When the Green Wave Comes to Utah

Protestor in Mexico City during the Day for Decriminalization of Abortion in 2023

What happens when the Brigham Young University campus newspaper publishes this article about the Green Wave, the Latin American pro-choice movement that has spread to all corners of the globe, including Utah? Senator Mike Lee throws a hissy fit and demands they take it down.

What is his relationship to the University? Besides being a former student, he's nobody and no one. He sees an opportunity to consolidate power on the backs of women and he's taking it. Of course he is. It's what he does.

Cue the churn of discourse. I saw one attempt at conversation, started by an LDS man, who wanted to know what others thought of the situation. He hoped we could talk about the free speech implications of the situation without it becoming "political." What he meant to say was "partisan," which was the cue for everyone in the room not to get mad at each other. And this was where I lost what was left of my patience on Friday.

I think it's deeply problematic and selfish for men in the Church to ask women to separate any discussion of free speech from "politics" when it comes to abortion bans. To begin with, we're supposed to somehow make a conversation about free speech apolitical? Impossible. To do it, we're expected to remain emotionally neutral and exclude any self-advocacy related to an issue that threatens our lives—to keep the peace?

Why should we? What have y'all done to deserve peace?

Abortion bans have made all women who live under them unsafe. All women are less safe during pregnancy, while giving birth, and in pregnancy loss because of abortion bans. That includes Latter-day Saint women with wanted pregnancies. We're also less safe, publicly and privately, by the legal conspiracies of the unqualified and uninformed we've been told we must embrace as a condition of faith and good standing in our religion.

This is what we have free speech for—self-advocacy to redress the wrongs committed against us by the State. If my free speech can't be used for that, then it doesn't exist.

If the people beside me in the pews aren't prepared to acknowledge or accept the situation they've helped to create, what else is there to say? These dangers for our women exist, in part, by our community's own creation and participation! We as a people have given the State that abused and disdained us, turned a blind eye to our suffering and our rights, the power to destroy our own and an open license to use it as they see fit.

If I can't say that when it's the truth because it might upset the people in my church who are doing it, then there's nothing else for us to discuss.

In less than a century, a political party has convinced our community to cannibalize our own women at the behest of the State, without fighting back at all. We self-censor on open forums over it because the idea of anyone pushing back against that political party is so entirely unacceptable to—whom, exactly? The Church? The senior leadership? The local leadership? The crazy guy in every ward who never stops quoting the White Horse prophecy in testimony meeting every July? The guy who wants to take away temple recommends from anyone who isn't a Republican—if not take us out behind the Church and shoot us with the gun he brings to every meeting he attends?

Who is all of this for?

Instead of examining any of that, we ask our women to contort themselves into whatever shapes are necessary to make this reality tenable, against our own best interests.

I won't do it. Be uncomfortable in this situation with me. Acknowledge that I'm no longer a fully enfranchised person in the state where I live. Acknowledge that the LDS women who fought so hard for women's suffrage—to give themselves and their descendants self-determination in their own reproduction—did all of that for THIS to be our lived reality a century later. Those of you who voted to make this happen, stand ten toes down in what you've done. In the words of the Young Women leaders who taught me, understand that you cannot separate accountability from your choices.

It's the least you can do.