We can all see that the world is entering a new paradigm. It is utterly different on many levels from fifty years ago, and as the Internet becomes more and more available all over the planet, it continues to change at a rate much faster than ever before in our history. This change is occurring on the level of human consciousness. People really are thinking differently.
Listening to the media, which is very determined to report anything remotely sensational, one would think that the world is going from bad to worse. My experience, however, as a single middle-aged woman who travels a great deal, is that our world is a much safer and more open-minded place. When I was growing up in Europe in the sixties, a woman could not hold a mortgage in her own name; marital rape was legal; alcoholism and abuse of all kinds were rife and never openly acknowledged; some European countries did not allow women to vote; racism was normal and acceptable; there were no environmental protection laws; and the forces dictating that a woman’s only option in life was to get married and have kids were very strong indeed. All these things have changed for the better, and in many circles the fact that I am a lesbian is considered absolutely fine. How wonderful to see such improvements in a lifetime.
It is all the more shocking then, to observe the questioning of women’s reproductive rights by a group of reactionary men who are refusing to consult with women, as though their opinions on an issue that affects them profoundly are irrelevant. In this day and age that is an extraordinary way of thinking, and would be laugh-able if it weren’t alarming.
Looking a little deeper, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised at these recent events. In the last thirty to forty years, women’s rights have taken huge strides, and even with a small percentage of women in positions of power, we can see how that has made a difference.
Put very generally, women work cooperatively, whereas men work competitively, quickly establishing hierarchies within which the people at the bottom of the ladder are treated as expendable.
Working cooperatively requires considering other people as individuals with their own needs and feelings, working with them rather than imposing on them. It is a completely different way of being in the world, valuing happiness above any concept of wielding power over others.
We see these changes in attitudes worldwide. Rather than working to establish their countries as world powers, the most progressive governments in the Western world are prioritising something else: making their countries pleasant and easy places to live, where basic life necessities are available to all citizens, where people work together to better each other’s lives. This new way of being is what radical feminists envisioned back in the seventies, but whether we call it feminism or not doesn’t matter—it epitomises a deep change in human consciousness, one that has been and is being integrated on a daily basis by many people of both genders.
The reaction we are seeing regarding women’s reproductive rights is against this way of being, this new paradigm. It is focussed on women’s reproductive rights because if men deny women the ability to choose not to get pregnant, they control women, and that is what some men want to do. It is an attempt to return to that old competitive way of being, undermining the radical changes that have occurred and are occurring.
It won’t work. Human consciousness has evolved and is evolving, and it cannot be reversed. Too many of us have been seized with delight at the prospect of a peaceful world. Too many of us have tasted real freedom, the freedom to make our own choices and to be exactly who we are. Too many of us have already embraced this new way of being, and we are moving right along into a twenty-first century that is illustrating incredible potential. Yes, it’s easy to be frightened as the old paradigm falls apart, but when we can see the possibilities for the future, there is far more cause for celebration than there is for fear.
The old mode of government can no longer prevent people from stepping into their personal power (which is totally different from power over others), and that personal power, embraced by individuals all over the world, is both caused by and is the cause of the huge changes that are occurring. It is a delightful cycle, a rolling snowball that is gathering speed by the second.
I know this snowball from the inside. Back in the eighties, after struggling to get an abortion through the medical establishment, I joined an illegal abortion group, run by feminists like myself. I didn’t want any woman to be treated like a piece of meat the way I had been. Following basic cleanliness procedures, and with a qualified doctor for back-up if necessary, our work was probably less susceptible to infections than the average abortion done in a hospital, an environment where germs abound.
Being part of that group was deeply empowering for all of us, because we learned how our bodies work, and we learned firsthand how simple it is to perform an abortion within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. We didn’t need to go through the weighty male authoritarian Western medical establishment. We only needed very basic equipment and a few individuals who believe in people’s rights. The ramifications of that lesson are huge, and once learned, that awareness remains, no matter how many rules are made by those who want to maintain power over others.
This is the twenty-first century, and the right for individual women to control their own fertility without having to consult anyone else should be so automatic it doesn’t even need thinking about. It’s sad to know that there are forces out there who want to go back to twelfth century ways of being—and it’s wonderful to know they haven’t got a hope in hell of keeping us down.