Dissent

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When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, my body responded with anger. I say body because the anger felt entirely physical. Animalistic in its intensity, it was like the cry of a trapped creature. Outsiders had placed a limit on me and on millions of others who shared with me the capacity to become pregnant. To the justices, who rule not as judges or as scholars but as clerics, our promise is contained in the womb. Whatever we are outside that organ means nothing in comparison to the people we could bear. So my anger was an assertion of myself: only a person could feel this way. No one could deny my humanity now.

My response to Dobbs felt visceral and personal, but it could have been different. Anti-abortion women reacted to the decision with elation. I am a child of the American right, and anger is my first political memory. Everyone around me was so angry all the time, and not just at the "abortion mills." The world was changing around us and might leave us behind, which was an intolerable prospect. Progress threatened our churches, we thought, but more than that it threatened the country. A nation without the church in power—our church—was a nation in ruins. Anger is not always righteous, and it does not always look like a pro-choice rally. Sometimes it is a picket outside a clinic.

The anger I felt as a child was an anger that adults transmitted to me. With it, they hoped to mold me into a foot soldier. But my anger shifted targets when I discovered that our side in the culture war had only two roles for a girl. The first was reproduction, and the second was to keep all the other girls in line. Much like a military, the Christian right runs on conformity. There was no uniform, but strict dress codes protected our modesty. As women in waiting, girls were thought of mostly as future wives and mothers. And any political inclinations had to follow an established trajectory. The right needs its Kellyanne Conways and its Amy Coney Barretts to soften the face it presents to the world, so women could enter right-wing politics without sustaining much reputational damage. Yet as I got older, I noticed that there seemed to be no room for the anger I was beginning to feel—anger at the men in authority over me, anger at the women who obeyed them. [End Page 21]

The dress codes exhausted me. I could map out my future with paces around my mother's kitchen. Even in church, the center of my life, I could not expect to have authority. Any role I could have would be handed to me by a man with real power. I would only ever be a reflection of him.

I knew vaguely of feminism, knew it to be the enemy, but in secret I began to suspect those feminists might have a point. I could not deny what I saw to myself. Women in my world occupied a second and subordinate tier to men, and I would never be an independent person. My worth depended entirely on my sexuality: on my purity and my capacity to bear children. My mind never entered into anything at all.

Midway through college I knew the right was no longer my home. So I went in search of a new one. I eyed the pro-choice movement and lurked in the comments of popular feminist blogs. This was the Obama era, and liberalism was ascendant. I defended Obama passionately on my college campus. But I knew I wanted more than a polite rally or a quiet moment at the ballot box. The entire structure of the world needed to change, I thought. The exploitation of the poor had radicalized me, as had the violent foreign policy of the United States, the vulnerability of the right to an abortion, and the moral imperative of rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Obama was not Bush, but he was no savior...