From promised land to cautionary tale: the reality of women's rights in America

I think the United States of America is one of those places that many of us have come to see as a cautionary example of ‘all that glitters is not gold’. I remember how, when I was growing up, the country was positioned as “the land of milk and honey” and referred to itself as the “home of the brave”. Many people dreamed of visiting the US and even living there, because it represented the pinnacle of success and democracy.

That illusion was shattered a long time ago. As a black woman, I would be suffocated by the thought of living in a place where I was in the political minority that was forcefully brought there through slavery, divorced from my country and damned to being a perpetual misfit on the margins of society, with no autonomy over my body.

Let’s examine this raging issue of the battle for control of women’s reproductive rights that has characterised the election through the lens of American feminist writers and activists.

Elizabeth Hira, senior policy counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, explains: “Throughout modern history, government control over women’s bodies – and by extension, women – has been a prevalent theme, built into our very systems.

“Rape was initially deemed a property crime against the victim’s father. And as property themselves, married women couldn’t own property under the common law principle of coverture.”

Novelist Toni Morrison said: “What men frequently do when they want to manage and govern women [is] to focus on their babies – whether they’re having them or not having them. Reproductive organs become the focus.”

And novelist Alice Walker wrote: “When the great task of pregnancy is completed in duress and not in joy, the world suffers. This has been, in my view, one of the greatest causes of unhappiness on the planet, a planet being controlled and mismanaged mostly by men (and their female accomplices) who, for whatever reason, are not recognised and stopped early enough to prevent their gargantuan harm to humanity and the Earth.”

Fortunately, in South Africa we have a Constitution that protects women’s rights to bodily autonomy. Section 12(2) states: “Everyone has the right to bodily and psychological integrity, which includes the right (a) to make decisions concerning reproduction.”

Section 27(1)(a) of our Constitution goes on to state that everyone has the right to have access to healthcare services, including reproductive healthcare. Section 27(2) notes that the “state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights”.

The contested terrain that women’s bodies continue to be marks an alarming return to conservatism rooted in the destructive ideology of patriarchy and capitalism that sees women merely as possessions to be bent to men’s will as a form of controlling and ordering society.

But the truth is, the results of the US election have shown that this is the wish of the majority of Americans, and so it has come to pass. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.