NARAL Pro-Choice America asked me to forward my friends a message starting, “I’m sending you an email because I want you to help protect privacy and a woman’s right to choose.”

NOW’s missive reminded me that the organization had fought Justices Samuel Alito’s and John Roberts’ confirmations. It spent a precious sentence on the attempted filibuster and pointed out that Roberts lied about his commitment to the principle of stare decisis, or respect for precedent.

From Planned Parenthood came: “We are outraged by this dangerous intrusion into the private relationships between a woman and her doctor. It is simply unconscionable for politicians to masquerade as doctors, dictating what is ‘best’ for women’s health and safety, as though they know more about medicine than skilled health-care professionals.”

Privacy? Filibuster? Skilled health-care professionals?

Are these words to mobilize the rage of women as the state seizes control of our bodies?

Health-care professionals have, of course, played a starring role in the fight over “partial-birth abortion.” On the first round of appeals, doctors helped persuade three lower courts and, seven years ago, the Supreme Court itself to overturn the ban. Not only did the statute neglect to make an exception to safeguard the pregnant woman’s health, but the term “partial-birth abortion” was so vague as to include, according to Dr. Leroy Carhart (of the original Nebraska challenge), as many as 21 methods of terminating pregnancies as early as 12 weeks. Doctors could never be sure whether they were breaking the law.

This time, weighing the opinion of such “prominent medical organizations” as the Christian Medical and Dental Associations against those of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association, the majority concluded that a health exception was not needed, because there is widespread “medical uncertainty” over whether the banned procedure, intact dilation and extraction, is ever “truly necessary.”

This alleged uncertainty is about as significant among physicians as the doubts about evolution or global warming are among biologists or climatologists.

For the Roberts court — like the Bush administration that installed it and the Rehnquist court that installed the Bush Administration — politics trumped fact. Still, it was politics dressed up as fact, and disdain for science dressed up as respect. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy even expressed faith that “the medical profession” would “find different and less shocking methods to abort the fetus in the second trimester, thereby accommodating legislative demand.”

Apparently physicians’ first duty is not to “do no harm” to the patient, but to do no harm to the delicate sensitivities of Congress.

It’s no surprise that the abortion debate has circled again and again around doctors’ opinions and prerogatives. The medical profession — which a century ago seized control of contraception and childbirth from midwives and other female lay practitioners — was instrumental in outlawing abortion. But doctors were also central to bringing it back. Physicians gave some of the most compelling testimony in Roe v. Wade, speaking of women rushed to their hospitals bleeding from back-alley abortions — and of the 5000 a year who didn’t make it. Some of these doctors understood that their profession was implicated in those deaths, since the only way a woman could obtain a “therapeutic” abortion was to submit to interrogation by a hospital board and prove that pregnancy or childbirth would endanger her physical or mental health. Authorization often hinged on a bizarre combination of her fitness to plead rationally and her unfitness to mother — and on the whims of the men on the board.

This system was undone by Roe v. Wade, but the ruling did not eliminate medical paternalism in the law. The Court recognized a right of privacy, “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The forceful and moving opinion, written by Harry Blackmun, enumerated many possible harms resulting from having a child, including a “distressful life and future.” But the justices also spoke for a compelling state interest in the regulation of medical abortion. The woman’s right of privacy, therefore, would be exercised “in consultation” with “her responsible physician.”

In Carhart, Kennedy employs the latest anti-choice tactic: He twists the feminist rhetoric of harm to argue that abortion, not maternity, leads to a distressful life or future. He recasts Roe’s doctor-patient collaboration as a relationship between trickster and victim and depicts the ordinary preoperative practice of withholding the gruesome details of the impending procedure as a subterfuge practiced on vulnerable, naive women. Seen this way, the ban on a particularly gory procedure, of the particulars of which few patients are informed, does not deny women rights — it saves them untold pain. The “partial birth abortion” ban, in other words, is good for women, or, as he calls us, “mothers.”

“The Act also recognizes that respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in a mother’s love for her child,” Kennedy writes. “It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming human form.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing the dissent, shoots back in fury. Citing cases that she successfully argued and in which, as Justice, she wrote the majority opinion, she zeroes in on the sexism inherent in Kennedy’s use of the word mother and reiterates the real meaning of Roe and the subsequent 30 years of jurisprudence on abortion.

“‘There was a time, not so long ago,’ when women were ‘regarded as the center of home and family life, with attendant special responsibilities that precluded full and independent legal status under the Constitution,’” she writes. “Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right ‘to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.’ Their ability to realize their full potential . . . is intimately connected to ‘their ability to control their reproductive lives.’”

Make no mistake, Ginsberg declares. The defense of abortion rights is not about “some generalized notion of privacy.” At stake is “a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

Pro-choice Constitutional scholars have long lamented that Roe was decided on this flimsy principle of privacy. Some also regret that the court extrapolated that right mainly from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of personal liberty and equal protection under law. To many radical feminists, including me, the decriminalization of abortion went far beyond equal protection, even beyond its protection from undue state restriction on life and liberty. To us, it was an act more akin to what the Thirteenth Amendment did: abolish slavery and involuntary servitude. In our first action in 1979, my feminist guerrilla theater group No More Nice Girls dressed in black, stuffed pillows under our gowns to appear pregnant, and wrapped ourselves in chains. Our banner read: “Forced Pregnancy = Slavery.”

Carhart is not just about a particular medical procedure. It is not about doctors’ ability to practice medicine — even to safeguard women’s health — unrestrained by know-nothing statutes. It is a threat not just to Constitutional rights but to the most fundamental of human rights: Each person owns her own body.

This ruling is the latest salvo by a state that imprisons two million of its people, indefinitely detains and tortures a vaguely defined “enemy,” and wastes hundreds of Iraqi lives a day.

It strengthens the terrifying hold of an administration — and its court — on the bodies of others. Or, should I say, of Others: “aliens,” Muslims, poor people of color, and women.

In the coming fight for abortion, women must claim not just the autonomy of doctors or patients, but the liberty of women. We must defend not just our health but our lives. Jurists are confined to building upon precedent. Radicals envision the future. This time, we must demand not privacy but freedom.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Ellen was among the great radical intellectual writers and activists of her generation, the author of scores of seminal essays and the founder of several radical feminist groups. She died of cancer two weeks ago, at 64.

The huge hole her death leaves in the world makes me know what that peering gaze was: clairvoyance. Not the prognosticating kind, though she was reliably years ahead of most everyone’s thinking. I mean, literally clear-seeing. Whatever she turned her attention to — from Bob Dylan to terrorism, Deep Throat to the Democratic Party, marriage to LSD — she illuminated anew. The first of her three essay collections was called, appropriately, Beginning to See the Light.

Ellen was seeking something she once called Reality — capital R. Reality was a combination of certain unchanging principles and the sped-up spectacle of real people, real life, realpolitik. At her memorial, in New York on November 12, her husband, the sociologist and labor activist Stanley Aronowitz, called her “a spontaneous philosopher.” But abstraction held little interest for her. “She never read the fancy stuff,” Stanley continued. “She’d say to me, ‘In 25 words or less, tell me what Walter Benjamin was about.’” Ellen was the best kind of journalist: She scoped the scene, then figured out what was happening. Each of her pieces is witty and aphoristic, thorny to grapple with, silky to read.

Before any other intellectual either left or right, Ellen took popular culture seriously; she was The New Yorker’s first rock critic. But that seriousness came from joy. She adored mysteries, tabloids and, most of all, rock ’n’ roll. She never looked more blissful than when she was dancing. She was not embarrassed to use the word ecstasy.

For Ellen, pleasure and happiness were basic human rights, the alpha and omega of politics. “The power of the ecstatic moment — this is what freedom is like, this is what love could be, this is what happens when the boundaries are gone — is precisely the power to reimagine the world,” she wrote, “to reclaim a human identity that’s neither victim nor oppressor.” But pleasure could not flourish without freedom, so political struggle could not end with economic security or even justice. “Freedom was her criterion,” said Stanley. “You could talk to her about health care in Cuba, and she’d say, ‘That’s nice, people have health care in Cuba. But are they free?”

This unwavering championship of freedom — and of culture, sex and unconscious emotion as central to politics — often put Ellen at the margins of the movements she felt closest to. She critiqued authoritarianism and Puritanism wherever she found them. Yes, in the religious right, but also in left anti-consumerism and feminist campaigns to outlaw pornography. And while she deplored Israel’s Palestinian policies, she also decried what she saw as left-wing anti-semitism.

Ellen could be cranky with her comrades, no question. But dissatisfaction didn’t lead to disaffection. “The struggle for freedom, pleasure, transcendence is not just an individual matter,” she wrote. “The social system that . . . as far as possible channels our desires, is antagonistic to that struggle; to change this requires collective effort.”

In 1969, with Shulamith Firestone, Ellen founded the radical feminist group Redstockings; in 1978, with a dozen New York women (including me), the pro-abortion-rights street-theater group No More Nice Girls. At her death, she was directing the cultural-reporting program that she had founded in 1995 in the journalism department at New York University. When the graduate students went on strike, Ellen, a fierce unionist, taught her classes off campus.

Ellen called herself a democratic socialist; she proudly called herself a feminist. But at heart, she was a utopian. “For most of my politically conscious life, the idea of social transformation has been the great taboo of American politics,” she wrote in a review of Russell Jacoby’s Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. “From the smug 1950s to the post-Reagan era, in which a bloodied and cowed left has come to regard a kinder, gentler capitalism as its highest aspiration, this anti-utopian trend has been interrupted only by the brief but intense flare-up of visionary politics known as ‘the ’60s.’ Yet that short-lived, anomalous upheaval has had a more profound effect on my thinking about the possibilities of politics than the following three decades of reaction. The reason is not . . . that I am stuck in a time warp, nursing a romantic attachment to my youth, and so determined to idealize a period that admittedly had its politically dicey moments. Rather, as I see it, the enduring interest of this piece of history lies precisely in its spectacular departure from the norm. It couldn’t happen, according to the reigning intellectual currents of the ’50s, but it did.”

Ellen’s quest for “it” — the utopian moment, the truly radical change — was a meandering journey. “She was always seeking the burning tip, the place where political life is alive with desire,” wrote her dear friend and comrade Ann Snitow, “and that place was always changing.” So she kept retracing her steps, scouting new routes to the same goals, or new goals.

A year before her death, at a discussion group in New York, Ellen shocked everyone in the room, myself included, by suggesting that feminist abortion politics had run its course. Once, it was the focal point — that “burning tip” — of a demand for sexual freedom. But liberals had turned liberation into “choice.” The only life-and-death passion left on the subject was on the other side. Maybe we should move our freedom fighting somewhere else, she ventured. She waited until the gasps had died down, and then, always the pragmatist, suggested: How about international politics?

As far and wide as Ellen’s gaze turned, it also stayed close to her own desires and demons. In 1976, the long, strange trip took her to Israel, where, to the alarm of his secular family, her brother had joined an Orthodox Jewish sect (he is now a rabbi). She spent a month talking to Michael and his rabbi, and hanging around with the women in his community. Reality and happiness were not just her personal grails, she discovered; they were at the top rung of Jewish law. She found herself reconsidering everything: her life of friends and movies, sex and work, even her beloved freedom. “What was the point of sitting home scratching symbols on paper, adding my babblings to a world already overloaded with information?” she mused in Next Year in Jerusalem. Why not follow her brother’s path?

Re-reading that piece last week, I already knew the end of the story. Ellen would return to New York and over the next three decades become a leading intellectual and activist, a proud and loving mother, a loyal friend and comrade, and a generous mentor to many of America’s feistiest journalists.

Still, I felt a moment of retrospective terror. What if Ellen had become an Orthodox Jew, applying her sui generis mind and heart to the fight for Jewish women’s education, for changes inside the family and synagogue? Judaism would no doubt be richer for it. But the rest of the world — the world where I live — would have been infinitely the poorer.

Where would we have been without Ellen Willis? Where will we be now?

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.