The Body and the Score

TERFs are pivoting to attack abortion rights. Their fight has always been against bodily autonomy.

This is the most gender-neutral instance of puppet violence I can find on our stock photo service. It took some really specific search queries. Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

This past weekend, everyone on my Twitter timeline was sad and defeated, but they were all sad about different things. Saturday, June 24, was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade being overturned. Most of the feminists I follow (most of the cis ones, anyway) were grieving the loss of legal abortion and the tide of death and suffering that followed. June is also Pride month, and it’s been a dispiriting Pride, given the current anti-LGBTQ+ backlash. To give you an idea, the most widely shared Pride article in my social circle is about “queer despair.”

So everyone I knew was grieving something, and in all that, I only saw one acknowledgment that our grief might be connected: An article by Kathleen Stock, one of her generation’s pre-eminent TERFs, arguing against abortion. The article is infuriating (I barely got through it) and I’d like to spare you the experience, so I’ll just give you the most relevant quote:

“In response to the jailing of Carla Foster — the British woman who used mail-order abortion pills to terminate her viable baby at around 33 weeks — feminist barrister Charlotte Proudman argued on Good Morning Britain last week that “abortion needs to be decriminalised and treated like any…