War On Choice
What is War On Choice? What does that mean? War on choice is the war on individuals’ bodies. It is the war on a person’s agency or autonomy that prevents them from using their voice to speak out. A war on choice has become a war on individualism and on women’s bodies.
It used to be a simple question about whether or not you as a person believed that a woman should choose whether or not she got an abortion. Now it has become so much more complex than that.
It has become a war on feminism, it has made feminism into a dirty word only to be touted by rainbow wearing hippies that may or may not shower. When feminism and choice and agency use to be such beautiful words. They were words of power, they were words of action and they were words that spurred and began movements. Those movements invested agency into people and revolutionized voice and life. However that is not the case anymore it is no longer a simple question as to what a woman has a right to do it becomes this stringent dichotomy of pro life vs. pro choice. (see next blog on activist rhetoric J)
Why does this matter? And this question is truly what has caused a stagnation of women’s rights movements. The most common statement is oh that does not effect me I am never going to become pregnant, or I am not a feminist I am not being oppressed in the status quo. Even if these things are true I feel that Audre Lorde says it best when she says that, “ we are all here because we share a commitment to language, and the power of language and the reclaiming of that language.”
I think that sums up why we are here the best. Language matters, language shapes reality which means when the War On Choice becomes a war on feminism a war on hippies heck a war on woman that is when it becomes a problem because it effects every single one of us. We live in a society of symbol users, we embrace and use symbols in daily life. Our attitudes and opinions are shaped by those symbols, which requires an interrogation of those symbols.
Our Mission The mission of this blog is not to change your mind. It is not so that you run out and have a thousand abortions or even one. It is meant to cause you to question the symbols and words we use to describe this daily battle and whether or not that is okay. I will end every blog with a new mission, a new action piece that all of my readers can do to interrogate this further.
We are all citizens of a global community and we have a responsibility to that community to interrogate our language and actions on a daily basis and how they shape our opinion.
Mission for Next Time: What are you doing in your daily life that affects the war on choice? What decisions have you made that shapes your opinions about this?
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