How the overturn of Roe. v Wade is the death of body autonomy

After 5 months of mourning the Supreme Court overturn of Roe V. Wade, the cuts begin to swell.

Women and sex workers with ovary-reproductive organs are in the precarious situation with the progressive banning of protections for abortion products and contraceptives. Sex workers historically have been the first to be at risk to any laws compromising the protections of body rights. Permeating social stigma and political policy has kept their labor at the margins of society, yet placed them in a unique position to advocate for struggles and campaigns that many other (particularly men) can’t see now, but is over the horizon. To critically take a moment to reflect on the substantial harm the overturn of the legal precedent brings, we need to look down from the barrel of the crisis to grasp its historical process, meaning from the perspective of sex workers.

As outspoken dominatrix Savannah Sly said in a Vice interview, ““Sex workers, like other canaries in the coal mine, help us see down the pipe.”

The body autonomy of cis woman and trans people vulnerable to unwanted pregnancies is the target of the supreme court’s ruling. In traditional conservative fashion, the right and its political actors have caped in their oppressive project through the public language surrounding the policy reforms (or upheavals) they organize, they claim to be protecting ‘national sanctity’ and preserving ‘traditional social dynamics and relations’, despite their true project is to squash subaltern resistances antagonistic to capitalism and the settler project (the USA social framework) merging out of the formation of new cultures and communities. These new cultures are the progressive, movements for autonomy (autonomies for the many genders, nationalities, economic practices, etc.), and the new communities are (in this case) the free association of woman struggling to maintain their autonomy and carve out new lives beyond the authority of patriarchy.

This is the fear of the right, its historical movement today seeks to solidify its strategic position to corrode away autonomy through the actions of its supreme court judges, the previous president, and several local and national representatives in office (ignoring the military and law enforcement agencies).

Access to legal, safe abortions is a domino factor in their vision, a foundational right for facilitating ‘degraded human behavior’, since it gives confidence and more autonomy to marginalized communities traditionally at the whims of the settler patriarchy. They delegitimatize the sexual freedom of women (and all oppressed gender folks) and the public, safe sexual exchanges among queer and trans communities by claiming these cultural practices and communities need to stop because their cultivating the ‘criminal’ elements of society. Despite the historical evidence to the contrary, the rise of crime, addiction, prostitution follow the increasing dissolution of social welfare, affordable housing, stable work, effective education and career training, the right seeks to echo dead myths from periods where the popular masses were entrenched in ignorance, cruelty, and ‘led by the divine laws and princes’ of society. Sex workers are the crux of their campaign against body autonomy, and the gateway to encroach on the autonomies of communities, the autonomy of press, the autonomy of free association, essentially the autonomy of being a free citizen in society.

“It's like there's a playbook of tactics that have been deployed on people like sex workers for a long time now, and now it's happening to the broader public...” says Sly

Words of advice: Even if people are uncomfortable with the new, progressive cultural expressions and subaltern life styles facilitated by the access to abortions and contraceptives, the failure to stop the advancements of the reactionary movement will allow for the boogeyman of fascism to come in (fascism has always been here for the oppressed nation and genders, but it wears the face of liberalism to regulate itself. Until now.)