Michigan protests after ‘vagina’ reprimand

“Who could have thought a floor speech could end like this?”

Lisa Brown, a Democrat from the Michigan state legislature, admitted she was overwhelmed last night, as thousands of protesters gathered in front of the Capitol building to hear a play about vaginas.

Yes, that’s right. Playright Eve Ensler was also there for the performance of her groundbreaking work, The Vagina Monologues, which was staged after Brown got herself barred from the floor of the state house for making a reference to the V-word during a debate on abortion.

“These women stood up for our rights,” Ensler told the crowd. “The vaginas are here to stay.”

If all this sounds a little surreal, then, well, it is.

It all started last week when the Michigan house was debating sweeping Republican proposals to restrict abortion rights, that would close down many abortion providers and outlaw all terminations past 20 weeks.

Brown pointed out that her Jewish faith actually permitted abortion at any stage during a pregnancy if the woman’s life was in danger. And she went on: “I’m flattered, Mr Speaker, that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.”

The Republicans went into a tailspin, declaring that Brown had “violated the decorum” of the house, and describing her words as “vulgar” and “unnecessarily provocative”. One representative went even further, insisting the word vagina was so offensive he wouldn’t dream of using it in front of women or “mixed company”.

The repression of women, the denial that women are deserving of equal dignity and respect with men, rooted in revulsion at their bodies, is on the rise once again in American politics. Eve Ensler

Brown was swiftly barred from speaking in the house for the remainder of the session. A colleague, Barb Byrum, who referred to vasectomies during the debate, was barred too.

A spokesman for the Michigan speaker later insisted that the problem had not been the V-word after all, but the context. “No means no,” he suggested, was akin to a rape reference, which had “crossed the line”.

No matter. In the context of Michigan’s highly restrictive abortion proposals, and a host of measures hitting at women’s reproductive rights in states across America, which the Democrats have dubbed the Republicans’ “War on Women”, this was blue touch-paper stuff. All of a sudden supporters – and financial donations – began flooding in, defending Brown’s right to free speech.

Brown herself, in an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press, declared it was “not acceptable for male legislators to silence women and tell us that we can’t even speak about our own bodies.”

The word #vagina began trending on Twitter, with supporters suggesting that perhaps the Republicans might have felt more comfortable if Brown had used a euphemism to describe her “va-jay-jay”.

Others posted the word dozens of times on the home page of the Michigan Republican Party, while the American Civil Liberties Union posted this comment: “Vagina – can’t say it, don’t legislate it.”

And as Eve Ensler agreed to host Monday’s live reading of her play in Lansing, she warned that she saw it as part of a more worrying political trend: “The repression of women, the denial that women are deserving of equal dignity and respect with men, rooted in revulsion at their bodies, is on the rise once again in American politics.”

And this is the point. Those who have rallied to support Lisa Brown are not caught up in a local debate about semantics. They see all this as part of a much wider effort by social conservatives to roll back the clock on a huge range of legislation, including women’s reproductive rights: a back door route, if you like, to overturning the 1973 Roe v Wade law which legalised abortions in the United States, up to 24 weeks.

The Republicans might lack a majority on the US supreme court to overturn it outright, but they do control governorships and legislatures in a number of states, which have begun introducing restrictions of their own.

It is not just abortion: there have been moves to stop state funded health insurance from covering birth control pills, lifting bans on “abstinence only” sex education lessons in schools, and taking state funds away from the sexual and reproductive health provider, Planned Parenthood.

There is a danger, of course, that all this could backfire for the Republicans. It might be an issue which fires up the social conservatives, but it might not go down at all well with those crucial independent women voters who tend to decide the outcome of elections.

When the Republican primary race got bogged down in talk about birth control and abortion rights, it did not end pretty; while banning women for using an anatomically correct word to describe a body part seems at best, old fashioned, and at worse, downright undemocratic.

For this whole issue has sparked a debate, not just about women’s rights, but that fundamental American right allowing elected representatives to speak freely on behalf of their constituents. As the Women’s Lawyers Association of Michigan put it, as they came out to support Brown and Byrum on Monday night: “They were neither vulgar nor disrespectful. When the minority is silenced, justice cannot prevail and democracy suffers.”

Felicity Spector writes about US affairs for Channel 4 News