A Tale of Two Amys
May 12, 2022
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May 3, Amy Goodman of the popular broadcast Democracy NOW! produced a segment on the leaked Supreme Court opinion concerning the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s a good segment, and worth 20 minutes of your time, but I’m addressing it here to make the point that Amy Goodman and all of her guests clearly know that abortion is a women’s sex-based right. One of her guests was Michelle Goodwin, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. In introducing Ms. Goodwin, Amy herself used the word “women” in her discussion of abortion rights and the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade. The other guest was Kitty Kolbert, who co-founded the Center for Reproductive Rights, argued Casey v. Planned Parenthood (which upheld Roe), and wrote Controlling Women: What We Must Do NOW to Save Reproductive Freedom. Kolbert’s entire interview is dripping with references to “woman,” “women,” “maternal,” etc. Then Goodwin goes on to make the important point that overturning Roe will be a “death sentence for many women” and that “black women are three and half times more likely to die during childbirth than their white counterparts.”
Watching the May 3 segment, it is perfectly obvious that all three women understand clearly that abortion is a crucial sex-based right for women and girls - the only categories of people who will ever need abortions.
In fact, everyone understands this, including the mainstream media, the plaintiffs in a related case in Texas, and the ACLU itself. I tweeted about all of this in a thread here.
And yet, just six days later, Amy Goodman had Chase Strangio of the ACLU on Democracy NOW! to talk about state efforts to protect children from abuse (what Chase refers to as “banning healthcare for trans youth”).
At 11:20 into this video, Amy asks Chase:
Finally, Chase, I wanted to talk to you about this historic week around abortion, a leaked draft opinion that the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade. … And I want to talk about both abortion and gender affirming care. We reported earlier that Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio introduced a bill Friday that would prohibit employers from deducting expenses related to their employees’ travel costs when seeking gender affirming care for their children out of state, as well as for those seeking an abortion. So if you can talk about what often in this last week hasn’t been talked about as much because, well, the abortion issue has been preeminent: why it’s important to talk about trans care at the same time. And if you can also talk about inclusive language around pregnancy.
Here, Amy is practically apologizing for society’s recent focus on the Supreme Court likely overturning Roe v. Wade and what that will mean for women’s rights.
Chase, then, goes on to argue that the conservative playbook’s aim of blocking access to abortion is, in fact, much broader than simply blocking access to abortion, and that it’s being used to block (women’s) access to contraception, which, by all accounts, is true. Chase then goes on to compare the importance of women’s access to abortion and contraception to men’s desire to access to women’s bathrooms (what Chase refers to “access to bathrooms if you’re a trans person”).
It’s worth pointing out that there’s a key difference here: women will always seek and obtain abortions, but children will not always seek to have the material reality of their biological sex obliterated. But even aside from that:
Why? Why can’t Amy just talk about women’s right to abortion, on its own, as she did on May 3? Is it possible that between May 3 and May 9, Amy realized the cardinal sin she had committed against the movement to abolish sex by centering women in a conversation about abortion?
Get a grip, Amy.