I don’t have anything to say about Howell’s most excellent and righteous proposal that a million other people who happen not to be patriarchal pricks in a full froth of hysterical sex panic aren't also saying, I'm sure. But I will add that there is something about the way Howell’s proposal viscerally dramatizes both the hypocrisy and costs of sexist and anti-choice politics that reminds me of the sorts of dramatic queer politics Queer Nationals and ACT UP and Riot Grrrls engaged in for nearly a decade, from roughly 1988 to 1997, and which energized educated queer activists built on in powerful coalitions online and on the ground with representatives and popular culture figures over the next decade or so, culminating soon enough in the end of DADT, anti-discrimination statutes, gay marriage initiatives... and I believe this is very much to the good. (By the way, I say this as an anti-militarist queer who disapproves of marriage and who is pleased that my critiques of patriarchal heteronormativity are now voiced from a position of righteous refusal rather than of marginal exclusion.)
I believe that the politics of choice have everything to gain from the absolutely vindicated strategies of parodic spectacular radicalism that have brought queer folks unprecedented equality in a breathtakingly short time in the United States (opposition to the racist War On (some) Drugs might also benefit from reflection of the tactics and strategies of millennial queer activism). I think that women and girls who have had abortions should come out loud and proud and en masse, I believe that the wives, daughters, and girlfriends of rich and powerful anti-choice figures should be outed as hypocrites when they make recourse to healthcare they would deny others, I believe that those conservatives who are both anti-choice and pro-capital punishment should be forced to say in public places that they believe rape victims and health care providers should be executed as murderers, and the arrant madness of their positions exposed to the glare of scrutiny. For far too long a bland faith in the availability of abortion coupled with a nervous distaste for the topic has provided a smoke screen behind which this nation has drifted via a thousand small regulations and cultural pressures into a nation in which a perfectly legal and absolutely necessary medical procedure has become disastrously de facto unavailable to millions of the poorest and most vulnerable through the efforts of the most ignorant, hypocritical, hateful zealots imaginable.
It’s time to stop pretending that anti-sex anti-women bigots and psychotics could care less that abortion rates factually decline when women have access to contraception, education, and healthcare or that pregnancy is an inherently risky process taking place in their own bodies over which women have the competence and right to consider on their own terms and in private consultation with their doctors. It’s time to stop letting the war-loving, gun-loving, execution-loving, child-poverty loving, insurance-profiteer loving death dealers get away with declaring themselves a Party of Life.
Fuck them! Keep Your Laws Off Our Bodies! Act Up! Fight Back! Out of the Back Alley and Into the Streets!