I Protested for Abortion Rights at the Supreme Court but Left Angrier than When I Arrived
By Amanda Houdeschell
Last week I was in Washington, DC to rally for women’s sports on the anniversary of Title IX. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on the following day, I was presented with another opportunity to stand up for women’s rights: protesting at the Supreme Court just hours after this devastating ruling.
I have organized and attended many protests over the years for a multitude of causes. I show up not only to express my outrage at injustice, but also to stand side by side with like-minded individuals and commiserate together.
But at the Supreme Court,
I showed up for women’s liberation, while everyone else came for… well, everything except that. I believe, as many radical feminists believe, that the movement against abortion rights is rooted in misogyny, in a demand for male control over women’s bodies.
But since “woman” has now become a dirty word to “progressives,” acknowledgment of men’s hatred for women is conspicuously absent from these events.
Take, for example,
the decades-old slogan “Pro-life is a lie / You don’t care if women die.” Protestors outside of the Supreme Court turned this historic chant into gender-neutral nonsense by changing “women” to “people.”
Which people will die as a result of Dobbs? I wanted to shout. The left may have forgotten who women are, but the right certainly hasn’t.
Similarly, the popular chant
where women shout “My body, my choice” and men respond “Her body, her choice,” had the response modified to “their body, their choice.”
The Left has so thoroughly forgotten women that women only made up a little over half of the speakers I saw during my time at the protests. One man took up time at the mic to shoutout the social media handles for an organization that promotes the ratification of the ERA, a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would jeopardize single-sex spaces and resources.
Unfortunately,
even when women were speaking, the focus was often derailed from reproductive freedom, or women’s rights entirely. On Friday afternoon, some speakers arrived who essentially turned the pro-choice event into a racial justice event, chanting “Back up, back up, we want freedom, freedom. All these racist-ass systems, we don’t need ‘em, need ‘em.”
The speakers asked Black people (not Black women) to come to the front and described the Supreme Court decision as an attack on Black bodies (not Black women’s bodies). In their speeches, they mentioned issues outside of the realm of what brought protesters to the Supreme Court steps that day, such as mass incarceration and DC statehood.
I mention these events
not to question the validity of the speakers’ anger over these issues, but to ask why, on the worst day for women’s rights in fifty years, we can’t have one protest that centers women?
And because Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court should reconsider other landmark cases that protect the right to contraception and legalized homosexuality and gay marriage, a significant portion of the events was consumed by questions of “who’s next?” Women can’t have one day to mourn the loss of our rights, not one day where we are the focus.
This decision would be just as disastrous even if no one else’s rights were on the chopping block. Misogyny is enough to be outraged over. Women are enough.
There is no way to know for certain what has caused this dilution of the women’s movement, but I do know that Planned Parenthood spending valuable time and money on unnecessary medical interventions for trans-identified people is not helping. The National Organization for Women adopting “gender identity” protections into their core issues is not helping. The push for every women’s rights organization and march and event to cover every single “social justice” issue - including those that actually erode women’s rights - is not helping; it is destroying the women’s rights movement so that it is completely unrecognizable to our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers who fought so hard for our rights.
With attacks on reproductive sovereignty
from the right, and assaults on single-sex spaces from the left, I have never felt so politically homeless as I do now. Gender activists have argued that their agenda fights for “inclusion,” but women across the country are being excluded from our own movement for believing that abortion rights are women’s rights. We are being silenced for speaking out about our oppression in the “wrong” way, because it angers our oppressors. Welcome to the new misogyny.
WATCH: Amanda at the Supreme Court Rally
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