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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLiberty No More
Link to tweet
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/roe-overturned-bodily-autonomy-american-constitution/629780/
No paywall
https://archive.ph/AbucY
How strange it is, the condition of having a body, of being a body. Consider the sponge of the marrow that makes your blood, the skeleton frame that holds in your organs, the tendons that attach your muscles to bone, the heart that pumps blood through your veins, the electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve from your retinas, the neural networks that light up the galaxies of your brain like constellations.
A persons interiorityyour sense of younessis typically understood to be situated in the mind, yet the mind and the body are inextricable. What, then, must it mean to be in possession of a body in America? This is, we are told, a land of tremendous abundance, of self-reliance, of liberty, and of invention. The promise America makes to its people, the covenant that we Americans can feel in our bones and in our blood and in our beating hearts, is the guarantee that we are free.
Liberty is given to us by God, by nature, by our own humanitynot by government. I am American and so I am free to speak, free to publish, free to worship, free to assemble, free to keep and bear arms. It is to me self-evident that I am free to pursue the life I choose, without interference from the state. Freedom of mind does not come without freedom of body.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, as now appears likely, the very definition of what it means to be American will change for women and girls in the United States. If the state makes a claim to your bodya claim therefore to your selfyou can no longer be American, not truly. To allow the state to control the body of a citizen is to deny her full personhood. To allow the state to control the body of a citizen is to undermine the very notion of what America is, the core promise it makes.
*snip*
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Liberty No More (Original Post)
Nevilledog
May 2022
OP
Irish_Dem
(47,107 posts)1. "Liberty and Justice For All" is gone.
secondwind
(16,903 posts)2. The fetus lovers are a sick bunch. We need to vote like crazy
in November!!!