Body Autonomy is Love. Freedom is Love. Planned Parenthood is Love.
tw: sexual assault, genital dysphoria, domestic violence
tw: sexual assault, genital dysphoria, domestic violence
With Valentine’s Day rapidly approaching, let’s contemplate the heart: the symbol, I mean, not the striated muscle thudding in our chests. The heart symbol, squat, cute, and easy to draw as it is, barely resembles the off-balanced, lumpy reality of our arteries and valves. That’s because human biology is not at all where the heart symbol came from.
That lovely, pinkish-red icon of ardor, curved and pointed in equal amounts, comes from the shape of the silphium plant, which was used in ancient Egypt and Crete as a form of hormonal birth control. The plant was so effective at granting people control of their bodies and their cycles that it was harvested to extinction. It was all but non-existent by the rise of the Roman empire.
Yet people remembered the wide, two-chambered seed and its curative ability to prevent pregnancy, the freedom it granted people to love and control their own bodies, and they cherished that freedom so much it became a symbol of love itself.
Control of your body is love. Freedom is love. Humanity has always known this. The history of contraception is a testament to it.
After the silphium plant died out, people resorted to more desperate means of family planning. People stuffed their vaginas full of honey, crocodile dung, and leaves; pregnant people seeking abortion intoxicated themselves with queen anne’s lace, myrhh, and rue. In China in the 7thcentury BC, people self-induced sterility by drinking quicksilver and oil. These means were risky, but for many, worth it; a few days of poisoning beat nine months of pain and an ensuing lifetime of bondage.
And let’s be clear: if body autonomy is love, if freedom is love, if birth control itself is an emblem of love, then abortion is love too. Seeing it as a hateful, murderous act is a recent fiction. Before 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII railed against the practice, abortion was seen as benign, even liberating. People from all walks of life on all the earth’s populated continents induced abortions on themselves, with few moral concerns. They knew, better than we do today, that a person’s body is their own to use, and that carrying a fetus to term is just one of many potential uses, neither superior nor inferior to any others.
But we live in a world tainted by the opposites of love: hatred, and the desire to control and own others’ bodies. For centuries, now, men in power have tried to rebrand contraception and abortion as evil. Pregnancy has been forced on people for the sake of producing society’s workers and foot soldiers, from Ceausescu’s Romania to the modern-day Quiverfull movement. Men feuled by hate have sought to define womanhood by the ability to reproduce, and have sought to control women through the obligation to engage in it.
This funhouse mirror of repression recast love as sin, and bodily autonomy as perversion. Freedom was taken with the pretense of saving souls. Even those of us who know the truth feel the stigma. We’ve internalized the hate. It burns us from the inside, makes us doubt the legitimacy of our identities, our desires, how we use our bodies.
How do we fight it? With love.
We show love when we choose for ourselves what our bodies mean and what they will be “for”. We show love when we honor and uplift others’ choices. We show love when we say no with no explanation or apology. When we take birth control, or abortifacients, or testosterone, or spironolactone and estrogen, we show love for ourselves. When we learn about history, and realize that the morals of the present did not always hold sway, we love the world as it could be, instead of how it is.
Planned Parenthood and places like it fight hate with love every day. They loved me when an ex-boyfriend left me with painful tears on my vulva. They loved me when I could not bear looking at my weight on the scale, by encouraging me to turn away from the numbers. Planned Parenthood loved me by providing medical forms with a variety of gender and pronoun options. They showed me love by screening for domestic violence circumspectly and gently, letting me arrive at insight on my own. A nurse practitioner at planned parenthood loved me by allowing me to forgo an annual pap smear when I was too beset with genital dysphoria and trauma to be able to endure one, and giving me a birth control prescription anyway.
Planned Parenthood, and places like it, show love every day to those of us who need abortions and birth control — and I say people very deliberately, not women, as not all of us are. Planned Parenthood loves trans women, too, by providing hormones and testosterone blockers in a dozen states. Planned Parenthood loves men by providing them with STD tests, condoms, domestic violence services, and testosterone. Planned Parenthood loves people who need mammograms, flu vaccines, body image counseling, sports physicals, and help quitting smoking, because body autonomy and freedom is love, and that love takes many forms.
I show love to others by remembering the vitality of freedom and body autonomy. By telling my sister that I will always be ready to pay for an abortion if she needs it, no questions asked. By calling my legislators to fight restrictions on abortion and contraceptive access. By defending the freedom of people whose bodies are still frequently controlled and oppressed– black people, refugees, trans people, disabled people. I show love by talking with other domestic violence survivors, by writing very publicly about body image, trauma, gender, and sexism. I also show love by donating to Planned Parenthood, though I can never pay back the love they showed me. But then, real love is given freely with no expectation of reward. Real love is freedom. That’s the whole point.
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This piece was originally performed live at the Uptown Underground for Lady Business, a benefit for Planned Parenthood and Chicago Women’s Health Center.
Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.