The Sovereignty of Flesh

For those unfamiliar with my work, or for those who have followed it in part, much of what I’ve done over the last decade has traced a single question: how power operates, conceals itself, and fractures. That inquiry has taken many forms: writing, performance, video, installation, protest. Sometimes serious, sometimes absurd, because power itself moves between those registers. My focus has often been on the intersections of sex, religion, and government, domains that appear distinct but in practice reinforce one another’s authority. This work is not abstract. Their convergence determines how we are taught to inhabit our bodies, which desires are permitted, and which forms of selfhood are suppressed. To me, understanding these relationships is essential, because they shape not only our social order, but our very perception of what it means to exist freely.

The history of power is, in many ways, the history of competing claims over the body. Who may govern the body, discipline it, sanctify it, or command its reproduction has long been a central political question. Those claims rarely appear in isolation. They move across domains often treated as separate: sex, religion, and government, yet in practice these systems repeatedly reinforce one another’s authority. Their convergence is not abstract. It determines how we are taught to inhabit our bodies, which desires are permitted, and which forms of selfhood are suppressed. Understanding these relationships is essential because they shape not only social order, but the very conditions under which freedom can be imagined.

Abortion and the policing of reproduction remain central. They are the point at which ideology meets flesh and questions of power become material. The control of reproduction is not an isolated moral debate but a mechanism through which authority sustains itself. When the state, the church, or any institution claims possession over the body, it asserts the right to define the boundaries of selfhood. It is here that institutions test the reach of their authority over the most intimate terrain of human life.

Seen in this light, the conflict over abortion is not primarily about life. It is about jurisdiction: who holds the authority to decide what may occur within the borders of a living body. At stake is the most direct expression of human freedom, the right to determine what happens within one’s own flesh. Everything else, the theology, the legislation, the shame, has been engineered to keep the body under supervision.

The evidence is everywhere: it appears in medically unnecessary ultrasound-viewing laws designed to induce guilt, in parental consent policies that reclassify minors as wards of the state, in waiting periods that convert medical care into punishment. It existed long before these, in the medical experiments performed on enslaved Black women and in the birth control trials imposed on Puerto Rican women without consent. It exists in the surveillance of miscarriage, in the policing of pregnancy, in the prosecution of those who self-manage their care. These mechanisms are not about protecting life but about producing compliance. Every regulation, every procedural delay, every moral injunction serves the same purpose: to remind those with the capacity for reproduction that their bodies remain contested territory.

Abortion exposes the expectation that some bodies exist in service to the state. It rejects the demand to reproduce for nation, race, or faith. The insistence on compulsory birth is not moral but political, a form of population control masked as virtue. To refuse it is to interrupt a lineage of exploitation: the conscription of bodies into labor, purity, and patriotism. Abortion marks the boundary where power tests its reach, where the state, the church, and the patriarch converge to remind us that they still believe they own the map of our flesh. To end a pregnancy by choice is to redraw that map. When power is defied, it responds with punishment.

If abortion is called violence, the violence lies elsewhere. It is the denial of autonomy: the insistence that control over one’s own body can be bargained, restricted, or revoked. A society that restricts abortion does not fear death. It fears defiance. To end a pregnancy by choice is to refuse conscription, to puncture the mythology that the body exists for others. It is to reclaim pleasure, fertility, and the direction of one’s own life.

The criminalization of abortion is presented as a defense of life, yet the moral outrage it invokes is strikingly selective. The same order that sanctifies war, profit, and incarceration suddenly claims moral agony over a medical procedure that ends potential life in order to protect actual life. Let’s be clear: their horror is not about embryos but about empire. It is about the loss of dominion when a person with a uterus acts as a free agent, untethered from the biological leash designed to keep them compliant.

Abortion exposes how fragile the control of those in power has always been. It reminds them that creation can also mean refusal. That the womb, so fetishized as a site of purity and production, can also be the site of revolution. To choose abortion is not to destroy life but to assert it, to claim a boundary power cannot overrule.

We are taught to carry shame before we carry knowledge. From the first blood, the body is marked as dangerous, sexualized, unpredictable, in need of containment. The story told about those who can reproduce is a parable of control: how to keep us obedient while pretending we are sacred. We are told that parenthood is salvation, that endurance is virtue, that pain is our inheritance. But abortion interrupts that script. It says: I will not bear what I do not choose. It is the moment the narrative slips from their grasp, the instant the myth of inevitable sacrifice dissolves.

The policing of abortion functions as the prototype for broader forms of bodily governance. It is where the machinery of surveillance and morality converges, regulating who we sleep with, how we express gender, and what families are allowed to exist. Control the womb and you control the species. Control reproduction and you begin to shape the boundaries of social imagination itself. Every anti-abortion law is therefore a confession: they do not trust us to be free.

To those who call abortion a tragedy, I ask what, exactly, they mourn. Is it the loss of potential, or the disruption of a belief that every life is sacred? The boundary between potential life and life itself has never been settled. Across history, theology, law, and medicine have each drawn that line differently, each claiming authority over when life begins. The real question, then, is not simply where life begins, but who has the authority to impose that answer on another person’s body.

The idea that all life holds equal value dissolves under scrutiny. If every life is sacred, why is so little done to sustain it once it exists, whether in war, in poverty, in prisons, or in the steady neglect of those already born? Even if one were to grant the premise that all life is sacred, the selective intensity with which reproductive bodies are regulated reveals that something more than moral consistency is at work. The notion of sanctity has become a shield for authority, a way to disguise control as compassion. There is nothing tragic about asserting freedom. The tragedy lies in being compelled to reproduce for someone else’s idea of morality, nation, or god. The grief we carry is not for the potential lives we end, but for the actual lives they are willing to endanger to keep us obedient. Grief, when faced squarely, becomes action. Freedom is not granted. It is practiced.

I believe in direct action. In hands that pass pills and bodies that cross borders. In whisper networks that become movements. In the quiet defiance of those who help another access care when the law says they should not. In mutual aid in its truest form, where help is not charity but continuity, networks of care that grow stronger across generations and borders, adapting to risk and bound by responsibility rather than law. This is what freedom looks like when the state and its institutions abandon it, people creating it themselves again and again through risk and tenderness. Abortion is not a symbol of despair but of endurance. It is proof that self-determination is a muscle that must be used or it will atrophy.

I will not romanticize this. Autonomy is not gentle, and it is not romantic. It requires confrontation. It demands recognition of the body as a political site, as terrain both sacred and violated, as the only property we are born owning and the first thing to be seized. To defend abortion is to defend the body itself, not as an object or a moral theater, but as a sovereign nation with its own borders, language, and laws. Autonomy requires action, and sometimes, it requires risk.

They will tell us to be grateful for what we are given: for legality bounded by weeks or zip codes, for permissions signed by parents or partners. They will call this freedom. It is not. It is bureaucracy performing morality, control disguised as care. The expectation that we should applaud incremental reforms and liberal ballot measures that trade autonomy for political convenience would be laughable if it weren’t so violent. Even Roe v. Wade, heralded as liberation, was built on the premise that the state could decide when autonomy begins and ends. That was never freedom. It was conditional permission, and conditional permission is another form of control. We do not accept partial rights or conditional mercy. We refuse to perform gratitude for access that was ours to begin with. The body is not a compromise. It is not a negotiation. It is a site of decision, of agency, of sovereignty that requires no consent but our own.

We are not asking for understanding. We are declaring independence. The right to decide what happens within one’s own body is not a favor bestowed; it is a birthright reclaimed. Abortion matters to me because it is the line that cannot be crossed, the last frontier of the self. To defend that line is to defend every other freedom that depends on bodily autonomy: the freedom to move, to express, to transition, to love, to exist without surveillance or sanction. When we surrender that line, we surrender everything: our bodies, our pleasure, our futures.