I wasn’t going to write on this subject, because it makes me so furious that it could be detrimental to my health, but since I’ve written about idiotic decisions by The Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS) before (like this one, this one or this one), I can’t let the most draconian of them all slide. Just a word of warning, this post will contain a lot of swearing, because how can it fucking not.

To sum it up, SCOTUS overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion in the US, and the 1993 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision that largely upheld the right. Individual states now have the power to decide what to do about abortion. Due to conservative electoral gerrymandering, this largely makes abortion illegal in America.

You can read all 213 pages of the “majority” opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito here if you enjoy reading legalese hogwash written by an elitist, condescending jackass who doesn’t even have his own uterus.

Honestly, I’m more tired than angry at this point. I am sick to fucking death of men deciding what’s best for us poor dear ladies who couldn’t be asked to think for ourselves. Men have been in power practically since there was power to be had. This applies to a lot of European history, almost all of American history, and lots of other histories too.

Old white men were responsible for slavery, apartheid, segregation, and black men not being able to vote in the US until 1870. They’re responsible for American women not having the right to vote until 1920. The rest of the world didn’t do much better–the earliest sovereign nation to allow women to vote was Norway in 1913. This means, at best, women have been able to vote for approximately 4% of the total time that voting has existed going back to ancient Greece in c. the 5th century BCE–also where women couldn’t vote.

Men made the rules that women couldn’t own or inherit property (still true in parts of the world), couldn’t have access to a proper education (also still true), and were paid less for the same work (still true almost everywhere). They’re responsible for the climate crisis and an egregious number of avoidable deaths as the result of everything from the Inquisition to COVID-19. Men have been in power for long e-fucking-nough.

So, now, here we are in 2022 where I have the right to vote, I can get the same education as a man, wear what I want, say what I want, run a company, own and inherit property, and can even hold office as an elected official (still can’t be President though), but I no longer have a right to decide what happens inside my own body.

How fucking dare you. How dare you, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and the highly-punchable Brett “date rape” Kavanaugh decide what I can’t do with my own uterus. It is mine and you don’t even have your own, so you do not, cannot, know what you’re taking from us. Until you conservative men experience firsthand what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world, I don’t want to hear squat from you on women’s reproductive rights. Let the owners of uteri decide for ourselves.

Imagine if the roles were reversed, i.e., women were in power since the dawn of time and we decided what men could or couldn’t do with their testicles… You wouldn’t like that very much, would you? So, what makes you think you have the right to decide for us? If men could get pregnant, this probably wouldn’t even be a discussion; abortion would be legal for everyone always. 

According to the same Politico article I linked above, “Asked whether abortion should be legal or illegal nationwide, or whether it should be up to the states, 47 percent say it should be legal, 21 percent say it should be illegal, and 19 percent say it should be up to the states to decide.”

Even if you add the 21% of religious zealots who say it should be illegal to the 19% who say it should be a state decision, that’s still only 40 percent. 47 v. 40. So, how is the leaked draft considered a majority opinion? Your math doesn’t add up correctly.

OK, so that’s just one poll, but almost all polls on the subject (other than those run by Fox News or other conservative ideologues) say that most Americans (the vast majority of women at any rate) think abortion should be legal.

As an aside, I don’t like the term pro-life. Unless they’re sociopaths, most humans are pro life by nature. In the same sense, I am not pro-abortion. I don’t think anyone should be compelled to have an abortion in the same way that I don’t think anyone should be compelled to carry a pregnancy to term. Semantically, I prefer the terms pro-choice and anti-abortion. They’re more accurate.

To the minority of women out there who are happy about Roe V. Wade being overturned, like this woman who said, “It has been hard to live in a world where ending human lives is considered a good solution to women’s problems,” I say to you what I always say to anti-abortion women: so, don’t get one then. If you want to have 20 kids, no one will stop you. However, for the rest of us, it should be a choice.

For medical reasons, personal reasons, or no other reason than it’s ours, all humans should have the ultimate say over what happens to our own bodies; not anyone else’s (this means you, SCOTUS), but definitely our own.

I’ll never understand why the religious, particularly Christians, seem to think it’s necessary to force everyone to live by their ideals. What business is it of yours? I don’t care what you do unless you are hurting people or taking my rights away, so why should you care what I do within the same parameters? I am not here to do your bidding, my special little snowflakes. Go ahead and do whatever your religion tells you to do and leave me out of it. I’ll be over here being free from religion altogether, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stay away from my uterus and my government.

So, what can we do about this other than screaming at the internet and rioting in the streets? Legislation is the answer. The right to medically safe abortion needs to be the law of the land. Let’s make it happen.