The Older Woman Comes of Age
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
The uterus has long doubled as a political tool. Summoned as a metaphor—for emptiness, for deficiency, for obligation—it has conflated a body part with womanhood, and used the logic of maternal sacrifice to limit women’s lives. Mental stimulation, some 19th-century doctors argued, could harm their reproductive systems. Exercise could, too. We might laugh, today, at the transparency of such tactical ignorance, but our smugness would be misplaced. The uterus, idealized into a means of degradation, is precisely what the Supreme Court reinstated last month as it overturned Roe v. Wade.
As Americans lurch toward our backward future, I keep thinking about the people who have sought to minimize the effects of Roe’s downfall. I think of the “we will adopt your baby” couple, how their message at once addressed and ignored the people who will be forced into motherhood. I think of those who have suggested that only will be implicated. And then I think of a film that has, on the surface, nothing to do with .
