Bodily Autonomy is Impossible Under Capitalism

By Petra Glenn

Bodily autonomy is the right to make decisions about one’s own body. United States capitalism has turned bodies into commodities, thus preventing the obtainment of the human right of bodily autonomy. Capitalism requires the utilization of bodies as capital to generate wealth. The historic bodily oppression and utilization, particularly of black women, has created a dangerous and exploitative experience of motherhood in the United States. Rather than being based on care, the American medical, childcare, and education systems are built to generate profit, which in many cases results in poor care and exploitation. Due to the role and priority of economic efficiency in every stage of reproduction within the United States racialized capitalism, true bodily autonomy is impossible to obtain. 

This argument is part of a wider national discussion regarding bodily autonomy in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Republicans’ newly revealed Project 2025, both of which highlight the GOP’s goal of eliminating access to reproductive healthcare. However, Project 2025 and the Dobbs decision are a consequence of a working system rather than a broken one. Capitalism, in theory and practice, relies on the commodification of bodies. So, despite living under a system supposedly grounded in individual liberties (abortion bans notwithstanding), to secure proper bodily autonomy, capitalism must be abolished. 

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Capitalism requires the utilization of bodily autonomy to sustain profit from workers. Workers sell their labor that occurs through the use of their bodily capital. Capitalists utilize labor by placing an economic value on labor and bodily capital. Through this process, the worker’s body becomes commodified. The United States economy was created through the oppression of enslaved person’s bodily autonomy and now operates under the guise of guaranteeing bodily autonomy but is instead rooted in the denial and utilization of bodily autonomy. Reproduction is vital to this system as it creates more bodies for the labor supply. Laborers create surplus value, or the value from labor that isn’t used to compensate the laborer. Through surplus value, businesses and companies generate profits. The goal within capitalist markets is to maximize profits, and therefore the surplus value created through laborers. Laborers thus don’t own their labor value. This system therefore relies on the exploitation of lower classes, which further burdens marginalized populations, such as women. 

The oppression of women has long played a role in the maintenance of capitalism even when separated from its racialized elements. The creation of modern Western class hierarchies was in part an establishment of gender hierarchies. From slavery through feudalism to capitalism, the oppression of women has been a feature of all stages of class society. The creation of separate family units isolated women into servile positions in their homes and families. Capitalist ideology reduced women to vessels of future workers, demeaning them while stealing the fruits of their uncompensated domestic labor. Pregnant people are therefore cogs in the creation of a labor supply while being economically valued through their labor in rearing children, homemaking, and other aspects of unpaid labor on which the United States economy relies. 

Black women are among the most oppressed populations in the United States through their intersection of race and gender. Through the legacy of slavery and contemporary racist policies,  race and American capitalism are inherently linked. Black labor was, and still is, foundational to the growth and development of the United States. The pivotal industries of cotton, tobacco, and sugar, which established the early infrastructure and profit that grew the economy, were built by enslaved persons. Railroads, which were essential in the Western expansion that grew and industrialized the states, were too. The White House, Capitol, and other landmarks were built by enslaved people. The rearing of many white children of plantation owners was through the labor of enslaved women. The for-profit prison industry and policing system were created in response to the emancipation of enslaved persons and now rely on black bodies for continual profit. The very core of the United States economy and culture was created through black labor and the suppression of bodily autonomy. 

Abortion access is just one facet of a racialized and for-profit medical system, which often fails to deliver actual care. Reproductive justice includes the ability to birth and raise children in a safe and healthy environment, which requires proper medical care beyond abortion access. These are consequences of the healthcare system's overall capitalistic structure, which creates economic inequality via class division. Owners' interests come first, so even healthcare is governed by principles of maximizing shareholder value. Among other things, this incentivizes insurance companies to deny care to those who are qualified for coverage.

Consequently, women are routinely denied the care they need to fully realize bodily autonomy — including but not limited to abortion. And it’s not just healthcare. No paid maternity leave also curtails bodily autonomy. The lack of support pushes many mothers into financial instability, disempowering these women and making them more reliant on their employers. 

Proper bodily autonomy therefore cannot exist under capitalism. For mothers in particular, every stage of conceiving, rearing, and raising children has been commodified, erasing the sanctity of procreation and parenthood. True reproductive justice is impossible under a class system that values profit over human lives. The Dobbs decision and the doom of Project 2025 simply prove that reforming a for-profit society can only secure basic rights for so long until the hierarchy inevitably shoves women back into place. Regardless of who wins in the upcoming 2024 election, securing true bodily autonomy will require greater class consciousness, rather than bandaging a system that requires control over our bodies. 

Petra Glenn is an activist and aspiring political scientist. She is pursuing her PhD and aims to aid in bridging the gap between academic theory and practice.

The DNC’s Successful Strategy of Failure

[Photo Credit: Charles Dharapak / AP]

By Petra Glenn

In the last few decades, on multiple occasions, Democrats have secured unified control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. Each time, they failed to deliver on their promises. Abortion rights are an infamous example.

The Biden and Obama administrations had years to codify reproductive freedom. In 2007, before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, President Obama told abortion rights activists that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act [FOCA],” which would have established abortion as a fundamental right nationwide. Yet, even with 257 seats in the House, the largest number of Democratic seats since 1994, and a supermajority in the Senate, Obama did not attempt to pass the FOCA.

Biden secured the House and Senate with narrow majorities, but despite his campaign claims that if made President “Roe would be the law of the land,” no action was taken to secure abortion rights. This allowed Donald Trump’s decidedly anti-choice bench to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Democratic inertia has terminated much of the goodwill the party once had on the abortion issue. Yet, in the leadup to the 2024 election, Democrats are claiming that your donations and votes will lead to the reproductive protections the party has promised for decades. Ignoring their misconduct, Democrats point the finger squarely at Republicans for widespread abortion bans that endanger millions across America.

The Republican Party indeed deserves much blame. Though Republicans once viewed abortion as a personal right, efforts to court evangelicals made them increasingly anti-choice. And they embrace this new identity, with Republican senators like Lindsey Graham calling for a national abortion ban. Oppressing women fits logically with the rest of their platform, which includes exploiting the environment and working class to line the pockets of corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Democrats, meanwhile, are a party of contradictions. They too continually bend to the ultra-wealthy but cloak it in the rhetoric of minority empowerment and progression. Abortion isn’t the only right Democrats dangle above the heads of their voting base. The Democrats have continually built their party off the supposed interests of Black communities, immigrants, workers, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. This alignment is typically purely symbolic, as both Biden and Obama increased police funding, sped up the process of deportation, blocked asylum seekers, and expanded imperialist foreign policies. Democrats have continually doubled down on oppressive systems while boasting of their diversity, equality, and inclusion.

It’s no wonder to those with intersectional class consciousness that the election of Vice President Kamala Harris, former “top cop” of California, didn’t smash the patriarchy. While standing for the same corporate interests, the two parties act like bitter enemies fighting to save the country from the other. Petty disputes take center stage while both vote for tax cuts, police expansion, more military spending, and genocide.

This hasn’t always been the case. In the 75th Congress from 1937-1938, Democrats secured 77% of the Senate seats and 75% of the House. With this majority, that hasn’t been achieved since, the Democrats heavily subsidized education and social services by raising the top marginal income tax to 75%. Fast forward to the 1990s and Democrats had a chance to achieve similar successes. Under Bill Clinton, they won unified federal government control after decades of Republican dominance. Clinton ran as a change agent, rekindling the optimism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election 60 years prior. 

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Despite campaigning as a progressive, Clinton governed as a corporate neoliberal. This shattered the electorate's hopes and set the tone for the Democratic Party as a whole. Taking office amid a recession, Clinton made economic growth his primary policy goal, not equality. This posture and the desire to create a “new economy” led to the embrace of free trade policy, which assumed that globalization would catapult the country into the 21st century. It was a crushing lie. As was the Clinton administration’s financial deregulation, which planted the seeds of the 2008 economic crash. But these choices made sense. Servility to the capitalist class meant more corporate money flowing into Democratic coffers—Clinton’s broken promises made for a more viable — but increasingly useless — party.  

In 2020, Joe Biden adopted the Clinton playbook. His campaign framed the notoriously conservative Washington insider as a staunch progressive. Behind closed doors, “Uncle Joe” promised maintenance of the status quo for his mega-donors. In public, Biden was a climate savior, reproductive champion, and working-class hero, bringing morals back to the Oval Office. Yet he was fully capable of turning on a dime. The same weekend Biden vowed to tackle poverty, he also promised a wealthy audience at the Ritz-Carlton that “nothing would fundamentally change.” He would not “demonize” the rich through higher taxation.

Ahead of the 2024 election, there is much discussion of Democratic failure to achieve any of the goals they set in 2020. A lack of climate urgency, the fall of Roe, not forgiving student loans, inflation, and funding a genocide are particular ways the DNC has failed Americans and millions abroad. Abortion, and other rights, have been used as leverage over Democratic voters. When the right continues to be at risk, at-risk populations have continual reason to vote for the party that claims to fight for such rights. The threat of the Republicans and Donald Trump, in particular, are utilized to explain policy failures and to create cop-outs when failure occurs.

Failure and purposely losing is therefore the strategy of the DNC. The more Democrats lose and fail to provide the rights they allegedly support, the further reasons to vote for them occur. Both parties have no issue voting bipartisanly to cut taxes for the ultra-rich or to fund genocides abroad, yet rely on their construed ‘differences’ to secure votes from their constituents. Republicans’ platform better aligns with their corporate interests, making it easier for them to follow through with their campaign promises.

Democrats, however, contradict their campaign with their funding, making their promised policies of rights, universal healthcare and education, and climate policy impossible. Therefore, the more the Democrats lose, the more they can campaign for further funding from voters and corporations, to hopefully ‘defeat’ the Republicans in the future.

Supporters can argue that Republicans, gridlock, and budgeting have been obstacles to the success of the Democrats, yet these same hindrances appear to be no issue when foreign governments need billions of dollars to commit a genocide that the American public does not support. Our foreign policy simply cannot be majorly adjusted, as “stability” abroad is vital to the security of the American people more than relieving student debt, prioritizing healthcare and education, and addressing poverty. So despite the skyrocketing prices, taxes used to bomb children, and attacks on women, BIPOC, and queer Americans, the very same Democrats who are the ones dropping the bombs remain the saviors.

Dissent against this losing strategy has been met with greater force than any Republican threat has. Forcing Bernie Sanders out of the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary elections was a key strategy of the DNC to avoid being held responsible for their promises and losing corporate interests. The DNC would have rather lost with Clinton than won with Sanders so they can continually look like the victims of the fascist haters of the Right. When Republicans vocally support a genocidal ethnostate, they are racist monsters that need to be voted out of the government so that the moral Democrats can quietly fund the atrocity instead.

Anything to the left of ethnic cleansing and continual tax cuts for the 1% is censored and any representatives who oppose such policies eventually succumb to the establishment to survive. The contradictions of this political game have led to representatives trading their political identities for social status. When progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala — which requires upwards of $50,000 for a ticket — in a gown displaying the message “tax the rich,” it became clear that progressive rhetoric is best used for social clout.

The spiel that continual funding and voter mobilization for the DNC will be the savior for the American people has continually failed to create meaningful change. Biden’s presidency has proved that identity politics can only take our country so far. Our political parties are working how they were designed to: for and by the rich. One party is simply more honest about it.

Petra Glenn is an activist and aspiring political scientist. She is pursuing her PhD and aims to aid in bridging the gap between academic theory and practice.