DENVER — Megan Rapinoe would have liked to talk about soccer on Friday. But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade a few hours before the U.S. women’s soccer team went off to practice, that became impossible.
So, as Rapinoe has done so many times in her 16-year national team career, she sat in front of a microphone to share her views on something away from the field.
“How sad a day this is for me personally, for my teammates, for just all of the people out there who this is going to affect,” Rapinoe said, opening a 10-minute soliloquy on a Zoom call with media from across the nation.
“Pro-choice means that you get to choose,” she said. “Pro-choice allows other people to be pro-life if that is what works for them, or that is what their beliefs are, or if that is where they’re at in their life. Pro-life doesn’t allow anybody to make a choice.”
Rapinoe is very public about her sexual orientation, and is engaged to WNBA star Sue Bird. They both speak often on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community, and as usual, Rapinoe did not hold back on Friday.
“Obviously, you can understand from an individual perspective how difficult it is to live in a country where you have a constant, unrelenting violent tide against you, an onslaught as a woman,” Rapinoe said. “And it would be as a gay person, and as a non-binary person, as a trans person. Whoever this is going to affect because it affects a lot more than just women or cis [gendered] women. It really does affect us all.”
She further said: “We know that this will disproportionately affect poor women, Black women, brown women, immigrants, women in abusive relationships, women who have been raped, women and girls who have been raped by family members. Who, you know what? Maybe just didn’t make the best choice. And that’s no reason to be forced to have a pregnancy.”
And she asserted, as pro-choice advocates have for decades, that “the lack of abortion does not stop people from having abortions — it stops people from having safe abortions.”
‘Wildly out of touch’
Rapinoe tied the Supreme Court’s decision to Thursday’s ruling loosening gun restrictions, and laws passed by Congress and state houses across the country.
“I think the cruelty is the point, because this is not pro-life by any means,” she said. “The right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness and liberty is being assaulted in this instance, and it’s just incredibly disheartening. There are an infinite amount of reasons why a woman chooses to do what she does with her body, or what they do with their body — none of which are anybody else’s business.”
And she called out the Supreme Court as directly as she did then-president Donald Trump during the 2019 women’s World Cup.
“Frankly, a majority-male court making decisions about my body or any other woman’s body is completely misguided and wildly out of touch with the desires of the country, the will of the country and the will of the people, and I think [they] are acting incredibly irresponsibly, and inappropriately,” she said.
“Pro-choice means that we all get to decide what is best for us, because that is our right as a human being in this country — and frankly, I believe in the world,” she continued. “And pro-life does not allow anything other than one very strict religious view, frankly, and belief system to be forced upon everyone else.”
As she made her remarks and took questions, Rapinoe checked her personal privilege repeatedly.
“I am a cisgendered, rich, white woman that lives in two of the most progressive cities in the world, with the protection of not only myself and my resources, but, you know, this resource and this protection, as are all of my teammates,” she said, pointing to a U.S. team logo on her jacket. “I will not be subjected to so much of the impact that this will have. But other people are not that lucky, and they will be affected immediately.”
She thanked the U.S. Soccer Federation for its support, and for allowing national team players to speak freely.
“Thus far, we’ve felt extremely supported by U.S. Soccer, by everyone here individually,” Rapinoe said, specifically noting U.S. women’s team general manager Kate Markgraf and longtime PR chief Aaron Heifetz. “This is not a political issue at all, this is a human rights issue. And I think the players, and U.S. Soccer, and everyone in this environment and back home in Chicago [where U.S. Soccer is headquartered], feel that same way and will support a group of women who rely on the autonomy of their body to do the thing that they love and to make this circus run.”
‘You’ve been silent to us’
She called on the public to take action, in some of her bluntest language of the day.
“I have zero faith that my rights will be upheld by the court,” she said. “I have faith in our country, and I have faith in people, and I have faith in the voters — and if you ever needed a [expletive] motivation to vote, to get involved, quite literally, people’s lives depend on it. Like, actual lives, we’re talking life and death. And also, you know, your life in terms of what does it mean to even be alive? If you can’t be yourself, full self, like what the [expletive] is the point?”
At the end, Rapinoe addressed the men in the room, figuratively in the country and literally on a Zoom that had a lot of them.
“You’ve been silent to us, as a whole,” she said. “Stand up, say something. This is your wife, this is your sister, this is your friend, this is your girlfriend, this is the mother of your children. This is all of us. And you are allowing a violent and consistent onslaught on the autonomy of women’s bodies, on women’s rights, on women’s minds, on our hearts, on our souls.”
If men had not held the most power in the United States for so long, Rapinoe said, “we would have none of these laws, we would have none of the inequality in terms of gender rights, and this onslaught on abortion rights. … We clearly cannot do this on our own with the composition of the power structure in our country. And frankly, that falls on you.”
