What the Constitution Means to Me

As Heidi explains, in 1965, William O. Douglas used his penumbra metaphor to reframe the ambiguous 9th amendment in defense of legalizing birth control, finding no other avenue to discuss women’s bodies. Heidi continues, “Because our bodies, our bodies, had been left out of this Constitution from the beginning!” (33). Considering the amount of effort and lawmaking that has gone into legislating women’s bodies, particularly where reproductive health is concerned, this omission demonstrates that the framers truly created the document for men, suggesting that they deemed women and their bodies to be uninteresting, insignificant, or an unlikely site for political debate. There were also no women in the room to remind the men of the Constitutional Convention that they existed and required legal protection of their rights, too. Similarly, there wasn’t a woman present in the room as a Supreme Court justice until Sandra Day O’Conner was appointed in 1981. Out of a total of 116 Supreme Court judges since 1789, only six have been women, meaning the embodied experience of womanhood and moving through society as a woman has been absent from the decision-making process about human rights and women’s health for the bulk of US history. At the end of Part I, Heidi plays a clip of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who asserts that there will be enough women serving on the Supreme Court, “When there are nine” (58). Even if one counts female justices cumulatively rather than simultaneously, nine is still far away.

In Heidi’s life and the lives of the women in her family, the female body has been tried constantly as a political battleground. Each generation prior to Heidi has had little to no access to birth control, and abortion wasn’t established as a legal right until 1973, leading her great-great-grandmother to have 16 children by age 36 and her grandmother to have six children with an abusive man. They had little agency in bearing children, and their husbands were also allowed by law, explicitly or implicitly, to batter their wives. Heidi’s great-great-grandmother Theresa’s official cause of death at age 36 was melancholia, which Heidi translates as chemical depression, which runs throughout her family. Thus, Theresa’s untimely death is blamed on her own body with no recorded questioning or consideration of why she was so melancholy. At 15, when Heidi and her friend began taking birth control, Heidi didn’t understand the significance of having such free access. Still, even with legalized access to birth control and abortion, Heidi feels a fundamental ambient fear of making men angry, describing to the audience how, as a college student, she had sex with a man out of a strange sense of politeness, even though she had and still has no rational fear of this particular man. Throughout world history, as the Legionnaire reads from Heidi’s cue cards, the abuse of women by men has been codified into law, suggesting a widespread desire among men to inflict violence upon women, and the changes to those laws don’t stop violent men or force the police to care and intervene.

The rights to abortion and birth control were never enshrined in the Constitution. They were only interpretations that became precedents, which can be easily reversed by a right-leaning Supreme Court, as evidenced by the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, removing the 50-year-old precedent that protected abortion rights at the federal level. This occurred after the play was written and published, and the playwright would no doubt expect a newer production to incorporate such a monumental blow to women’s rights and bodily autonomy. Without the permanence of an amendment, the interpretation of the 14th amendment as protection of abortion rights was tenuous, held together by the mutual agreement of enough Supreme Court justices—until it wasn’t. The failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would guarantee equal protection under the law as a constitutional right, including bodily autonomy for women, suggests that there are too many politicians who aren’t interested in codifying equality. Women are forced to continually ask for rights and protection, perpetuating the feelings of underlying fear that urged Heidi to have sex to be polite, and inciting her mother’s reflexive panic response to the idea of Heidi being pregnant. When Heidi needed an abortion, she discovered first-hand how failing to directly and overtly protect abortion as a constitutional right allowed conservative states to skirt the ambiguous parameters of constitutional legalities to make abortion legal but increasingly difficult to get. Heidi was fortunate to have the means to travel for an abortion, but for every case like hers, there are many that don’t end so well. Pregnancy has long been weaponized as a way to force women’s bodies into domesticity, restricting their ability to move and hold power in the world.