Anh, Colleen and I were walking back to our apartment from LM last Tuesday afternoon. At the time we were on 6th avenue and we passed a young white male who called out to us, “Save the world, Charlie’s Angels…”
We were a professionally dressed, multi-cultural triplet of women consisting of two brunettes and a blonde walking down 6th avenue, just leaving the mists of a feminist organization making big changes for women in this nation.We are all here to aid our organizations in saving the world one little piece of progress at a time. Since we are here under a framework of feminism it seems as though–to me at least–that women are those that are most violated by the world and by the same token, the ones that seem to have to bear the weight of it upon their shoulders in efforts to ‘save it’.
Reading Merle’s work, listening to her story and visiting her clinic made me wonder: How on earth can women save the world when we can barely hang onto the freedom to save our own bodies from events we do not desire. All of the recent and historical controversy over birth control and abortion represent nothing more but constant attempts to try to control the sovereignty a woman has over her own, personal property–her body. How can I be expected to control or influence events that could make the world–or some part of it–better if I can barely hang onto my own reproductive rights?
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Merle told us that black women have abortions twice as much as white women. I think that this is due to a historical inaccessibility to equal education and economic opportunity. I think this is why Sistersong’s perspective is important. Arguably, reproductive rights can benefit minorities the most because they are the population that has been historically disadvantaged the most. And when you help the most marginalized people, everyone benefits.
I think that all of our organizations—like Choices Clinic—are saving the world by saving the rights of women (be they reproductive, economic, freedom from abuse, discrimination, etc.)
Women—and some men too—are the cradle of life, change, improvement and evolution. Whatever works for women, works for everyone (a little mantra I learned from my LM supervisor) which is why it makes perfect sense to tackle women’s rights in order to make this world a better one.
Saving the world sometimes can sound like an empty, superficial statement. But if people didn’t congregate and save my world as a black woman, I wouldn’t be at Duke; I wouldn’t be interning; in fact, nothing about my life would be as it is now. I’d like to dedicate this post to any woman anywhere who in some way protected the rights of her fellow sister and thus, protected the potential of this world to be fair, egalitarian and a good place to live for all sentient beings.