What People Don’t Understand About My Body My Choice
by Stephanie Ann Devito
It’s not every day Joseph Campbell comes up in a debate about abortion, but it’s very much what’s about to happen here. In a free and open society, my body, my choice should be the only argument for reproductive rights you ever need. But recent events and a Joseph Campbell quote got me thinking about all the ways my body, my choice is misunderstood. So, read on or listen along and let’s get into them.
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The fear of women and the mystery of her motherhood have been, for the males, no less impressive, and imprinting forces than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself. And there may be found in mythologies and ritual traditions of our entire species, innumerable instances of the unrelenting efforts of the male to relate himself effectively- in the way, so to say, of antagonistic cooperation- to these two alien, yet intimidatingly constraining forces: women and the world.”
– Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell
Panic widened my eyes, making way for the flood of inconvenient tears that were soon to follow the failure of all my calming intentions. Next, I tried frantic gasps, but I still couldn’t manage to free my chest from the weight of defenselessness. Reaching the point of ultimate distress, I feel like I would have flailed if I could have figured out how to move at all. It was becoming clear that my body just learned what it was now trying to tell my mind – I can’t breathe.
This is what it felt like when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and what it’s felt like ever since as the tides of the American abortion debate continue to rise. It feels like drowning. Like me and half the population used up all their breath on unanswered demands for bodily autonomy and now we’re grasping for anything to keep us afloat. As I personally flounder, trying to defend legal ground I very much stand to lose, this quote bobs back and forth into my consciousness and I find myself clinging to it for support.
But why Joseph Campbell
Trust me, I asked myself that same question. Submerged in the waters of holy tyrants, it made no instinctual sense that the musing of a dead, white, lit teacher would give me buoyancy.
Especially at a time when the Department of Justice gears up to take Texas to court over their 6-week abortion ban, and a Supreme Court packed with conservatives clenches their haunches in tense anticipation of a hearing. In the time leading up to the inevitable final ruling, there will be lots of arguments, analogies, and apothegms about reproductive rights in this country. But there is only one argument that matters in a free and equal society, and that is that this is my body so it’s my choice.
As a general rule, I don’t engage in abortion debates. Most polite people don’t; they avoid it out of a reflex to the sensitivity of it all or an acknowledgment that the philosophical nuance used to define life is delicate to the point of untouchable.
Personally, though, I don’t argue about my right to abortion because I don’t feel like I should fucking have to.
This is my body, so this is my choice.
Made self-evident, however, through one horrifying headline after the next is that waves of Pro-Life arguments invoking God or likening abortion to murder prove that people don’t understand. Not just the simplicity of that argument, but the complexity of the bodies to which it applies. And frankly, it’s not only true of Pro-Life defenders.
Despite their pure intentions, some Pro-Choice arguments don’t start and stop with body autonomy either. Too often they feel they have to position themselves in a world of trauma before they feel they can even begin validating reproductive rights. But the raw truth of it is that a person doesn’t need to go through the ethical acrobatics of swinging from dramatic hypothetical to imperfect analogy in order to defend access to abortion.
Deciding whether or not to keep a pregnancy, regardless of it being life-threatening or the result of assault, is solely at the discretion of the person having the pregnancy. The only necessary defense of abortion rights is that this is my body. It belongs to no one else, and it will be me alone who controls what happens with it.
Now I understand that defending the right to your own body can sometimes feel like a whack-a-mole game of irrelative arguments and quoting Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology might seem equally tangential, if not well-intentioned. But bear with me, because I’m about to take a quick and dirty smack at every irrelevant mole worth whacking all while proving that Joseph Campbell is a Pro-Choice Feminist.
So, let’s start in Joseph Campbell’s wheelhouse and talk about God.
Is A Child God’s Will?
No. What? Just, no. The reason we’re starting here is because we’re going to stop this argument dead in its tracks.
What God?
Using what interpretation?
Interpreted by whom?
Using what authority?
Given to them by whom?
And what if there is no God altogether?
My point exactly.
Unfortunately for zealots across the country, it doesn’t matter how you answer these questions because you have the right to do so in any way you see fit. Even though our Western society espouses hella Christian overtones, our political philosophy, and the liberties it grants us, are based on an individual’s right to govern their own lives.
That means you can let an Abrahamic God dictate your life and your choices, but it allows for me to consult myself, using my own proximity to divine forces, to make decisions about my life.
Abortion laws with religious conviction presuppose the God and the will you’re forced to obey. If you’re happy to admit you’re comfortable imposing a theocratic law like that, then you clearly don’t care to live in a free and open society. That would also mean that now might be a good time for you to pop right off this train of thought. Because I don’t think an argument that abortion rights are fundamental to a free, and equal, society will budge you any if you’re openly hostile to the very ideas of freedom and equality.
Theocrats aside, a nation where freedom of religion entitles every person the right to guide their lives according to their own conscience is not a country that should be able to legally pass laws restricting abortions.
There will be people whose personal beliefs motivate them to see every viable pregnancy to term, but sometimes a personal philosophy can convince you it’s better not to give birth when you don’t think it’s right for you. Believing in God only entitles you to use God to inform your choices, it does not justify a law forcing those, to whom God’s will means very little, to be subjected to it.
So that’s that. An individualistic society should not pass laws that attempt to interpret God’s will on someone else’s behalf. Or presuppose there is a God at all.
But What About Nature?
What about nature?
Speaking as if nature has an agenda is really just informalizing God. Dressing the divine down into a vagary doesn’t make the previous argument for religious restrictions any more valid. But it is very telling of man’s reasoning. The further away we move from early animist beliefs, the more we think of humans as removed from the natural world. We think of nature as the other, a thing that we must dominate or else submit to. It’s to the point that even the Godless can’t see well enough to realize that we are not observers of the natural world, we are participants in it.
How are we to know if a pregnancy is or isn’t nature’s will?
Simple. I am a force of nature – my will is nature’s will.
I’ve been given a body with the ability to create life, not an obligation to. An inability to understand the gravity of that does not change the fact that I alone have the biological responsibility to decide what lives and dies within me.
If you’re thinking to yourself that it sounds like I’m saying reproduction gives you God-like rights over creation, it’s because I am. And so was Joseph Campbell. Women and the world of nature, in this respect, are one and the same.
Since our primitive age, “the males” have feared the mysteries of the life women gave them, and the death that nature promises will follow. Patriarchal reasoning would have us believe that if we control one, we control the other. What power men can exercise over women is their “fuck you” to nature, as if to say that they cannot be bested by chaos. But what’s more tragic than male petulance, are those who have had the concept of their own body shaped exclusively by the patriarchy and see their connection to life and death as a punishment from a divine master rather than the reason they are feared like one.
Of course, we don’t often frame the legal argument to abortion rights with quite as much mysticism and existential awareness. Instead, the verbiage it takes on brings us to the next, and, admittedly, most convincing argument against access to abortion.
That abortion is murder.
And even though the Christian religion is built around the story of a parent offering their child as a blood sacrifice (and a whole lot of murdered people along the way), the sticking point for a lot of people, faithful and otherwise-inclined, is that abortion is the murder of a living being. A being who deserves the full protection of the law.
So that begs the question –
Is A Fetus A Person?
Yeah, it is. But it sure as hell isn’t a new person. I’d heard it said once that Roe V. Wade was won on the grounds of a right to privacy when denying access to abortion should really be framed as a form of slavery. As part of my body, a fetus is just an extension of myself. That is until the literal moment it is severed from my insides. Until then, the only person it is is me. It’s a testament to the oddity of nature, and complexity of female physiology, to think like that, but it is true.
I can become a second being and exist as one life with two heartbeats.
Giving personhood to a thing that is physically inside another human being, isn’t the addition of humanity, it’s the subtraction of it. That the person carrying the child no longer has a body that’s completely theirs if there is legally another person inside of them. It would force them to sacrifice part of their personhood for the sake of another.
When feminists say that reproductive rights are human rights, this is what we mean. Denying people access to effective birth control and safe abortion services is a way of denying someone access to their full personhood and to the choices they were given to make about their own lives. It’s inarguably a form of oppression to force someone against their will to give their body to the service of another person.
And in this instance of ownership, we wouldn’t even belong to a person with any brain function.
Without reproductive rights, I would occupy a space in society secondary to something that shares the cellular complexity of an insect.
But in order to be emancipated from your oppressor in this analogy, they would have to be killed!
Ah-yup.
This is where I climb back aboard the words of Joseph Campbell.
“The fear of women and the mystery of her motherhood have been, for the males, no less impressive imprinting forces than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself.”
It’s hard to believe, but all the while still true, that certain bodies are capable of God-like feats of creation, and with that capability comes the divine discretion to decide what lives and dies within us. It’s not a responsibility we demanded or stole, it was given to us by virtue of our birth.
So why a Joseph Campbell quote about mythology and folklore, not something about Feminism or reproductive health? Because I think, in a very primal sense, the argument for my right to abortion isn’t about Western law or medicine, it’s about something that is borderline mythical. In a way, my ability to get pregnant makes me a type of dying God; capable of suffering the death of myself so that something new is given space to rise.
For those whose bodies entitle them to a more intimate relationship to life and death, you have a right to everything that entails. No one alive should force you to give up ownership of yourself just because you have a power that makes cravens of the prideful. It’s a cowardice as old as God itself: a refusal to accept that there is a world within someone that you do not have any right to and an outright denial that its creation is not theirs to control.
No one else can write the scripture that controls my body when I alone know the gospel of my own universe.
Throughout history, men have taken total control of the church, the state, and the courthouse as a way to swaddle themselves with reason and ritual. It’s a protection from the fear Joseph Campbell describes, the fear of the world of nature, of death and its predeceasing chaos.
In our fight against these patriarchal systems, we should remember that they’re only worth our pity. They’re motivated by the fear of nature: its capricious love and indifferent violence. They see their fears in us when they see how much closer we stand to the nexus of life and death. These are men trying to wrestle this power away from us as if putting pen to paper would condemn their existential demons to death.
But they have no more right to their fear than we do to ourselves. My body is a world of nature and I am its only God. What creation and destruction happens in my world is completely up to me.
I am a human making divine choices over what life gets to walk this earth, and just because you cannot understand that, or its gravity, does not make my body or my choice any less mine.
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