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This year’s Blog for Choice Day  asks “What is your top pro-choice hope for President Obama and/or the new Congress?” It would be easy to respond with a list of policies that needs to be changed, though given the real impact each law has on women’s bodily sovereignty—and even on whether women live or die—it would be difficult to choose just one.

• The Hyde Amendment needs to be repealed so that women who depend on Medicaid can have the same reproductive freedoms as wealthier women, since the constitutional right to a procedure means nothing if you can’t access it.
• The so-called conscience clause, which lets health care providers out of doing their jobs if they claim religious reasons, no matter the impact on the woman seeking healthcare, needs to be ended. This is a law that appears primarily intended to support those who would deny women the right to access birth control.
• The global gag rule, which prevents organizations that offer or even mention abortions from receiving funding, needs to be overturned.
• Funding for abstinence-only education must be replaced with full sex education which will give young women the knowledge they need to truly control their bodies and sexuality
• The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief needs to be changed so that it can pass “the real-world test”.

These are all essential changes for Congress and Obama to make. Changing laws, however, is not enough. Now that the party generally more friendly towards reproductive rights is in power, we need to change the discourse around abortion so that it foregrounds women’s bodily autonomy. Instead of promoting comprehensive (ie real fact-based) sex education and access to birth control because they reduce abortions, we need to promote them on the basis of empowering women to control their own bodies.

When we center bodily autonomy, it reveals connections to so many other issues in a way that “safe, legal, and rare” cannot. There’s universal health care, because whether a woman chooses to have children or not, she has a right to a healthy body. (That means making sure women detained by ICE or otherwise imprisoned receive proper medical attention too.) There’s the right to sexual autonomy and freedom from rape. There’s the fight against the forced or economically coerced sterilization of trans people, the mentally different, women of color, and other stigmatized bodies. There’s facing the sick history of eugenics in the US and making sure women and families who are struggling have what they really need. Centering bodily autonomy in discussions of reproductive rights and justice demands intersectional analysis and actions.

For too long, anti-choice forces have been allowed to frame the discussion around abortion. In changing that, we must also connect abortion rights to the full range of reproductive and health rights that will allow women—all women—to fully control their bodies.

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