Addressing the leaked upcoming Supreme Court ruling on abortion at a news conference a few days ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said:
In recent years republican legislators have been racing to pass extreme anti-choice legislation that would send women’s rights back into the Stone Age.
That’s actually a great idea! In fact, I can’t think of a better solution to the abortion rights issue.
Up until the very end of the period known as the “Stone Age,” all humans on the planet were living as small band hunter gatherers, an overwhelmingly egalitarian lifestyle. The very idea that a woman could lose her right to choose what happens to her own body would have been inconceivable.
Part of that has to do with the fact that the notion that people have “rights” was inconceivable. The idea of rights only makes sense after the social world has been embedded within hierarchies of power and oppression. What would it mean to say that I have a “right” to choose to do a thing when there is no one around with any legitimate authority either to force me to do it or to prevent me from doing it?
And when it comes to “reproductive rights,” women living in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies typically have more or less complete bodily autonomy, and can choose to end a pregnancy at any time up to (and even immediately after!) birth. No questions asked.
Seriously, Chuck, we really should send women’s (and everyone’s) rights back into the Stone Age!
Given the point he was obviously trying to make, Schumer’s choice of “Stone Age” was off by a minimum of ten thousand years. In reality, Republican legislators only want to send women’s rights back to the 19th century, back to a time when women didn’t have much in the way of any rights at all.
