Overturning Roe v. Wade is an act of psychological warfare:

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is an act of psychological warfare. Its immediate impact is on the physical health of those pregnant people who need abortion care. But the decision marks a decisive victory in the Right’s decades’ long fight to influence the courts. The decision is as much symbolic as it is literal.

This decision lands like the culmination of the last six years’ pummeling of the people. So much of the recent violence that is the product of the intertwining structures of patriarchy and white supremacy has become visible in tortured bodies. We have witnessed immigrant children, hungry, dirty, crying, on cement floors, in cages. We have viewed the bodies of Black men, children, women, murdered and left on the hot tarmac. We have watched  trans people, denied hormones and affirming surgeries, forced to endure their bodies’ physical repudiation of their internal self-knowing. It makes me wonder if this is supposed to be the knockout blow, here to put us on the mat.

The gut punch is the point. This decision is designed to create an embodied impact, even if the body you currently inhabit is not pregnant, nor is going to become pregnant in the near future—or ever. It offers the opportunity in the present to experience, or re-experience, depending on your identities, the ways in which personhood, so often figured in European law as a form of personal property, can itself be owned by the court.  

And in so doing, it reflects not only the present moment, in which the bodies of pregnant people—in both the present and the future tense—are imbued with less personhood than men, but also the national histories of enslavement and genocide, both of which depended on situating some bodies as human and others as less-than-human, or as objects to be traded and owned by another.

On my part, I receive this decision as a literal invasion: it lands first in my enteric nervous system—the network of nerves that crisscrosses my center—and its forceful impact is so rooted, so lodged in my self-conception, that it feels like it knots and swirls there, in my center, in my core self.  

The writer Philip Shepherd’s New Self, New World explores the hypothesis that we have two brains, two minds: the holistic, enteric nervous system, and the analytical, cerebral mind. It’s hard to will my response to move up into my mind, to the place where I have more tools and strategies to defend against emotional and physical attack. My brain feels fuzzy, cloudy, sleep-deprived, unhinged.   

In fact, I think the breathtaking cruelty of the law is designed to overwhelm the psyche. My core self is on high alert. My spinal cord tingles and vibrates with urgency. My low back is arched; my animal self squints through the darkness, watching. The attack is here, but the attack is on-going, still coming at me. I want to stay up all night, scanning. I want to sleep for days, stoned on grief and defeat. 

Almost immediately after the press reported the overturning of Roe, I noticed the articles starting spilling forth, predicting even further violence, even more rights being shattered. My rights as a woman gone, my rights as a gay person soon to be added to the heap.  

In fact, I think the breathtaking cruelty of the law is designed to overwhelm the psyche. The attack is here, but the attack is on-going, still coming at me. I want to stay up all night, scanning. I want to sleep for days, stoned on grief and defeat. 

Journalists have bodies, too. They are tasked with reacting fast; with writing analysis even as an event is unfolding. And in this cascade of nihilistic, speculative reporting, I see the intellectualization of the body’s difficulty metabolizing so much trauma, so much structural violence. Who is helping the journalists address their own trauma, so they can pause their hypervigilance; so they can report this event in a way that helps the people fight back?

A heartbroken, terrified, despairing people are a pacified people. It’s harder to cope when you’re traumatized. Harder still when the trauma you’re experiencing is historical and multigenerational. Therapists and others working in mental health have the tools and the expertise to understand trauma. We are here to help each other, and those who are not in mental health, learn and use the tools necessary to address the trauma and keep going, in order to refuse to become docile, terrified, obedient subjects.

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The overturning of Roe is a component of a multi-pronged attack strategy, operating at both the psychological and political registers. In order to counter its impact, it’s important to be able to fight both registers at the same time. In many ways, of course, they are all one—an enormous feedback loop, an ouroboros, impacting flesh and consciousness, possibility and limits, imagination and desecration.  

Nevertheless, as crucial as it is to mobilize the tools to work with the somatic and traumatic impact of the decision, it is also necessary to understand how the decision works, at the level of the political.  

Here, then, in a gross reconfiguration of the poet Wallace Stevens, are 13 ways of looking at the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This is a list of political frames that are evoked by the decision, and that at the same time express the function of the decision, in terms of consolidating the violence produced by the intertwining logics of patriarchy and white supremacy.

1. The patriarchal control of women’s bodies

2. The ascendency of a Christian theocratic social order

3. The forced, nostalgic return to a 1950s white “family,” rooted in binary gender roles said to be an expression of the biological sexual difference between men and women (and thus the erasure of all non-heteronormative, trans, nonbinary people from the realm of the “human” and the “normal”)

4. An expression of the Right’s victory over the Left’s political vision

5. The reinforcing of whiteness as property; the body as property

6. An expression of great replacement theory and a strategy to increase “white births”

7. In its consolidation of patriarchal control, the decision expresses what theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Law of the Father

8. An illumination of what the author and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem has noted: that the organizing structure of the United States is not the Constitution, but rather the plantation

9. A reaffirmation that the white male body is the definition of what counts as human, and the positioning of those who are less-than-human as under his dominion

10. A distraction machine, put forth to shift public attention away from the January 6th hearings, which seek to galvanize the public to reject authoritarianism and political violence

11. The softening of the separation between church and state

12. The forced expulsion of women from the workforce and back into the home

13. An act designed to traumatize and emotionally overwhelm much of the populace, and in doing so, to immobilize resistance to patriarchal domination

It is my hope that these frames can be entry points for your own analysis and exploration of the larger function of this decision. To be able to contest this powerful act of violence, I believe we must work at the level of the mind and the body; the somatic and the strategic.  

I welcome discussion of these ideas in the comments section. As well, I’d love for you to use the comments as a space to gather strategies and practices—both emotional and political—you are using in this emergent and fraught moment.

I send you all love, and power.

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