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It seems like every time I read the news, there’s another old white congressman introducing legislation to police women’s bodies. From limiting access to contraception to mandating transvaginal ultrasounds, every aspect of my health and reproductive rights is being determined by people who couldn’t know less about them. This needs to change, and it needs to change now. The only ones who should be regulating women’s bodies are the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
It seems obvious, right? There’s just no way that a fallible human mind can know exactly what is right for me and my uterus. It is WAY past time we took those decisions out of the hands of clueless, backward-thinking lawmakers, and fed them into a Xeon E5–powered supercomputer that can break 5,000 teraflops.
Look, it’s not complicated. If you’re an old white man, the next time you get some bright idea about denying insurance coverage for birth control, you just stop, think, and consult a rich data visualization from the Oak Ridge Computing Facility laying out a 50-year reproductive schema for every woman in America, and then leave my ovaries alone.
If your brain isn’t powerful enough to calculate the billionth digit of pi in 0.00034 seconds, can you really expect to make fully optimized choices for your body?
Anyone suggesting that the Atos Group’s Cartesius 2 should decide what reproductive health options women should have access to is completely missing the point. It is not even a top-50 supercomputer globally and is scarcely better than the Texas Legislature voting to defund Planned Parenthood. It’s time to get serious about change.
The same goes for my fellow women. If your brain isn’t powerful enough to calculate the billionth digit of pi in 0.00034 seconds, can you really expect to make fully optimized choices for your body? Let’s stop fooling ourselves about this, ladies. The stakes are just too high.
Even though it can sometimes feel more like 1950 than 2016 in this country, we must continue to fight to keep control of women’s bodies out of the hands of old men on Capitol Hill and into the vast server farms of Tianhe-2. I hope that when my daughter grows up, she will be free to follow the dictates of a 700-tebibyte supercomputer when it comes to what she can and can’t do with her body. That day can’t come soon enough.
