Bokeh, Inc. Statement on Leaked SCOTUS Opinion on Abortion Rights

We, at Bokeh, are alarmed by the leaked Supreme Court of the United States opinion on women’s reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This is our statement.

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THERE CAN BE NO CREATIVITY WITH COERCION...

Pressure: yes. There are few tools as effective at getting your creative juices flowing as a good, unyielding deadline. Constraints: certainly. An empty canvas with no rules, no guidelines, and no direction to help initiate inspiration can actually be intimidating if not downright overwhelming for a creative. But coercion: NO. No masterwork of art, song or sonnet, line in literature, or scientific breakthrough is conceived with a gun to your head.

So, we, at Bokeh, want to be clear and unequivocal:

We believe this leaked decision is egregiously wrong, anti-American, anti-democratic, inherently misogynistic, and a blatant attack on human dignity and ingenuity.

Justice Samuel Alito's prose is as malicious and vindictive as its logic. Its argument, alongside the purely ideological premise it's grounded on, is embarrassingly simplistic in thought and absent in reason.

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NEARLY TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO...

The founding fathers of this nation declared to the world - and in so doing codified into the collective consciousness of all Americans - a sacred and undeniable truth: there exists a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, we tend to understand this right as inherent and inalienable to all mankind.

What claim can we make to "life"

• In a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world?
• In a country that fails to provide equal and equitable access to affordable quality healthcare to its citizens?
• In a country that politicizes the availability and use of birth control and contraceptives?

What claim can we make to "liberty"

• In a country that dictates the private health outcomes made between doctors, patients, and their families?
• In a country that prioritizes the bodily autonomy of one biological sex over another?
• In a country that places greater value on the religious doctrine of some sects over others?
• In a country that legally requires pre-mortem consent to harvest life-saving organs despite the huge backlog of patients desperately waiting for a donor i.e. in a country that grants more bodily autonomy to a corpse than a living person?
• In a country with no comprehensive standard for sex education to ensure that American children have the tools to make safe, informed decisions?
• In a country where victims of rape or incest are forced to carry the abuser’s child to term?
• In a country that allows an unelected body of judges or the ideological whims of a legislature to cosplay as the Almighty and determine the point at which human life starts??

Government is not God and has no right pretending to be.

What claim can we make to the “pursuit of happiness”

• In a country that lacks universal childcare or paid family leave?
• In a country that bickers over social welfare spending and investments in public education?

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WHERE IS THE LINE?

The Constitution makes no mention of marriage let alone interracial or same-sex marriage. The Constitution makes no mention of desegregation. However, the Constitution DOES declare that Black Americans born into bondage were to be considered 60% of a whole person.

How are we to consider any person born biologically female “whole” if our government retains the right to regulate their uterus? What percentage of a person does that actually make them? How many parts of your body is the government allowed to legislate? Will they outlaw vasectomies next?

Likely not. That’s the privilege of being born biologically male.

Originalism is a nugatory judicicial interpretation of the Constitution in today's world. The sheer ability to "amend" the Constitution shows that this document was never intended to be interpreted as gospel.

This decision's originalist interpretation portends to be principled and its advocates pretend to be virtuous. Yet the vast majority of those concerned with “protecting life” abdicate from the responsibility of strengthening the public resources and building the social safety net required to raise it. In fact, more often than not, they do the opposite by gutting programs designed to help parents and children. Being Pro-life is easy and asinine. Anyone can hold up a sign and speak for a voiceless zygote before its vocal cords have even developed. It requires time and effort to actually listen to someone living outside the womb. It requires creativity to balance the nuance, confront the shades of grey, and find solutions that actually make a positive difference in people's lives. In short, this paltry attempt to portray virtue is little more than punishment veiled in patriarchal “morality.” It’s punishment for being poor, for living in a red state, for being a person of color, for not prescribing to dogma. It’s punishment for being a woman.

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WE, AT BOKEH, BELIEVE IN ROE.

We believe that freedom of family planning is critical. We believe that a women’s reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, health, and safety, are fundamental to their physical, mental, emotional, and financial well-being. We believe these rights are prerequisites to a woman's personal and professional fulfillment which include the pursuit of their creative passions, all of which have a direct effect on performance in the workplace.

Should a corporation have a political opinion? In this case, we believe so. We believe we have no choice. Our creativity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Our employees and partners are Americans spread across this country, in red states and blue states. Should their reproductive rights be our burden? Not at all. Small businesses, private companies, and public corporations should not need to patch the holes in our social safety net. We should be concerned with profit and efficiency, not social equity. That said, we won’t run from this challenge, and we won’t remain silent.

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STAND UP!

The government has failed us. ALL OF US. It has failed business. It has failed the middle class. It has failed the working class. It has failed Millennials and Gen Zers who have only known a post-Roe world. It has failed BIPOC communities, and it has failed women. But there is a way out. It’s through our collective creativity.

Solutions are not found in the ability to go back to the world that was in 1776 or 1973. Instead, they are found in our ability to interpret the world as it is right now and imagine the world as it should be.

This is a competency that we, as an organization, are well familiar with. It’s one we strive to cultivate in ourselves and the people we hire. Let’s use this moment as a catalyst to create a groundswell, a movement, a change because we have no choice.

These rights are too important.