Carolina Cuellar at NPR writes: “In South Texas, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera is being charged with murder because of a, quote, ‘self-induced abortion’” (Cuellar). Women’s rights to sovereignty over their own bodies are being rapidly chipped away by men in mostly Southern states, using their own religious beliefs as a basis for “judgment”, and continually mixing religion into politics to appease their right-wing base. They are wielding this weapon of religion to force women into a “guilty” role, criminalizing them for wanting bodily autonomy, which these men themselves are able to enjoy without question.
The inequality of women in our country is ingrained in all of us from a very early age. Lori Baker-Sperry writes in “The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tales”: “The feminine beauty ideal can be seen as a normative means of social control whereby social control is accomplished through the internalization of values and norms that serve to restrict women’s lives” (Baker-Sperry). We all grow up as children learning that women are subordinate to men through cultural examples that are set for us: men take action while women react, men make decisions while women “stand by their men”, men have adventures while women keep the home fires burning.
An example of this early indoctrination can be found in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, in which human clones are raised in a State-funded institution, and told from a very early age that they will be donating their body parts in service to others (real human beings). Miss Emily (one of their Guardians) lectures them at their daily assemblies that they are “Unworthy of privilege” (Ishiguro 43); this can also be seen reflected today in the United States that women are “unworthy” of basic human rights in autonomy over their own bodies – they are seen as “less than”, they are not the Norm. Men making the rules are the Norm.
Margaret Sanger said: “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body, no woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother” (Sanger, 1920). Women have been fighting this uphill battle for over a century, and now after almost fifty years possessing the right to choose what happens with their own bodies, the Supreme Court is teetering on the brink of repossessing those rights. Our governing systems are still run mainly by what my Professor Claire White calls “the Old Weirdy-Beardies”; old white men who are stuck in the past and want to keep all of us stuck there with them, because it caters to their own needs above everyone else’s.
Michel Foucault describes biopower as a regularization process of humanity, in order to gain the most production from it. Whereas the previous sovereign powers utilized the threat of death, biopower uses the regularization of life: “Power is decreasingly the power of the right to take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live” (Foucault, 248). Biopower seems to me to be reflected today in the current fight over abortion rights for women in various states such as Texas, Missouri, and Michigan among others. The regularization of women’s bodies is moving from the private, individual level to the public, collective level. The lines of the “right to life” are being blurred: who is deserving of the right to life? The fetus? Or the woman carrying it?
Regularization has steadily increased back in to track, monitor, and vilify women for decisions they should be able to make over their own bodies and the state of their bodies (in my opinion, as a woman). This time, biopolitics has gone one step further in incorporating the random citizen in Texas to create a bounty on a woman’s head for attempting to get an abortion, or for even thinking of getting an abortion. Women can potentially be tracked over state lines, if they flee their own state to obtain an abortion in a neighboring state; their doctors, families, and even their cab drivers could be potentially implicated in this bounty hunt.
This is a horrible regression of women’s rights, and places women in the position of second-class citizens, in which men are making the decisions for them – and now not just politicians, but random citizens endorsed by the politicians. Judith Butler asks in “Violence, Mourning, Politics” who counts as human? In a world dominated by power, violence exploits certain people and cultures who are outside the “norm” of white male heterosexuality, and we have become accustomed to accepting these inequalities because they are constantly being force-fed to us by the people in positions of control and the media machine. There is a general idea of the “normative body”; those that fall outside of that are often seen as less than human, and become invisible and unrecognized. Butler writes that violence against these people doesn’t really count as violence because it is expected to happen and is normalized. These people are viewed as “unreal” – not really existing in the first place: “If violence is done against those who are unreal, then from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated” (Butler 2002, 33). Stripping women of the right to govern their own bodies is a form of violence, persecution, and oppression. If women are viewed as “earthen vessels” (as North Carolina Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn recently stated in the House of Representatives) or inanimate objects, they are non-human entities, only existing to serve the needs of the “humans”; straight, white males in power.
Where could this end? Could these “normative bodies” as bounty hunters track women down like animals, and even kill them if they felt they were entitled to do so? If women do not have control over their own bodies, they are seemingly the slaves of men, and slaves of the system in which they fully live, contribute, and participate. If biopower is indeed there to encourage life, shouldn’t it be protecting the lives of women? Women, it seems, have morphed (or returned) into non-entities or objects to be manipulated and controlled more than men, and by men, and for men.
Women are living beings, contributing to the ecosystem of biopower, working and being productive as well as reproductive, producing the babies that they want to produce. It appears that biopower is not satisfied with this, and wants to extract even more from them, while taking away their basic human rights to control their own bodies in exchange. Biopower seems to favor the masculine, while placing an ever-tightening rein on the feminine, which feels, from a female perspective, more and more like a noose.
Baker-Sperry. 2003. “The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tales.” Gender & Society, October 1, 2003.
Brechtel, Evan. 2021. “Cawthorn Calls Women ‘Earthen Vessels’ in Bonkers Anti-Abortion Rant on House Floor.” Second Nexus, December 3, 2021.
Butler, Judith. 2002. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.”
Cuellar, Carolina. 2022. “A Texas woman has been charged with murder after a so-called ‘self-induced abortion.’” NPR, April 10, 2022.
Foucault, Michel. 1976. “17 March 1976.” ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France 1976-1976. Translated by David Macey, Picador 2003.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. Vintage International, 2006.
Kelly, Mary Louise. 2022. “Gloria Steinem’s calls to protect bodily autonomy live on as Roe faces reversal.” NPR, May 6, 2022.
Sanger, Margaret. 1920.
