Bodies Under Siege: What’s actually behind the Far Right’s anti-women agenda?
Sian Norris on the rising global far right’s dependence on exploiting women.
The rising global far right is violent, racist and misogynistic – and depends on exploiting women.
While many of us associate attacks on women’s bodily autonomy with ultra-religious groups, openDemocracy’s Sian Norris argues that the stripping away of abortion rights is a political issue, rooted in fascistic ideas about women and men. Her book, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global, explains how organisations and individuals obsessed with stopping the “great replacement” are fuelling the assault on reproductive rights, and their success relies on recruiting, and exploiting, women.
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What’s behind undermining the very definition of what a woman is? Why do so many trans activist men demand to be treated like a woman.
Isn’t the “kill the Terf” aggressive language mysogynistic?
Oh, FFS. Maybe they’re all graduates, or something.
This is a good example of how bundling quite different things together under one banner deemed either all good or all bad is false.
In this case it is not illogical to see the banning of abortion as an attack on women’s rights as well attempts to redefine what a woman is. The two are not mutually exclusive. Of course there are arguments to be had about both but they should be had on the merits of each topic, not as an ideological lumping together of ‘progressiveness’, or indeed far right anti-wokery.
So when Vance castigated the UK the other day for not allowing a praying vigil near an abortion clinic as an attack on free speech, he was not talking about free speech (you can pray nearby if you choose, but not right outside so as not to intimidate visitors doing what is lawful at a traumatic time for them), he was simply showing his anti-abortion stance and wanting to support those in the UK who share that view. He was trying to hide this behind a bogus reference to free speech (whilst also ignoring the way Trump’s US is hardly a bastion of free speech given their zealousness in banning library books the content of which don’t agree with, for example, a genuine and egregious attack on free speech). Similarly, someone who suggests a woman who agrees with that analysis but does not want any redefining of what a woman is, is ‘siding’ ideologically with the likes of Vance and the US far right, is equally false.
Philosopher-ethicist Peter Singer makes the reasonable point (in the section Life and Death, in Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter, 2023) that reproductive rights should be enshrined in a codified political constitution, not left to legislatures or supreme courts to decide. Unfortunately, this is not an option for the British imperial quasi-Constitution. Elsewhere in the book, Singer and collaborators also recommend Ending the Taboo on Talking About Population.
This raises a question of ideological incoherence: the far-right groups pushing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory are in the same far-right USAmerican administration that are cutting foreign aid (including reproductive health measures) and take anti-contraceptive and anti-abortion positions towards foreign nations and international bodies (essentially the Republican Party doctrine):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39487617
Logically, funding birth control measures in foreign countries would seem to reduce the need for ramping up a population race at home, if you were concerned about such things. Human population races are a sign of degraded public health and often associated with conflicts and racist, settler-colonialist or survivalist ideologies (as in the very large families of Haredi Jews or some of their Palestinian counterparts).
I differ from Singer, who seems to have faith in solely democratic means, in that I would base human reproduction policies on biocratic principles; that is, taking the health of the living planet (and its constituent subsystems) as the foundation. The principle that you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet applies to human populations too.
Of course the incoherence in far-right ideologies would be a source of divisions, and in power these tend to manifest in occasional purges, but not-making-sense may currently be favoured over ideological purity. Just as NATO is an organisation dedicated to wage war primarily on women, children and the environment, and ‘losing’ to the Taliban should be seen in this light, the far right takes hypocritical stances and makes nonsense statements like “women should be at home looking after the children” without recognising that these children will be at the mercy of men outside the home (if they had a domestic space in the first place), in schools, hospitals, religious buildings, other institutional settings and so forth. And of course that other hierarchical patriarchal anti-abortion anti-contraception organisation the Catholic Church has many centuries of form here.
While such analyses are welcome for explaining the principles involved, I think there is also an undertone of defeatism. They are fighting on the aggressors chosen ground and failing adequately to set out what millions of women are just doing.
Women with children, and particularly grandmothers, are very influential groups within societies and command a great deal of respect by virtue of whom they are and the strong feelings their children and grandchildren have for them. Attacks on them, especially on grandmothers, transgresses moral norms in societies.
We saw an example of this in Argentina with the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Troops and police baulked at the orders to attack the older women. The wife of the General commanding the troops, herself a grandmother, stood with them.
I am not claiming this and other examples are the only forms of effective resistance. What I am saying is that for too many articles like this one, tacitly, expect defeat but also ignore the strength of the large number of women who do not speak in the jargon of the various ‘waves’ of feminism, but simply live, day-to-day, carrying out what they believe, unquestioningly, they have the right to do. And they expect their daughters to have the same right.
@Alasdair Macdonald, perhaps it is the case that grandmother figures are underrepresented in mainstream anglophone culture?
I’ve just been playing Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which features grandmother and grandfather as major characters, but it’s set on a Spanish island. It’s a world away from “violent, racist and misogynistic”, in case anyone wants a respite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alba:_A_Wildlife_Adventure
The point I’ve made elsewhere is that women can be role-models for boys as well as girls, and grandmothers as easily stand up for grandsons as well as granddaughters. I think you touch on an important point about cultural differences which are sometimes related to nuclear versus extended family norms.