Woman's right to choose: Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Womansplaining

Hollywood’s awards stages have become the hallowed ground on which politics shakes hands with liberal values, and then virtue-signals to the world. This time, chief and repeat offender Ricky Gervais spared no one with his opening monologue where he – rather politically incorrectly – asked them to collect their statues, thank their agents, and get off the stage. This didn’t stop Hollywood’s indie favourite, Michelle Williams, from using her platform to advocate for the right to choose.

You will have heard of Roe vs Wade, a battle cry that presidential candidates use during their campaigns. Roe vs Wade (1973) was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in which it ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. And the dictionary definition of “right to choose” is “the right to terminate a pregnancy by abortion.”

Williams invoked this in her impassioned speech (which of them isn’t?): “I wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose,” she said, holding up her statue while accepting her award. Pregnant Williams was then predictably castigated on social media: for choosing “cold metal” over “living tissue” (she has a daughter, for heaven’s sake, and another child on the way), for having “dead eyes”, for not honouring her biological ability to give birth, for being the very worst version of a woman she can be. Most of these observations were made by – you guessed it – men.

If you are active on Twitter, and follow at least one person who is a feminist (this term also has been much maligned to bracket all women asking for equal rights as shrill shrews with nothing better to do than shout – more on that in a future column), you will have read a tweet thread by Gabrielle Blair (@designmom -- who should win the award for the takedown of the century, if not both the millennia) about men exercising their right to choose to at least not make women pregnant in the pursuit of sex, a pleasure that patriarchy still prioritises for men first. She references an article that reports that a male birth control study was killed after men complained of side effects. Quoting one of her tweets here: “There’s a lot to be unpacked just in that story, but I’ll simply point out (in case you didn’t know) that as a society, we really don’t mind if women suffer, physically or mentally, as long as it makes things easier for men.”

Western feminism enjoys privileges that others don’t. But we have come far as a society – perhaps, more so than many others – in the rights that women enjoy in today’s times in India. But in all the virtue-signalling that is done on Twitter, one particularly hideous example is this: that of telling a woman what’s best for her.

Flipside: remember the instance when Mira Kapoor, Shahid Kapoor’s wife, was also attacked for choosing motherhood over career?

Here’s the thing, men. The right to choose is not the enemy of motherhood. Neither is choosing motherhood over a career - the enemy of feminism and equal rights for women. The enemy here is you, especially those who virtue-signal and invoke God and biology and shame women for the choices they make.

Stripping all definitions of “right to choose,” can we just look at it in its basic, literal terms, please? Let the woman choose what is right for her individually. Her womb is none of your business, neither is her mind.