Patriarchy and Women's Reproductive Rights
The political cartoon illustrates the issue of women’s reproductive rights, specifically in the United States. The U.S. must embrace the right of a woman to choose and have access to medical care they deem appropriate. Whether it’s something as neutral as contraceptives and prevention surgeries, to one of the most difficult decisions in a woman life: abortion, safe and reasonably affordable health care must be provided. The alternative in a dire situation includes dangerous back alley operations. A clear-headed society must absolutely prefer the most life saving and death preventing operations instead. However the U.S. has broken away from the pack of rational society and governing. Instead, it is using the system of patriarchy to encircle and ravenously attack the human right of access to appropriate health care.
The political cartoon has three prominent women’s reproductive rights opponents, who are unsurprisingly male, appearing on a pregnant woman’s ultrasound. The very men on the ultrasound are those who actively propose and enact laws to restrict women’s rights. In doing so, they are forcing women, who potentially may seek to terminate their pregnancy because of a dire situation, to resort to unnecessarily risky surgeries. After Texas reduced the number of clinics with the ability to preform abortion from 22 to 6, researches have already found accounts “of women taking herbs or other substances, or intentionally getting punched in the stomach or beaten up -- the same kinds of things they did before abortion was legal."[1] There are other safer alternatives than this, but even clinics that do not preform abortions at all are being severely defunded.
Although the systematic erosion of women’s reproductive rights is clearly egregious at its most basic form, looking at in a lens where we analyze the patriarchal gears behind it all reveals a deeper issue. Patriarchy says that the three politicians (referenced earlier) individually do not directly oppress women and their right to appropriate health care. Albeit very influential, they are still mere cogs in the system that is the Patriarchy. Patriarchy is enforced “Through a process of socialization,” which teaches us how to “participate in social life – from families, schools, religion, and the mass media, through the example of parents, peers, coaches, teachers, and public figures.”[2] The socialization process surrounds us and identifies who we are in the world in relation to others. Patriarchy directs this relation to oppressing women and allowing men to have disproportional power.
This very patriarchy is what allows men to control and place restrictions on women’s human right to appropriate health care.
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