U.S. Women’s National Team player and outspoken liberal activist Megan Rapinoe is blasting men for their “silence” on the abortion issue and pleading with them to “stand up.”
“How sad a day this is for me personally, for my teammates, for just all of the people out there who this is going to affect,” Rapinoe said at the outset of her Zoom call with reporters.
“Pro-choice means that you get to choose,” she said. “Pro-choice allows other people to be pro-life if that is what works for them, or that is what their beliefs are, or if that is where they’re at in their life. Pro-life doesn’t allow anybody to make a choice.”
Rapinoe, who is gay, tied the court’s ruling to LGBT issues.
“Obviously, you can understand from an individual perspective how difficult it is to live in a country where you have a constant, unrelenting violent tide against you, an onslaught as a woman,” Rapinoe said. “And it would be as a gay person, and as a non-binary person, as a trans person. Whoever this is going to affect because it affects a lot more than just women or cis [gendered] women. It really does affect us all.”
U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Rapinoe continued, “We know that this will disproportionately affect poor women, Black women, brown women, immigrants, women in abusive relationships, women who have been raped, women and girls who have been raped by family members. Who, you know what? Maybe just didn’t make the best choice. And that’s no reason to be forced to have a pregnancy.”
The U.S. women’s soccer star characterized the court’s ruling as not “pro-life.” But instead, an attack on women’s rights in which “cruelty is the point.”
“I think the cruelty is the point, because this is not pro-life by any means,” she said. “The right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness and liberty is being assaulted in this instance, and it’s just incredibly disheartening. There are an infinite amount of reasons why a woman chooses to do what she does with her body, or what they do with their body — none of which are anybody else’s business.”
Megan Rapinoe kneels in protest (Kathryn Gruber-USA Today Sports)
Rapinoe then addressed men specifically.
“You’ve been silent to us, as a whole,” she said, “Stand up, say something. This is your wife, this is your sister, this is your friend, this is your girlfriend, this is the mother of your children. This is all of us. And you are allowing a violent and consistent onslaught on the autonomy of women’s bodies, on women’s rights, on women’s minds, on our hearts, on our souls.”
Rapinoe then made a criticism about male judges that doesn’t really stand up to historical scrutiny.
“Frankly, a majority-male court making decisions about my body or any other woman’s body is completely misguided and wildly out of touch with the desires of the country, the will of the country, and the will of the people, and I think [they] are acting incredibly irresponsibly, and inappropriately,” she said.
It would greatly inconvenience Rapinoe and her argument if we were to point out that the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortion the law of the land was decided by a court entirely comprised of men. In Friday’s ruling to overturn Roe, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a woman, voted with the majority.