Women’s Sovereignty and Body Autonomy Beyond Roe v. Wade: Book Review by Beth Bartlett

Women’s Sovereignty and Body Autonomy Beyond Roe v. Wade was not what I was expecting.  Given the title, I thought it would be similar to Robin Marty’s New Handbook for a Post-Roe America – a practical guide for ways to gain access to reproductive care in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  Instead, I found, in contributor Mary Saracino’s words, “the howl of ages” – a deeply passionate and spiritual collection of poetry, prose, and visual art expressing  women’s outrage, grief, resistance, and empowerment in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision of June 2022 denying women the right to abortion care that had been settled law in the U.S. for nearly fifty years.

The 47 contributors to this anthology, while of varying backgrounds and nationalities, providing a multiplicity of perspectives, are united in their dedication to women’s body sovereignty, rebellion against patriarchy and patriarchal control of women’s bodies, and women’s empowerment through the feminine divine. The selections range from scholarly articles to personal narratives, from lyrical and creative essays to poems of mourning and uprising.  Interspersed throughout are black-and-white drawings and prints of goddesses and female bodies in all of their power, rage, fury, autonomy, lament, and sacredness.

In many ways, this is a book to be experienced, to sink into with all of one’s being, to find within the expression of one’s own and the collective woundings of living in a woman’s body in a patriarchal culture determined to wrest control of that body, and of the uprising those attempts at restricting our autonomy evokes. A common theme throughout was, quite simply, rage – or as Anne Wilson Schaef said long ago in her Women’s Reality — “giving red rage the green light.” As so many of the contributors note, patriarchy has required women to be small, silent, passive, accepting, but this anthology allows and evokes the full venting of women’s fury at having our bodily autonomy stripped away. But more than this, it is a call to use this anger to claim our power and voice to rise up against these incursions on women’s sovereignty. Throughout, writers and artists invoke the feminine divine – especially the fierce and powerful goddesses and divine mothers – Lilith, Kali, Isis, Morrigan, Hecate, Boudicca – to inspire and empower.

Among the most moving aspects of the grief and rage expressed are the remembrances of the ancestors — as Arlene Bailey names them – those who “hover just on/ the other side of the Veil . . . those women who/gave their lives/ at the hands of Patriarchy”; “the witches,/wise women, elder women” – and the fears for the daughters — the young women growing up in a country where their right  to make decisions for what is best for their lives has been taken away.  As Karen Storminger notes in her piece, “We have only just dipped a toe in the water of equality and equity. Now there are those who would drag us back into subservience and inequality.”  I was fortunate to live most of my reproductive years in a time when contraception, abortion, and women’s reproductive health care were legal, though not always accessible, in this country. Had I been born in an earlier day, I certainly would have been branded a witch and burned.  Had I been born later, I would suddenly see my life choices determined by the state and the whims of chance. Yes, we have only just dipped a toe in the waters where we need to be and by all rights should be fully immersed.

Trista Hendren, one of the editors of the anthology, wrote in her preface, “If there aren’t at least several pieces that challenge you, we have not done our job here.”  I found so many that challenged and moved me. I so appreciated Jodi Blazek Gehr’s “Both Life and Choice” and Molly Remer’s “This Is My Body” that spoke with compassion and sensitivity to the complexities, the false dichotomy of being “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” and the recognition of the both/and perspective. As Remer wrote, “I love life./I love women./ I love babies./  . . . I believe children are a gift/and life is holy./AND,/this is my body,/inviolate. . . . It is possible to hold both/and,/ to BE both/and/to hold holy yes/and sacred no . . . .”  I was moved by the personal testimonies of Nina Gorgy about her sexual assault and the generational trauma of that, by Louise M. Wisechild’s song from an unwanted child, by C. Ara Campbell’s attempts to find a physician who would perform a hysterectomy on her to rid her of the pain and bleeding she was experiencing in her 20s. As she wrote so movingly, “They call all life precious but don’t include us, the unwilling mothers. Who is allowed to make these decisions if not us?”  I was greatly appreciative of Annie Finch’s relaying of her experience of creating a post-abortion ritual that included her husband and children, and especially her stating what is so often overlooked — that abortion is a profoundly spiritual experience.  As she wrote so beautifully, “It was then that I finally came to understand the complex web of will, mind, body, heart, and spirit, of family, self, and society, of future and past, that may be summoned and considered and experienced in the choice to end a pregnancy.”

I could go on.  This is a rich and powerful collection.  In its closing pieces I found true inspiration and hope.  In her painting, “Women of the World Unite,” the late Cheryl Braganza envisions a world in which women of all cultures and colors “recognize their true potential and rise up in revolution to effect real change around the world.” Finally, in her closing poem, Melissa Ann Howarth expresses the theme running throughout the book: “This is MY sacred vessel; my temple of divinity. . . . Those who dare to try to tread upon it,/shall be met with the unstoppable will/of Divine Feminine power; for the blood of the ancestral Mothers still flows through us all.”

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