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The following papers—first delivered at the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 39 Spring Meeting, Reckoning/Foresight (March 2021)—belong to a time that was less ominous for women’s reproductive rights. In the period since, we have begun to feel the reverberations of Roe’s overturning across our nation. We considered updating our writing accordingly. However, we soon realized that no amount of revision would justly reflect the profound degree of violence to which women’s lives have now been subject. And so, we are choosing to let our past words reside as an artifact of the way we once thought, the way we wrote, back when we had more sovereignty over our uteruses.1
In coming back to these papers, with thoughts of revision, we also considered the responses we received when originally presented. One particular comment stayed with us, regarding our use of binary language as trans-exclusionary. On whose bodies did we imagine abortions were performed or denied, in whose minds were they chosen? In some ways, our use of “woman” can be seen as a relic of a bygone era—one in which gender was ascribed, not chosen or deconstructed. And from another perspective, the reference to women in this context is not a reification of the patriarchal gender binary, rather a recognition of its persistence and the way it wields its power (both psychically and actually) on the female body. From this perspective, to neutralize language around abortion is yet another erasure of women, yet another psychic silencing. Thrusting us into the heart of one of today’s most contested issues, the comment highlighted abortion’s inextricable
Address correspondence to Naomi Snider. E-mail:
The Editors-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, however, reviewed all three papers prior to inclusion in this issue, raised a few questions, and made minor edits for clarity purposes.
linkage to gender politics, a politics that itself is tethered to both the body and the psyche o