Mick Hartley

A quote from the late Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.

The new improved version, courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union:

With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, we lost a champion for abortion and gender equality. And on the anniversary of her death, the fight to protect abortion access is more urgent than ever. pic.twitter.com/vIKadIHouN

— ACLU (@ACLU) September 18, 2021

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"Woman", remember, is not a word we like to see nowadays. Doesn't mean anything, and it's transphobic.

Update: to clarify – gender, as we've learnt from Judith Butler, is performative. The gender "woman" therefore, is defined by the appropriate performance: the head tilted to one side, the simper, the eyes submissively downcast, the high heels, the make-up. Do that stuff and you're a woman. When we're talking about babies and abortion we are, clearly, talking about biology. But "woman" is not a biological category. Therefore to talk of women in the context of childbirth is to make a fundamental philosophical mistake.

Glad we've cleared that up.