Blog for Choice Day 2009
"Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard." Helene Cixous The Laugh of the Medusa
The right to choose protected by Roe Vs. Wade isn't just about choice. It must be made about ACCESS to pregnancy control options. We need to change the way we think about Roe V Wade and so-called "birth" control. We must insist, through our own language our OWN bodies be heard, not manipulated.
In the words of Cixous:
"I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.
I write this as a woman, towards women. When I say 'woman', I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the 'dark' -- that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute -- there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes -- any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible."
Celebrate today, the 36th anniversary of Roe Vs. Wade.
It's not support of abortion.
It's support of female autonomy.
The celebration that ALL women have the "God given" right to self-determination. Our bodies, ourselves.
We must teach young women about their own person-hood beyond their bodies.
It is the persistent reminder of "birth" control that perpetuates the cultural attempt to distance woman from her own body, to move it beyond her own control.
Today, celebrate your womanhood, and the womanhood of others in your life. Please, check out the Center for Reproductive Rights.
We are all born with the right to determine what we do with our OWN bodies. May it be a reality for all women everywhere.
