The threat of abortion bans is about so much more than abortions

If Roe is overturned, and/or abortion is cast as "murder", the loss to women's autonomy -- and to American democracy -- may have terrifying ripple effects. Here's a primer on the issue.

Well, we’ve arrived. We were warned time and again that this could happen, and now it is happening. The Supreme Court is now considering whether to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 landmark case in which a 7-2 ruling from the all-male bench made women’s access to abortion a “fundamental right” for a woman’s “life and future”. Arguments were recently heard in the case of Dobbs v Jackson, a petition that asks the current conservative majority court to make abortion illegal from 15 weeks.

But Dobbs is hardly the only threat to women’s body autonomy currently creating a siege. They are coming at us from all sides.

(Ironic, isn’t it, that an all-male bench overwhelmingly sided with women’s rights, while the bench with the most women in history may be the one to throw it all away? Thanks, Amy Coney Barret……)

The significance of this moment is about more than abortion. At its core, it’s about women’s body autonomy, women’s health, and women’s freedom. But it’s also about the relentless rise of religious-backed patriarchy in American life, an angry misogyny that seeks to brutally punish women who dare to lead our own lives, and the devastating long-term impact of Republican spin tactics delivered masterfully by Donald Trump with his uniquely destructive ability to rile his masses by replacing facts, ethics, and compassion with lies, violence, and hate.

To understand how we got to this point, we need to look back at the history of this issue in America.

The Vashti paradigm

Before we look back at the history of abortion in America, I would like to offer a paradigm for what we’re dealing with that is 3000 years old. The story that I think exemplifies the issue comes the Book of Esther, and particularly the incident of Queen Vashti’s marital disobedience. According to Chapter One, Queen Vashti had the gall, all those years ago, to disobey her husband, the king, when he summoned her to come. Take a look at the text about what happened next, because I believe it is informative for us today:

What shall be done to Queen Vashti, as she did not comply with the order of the king?

Then Memuchan declared before the king and the princes, "Not against the king alone has Vashti the queen done wrong, but against all the princes and all the peoples that are in all King Ahasuerus's provinces. For the word of the queen will spread to all the women, to make them despise their husbands in their eyes, when they say, 'King Ahasuerus ordered to bring Vashti the queen before him, but she did not come.’

If it please the king, let a royal edict go forth from before him that Vashti did not come before King Ahasuerus, and let the king give her royal position to her peer who is better than she.

And let the verdict of the king be heard throughout his entire kingdom, and all the women shall give honor to their husbands, both great and small."

And he sent letters to all the king's provinces, to every province according to its script, and to every nationality according to its language, that every man dominate in his household and speak according to the language of his nationality.

Chagall’s painting of Vashti being punished by King Ahashverosh

The King’s advisers express a palpable fear that if one woman disobeyed her husband all hell's going to break loose throughout the empire. In other words, if a woman disobeys her husband — if women disobey their husbands — then men are weak, and ergo the nation is weak.

This this last bit is really important to understand, “that every man dominate in his household and speak according to the language of his nationality”. There is this perception among the men in power — not necessarily the men at home, but the men around the king making the decisions — that there is a connection between men’s abilities to control their wives and the strength of the empire. That the empire needs men who are able to force compliance and obedience at home. Otherwise, the men are not real men, and the nation is powerless.

This is a core concept of the patriarchy, and it is 3000 years old. It’s the idea that men's political power comes from being able to control the women in their lives — the women’s movements, women’s ideas, women’s sexuality, and more — and that's how government that's how the nation gets us power. This might feel like an old text, and yet here we are . The idea that women have to be controlled an punished in order to keep the nation strong — that is what is currently driving the threatening discourse in America today not only around abortion but about a whole slew of issues around women’s bodies that are bubbling up to the surface. And we need to understand this in order to fully understand what we’re up against today.