In the spring of 2004, the same year in which both of my sisters would give birth to their first children, I had an abortion. Precisely two decades later, I only vaguely recall flipping through the feathery pages of the Phoenix phonebook, searching for the listing of the nearest Planned Parenthood. I know I called my manager at work to tell her that I would have to miss a regularly scheduled lunch shift so that I could go to my appointment. Through the clatter of dishes being unloaded outside of her office, she expressed sympathy for the position I was in, and perhaps for the decision I had made. Though I am sure that I called my mom on the small silver flip phone that I had recently acquired, I have no memory of our conversation.
The boyfriend that had gotten me pregnant drove me to the Planned Parenthood in his boxy red Bronco, and he sat with me in the dim doctor’s office as they explained the pill I would swallow, and what to expect afterwards. We drove to his house under the relentless pulse of the Arizona sun, and I took refuge in the cool, dark living room. The corduroy couch left rows of stripes on the backs of my legs as I lay there, waiting for the cramping to begin. I went from pregnant to not pregnant in the span of a week.
I have never once regretted this decision. It was not difficult for me to decide, at age twenty-two, that I didn’t want to be a mom. I can’t say with certainty that I had yet decided to never have children, but I knew that I was only six months into a relationship with the father, and that I was poor, with no support system around me. Given that I had no college degree or marketable skills, and an unhealthy tendency to numb my emotions with drugs and alcohol, I knew that I could not provide any kind of life for this unexpected child. In the intervening years, I have never questioned my choice, and I am extremely grateful that I had the choice at all.
In 2004, the ability to make a decision regarding terminating pregnancy had only been a constitutionally protected right for a little more than thirty years. I took my bodily autonomy for granted, along with my ability to rent an apartment on my own, and to apply for and receive a credit card. Upon moving out west, I had opened my Bank of America account on Mill Street without a single thought to the fact that there once was a time in which women were not able to exercise financial independence. I was only one generation removed from the shackles of a pre-feminist America, and yet I wore my freedom as nonchalantly as my low-rise jeans.
In the wake of 9/11, and with the proliferation of cell phones, easy access to home internet, and the rise of the twenty-four news cycle, the preciousness of the gifts that had been bestowed upon me by my feminist, albeit white-centered and class focused, foremothers was lost on me. I was instead conditioned, from my teenage years in the mid-1990’s through the early aughts, to hate my body while simultaneously encouraged to display it. The Calvin Klein ads featuring Kate Moss in slinky slips of clothing did nothing to convey a need to stay vigilant to women’s rights. Reality TV shows featuring Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Holly Madison and Tyra Banks focused us instead on consumption and celebrity. Girls Gone Wild was sold as the pinnacle of female sexual expression.
That is not to say that there weren’t attempts made to highlight the significance and importance of women’s rights advocacy. But it certainly wasn’t a part of mainstream culture, and as a young woman in her early twenties that was not enrolled in higher education, it was lost on me. I had not developed the critical thinking skills necessary to see how the structures of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism required that women be subjugated. It had not occurred to me that I was perhaps living in a brief period of time in which women were as liberated as they were ever going to be.
Pro-life advocates argue that women have a responsibility to bear children, and that if we do not participate in reproduction, we will not be able to replace the population. This argument fails to appeal to non-child bearing women such as myself because I don’t care to replace the population. I don’t want to give birth to a child that has to witness and live through the atrocities we are currently experiencing. There is an unbearable dissonance in living in the West and watching the genocide of Palestanien men, women and children and knowing that our tax dollars are funding the perpetrators of this hate. It is soul crushing to have to watch Black and Brown men in America be gunned down by police. To know that in the United States, children are more likely to die from a school shooting than from any other cause of death.
The myth of America is crumbling, and so with it falls the assumption of motherhood. A January 2022 press release from Oxfam highlighted that, “The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty.” Inflation continues to rise and drive up the cost of everything from homes to groceries to medications to health care. It is not sustainable to have children, and it is unreasonable to expect that women would willingly choose to put themselves and their potential children into untenable situations. It is precisely because women are more likely than ever to remain childless that we saw the reversal of Roe and subsequent attacks on birth control access.
The Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization was about controlling women. Though the desire to control women and their reproductive rights has always been prevalent among white men, the maddening urgency of Christian nationalists groups reached its fever pitch in the summer of 2022, and we continue to see the fallout on both a state and federal level. While attacks on women’s bodily autonomy are packaged as “pro-life”, even a cursory glance at what these groups advocate for makes it clear that they do not care about women or children in the slightest. We can see it in the legislation that is passed: anti-abortion bills that prioritize the health of a fetus over the health of the mother; the continual slashing of federal support in the form of WIC, SNAP and other benefits; the underfunding of public education systems; the ongoing suppression of the federal minimum wage.
If anti-choice advocates harbor such an obvious disdain for women and children, then why is there such pervasive conditioning happening in white American culture around the “Trad Wife” role and lifestyle? It seems to me that the answer is a tightly coiled rope composed of misogyny, capitalism and white supremacy. Firstly, a “Trad Wife”, shorthand for Traditional Wife, exemplifies the qualities that conservative white men want in a woman: wholly submissive, uneducated, financially dependent and a mother. Secondly, the creation of children supplies a future workforce and consumer base, which is essential to upholding capitalism. Finally, there is a deep fear among conservatives that white people will cease to be a majority and the structure of white supremacy will be threatened. However, if white people continue to have white babies, then the mantle of supremacy can remain in place.
By positioning the role of “Trad Wife” as something to be desired by women, to the point that women are undermining their best interests by choosing this lifestyle, then it sets the stage for even further reversals of women’s rights.
It was only in 1960 that the birth control pill became available in the United States, giving women the ability to exercise control over their reproductive health. A mere sixty-one years ago, in 1963, the Equal Pay Act was passed, giving women the federal right to be paid as much as their male counterparts in the workplace. Though women were able to work and earn money, prior to the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act women were generally not able to open bank accounts without their husband’s signature. This, of course, required that a woman have a husband, thus making it difficult for single women to receive access to financial institutions or a pathway to home ownership. However, with the combined federal legislation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, women were finally able to take out mortgage loans to buy a home.
In 1969 California passed state legislation allowing for no-fault divorces. Over the next forty years, every state in America would go on to pass no-fault divorce legislation, which allowed for women to more easily initiate divorces than under at-fault divorce requirements. In the span of just fifteen years, women went from being forced to remain in a marriage and under the financial control of her husband, with no ability to prevent pregnancy of her own accord, to being able to make independent decisions regarding her reproductive health, earn as much money as a man in her same position, open a bank account, apply for a credit card, take out a mortgage, buy a home and leave a marriage that she no longer wished to be in.
These are not rights and abilities that deeply conservative, Christian right-wing groups want women to have. In fact, CNN’s 2023 article “What is no-fault divorce, and why do some conservatives want to get rid of it?” plainly points to no-fault divorce as being a potential legislative target of the conservative right after their “wins” on abortion access and affirmative action. The blistering desire of the right to control women, in all aspects, is in conflict with the current rights that women have. And what better way is there to control a group of people than to have members of that same group buy into your ideological rhetoric and in fact claim to want it for themselves?
Revolutionary second-wave feminists saw the inherent flaws of focusing on reformation of women’s rights within the existing structure of patriarchy. In her book, Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks explores the difference between women simply gaining equality with men within a social stratification that was always meant to serve men, and ending the sexism and oppression of women that is required by patriarchy in order for it to continue to flourish. She notes that in the 1960s and 70s, the revolutionary voices of Black and Brown women, along with non-heteronormative women and working class women, were drowned out by the louder and more palatable voices (and perhaps faces) of white, middle class women.
Though I am certainly grateful for the financial independence won for me by the women’s rights movement of the previous century, I can see why women such as hooks took issue with focusing only on equality and class mobility. When the socially acceptable feminist voices of the time aligned their viewpoints with the dominant existing social systems of patriarchy and white supremacy, it did nothing to actually dismantle the exact forces that were oppressing women in the first place. Fifty years after the rise of second-wave feminism it seems clear to me that as long as we live in a society that serves the goals and desires of white men, the rights of women and of minorities will remain under constant threat.
I was not close with my grandmother. I don’t know how she felt about women’s rights, but I know that she didn’t want to be a mother, despite having five children. She held both a Bachelor’s degree and a Masters degree and after divorcing my grandfather, she never remarried. I wish that my grandmother would have taken my hands, holding tight to them at the turn of the century, as I became an adult and went out into the world. I wish she would have looked me dead in the eye and said, “All of the freedoms you have- they aren’t a given. Stay vigilant.”
Though I am not a mother, or a grandmother, I am an Aunt. And so let me be the one to take you by your hands, my darling girl, and tell you: Our freedom, the abilities that we have now, are not a given. There are people who want to make sure you have nothing except a kitchen to cook in and a baby on your hip. If you want that life for yourself, I don’t begrudge you, but it shouldn’t be forced on any of us. It is a deeply disturbing experience to have your rights stripped away from you. Stay vigilant, watch what is happening and use your voice while you still can.