Today is the 37th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that secured abortion rights for women in the United States. Sally already wrote a great post about this year’s theme, “Trust Women.” Jos over at Feministing has also written about what “Trust Women” means for her, especially in light of Dr. Tiller’s murder.
For me, though, “Trust Women” rings a little bit differently — because, quite frankly, I don’t trust women to always make the right decision or the best decision any more than I trust men to. At the end of the day, human beings do foolish things all the time — we make bad choices, we lie, we cheat, we mess up, we hurt other people, we make mistakes. We do things we regret. We regret not doing things. It’s part of being human.
So, no, I don’t trust women to always make the right choice or the best choice. And one consequence of that is that I sure as hell don’t trust any other woman (or man) to make the best decision for me about my body.
Part of being human is accepting that no one of us is perfect or infallible, and that in structuring our laws and our society, one goal is to mitigate harm as much as possible while giving individuals as much freedom as possible. For me, “trust women” isn’t a rallying cry because women are the best decision-makers or because women don’t make mistakes or because every choice is a good choice; it’s a rallying cry because it emphasizes that women are human. We are imperfect, we are fallible, we will not always choose what any given outsider thinks is best — but we nonetheless deserve the right to determine, for ourselves, how and when and why we reproduce.
Why? Because who else is going to do it? To put reproductive rights in the hands of anyone but the individual whose body is doing the reproducing is to radically infringe on the most basic of human rights. It is in essence to say, “Your very being is not as important as my opinion.” And if we don’t trust individuals to make their own choices about reproduction, given their own unique set of circumstances, why in the world would we trust outsiders — who know significantly less about the whole of any one individual’s circumstances than the individual involved — to make such important decisions for them?
Trusting women doesn’t mean believing that women are morally superior or magically able to make the best choices all of the time. Instead, it means giving women room to be human — and trusting that no choice is perfect, that no human being lives in a vaccuum, and that we mostly do the best we can given our circumstances. And sometimes we don’t, and that’s ok too.
Here, I’ll echo Miriam’s point: That choice matters, and trusting women matters, but changing the circumstances within which women make their choices matters too. Women should have the right to determine their own reproductive lives, but that right is too often limited not only by anti-choice laws, but by the day-to-day injustices that women face because of their race, class, body, or a myriad of other factors. Actually work to give women a full range of real choices, and then I’ll take a little more seriously anyone who would put their opinions on abortion before a real live woman’s fundamental right to be free from bodily harm and physical intrusion.
Because make no mistake: Infringing on abortion rights does real, tangible harm to women. The abortion debate is often framed as an individual’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but that’s only half the story. It’s also about an individual’s right to be free from government intrusion when it comes to the most personal and fundamentally human things — choice, desire and self-determination in sex and reproduction. For me, the pro-choice position isn’t just “women have the right to abortion” (although it’s that, too); it’s also saying, “The government does not have the right to come in and tell me when and how I must or must not reproduce.” Putting the decision to have a baby (or not have a baby) in the hands of the government, or in the hands of anyone other than the person doing the having, is an unconscionable violation of physical integrity and human rights.
So I trust women, and I don’t. I trust myself, at least, to be the best moral arbitrator when it comes to how and when I reproduce. And I am not so arrogant to think that my opinion is more important than another woman’s evaluation of her own unique reproductive circumstances. So I trust her to do the same. And I trust that, because we are all human, we will not always handle our choices in a way that X, Y or Z person thinks is best. We won’t always handle our choices in a way that we ourselves think is best, at the time or down the road. It will be messy and imperfect. But at the very least, we will try to self-preserve. At the very least, to trust women is to say, “You, too, are a human being and you, too, deserve sovereignty over the little flesh-and-blood space that only you occupy.”
I trust that allowing all of us that basic bit of humanity is the least we can do.