I don't know enough about the arcane US politico-legal system to speak with real authority but it seems to me that if the right of women to bodily autonomy gets kicked back to state legislatures to determine, those states in which ultra-conservatives hold political and economic sway will carry on enacting laws that are harmful to women, and repealing ones that protect women, such as the criminalisation of spousal rape. (1)
And they will not stop there; they will also roll back minority rights which are protected by Supreme Court judgements.
Roe v Wade was a wedge which forced open a door the US ultra-cons want to remain closed or even to have bricked up.
It's a door that had led to changes in laws and social norms that undermine ideas and institutions which ultra-cons see as the very bastions of the American way of life.
Following hard on the heels of the shock to the ultra-con psyche, of the anti-racist and civil rights' movement, women's and gay and lesbian rights had them reeling – abortion, decriminalisation of homosexuality, criminalisation of spousal rape, equal employment opportunity, same sex marriage, trans rights and latterly, the morphing of that into the Hydra of queer rights.
There's a powerful tension between social and political conservatism and what may be termed, social and political transgressivism.
In a healthy society a balance is maintained between the extremes of social conservatism and social transgressivism – imagine it as a spring that is calibrated to hold the extremes in tension.
If one extreme starts to pull too far or too fast, social forces which would usually remain gathered around the centre may move towards the other extreme to counter it. If enough of them move, the rebound effect can be extreme and sudden.
It is gender identity, with its core of hyper-individualism and its politically vague and theoretically tenuous conflation of sex and gender that led irrevocably to gender self-identification, which has proved to be the step too far for many. (2)
This step too far is not just for ultra-cons but for a rising number of women from across the political spectrum who have moved towards the ultra-con side, many of them on this single issue.
Also moving are a load of opportunists and coat-tailers who see a political advantage in forcing a political and legal rebound.
That the first federal level move the US ultra-cons are making is an attack on women’s reproductive autonomy is an irony which seems to escape far too many.
Women, and especially left-leaning women and lesbians who have liked arms with the right on the gender identity question need to know that a political and legal rebound will adversely impact on them.
Notes:
1) Spousal rape only became a crime in all states in the late 1990s and is still treated differentially in some states.
2) Ironically, post-modernism which has served the Neo-liberal project well with its undermining of Marxism, its emphasis on the individual, its essential idealism ... seems to have carried the seeds of its own destruction.
