Two Years after Dobbs: My Body has Always Been Inherently Political

Isabeau Dasho is the assistant director of the Harris Writing Workshop.

I was born and identify as female and as such have had to endure a cascade of experiences that have proven time and time again that this world wasn’t intended for me. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a revolving door of pretty common experiences. Boys hitting me in elementary school were shushed away as boys who liked me and didn’t know how to express it correctly. By middle school it was my job to protect the boys from my body with tank tops that had two-inch straps, and shorts and skirts no more than a finger length from my knee lest the very idea of a thigh or a bra harm their masculine GPAs. The idea that some of my classrooms didn’t have air conditioning and could get really hot and potentially interfere with my academic excellence was never brought up.

I graduated into catcalls and a political landscape that had women senators who were asked about their hair products, their go-to week night dinner recipes and how they ‘handled it all’. Questions their male colleagues were never asked. I was living in a state actively banning abortion care, where the large college town in the middle of state was reduced to only offering abortions once a month. And then not at all. People still protested the Planned Parenthood even though all that happened in that building was birth control prescriptions and pap smears. All before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided.

I have always understood my body as both my own and somehow intricately and inextricably tied to a public domain. Cars are more dangerous for women because seat belts and air bags are designed for men larger and taller than us, we adapt to the car with seat risers.

I knew in 2016 with Clinton’s defeat that Roe v. Wade was likely dead. I was told I was being dramatic. But I’d seen the pro-birth protestors scream themselves hoarse at high school girls just trying to get birth control. I’d seen a series of TRAP laws instituted with surgical precision across an array of states. I was not surprised by the Dobbs leak, nor the eventual decision itself. In many ways it felt like people were finally awake to the danger and radicalism of the misogyny so many others had been fighting for decades. This is what comes from saying boys who hurt you like you; this is what comes from telling girls that they’ll miss catcalls when they are old.

This is what comes from a thinking that believes women cannot be trusted.

I was eight months pregnant when Dobbs was decided, and my daughter was born with fewer constitutional rights than I was born with.

I’m pregnant again in a post Dobbs hellscape where 24 states have enacted near total abortion bans because they don’t trust women and families to make decisions for themselves. Even in cases of incest, even in cases of rape, even in cases where the health and life of the mother are at stake. This time, however, something might be wrong with my fetus.

Make no mistake this is a wanted pregnancy, one I discussed at length with my partner, one we prepared our finances and selves to have. I started taking my prenatal vitamins three months before going off birth control to make my body as welcoming a place as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends.

At week 13, my noninvasive prenatal genetic screening test (NIPT) came back with an atypical result. I was recommended for an amniocentesis. At 13 weeks I was already outside of the limit some have called ‘reasonable’ –the atypical result delivered by the NIPT indicated there might be a duplication on chromosome 18. A full replication of the chromosome is called Trisomy 18 and is incompatible with life or extremely life limiting. A partial duplication of unknown significance required diagnostic testing. But you can’t even get an amniocentesis until you are 15 weeks at the earliest, per the proposed ban that Chief Roberts floated in his concurring Dobbs opinion. The problem with a 15-week ban is that even if you can get an amniocentesis, the results cannot be delivered until 16 or 17 weeks.

Now some might argue, that I got the pregnancy the universe gave me and that all such babies should be born and loved. I agree. Life is precious. But I also live in the world, where social safety nets are sparse, and support for families with medically complex children is bare, hard to access, and often ruinously expensive. What is my duty to my living child? To my marriage? To myself? These are questions strangers cannot answer for me, but have legislated in my name, and the names of people like me.

My amnio had to be delayed, in part because Chicago is inundated with women from all over the country needing to end their pregnancies. My obstetrician and her practice are busy trying to accommodate hundreds of women from states that don’t trust them. This delay pushed me into week 17, I will be 19 weeks before results are available to help me understand what kind of life this baby might face. If the worst happens and this child is unlikely to survive their first year, I am entitled in the state of Illinois to end this pregnancy and let this little life pass as it has existed so far, soaked in my love and the comfort of my body.

But that is a choice that I must make. A choice for this baby, a choice for my family, a choice for me. Other people would make other choices. And isn’t that the promise of this whole place?

For people in my situation in states that have imposed bans, they don’t get to choose. Strangers have invaded this fraught and private moment, forcing themselves into doctors’ appointments, and ultrasound rooms to make heartbreaking moments unbearable.

Legislators and those who scream for bans don’t know enough or care enough about pregnancy or what can go wrong. They won’t enact even the simplest and popular exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. Let alone fetal abnormality. They don’t call for stronger social safety nets, they don’t call for fairer schools, or more and more robust health care or guarantee fairness protections and accommodations for families with medically complex children. These are laws not informed by science, nor compassion, nor even basic information in some cases. These are bans that in no uncertain terms tell me my life is less important than their convictions. That my own personal agony is less important than their right to impose themselves on me.

It’s familiar. It’s a catcall, it’s a seatbelt not designed for me, it is proof positive that my reproductively capable body isn’t and was never meant to be wholly mine.

I reject that premise.

I believe the words of The Declaration of Independence that I am created equal and that I have the right to pursue my own life, my own liberty and my own happiness. That governments that justly serve at the consent of the governed are organized to secure both my safety and my happiness. Abortions bans cannot and do not secure safety. Abortion bans cannot and do not secure happiness.

I will vote in November like my life depends on it. Like the life of my daughter depends on it. Because it does. I hope you will join me in voting against an ideology that doesn’t trust women or families—and vote for candidates and policies that put the safety of women above the desire to control them.