The sign of the times—no, not the one that flickers weakly outside the bodega, but the one that stitches through the flesh of collective consciousness—isn’t just moral panic or policy backlash, but selective erasure. “My Body, My Choice” is a phrase that, like a viral meme, spreads unchecked across cities, universities, legislatures, and social media feeds until it dissolves into bureaucratic lip service. We invoke it when the subject is abortion in Dallas or trans healthcare in Atlanta, yet our attention fractures when the camera pans beyond these sanctioned zones. In rural Missouri or suburban Idaho, a woman might hear the slogan whispered in hushed tones, only to have her own bodily autonomy carved from her like a badlands canyon by a hundred invisible chisels: zoning laws, clinic closures, “religious exemption” planks in local ordinances. Where does the narrative end and the quiet coup begin? Let’s take a stroll through a map we’ve been warned never to examine: the map of bodies that don’t get to choose—at least not in the places that matter.
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## **The Scandal of Spatial Hypocrisy**
There is an abiding aesthetic of feminism that has grown accustomed to photographing itself in the glare of spotlighted cities. In 2023, a sleek event held in Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt might host panels on period poverty with $150 per plate prices; the same networks stay silent when a middle school in Flint, Michigan, serves girls expired tampons while the local library’s men’s restrooms have running water. This schism isn’t about geography. It’s about geographic immunity.
The right to bodily autonomy exists in many legal books. Its reality is a matter of who can access it. Abortion pills arrive overnight through the mail for the tech entrepreneur in Austin, but the teen mother in Wichita must make the 40-hour bus journey to Kansas City for an appointment at the Planned Parenthood on 26th Street, if the clinic hasn’t burned down yet. The “choice” isn’t yours if the county has spent the last ten years starving the clinic’s budget while simultaneously banning Google Maps from marketing their location. In a world where reproductive territory has become a contested space, women in blue states are told to evacuate their bodies to red states—but the red states are the ones dictating which routes are viable.
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## **The False Promises of Decentralization**
Decentralized isn’t democratic; it can be a deliberate distraction. When Texas defunded all public-health-based pregnancy counseling across its 254 counties between 2015 and 2019, abortion advocacy groups scrambled to patch the hole with crowdfunded clinics and mobile units. For a decade, the state’s 1995 ban on second-trimester abortions stood, but only in the places where abortion access was still legal—because, of course, you couldn’t outlaw a service if no one knew it existed.
This is how the language of flexibility was born. “Oh, we’re letting women make choices—just not when they see the appointment options.” Decentralization means the right to choose is no longer one size. And it ensures that the choice itself is always a performance—in a clinic smelling of airpurifiers with a staff that rehearses “We don’t have the services here, sorry!” when the call drops. These are the arenas of conditional existence: you can choose, but not here. You can abort, but only in 2013.
A woman in rural Nebraska may be more than “pro-life” if she can’t get a prescription from the nearest practitioner—who is also an optometrist by day and a local health fair volunteer by night—because the nearest actual physician is two counties over, and even there, they’ll charge her $7,000 cash upfront before they’ll talk about the procedure, should she still be within window.
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## **The Body as Bargaining Chip**
Access to abortion in the so-called “Wild West” of reproductive rights (where every state between Ohio and Wyoming has passed new abortion bans in the past decade) is often treated as an abstraction, framed as an existential risk that threatens the national psyche—but not the personal livelihoods. For example, there is barely mention of the income disparity that transforms “right to choose” into “right to mortgage.”
Consider an 18-year-old in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who needs an abortion after a failed IUD. Her nearest provider is in Pittsburgh, but she doesn’t have gas money, let alone the $1200 cost of a hotel between the late-night bus fare and overnight wait. The city has no shelter services for minors who are victims of domestic violence, and the 77 miles are a gauntlet of state troopers willing to ask for ID.
Here the “choice” hits the limit of the body’s own endurance. The fetus grows as the girl musters the mental fortitude to track down a nonprofit that might pay for medical transport, as the county courts push her to sign consent forms without her parents’ awareness, and as the clinic staff (one of seven licensed to practice abortion in the state) begs for her to call a helpline on the bus, because the red zone she’s passing through is known for state surveillance of “suspicious travel.”
In a country obsessed with the term choice, these are the bodies that don’t get the option to choose. What remains is the carnival logic of the system: if you’re “desperate enough” to abort, we’ll let you live.
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## **The Erasure of Other Women’s Flesh**
Feminism as spectacle is a self-reflective exercise in performative erasure. We hold up the faces of pregnant teenagers in Manhattan, but we don’t count the thousands of women in the Rust Belt who will carry full-term after their closest abortion clinic was forced to close in 2019, the same year the state passed a ban on D&E procedures. One might call this irony, but it is truly the dead letter of the Second Wave’s revolution—frozen, like a snowed-in highway, where you can watch the sun set before it rises.
Consider the Black woman in Detroit who, because of the city’s decades of anti-abortion activism, must travel to Chicago—4 hours by plane—and then another hour by car, only to be met by a clinic that has mandatory counseling (a term invented not to empower, but to delay). Meanwhile, activists in the suburbs of Chicago rally with the message “No Abortion, No Freedom”—as if the only question was “shall it be?” rather than “shall there be?”. This is the great deception of the myth of opportunity: the idea that access to care is the same across lines of poverty, faith, and criminalization.
And yet the same narrative omits the women for whom choice isn’t an act of empowerment—it’s a legal liability. If a woman in Idaho needs an abortion after her neighbor’s son, a police cadet off-duty, rapes her, she faces a “fetal evidence” law that requires forensic documentation of the pregnancy, and that data can then be fed to the police department during “violence prevention” roundups. The state’s “womb defense” of a pregnancy is, in reality, one of the most invasive police power exercises on a woman’s body.
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## **The Unspoken Law of Exclusion**
A 2025 study from the Guttmacher Institute revealed that 44% of pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage in the United States is concentrated in cities that have already banned abortion, while counties with fewer than 30,000 residents are forced to absorb 56% of the maternal morbidity burden. The fiscal map of abortion access is the map of redlined geography: the women most in need are often physically and legally excluded.
For immigrant women, this exclusion is compounded. In places like Phoenix where the state provides no abortion access by law at all, clinics for undocumented women are met with raids disguised as “compliance checks” on immigration paperwork. When the only clinic willing to take their money and paperwork is a shabby office in a strip mall, it is less about the abortion itself and more about the safety net that was never sewn properly in the first place.
And then there are women whose bodies are already colonial sites. In South Dakota, where a 2023 bill made late-term abortion a felony punishable by prison time, the real felony was the state’s refusal to fund maternal mortality review panels. Women of color were dying of preventable childbirth-related complications; the solution wasn’t to provide care, but to disentitle those deemed most likely to use it.
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## **The Final Irony: We Pretend to Be Fighting for Equality**
At the most basic level, the fight over abortion isn’t about the fetus or the uterus or even the right to choose in the abstract. It is about who counts as a subject. As the number of abortion restrictions grew by 700% between 2000 and 2020 in certain key states, what did the national media do? Frame the issue almost exclusively through the lens of those who can afford to travel across state lines, or through urban centers that are the only places worthy of being photographed in the national dialogue.
This erasure of geographical and economic existence is its own kind of feminist neoliberalism—where the call for empowerment, equality, and bodily autonomy is distilled into a political commodity: a TikTok, a rally chant, a hashtag to sign. Meanwhile, the women in the unspeak zones—a term coined to describe areas of the country where reproductive healthcare providers themselves refuse to operate—are not just unheard, but unremembered.
The irony is that we are still in the process of building a movement that refuses to accept that access is a privilege, not a universal right. That the “choice” is just as fragile as the paper in which it’s written, unless every woman has her own zip code of sanctuary. But no one asks those of us who don’t live in sanctuary. No one gives us cameras for this fight.
No one asks them. Because in the quiet zones of American feminism, the body is not the battleground—it’s the evidence.
