From the next newsletter I am working on:
It is a central tenet of unionism that an attack on one member or group of members is an attack on all. That’s why, after Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 2018, I wrote a statement as the secretary of my faculty union expressing solidarity with the people most immediately threatened by the overturning of Roe that Kavanaugh’s appointment foreshadowed: women and anyone else who could get pregnant. Some of our members—all of them men, as far as I know—threatened to leave the union after reading that statement, arguing that we had inappropriately politicized the organization. Since the only reason a union exists is to negotiate and protect its members’ contractual rights, regardless of where individual members’ views might fall on the political spectrum, those who objected to the statement argued that our union should not take a position on partisan political issues like abortion.
This neutrality, however, only looks neutral on the surface, eliding as it does the fact that when two people conceive a child, the position of the one who is pregnant and the position of the one who isn’t are fundamentally irreconcilable, and have been from the moment they agreed to have sex. To take the position my colleagues wanted the union to take, in other words, would have been be to ignore the material difference between entering and being entered during heterosexual intercourse; between the possibility and impossibility of getting pregnant as a result of that act; between, if conception does take place, having no choice but to live and by definition not having to live in a pregnant body; and between enduring the risks of pregnancy and being completely immune to those risks. It would be, in other words, for the union to abdicate its responsibility to advocate for the ability of the person who can get pregnant to determine the relationship between their personal and professional lives, something that they cannot do by definition if they have no control over what to do if they get pregnant.