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Beyond Choice: The 2024 Election and the Battle for Women’s Autonomy

Part 2

Amber Stewart
8 min readAug 26, 2024
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As we saw in part one of this series, the way the Right conceives of women’s lives limits women’s potential. We looked at how their documented policies will define educational opportunities for girls and women, as well as placing penalties on our self-expression.

The political stakes are high, not just because of who will become president, because we have a decision to make as a society: whose vision for the future are we going to endorse? Are we going to define womanhood as expansive or limited? Will we, as a society, avail ourselves of women’s creativity and resourcefulness, or will we relegate women solely to the domestic sphere?

For the second part of this series, we are going to look at the love and sex lives of women and how far right principles define and restrict our possibilities.

The Right to Love How We Love

In Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case that overturned Roe v. Wade), he wrote that “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [v. Connecticut], Lawrence [v. Texas], and Obergefell [v. Hodges].” These cases deal with birth control, same-sex sex, and same-sex…

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Amber Stewart
Amber Stewart

Written by Amber Stewart

Recovering American living in Uruguay. Progressive Christian. Queer essayist and poet. She/her.

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