Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but the number of times that “breast” and “vagina” have appeared in the news in the past month makes me wonder if people, and by “people” I mean “the government,” remember that those organs are actually attached to living human beings. These terms are so often being used in a way that disembodies them, as if they were animate organs floating in space or walking down the street on their own, belonging to no one in particular but, according to the fear-mongering Right, promising to be the downfall of civilization.
While, on the surface, it may seem as if the issues around the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Virginia’s abortion and “personhood” laws have passed us by for the moment, the reality is that seven states in the US already mandate ultrasounds before abortions and countless non-profit organizations aimed at serving women (and all their parts) kowtow to vocal donors and political pressure. And though the Republican presidential debates seem like an annoying farce much of the time, they serve as a kind of chaotic sideshow that allows actual legislation to slip through the big tent of Congress when the popular attention shifts to a new topic du jour. And nothing makes the sideshow barker happier and sells more tickets than screaming about ladybits.
When it comes to election time and the Right you can forget crippling unemployment and personal debt, or a health care industry so far off the rails that over 60% of all personal bankruptcies in 2007 were caused by health care costs, or the utter lack of health care for a huge swath of the American population, a severely underdeveloped US manufacturing sector, an out of control political campaign finance situation, and government impasses that seem to prevent any meaningful change from happening on a national scale, not to mention ongoing international conflicts and humanitarian crises. None of that is as important as the threat posed by America’s vaginas.
What’s perhaps more troubling is that in order to attempt to quash this supposed threat, Conservatives regularly seek to take control of those particular parts, to both colonize and dominate a certain sector of the country’s nether regions—a science fiction-sounding proposal that ought to remind us of some books and plays we all should have read in school (where it’s still legal to teach literature that demonstrates opinions and ideas unsupported by Conservatives, that is).
So much of this could be seen as rhetorical posturing and semantic tomfoolery if it weren’t for the fact that it is language that is used to write laws and it is language that is used to interpret the meaning of those laws when they are challenged in the court system.
For example, as others have already pointed out, the now dormant section of Virginia’s bill requiring doctors to give women seeking abortion a transvaginal ultrasound without obtaining the woman’s consent constitutes rape under the current Federal definition: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” So, sticking with that language, this means Virginia was proposing state-ordered rape of women. Or was it just their vaginas that were being violated?
Further, if you look at legal precedent and language, what is really being suggested by the hibernating “personhood” law, in which life is said to begin at conception, then what is really going on there is state-mandated pregnancy. Or, to borrow the language of people who work around the globe to protect the human rights of women in nations that some in the United States like to claim are less democratically enlightened than us, that’s “forced pregnancy.” And in the case of that Virginia law, it would be forced pregnancy not by a slave owner (yes, Virginia legislators, there is still slavery) or an abusive spouse, as is usually the case in the human rights trials that are being prosecuted around the globe, but by the state.
While these Virginia bills may be off the headlines for the moment, what they remind us of is that women’s bodies continue to be treated as a battleground in American politics—literally a site that can be occupied and blown apart by political forces. While it can seem as though only temporary flare-ups occur, the reality is that these are just the examples that were picked out of a crowd of laws that have steadily been put forward in the past 10-15 years (not to mention the past couple hundred years…).
When it even occurs to lawmakers of any stripe in the contemporary world to treat women as chattel of the state we have a problem, and you can be sure that the few times it floats to the surface these kinds of laws and ideas have been quietly making their way in other less prominent areas all along.
So who do we vagina-carriers go to when we (or at least certain parts of us) are being subjected to sexual abuse and slavery by our own government? I can only imagine that we resort to the international organs that the US and other nations worked so hard to institute—the International Criminal Court, perhaps, which is charged with ruling on crimes against humanity or “serious attacks on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings.” To be clear on that, degradation means to break something down, or, in a chemical sense, to reduce something into smaller parts. I can think of nothing less degrading than the current trend toward treating women as nothing more than discrete packages of flesh that can be carved up and controlled by any person or government body other than the human being herself.
