storer, connected with the AMA, was terrified that in the wake of the civil war, Protestant white women were having fewer babies, and the American west was about to be overrun by Chinese people, Black people, new immigrants, and Catholics. If you’ve heard the term “replacement theory” used by white supremacists today, that’s what Horatio Storer believed back in 1860. Storer convinced the AMA and many states that midwives and pregnant women were too delusional to make their own decisions, and he claimed that opposing the notion of “quickening” was the moral stance and the stance of medical professionals.

At the same time, civil war veteran Anthony Comstock was on a crusade against birth control, conflating it and abortion, and by 1873, he got Congress to pass legislation banning most forms of birth control as well, in honor of his Puritan ancestors. However, none of these laws prohibited sterilization of Black women by force or without consent, because control of women’s bodies was about making more white Protestant Americans and reducing any power by anyone else. So I think it’s worth noting that sexism, racism, and a sense of the right to control bodies goes back a long way in this country, including when we talk about issues like abortion.

As an aside, speaking of midwives, you might want to read about Anna Bixby, the midwife who discovered a cure for the awful disease known as “milk sickness” in 1832 but was ignored for decades because why would a woman be able to find a cure for anything?!

How our ancestors fought back:

Since we’re focusing this week on how some people want us “out of control,” as in not able to make our own decisions about our bodies, I had trouble choosing a particular ancestor; a lot of folks have fought for women’s rights, trans and queer rights, for the right to safe migration across state lines.

You may have heard me talk about Fannie Lou Hamer, the powerhouse civil rights leader in the mid-1900s—well, it turns out she fought against the forced sterilization of Black women at that time, cruelly nicknamed “the Mississippi appendectomy.”

Judith Heumann, who was part of the disability rights movement that gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act, also fought against forced sterilization, of people with disabilities, and advocated for people with disabilities to have control over their own reproductive decisions.

It would be cheating on an ancestor-honoring day to name contemporary fighters for bodily autonomy at the intersection of gender and race, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Mia Mingus, and Patricia Berne, so I won’t.

I could name Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who fought for working class trans people’s right to bodily autonomy and freedom of movement.

I just couldn’t choose, because I want us to remember that there are SO MANY ANCESTORS and also contemporaries with us in the fight to make sure people have control over where we go and what we do with our bodies.

I hope you find the reminders of these amazing forebears and contemporaries a source of encouragement in the midst of our own work.

Grateful as always to be part of this work with you,

Sandhya