I confess. I called myself a feminist in the early 70s. The focus of that label centered on equal rights, sexual freedom, access to birth control, and abortion. In college I met a fellow who told me if I wanted to date him I needed to be on the Pill. I didn’t see that as sexual freedom at all, just another Y-chromosome telling me what to do with my body. I moved on, got an IUD, and rallied in support of Roe v. Wade.
Today I look at the insidious movement to turn back time and shudder with amazement and fear. Amazement that young women today seem unconcerned about forces at work seeking to take control of their most private, personal decisions. Fear that so many people are verbal and passionate and self-righteous about doing so.
Then I picked up When She Woke, by Hillary Jordan, and amped up my anxiety. I believe more people need to read this novel today. Jordan creates a world in which radical conservatives rule the country. The laws of the land are extreme end-results of the trend I see in modern attitudes. Hannah Payne aborts the child conceived during her affair with a well-known, married leader of a megachurch. When her act is discovered, she is sentenced to sixteen years of “chroming,” a process which turns her skin red. The Scarlet Letter in the extreme. All criminals are subject to such punishment with crimes being color coded. There is no need for imprisonment when the color of your skin defines who you are and what you have done.
When She Woke allows the reader to accompany Hannah on her quest to find a new life and redefine herself as a woman. Raised in a fundamentalist home, she must reconcile her faith with the cruelty and prejudice she encounters as a Red. Even more difficult is her break from the traditions of a rigid social upbringing. She learns to take control, make her own decisions, and not judge herself as she escapes the oppression of her family and community. How relieved was I to reassure myself Hannah’s life occurred in a fictitious world? Not much.
Enter the 21st century and a “Perspective” published in the Jan. 16, 2014 New England Journal of Medicine called “Physicians and the (Woman’s) Body Politic,” by Alta Charo, J.D. The essay sites numerous cases in which the law supports the incarceration, admission to mental institutions, or forced medical/surgical therapies of pregnant women claiming protection of the unborn as justification. State laws targeting abortion providers have burdened them with restrictions deemed “unwarranted and unjustified” by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. And then there is the transvaginal ultrasound, mandated in an effort to keep women from choosing abortion. Invasive, dehumanizing, it is a diagnostic test that should be decided upon by the patient with the physician. A legislator in a state, or the nation’s, capitol cannot know the circumstance of every pregnant woman. It is ludicrous to pass general legislation for health care that is driven by the individual patient. Would there ever be a law mandating someone engaged in high risk social behavior be tested for Hepatitis B or HIV? A law regulating eating and BMI?
In When She Woke, the Novembrists are members of a group of rebel-activists helping Hannah escape a community where she will be ostracized and abused. When asked why they do what they do, the spontaneous response is: “It’s personal.” Sexuality, pregnancy, and child-bearing. Personal choices. Not to be influenced, regulated, and interfered with by outside forces. When She Woke is a wake-up call, a warning about the possibilities of what could happen in the atmosphere of today’s politics and voter distraction.