Dear Friend and Reader:
WE ARE ABOUT to experience a total eclipse of the Moon in the sign Scorpio, symbols boldly pointing to matters of women’s reproduction, and concerns of the public about such issues.
Soon after the corresponding solar eclipse in Taurus on April 30, a draft decision was leaked from the Supreme Court for the first time in American history, pertaining to the case Dobbs v. Jacobson’s Women’s Health Organization.
The proposed ruling would render it legal for states to entirely ban abortion, overturning the famous Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood cases.
This is also happening during the Chiron return of the Roe decision, and of the United States — and during the Pluto return of the United States. We live in revolutionary times. But the question is, whose revolution, and against what.
The supposed religious rights of a fictional entity (a corporation) were held by the court to be more important than the private medical choices and religious or ethical principles of individual women.
We’ve Been Witnessing This for Years
As the kind of man who hangs out with midwives, civil rights attorneys and internationally acclaimed feminists, I have known which way the wind was blowing for a long time. A journalism colleague of mine was involved with training women for safe, home-based, early-term abortion in 1990, preparing for this moment 31 years ago. (She is now a midwife.)
We have all watched as the Supreme Court has slowly but steadily eroded sexual freedoms and privileges, including the infamous Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, a 2014 decision that allows medical discrimination in the name of religious freedom.
Under this decision, family-held businesses can prevent women employees from obtaining birth control through their employee health insurance benefits, if the business determines that such violates its own “religious freedom.” The supposed religious rights of a fictional entity (a corporation) were held by the court to be more important than the private medical choices and religious or ethical principles of individual women.
The same people who are attempting to remove the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term are also interfering with their right to prevent pregnancies. And so far as I have seen, the feminist movement is not responding; a few individuals have a clue. But there is no sense of collective response.
During the hearings, it never came out that he was one of the company’s top attorneys during the height of the company’s atrocities involving Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era herbicide that was at the time being used on civilians in the United States. While dioxin poisons everyone, it is especially toxic to the female reproductive system.
We’ve Come a Long Way Since The Second Sex
Since the old days of the late 1980s when I took Carol Smith’s 20th Century Women Poets graduate seminar at Rutgers University — an awakening experience for me — I have seen the feminist movement do everything but stand up in some meaningful way for women’s right to make their own choices. It has done everything but stand for equality, in society, in relationships and under the law.
The “feminist” agenda has included anti-porn censorship crusading (not prior, but post-restraint — confiscate the already printed books at the border). It regularly wages war against perceived “pickup artists” and “involuntarily celibate” men.
Its devotees have complained endlessly about “manspreading” (a way of sitting) and “mansplaining” (a perceived way of speaking), and have destroyed the careers of men for so little as making a joke in an elevator.
“The male gaze” is considered a form of terrorism (it is actually a theory of cinema).
They routinely attack other feminists including Margaret Atwood, and have declared war on so-called TERFs — classical feminists who object to the conflation of feminism with trans rights.
They chant “My Body, My Choice” at rallies, while allowing a generation of girls to be injected with Gardasil without their informed consent about the known effects.
In 1991, during the confirmation hearing for Assoc. Justice Clarence Thomas, the then-nominee was interrogated for his alleged “pubic hair in the Coke” comment, while being given a free pass for his role in defending and promoting Monsanto’s most heinous crimes against people and all living creatures.
During the hearings, it never came out that he was head of Monsanto’s Regulatory Affairs office, one of the company’s top attorneys during the height of the company’s atrocities involving Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era herbicide that was at the time being used on civilians in the United States. While dioxin poisons everyone, it is especially toxic to the female reproductive system.
And he presided over Regulatory Affairs for the company during the entire IBT Labs scandal unfolding — the total failure of safety regulation in all chemical products, where Monsanto was directly involved. But thanks to the alleged pubic hair in the Coke (a company that owed its success to Monsanto making cheap soft drink components), the public knows nothing about this. [Check out upcoming Planet Waves FM for details].
While supposedly liberal women went after the claimed misdeeds of Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken, ending the careers of these and other political allies, their adversaries were working together tirelessly with lobbyists, organizing in church, raising money, and pushing laws through state legislatures.
Compared to those who terminated their pregnancies, those who continued pregnancy were more likely to experience perinatal death and serious pregnancy complications. They also were more likely to remain in relationships with intimate partner violence, a risk to themselves and their children.
Meanwhile, Conservatives Were Organizing
During the post-Roe era, conservative women and their many supporters successfully organized around one central purpose: ending anything that assured the legal personhood of women. They blocked adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and worked relentlessly to dismantle and demolish Roe v. Wade and the closely related Casey v. Planned Parenthood.
While supposedly liberal women went after the claimed misdeeds of Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken, ending the careers of these and other political allies, their adversaries were working together tirelessly with lobbyists, organizing in church, raising money, packing the Supreme Court, and pushing laws through state legislatures.
And they were litigating with the single-minded determination to get anti-choice laws before the Supreme Court. This was all in hopes of fairly overturning Roe, a project endorsed by then Assoc. Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Now that day has arrived. Even if by some miracle the vote count or specifics of Dobbs change, the court still has the votes to effect its sweeping mandates. The conservative bloc on the court currently has a six-to-three majority and can enact any agenda it wants. This has taken persistence and patience over many decades. Many people incorrectly assumed that the court would never possibly overturn Roe and Casey, and stick to their own precedents.
But the court seems poised to do much worse. In my reading of the proposed Dobbs decision, it answers none of the questions raised by banning abortion, and opens the door to prosecuting them. This will also have the effect of killing some women, thereby depriving them of their due process rights — and their lives.
As was recently written in The Hill by Marta Perez, a board-certified OB-GYN:
“This dichotomy between the safety of pregnancy and abortion was shown in The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study from researchers at the University of California San Francisco. They collected data from abortion facilities nationwide comparing outcomes for people who accessed abortion and those who could not.
“Compared to those who terminated their pregnancies, those who continued pregnancy were more likely to experience perinatal death and serious pregnancy complications. They also were more likely to remain in relationships with intimate partner violence, a risk to themselves and their children.”
Hypocrisy weakens any argument, particularly one made on spiritual or moral grounds. To my senses, “My Body, My Choice” has been abandoned, and treated with contempt, by the people who now need it the most.
Where is the Moral Standing of ‘My Body, My Choice’?
A few years ago, we all understood the meaning of “My Body, My Choice.” It meant that all women, and by extension all people, have the right to choose what happens to their body. This is the concept of pro-choice rather than pro-abortion.
In the past two years, we have seen the liberal movement line up behind a policy of “Her Body, My Choice.”
We have watched (or cheered) as nurses, doctors, teachers, firefighters, airline pilots, and people of many other professions were forced to get a “covid” injection — or be fired from jobs they may have done well for decades.
Anyone who supported their freedom of choice was supposedly in favor of the virus.
What surprised me was the lack of any recognition that the two issues are not just related, but one and the same. The right to choose is the right to choose.
The right to not be penetrated against one’s will, including by coercion (sometimes called “coerced consent”), has been a rallying cry of the “feminist” movement for years. So we may wonder why a sharp object containing a mystery liquid being forced into one’s body is more permissible, and more welcome, than a penis. At least we all know what a penis is.
Where is the moral standing of the claim, “My Body My Choice”? Hypocrisy weakens any argument, particularly one made on spiritual or moral grounds. To my senses, “My Body, My Choice” has been abandoned, and treated with contempt, by the people who previously espoused it as sacred, and who now need it the most.
If we are willing to tolerate and even cheer on forced, experimental injections, we open the door to many problems related to the state imposing its will on the body; and of people allowing this to happen. If we allow the courts to take away the right to choose pregnancy or not, what else can they take jurisdiction over? Is one’s own body one’s own property, or that of the government?
Any country that can ban abortion can make it mandatory; if it is not the woman’s choice, then it is not so under any circumstances.
Healing Fractured Trust Between Men and Women
When the #metoo movement emerged in the autumn of 2017, my first thought was: this is not going to be good for the already fragile trust between men and women. Specifically, I was concerned about the potential that, in the likely event that Roe was overturned, a woman could have a miscarriage, and then be falsely accused by a malicious partner of having had an abortion.
Anywhere that is considered homicide, women are going to need allies. Would someone lie and falsely accuse a woman? Well, it’s happened before.
Anti-choice activists are not going to stop with overturning Roe, should they succeed in doing so. It is probable that every pregnancy will become a potential crime scene. This has happened in El Salvador and as close to home as Utah.
Any country that can ban abortion can make it mandatory; if it is not the woman’s choice, then it is not so under any circumstances. And women are going to need men to advocate for them, and be both personal confidants and political allies as this moves forward. In today’s environment, this seems to be a stretch.
In 2017, I wrote an article called Summer of Trust: The Great American Eclipse. We need to revisit that event as the astrological root of the various disasters we are seeing unfold – all of which involve a divided society. This was about eight weeks before we first heard about the #metoo movement.
I hear talk of revolution and fostering change, without the meekest awareness that to do that, we have to get together and talk and listen to one another; to make any change at all, we need to be willing to work together — for no money, and no promise of success.
What the World Needs Now is Trust, Sweet Trust
In that article, an artifact of the summer of 2017, I wrote:
I‘m noticing anger, particularly from women. They don’t talk about it much; you can see it on their faces, which often look like they’re cast in stone. Attempting to start a conversation is widely seen as an affront. I notice many young men walking around the streets with a vacuous expression in their eyes. I see many people avoiding one another; I notice many people who seem terrified to go off-script even for a moment, or to embark on anything without a supposedly guaranteed outcome.
I walk into a busy café and half of the people are typing into computers or other devices. This is just an outer representation of what seems to be a society whose members are growing increasingly socially crippled, and unable to have a conversation without panicking or getting offended.
I hear, or hear of, many conversations that conflate attraction to another person with sexual objectification — or worse, with rape.
I hear talk of revolution and fostering change, without the meekest awareness that to do that, we have to get together and talk and listen to one another; to make any change at all, we need to be willing to work together — for no money, and no promise of success.
Underlying all of this is a profound lack of trust in one another, and in society, which must be rooted in people’s lack of trust in themselves, their perceptions and their assessments of people.
We need to do better than we are doing right now, though this will require a conscious effort at healing, reconciliation, and honoring the bodily and spiritual integrity and autonomy of everyone.
By which I mean, everyone.
Faithfully,
Eric Francis