Women’s bodily autonomy is recent, fragile, and central to whether democracy is real

Article originally published in The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook, a project of the 22nd Century Initiative on May 27. 2026. Written by SCOT NAKAGAWA.

Within the lifetime of millions of Americans now living, a married woman in this country had no legal right to refuse her husband sexual access to her body. The common law held that by the marriage contract she had consented once and for all, and that a husband therefore could not, by definition, be charged with raping his wife. That exemption was not a dusty relic quietly cleared away at the founding. States were still dismantling it in the 1970s and 1980s. Marital rape did not become a crime in every state until the early 1990s.

I begin there because it resets a baseline we have let ourselves forget. We tend to speak of women’s bodily autonomy as a settled inheritance now under threat. It is under threat. But it was never settled, and it was never an inheritance. It is one of the most recent achievements in American life – assembled, in most of its particulars, within the last sixty years, and assembled unevenly, by movements who fought against the grain of the law.

To see why its loss is a democratic emergency and not only a private tragedy, you have to see three things: how new it is, why authoritarian movements target it first, and why self-government – the whole democratic project – depends on it.

The baseline was not freedom

For most of Anglo-American legal history, a married woman had no separate legal existence to speak of. The doctrine was called coverture. As William Blackstone put it in the 1760s, husband and wife were one person in law – and that person was the husband. A wife could not own property, keep her own wages, or sign a contract in her own name. Her legal self was, in the law’s own word, suspended.

Bodily autonomy was carved out of that, piece by piece, and recently.

Take contraception. Until 1965, a state could make it a crime for even a married couple to use birth control. It took a Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut, to end that – and another, Eisenstadt v. Baird, to extend the right to unmarried people in 1972. The federal Comstock Act, which since 1873 had criminalized sending contraceptives, or even information about them, through the mail, was never fully repealed. It is still on the books.

The right not to be sterilized had to be won too, and it is the part of this history most often left out. In 1927, in Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilization of people the state judged unfit. Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized under eugenic laws, overwhelmingly poor women, disabled women, Black and Native women. Those programs did not end in some distant past. Native women were sterilized in significant numbers through federal health services into the 1970s. Incarcerated women in California were sterilized into the years just before 2010.

And abortion was legal nationwide only from 1973, with Roe v. Wade; narrowed in 1992; and removed as a federal right in 2022.

Put the dates together and the pattern is unmistakable. A woman’s settled, recognized authority over her own body is younger than the interstate highway system. It was built, late and unevenly, by people who had to fight for every piece of it.

Why the body is the first target

Why would a movement bent on concentrating power spend so much of its energy here? Because controlling women’s bodies is not a side project of authoritarianism. It is close to its foundation.

Start with the household. Authoritarian order depends on a society organized into small, hierarchical units, each with one authority and a set of dependents who owe obedience. The patriarchal household is the original model for that arrangement, and the authoritarian imagination wants the state to mirror it and the household to hold firm. A woman with full authority over her own body and her own reproduction is, by definition, not a dependent in a fixed hierarchy. Restore control over her body and you restore the unit. The household becomes again a small monarchy, and a country of small monarchies is far easier to rule from the top.

Then there is the question of who gets born. Authoritarian and ethnonationalist movements are, almost without exception, preoccupied with birth rates – with demographic decline, with the fear that the wrong people are outnumbering the right ones. That preoccupation turns women’s bodies into instruments of population policy. And here is the tell: the same logic that forces some women to carry pregnancies has, in other decades, forced other women to be sterilized. Forced birth and forced sterilization look like opposites. They are the same principle. In both, the state decides and the woman does not. The constant is not more children, or fewer. The constant is control.

Finally, and most chillingly, the body is a practice ground. Look at the techniques being built to enforce the new restrictions: surveillance of pregnancies and miscarriages, the criminalization of ordinary medical events, laws that deputize private citizens to inform on and sue their neighbors, prosecutors reaching across state lines to punish conduct that was legal where it happened, the harvesting of menstrual-cycle data. None of that is specific to reproduction. It is general-purpose authoritarian infrastructure – informant networks, criminalized private life, surveillance, extraterritorial reach – and it’s being assembled and normalized on women first, because women were judged a politically manageable place to start. What is built to control women’s bodies does not stay there. It is a prototype.

Self-government begins with the self

Here is why this belongs at the center of any honest conversation about democracy, rather than off to one side as a “social issue.”

Democracy rests on a particular idea of the person: someone capable of governing themselves, and therefore fit to share in governing everyone. The self-governing citizen is the basic unit of a republic. But self-government has to begin somewhere, and the somewhere is the self – the body you actually live in. If you don’t have authority over your own body, you are not, in the sense that matters, self-governing. You’re a dependent. You can be the object of decisions, but not fully their author.

Real freedom, as I see it, is not the absence of all rules but the absence of a master – the absence of an arbitrary will that can dispose of you without your consent. Bodily autonomy is that principle at its most literal. The marital rape exemption was, precisely, the law naming a master over a woman’s body. Coverture was the law suspending her separate self. To roll authority over the body back toward the state, or back toward the household, is simply to reintroduce the master.

So the claim that women’s bodily autonomy is central to democracy is not a slogan. It’s closer to a definition. A political system that grants half its people full sovereignty over their own bodies and denies it to the other half is not a complete democracy with a single flaw. It’s a partial democracy running, underneath, on an older model – the household model, in which some people are citizens and others are subjects. You cannot be a citizen of a republic and a subject in your own skin.

The lines that cross through women

What, then, do we do, and do differently?

Begin by noticing that the lines of power in this society all cross through women. The control of women’s bodies has never fallen evenly. The married white woman of the Roe paradigm and the poor, Black, Native, disabled, incarcerated, or immigrant woman have stood in very different relationships to this history – one more likely to be denied an abortion, another more likely to be sterilized without meaningful consent, and both denied the authority to decide. A defense of bodily autonomy that protects only the most protected woman, and treats abortion access as a single isolated issue, will miss the actual structure of the attack.

The better frame already exists. Black feminist organizers named it decades ago: reproductive justice – the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise one’s children in safe and dignified conditions. That frame is stronger than “choice” because it follows the lines of power all the way down. It defends the whole structure – contraception, abortion, IVF, the right not to be sterilized, the right to a safe pregnancy and to parent – and it centers the women on whom the cost has always fallen hardest.

Now notice a second set of lines. Women are not only where the lines of power converge; they are where the lines of community run. Across most of human society, women carry disproportionate weight in the work that knits people together – caregiving, kinship, congregations, neighborhoods, mutual aid. That is exactly why authoritarian movements find the control of women so strategically rich: capture the nodes and you weaken the whole web. But it cuts the other way too. Because women are distributed through every community, a defense organized around them is not confined to courtrooms and ballots. It runs through the entire distributed fabric of ordinary life, through the networks, the practical solidarity, and the everyday refusal to comply. That isn’t a weaker kind of power than the concentrated kind. Against concentrated power, it’s actually the answer.

Which means the work is not women defending women while everyone else looks on. The household model that subordinates women does not produce free men; it produces subjects with one person to lord over. Self-government is indivisible. A man who would rather live in a republic than in a hierarchy of small monarchies has a direct, personal stake in women’s bodily autonomy because the principle at issue, that a person is sovereign over themselves and cannot be ruled by an arbitrary will, is the same principle that makes him a citizen.

So: defend the whole structure, not only the most comfortable part of it. Make the argument as a democratic argument, in mixed company, rather than as an interest-group claim. And build, alongside the defense, the affirmative thing – a country that actually treats every person, without exception, as sovereign in their own body. That country has never yet existed. It’s worth saying plainly that this is not a fight to get back to 2021, or to 1973. It is a fight to finish something we’ve only ever partly begun.

Self-government begins with the self. A democracy that won’t protect the self hasn’t yet earned the name.