I reject the US abortion ruling. I vow to defend the sovereignty of women’s bodies | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

After the supreme court declared war on us a week ago, at first I wanted to weep and howl. But then I wrote - and then I revolted

How did you feel when it happened? When they came to take away the rights to our bodily autonomy? When they said 12-year-old girls would be forced to carry to full-term, and then go through excruciating labour to deliver, babies with the faces of their rapists. When they legalised paying bounty hunters to pursue us for living in our own flesh and blood and wombs. When they believed that those of us who had given our lives to be free, to walk our own paths and dream our most vital dreams, would easily and quietly surrender to their twisted cage, unable to see they were connected to other cages inside cages, each one taking more of our air and our light. I heard a shrieking, high-pitched laugh-scream coming out of my frothing, ancient mouth, my white hair blazing with fury. I wanted to weep and howl, and I did, for the depth of their hatred for me, for women, for Black women and brown women and Indigenous women and Asian women and young victims of incest and poor women and trans men and non-binary birthers of babies and all the rest of us trying to get free.

So I wrote. I wrote and I wrote. I wrote piece after piece trying to say something smart. Something that hadn't been said. Something so revelatory and earth shattering it would unlock the story, solve the crime, catalyse the opening. Finding the words that would undo this nightmare. That would save the young women and people who would die trying not to give birth and the ones who would be forever emotionally, economically, spiritually tortured and destroyed by having babies they never wanted, which would rob them of their dreams and destinies.

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls