[MAINSTREAM ABORTION RIGHTS RHETORIC NEEDS TO CHANGE] - let's talk about the human rights abuses committed by anti-choicers & the morality of abortion bans
Current mainstream abortion rights rhetoric involves talking points such as our futures, our finances, and our health. While these are important talking points, there are so many more human rights abuses that are committed by the anti-choice movement that go unspoken in the mainstream.
Abortion rights and the right to bodily autonomy needs to expand beyond just results-oriented rhetoric. It needs to call out these human rights abuses. It needs to call out abortion bans for what they really are - reproductive enslavement. And it needs to call out prolifers for what they really are - the reproductive equivalent of rapists ("she was asking for it because she knew the risks when she had sex.") No longer should we simply be talking about the morality of abortion. In fact, we should stop talking about it all together.
If we are "baby murderers," then they are rape advocates and reproductive enslavers. We need to talk about the morality of abortion bans. And our rhetoric needs to change.
aka Reproductive Enslavement, Gestational Enslavement, Involuntary Reproductive Servitude, or Involuntary Gestational Servitude.
Abortion bans are a form of enslavement and violate anti-slavery laws and the 13th Amendment. When someone is denied the right to end their pregnancy, they have no legal choices left. They are faced with the inevitable outcome of continuing the pregnancy. The pregnancy may end naturally, but this is not something that the person can choose. And for the majority of people, it will inevitable end with them giving birth. And they will not have chosen this.
An anti-choice rebuttal to this might be to compare abortion to slavery. That we once let slavery be legal even though it was wrong and so too will it be with abortion. That abortion denies the personhood of the zef in the same way that POC were denied personhood.
To make this argument is to ignore that forced impregnation, pregnancy and birth were the backbone of the slave trade. Chattel slavery did not exist without forced pregnancy and birth. It could not exist without the exploitation of the biological processes of the pregnant person's human body as well as the exploitation of the resultant child. And one cannot ignore the connection between the anti-abortion businesses and the adoption businesses that wreak of legal human trafficking.
Abortion bans are, in fact, what denies people their personhood. They take a fetocentric view here and completely ignore the reality of what they are doing to pregnant people. The idea that they would align themselves with abolitionists while literally condoning slavery, is laughable and highlights either a potential issue with logical consistency or an attempt to obscure their dehumanization of pregnant people.
Another rebuttal to this might be: "we aren't forcing anyone to become pregnant." And while this may be correct, they are absolutely forcing someone to remain pregnant. Preventing someone from withdrawing consent, is force. We have options available to us to end our pregnancies. Blocking access to them forces someone to remain pregnant. The dodge of accepting that shows that they do not find it ethical to be associated with the idea of forcing continued pregnancy. I have no problem saying that not letting people in need of an organ donation forcibly take other people's organs against their will, forces that person to remain sick and inevitably die. This is not ethically problematic to me.
Denying that women are being treated as less than human while taking away their basic human rights is not something that aligns with the view of them being human. Secondly, if pregnant people are, in fact, of equal concern, then their concern for the zef should be accompanied by equal concern for the harm the pregnant person faces. And at the very least, this would include admitting that they are being harmed by pregnancy and enslaved through state abortion bans. To selectively deny the grievous bodily harm that is done to one but not the other, especially when forced, is a form of subjugating one of them. Their pain and the harm they endure isn't even acknowledged. To marginalize a person's suffering or deny their harm altogether is egregious behavior not synonymous with a view of equality. Either they find it unethical to be associated with that concept or they logically cannot follow it. Both show further fetocentric thinking and further dehumanize pregnant people. And neither point to a competent person who should be making decisions about the intimate body parts, health, and well being of others.
“If you’re drafted into the army, the other situation in which the state seizes control of your body, at least you get three meals a day, clothing, and a place to sleep,” she said. “So, if you’re going to do that to women, pay up.” FORCING WOMEN TO HAVE CHILDREN THEY CAN’T AFFORD IS A FORM OF SLAVERY
Additional relevant reading:Nine months a slave: when pregnancy is involuntary servitude to a foetusThe Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans - how midwifery was largely heldAbortion Is Not Like Slavery, so Stop Comparing the Two - how abortion was used by enslaved people as a form of resistance to their slavery
Abortion bans are a form of reproductive coercion in that they are designed to give the government the right to control the reproductive outcomes of pregnant people. Anti-choice states that this outcome is preventing fetal death, but this goes hand in hand with inevitable birth. When someone is denied the right to end their pregnancy, they have no legal choices left. They are inevitably faced with continuing the pregnancy. The pregnancy may end naturally, but this is not something that the person can choose. And for the majority of people, it will inevitable end with them giving birth. They will not have chosen this. Thus, it is not only a form of enslavement, it is someone else controlling the outcome of your reproduction.
Anti-choice will try to obfuscate the fact that they are taking choices away. They will say you have the choice to use birth control, not have sex, tie your tubes, or give the baby up for adoption. These choices, however, only work pre or post pregnancy. They do not apply to the situation of current pregnancy and instead provide a list that they approve of for us to use with our bodies.
Giving someone the ultimatum that they must continue to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term if they want to have sex
Putting a condition on what they must do with their body in regards to sex, that they don't approve of but you do
Giving unsolicited alternatives that you approve of such as adoption or abstinence which don't even have to do with pregnancy - the issue at hand
Dehumanizing them by shaming and ignoring their human desire to have sex by telling them things like "keep their legs closed"
All of these are coercion. Coercive tactics being used on someone's sexual body parts, activities, and behaviors. The suggestion of these choices are a direct response to their abortion bans. They are being used to ensure their outcome for your pregnancy ie. reproductive coercion. No one should have to compromise on their own bodily rights by taking hormones or undergoing surgery to appease others. The privacy of our own bedrooms, of our most intimate body parts, are pried open for the public to commentate on and involve themselves. This tactic is typical only seen in abusive relationships. It's a tactic of exploitation.
Further, tactics such as going after healthcare providers and those used in things like Texas SB 8, which deputizes anyone to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion (family, friends, front desk person), is a form of isolation and cutting off support. This is done in the name of protecting the pregnant person's best interest - they are so incompetent that they need someone to look out for them and make their decisions for them. And finally, they present themselves to the world as upstanding people. They hide the abuse and harm, gaslight people by saying they "love them both!" and give the public appearance that all is well.
Yet when people actually ask them for help, the rhetoric quickly switches to them not wanting their tax dollars to go towards the social support systems to do that. Instead, they once again offer a heinous alternative - give your baby up for adoption to an affluent, white, Christian couple. Oh, and by the way, go through an adoption agency that will profit off the adoption - cause somehow it isn't human trafficking. Or they will open up a "Maternity Ranch" with adherence to their approved religiously motivated involvement, leading to further coercion.
These tactics accompany their state-mandated ultrasound laws, which are a, "quite simply, state-sponsored rape. Even the FBI recognized last year, as most states did long ago, that vaginal penetration without a woman’s consent is rape. " Mandatory Ultrasound Laws Violate Women’s Rights and Bodies
As a side note, I have seen the tactic used where they will state that it isn't a reproductive right because reproduction has already occurred. This, however, once again, takes a fetocentric stance of centering the zef on the topic of the pregnant person's rights, and overlooks the fact that a person's reproductive organs are still playing a role. The uterus is a part of the reproductive tract and is providing a biological function in servitude to the zef. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest that their reproductive rights are no longer in play. And this framing suggests incompetency of pregnant people by suggesting they don't actually understand what pregnancy is. It also belittles pregnancy - suggesting that it doesn't even deserve a seat at the table on the topic. In doing so these tactics dehumanize the pregnant person.
This topic is constantly centered around the morality of abortion. And anti-choicers are forever taking a fetocentric stance. But the topic we need to be concerning ourselves with is the morality of, not abortion, but abortion bans.
Let's take consent, for example. Anti-choicers constantly push that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. A few of them will agree that pregnancy is a non-consensual biological process. (They typically mean this to be that one doesn't need consent to gestate, though. Or that we somehow need the zef's consent to have an abortion.)
But we aren't talking about if consent to the activity of sex with person A is consent to the act of implantation from "person" B. We are talking about the consent between the party that is the pregnant person and party that is anti-choicers and the State.
And for that, no, you do not have our consent to the use of genitals, reproductive tract, or body in order to enforce your abortion bans. And even if we did somehow give consent to pregnancy, preventing us from withdrawing consent, is still a form of force and is immoral. And if we were talking about sex, it would be considered rape.
This is the morality we need to be talking about. Just because something is legal, doesn't make it moral - of this, anti-choicers have made it quite clear they understand. So, just because it is legal to vote away our human rights, doesn't mean it is moral.
Additionally, abortion bans are a form of sex-based discrimination. The right to bodily autonomy is denied of people born with the female reproductive tract - an immutable characteristic - specifically because they are pregnant. In any other situation, if you were to target a law at a group of people with an immutable characteristic, that comes at their detriment, it would be called discrimination.
I think it is important to note here, that other laws established under the guise of protecting the lives of babies were just a means to police pregnancy and sexual impropriety. Pregnancy concealment laws, for example, were meant to prevent infanticide, but were only enforced on women who had babies out of wedlock and not on married women. It was just assumed that if you had a dead infant and were unmarried, you had to have murdered them to hide your crime of adultery.
Rape and Incest exceptions came about while reviewing then-current abortion bans. Abortion was originally only allowed under life threat reasonings, but it was later added in fetal abnormalities, and rape and incest. "The ALI could easily justify most of these exceptions as codifications of best medical practice, but rape and incest were different. There, the ALI suggested, the concern was not physical health but the “anxiety and shame” of people who were pregnant through no will of their own. Allowing abortions for people who had had consensual sex, ALI’s leaders suggested, would be “an invitation to promiscuity.” But the ALI’s framers had no such concerns about victims of incest and sexual assault." Whatever Happened to the Exceptions for Rape and Incest?
On the flip side of that, the injection of zefs into other areas of law, has been used to then bludgeon the rights of pregnant people. Most notably of which is the Unborn Victims of Crime act of 2004. This law, which carves out pregnant people as exceptions, only passed because it recognized, and extended, the rights of pregnant people. Now, it is used as an example by anti-choice people, as evidence of the law recognizing fetal personhood, in order to justify the removal of the rights of the very people whose rights being honored was required in order for it to be passed. If this isn't a perfect analogy to the anti-choice exploitation of pregnant people, I don't know what is.
Additional relevant reading:What To Expect When You’re No Longer Expecting: How States Use Concealment and Abuse of a Corpse Statutes Against Women
This topic may seem like a bit of an outlier from the other topics because the other topics have clearly been about the pregnant person and the relationship between the pregnant person, anti-choicers, and the State. Anti-choicers constantly want to evaluate the rights of the zef on the zef's own merits. So let's do that. Let's evaluate the zef on the merits of its own abilities. And apply it to a key component in the evaluation of if abortion violates the right to life of a zef: homeostasis.
Zef's are homeostatically, metabolically, functionally, topologically, and immunologically intertwined with the pregnant person. They are hooked into the body of a pregnant person via placenta and umbilical cord. Zef's cannot maintain homeostasis on their own, and they don't until birth.
Maintaining homeostasis is the basis for life. If you are unable to do this, you die. And if vital organ systems don't kick in at birth, it is considered a stillborn. Zefs do not maintain their own homeostasis independent of the pregnant person's body, as is evidenced with spontaneous and induced abortions. And while they do maintain some amount of their own homeostasis it is fallacious to assume this, therefore, constitutes a whole separate being (especially since they are attached via placenta and umbilical cord), because other parts of a whole body do the same - testes and the blood brain barrier. No one would argue that these are not a part of the human they are in. And unique dna doesn't change this aspect either. Mitochondria, chimeras, transplanted organs, gametes, and medical implants - all examples of different dna, yet parts of a whole body.
It is folly, therefore, to apply an individual right to life to an organism who is biologically incapable of exercising that right as an individual (and then claim that your beliefs are backed by biology to boot.)
As an additional note, apply human rights at conception is an insult to what it means to be human. It implies that you are a full human at conception and that the human traits you will later possess, ones that will be actualized by your DNA and make your DNA actually worthy of human rights protection, don't actually add anything to the equation of your humanity.
Abortion, therefore, is not the violation of a zef's right to life. Abortion isn't even denying them a right to their own ability to maintain homeostasis - they still have the right to maintain homeostasis, they just biologically cannot. We do not violate the rights of another human who is unable to maintain homeostasis by denying or revoking their access to our biological tissue that only we are entitled to. Pregnant humans are not medical devices in which you are entitled to use in order to maintain or provide homeostasis to. So when we evaluate the zef on their own merits, we realize that without the pregnant person, there is no zef to evaluate. And it makes zero sense to hold this role as vital from a fetocentric view and trivialize it as nothing from the pregnant person's view. The denial of this biological reality is to yet again deny pregnant people their humanity.
Additional relevant reading:Post on Liminal StatesHow a ZEF is homeostatically, metabolically, functionally, topologically, and immunologically intertwined with its mother
Push for political action.
Urge for removing abortion medication from the REMS list. REMS stands for Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy. "It limits dispensing to certified providers and specified settings, which do not include retail pharmacies. The FDA’s limitations on mifepristone can discourage providers from offering medication abortion because providers have to preorder and stock the medication ahead of time and, as a result of the history of violence and harassment against abortion providers, may be reluctant to be added to the manufacturer’s record of certified providers. The REMS dispensing requirement prevents patients from obtaining the medication from a pharmacy (whether online or in person) like most other safe and effective medications. A 2017 expert panel suggested that the REMS is inconsistent with mifepristone’s safety record and simplicity of use, and places an unfair burden on those seeking access to medication abortion."https://www.guttmacher.org/evidence-you-can-use/medication-abortion
The FDA has already removed restrictions for medication abortion to be dispensed by mail. There is zero safety reasons for this medication to not be made available at every pharmacy and in every doctor's office. The targeting of abortion providers is made all too easy by their quite literally being targets. If every obgyn can dispense abortion medication, it makes it all that much more harder for them to harass doctors. Which leads to my next point:
Urge your state to provide buffer zones around abortion clinics. Legal protesting has been used as a farce to harass doctors and patients in legal manners. They go undetected because they are disguised as protesting. Protesting outside abortion clinics shouldn't be the hobby that it is has become. It shouldn't be organized to the extent that it has been. (Must be nice to be so privileged that you can spend your day in such a manner while people seeking abortion could barely find the time off work or someone to babysit.) If vegans aren't outside your local butcher shop, and environmentalists aren't outside your local car dealer, people shouldn't be outside your local abortion clinics. Protest outside your state capital - it is completely inappropriate for protesting to have been wielded in this manner that is akin to harassment and often times does contain actual harassment. And no patient should have their healthcare be a political battleground, let alone ones that aren't even seeking abortion to begin with. It is long past due that buffer zones be implemented. Your private parts shouldn't be public knowledge to the extent that they are - patients should be free to receive abortion care from their current obgyn and be free of protesters harassing them for any and all reasons.
Enshrine abortion rights protections on the state scale. This is mainly going to be for blue states that will be largely unaffected by the overturning of Roe or Casey... for the time being. Without enshrining the protections on the state level, abortion opponents will eventually come after abortion rights in your state. But on a broader scale, having laws that actually explicitly call out the right to abortion, that explicitly call out abortion as a method in which afab exercise their right to bodily autonomy, will prove helpful in setting precedent for fighting anti-abortion laws and fighting for abortion rights to be cemented in our Constitution on the federal level. Because these are the tactics that anti-abortionists have already been using. "[G]roups such as Americans United for Life set out to make Roe an outlier by recognizing fetal personhood in inheritance law, property law, personal-injury law, and even homicide law." source The Unborn Victim's of Violence Act is another example - the law that literally could not have passed without recognizing the rights of pregnant people, is used as an example for fetal personhood in order to justify not recognizing the rights of pregnant people. It couldn't be more of a bludgeon to the head - the perfect symbolism of exploiting pregnant people as they literally exploit pregnant people.
Expand access to abortion on the state scale. People in Red states are going to need places to go for their abortion care. And they are going to turn to Blue States to provide that for them. These states need to do everything they can to meet that call. So not only can this be done by enshrining the right into state law, but by expanding state medicaid coverage reimbursement rates. The reimbursement rate is so low, it is essentially meaningless. In turn, it essentially requires that abortion providers provide care for free. This idea that abortion providers are driving around in Lamborghinis is just absurd. These are people who receive harassment and death threats. They risk their lives to provide us this care - we need to return the favor and protect them in turn. If we can increase the reimbursement rate for providers, not only are they being paid accordingly for the medical care they provide, but perhaps additionally they can, in turn, keep out-of-pocket fees low for out-of-state patients who they will be providing for. This will free up costs for abortion funds as well, who will be seeing higher costs for funding for travel and accommodations.
Contact your Senators and urge them to pass the WHPA (it has already been passed by the House and is awaiting review by the Senate). As well as the EACH Act.
Source for bullet points sans the 1st one:Strict Scrutiny podcast - At Liberty: This Fall’s Fight Against Forced Pregnancy
This blog post was brought to the mods attention recently. It provides an open letter than can be sent to the members of SCOTUS to enlighten them about our Constitutionally protected abortion rights, since they seem willfully poised to gut them despite precedent and despite the wishes of the American constituents. It calls them to action to honor the codified rights our Constitution protects. It is unacceptable that this court even took this case and placed our rights on the chopping board. But that doesn't mean we will go down without a fight and demand that they do their job.
How the US Constitution Protects Abortion
Some additional points would be to fight back against anti-choice rhetoric and beliefs. Challenge their concept of personhood. How does the actualization of inherited DNA traits not add anything to the equation of human rights when those very traits make humans worthy of their rights? How does twinning and chimeras fit in to the equation of a person at conception? Is killing always wrong? What is the point of self defense - does it hinge on the intents of the person committing the offense, or rather on the human whose rights that are being protected? Do you have the human right to your own body and if so, how could abortion be an unjustified killing if you have this right? Should abortion even be considered killing if it is just the revoking of your body's participation in maintaining the homeostasis abilities of an organism that is incapable of maintaining their own? Does it constitute that a zef's rights were violated just because they die in an abortion?
Part of the reason anti-choicers have been so successful is that they throw every kind of argument at the wall and see what sticks. For example, some people are turned off by anti-choice rhetoric because of the anti-woman messaging - so a response to this was the "love them both" message to bring in those people.
We need to broaden our arguments out more. They aren't winning because they somehow hold the moral high ground. They are winning because they haven't had anything to lose.
The fact of the matter is, they don't stand to lose any of their human rights by playing this game - that is what has made it so easy to use abortion bans in order to manipulate their voter base. Have you ever seen the quote about how the "unborn are a convenient group to advocate for?" Since they aren't bartering for gaining or losing their human rights, they don't actually have to stick within the confines of their morals in the arguments that they make.
Conversely, people who have reproductive rights on the line potentially compromise their rights if they weaponize the very morals they are trying to protect. This is why, for example, we can't just throw the idea of forced vasectomies into the foray in the fight for bodily autonomy over abortion. Not only are we throwing our morals under the bus, but we could effectively be harming people along the way.
There isn't an anti-choice equivalent to this upon a cursory look - no matter what they do, they will always retain their right to life and their reproductive right to have babies. (That anti-choice women lose their right to abortions as well is of little consequence - those people keep themselves subdued by either believing that their abortion would be morally permissible, or they are too afraid to speak out because they will be cast out of their social support.) It allows them to maintain this appearance of being morally superior, not because it actually is more moral, but because there are no drawbacks to the scrutiny. Which in turn gives a feedback loop of seeming morally superior.
If they actually had something to lose in this social warfare, we would effectively have something that we could attempt to use to negotiate with them on. If they have rights on the line they then have to start providing compromises in order to keep their right. But we are only advocating for us to keep our rights, not take rights away from them. Which makes this whole "balancing of the rights" untenable.
And this exposes the corruption within this supposedly morally superior movement - true martyrs, true causes, stand to lose something. The concept of just war, for example, requires that you sacrifice lives for your cause. And they stand against those that are wielding their human rights as bartering tools - who are laying privilege to something they are not entitled to.
It is an extremely privileged position to have your rights honored while you advocate for them being revoked from others. The perfect imagery for this is to imagine clinic protestors who have made this into a full time hobby. What sort of time and money do you have at your disposal, that you can be out there on your soapbox "saving babies" while shouting at the people who, through voting, you have placed obstacles in their pathway, such that they struggled just to find the time or money, to be there. These patients have to take time off of work, struggle to find funds, find childcare and transportation, possibly even lodging, just to be there.
The contrast is a great metaphor for the actual social struggle that is going on. Anti-choicers aren't struggling to make ends meet while fighting for their rights. They are privileged people fighting for a privileged cause.
Anti-choice rights are safe - so it makes it seem like they are fighting for a righteous and just cause, that they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts in order to protect innocent unborn baby's lives. When the fact of the matter is, that without something to lose, without a risk to be taken, the idea that your cause is somehow morally superior, is completely meaningless.
So what do they actually gain from their cause that is so important that they fight for? Well we need only look at the fruits of their labor.
They impose their idea of sexual morality on people which puts them in favor with their god and helps them justify why they've deprived themselves.
For those who have had abortions and were shamed by their prolife community, it offers a way to cope with that trauma, to atone for their sins, by keeping others from having an abortion.
They gain new babies and cause financial strife and crisis for their mother's. This will make them perfect targets for evangelizing them to join their church. This is further evidenced by the fact that they refuse to have their tax payer dollars go towards social welfare programs - instead, they advocate that these needs are better served by the church. But this pools the money to small locations and won't reach as many people - so the advocacy is a means to create a community need for the church, which further allows for them to indoctrinate people. (As a former Christian, God commands you to evangelize to people and help them hear the word of the Lord. Any resistance that is met, is a sign of the Devil's presence and the persecution tells them they are where they are supposed to be. It is not a great mentality for 1st Amendment rights and the respecting of freedom of and from religion of others.) It's manufacturing the problem in order to sell the solution.
Or it could be that these babies will go into the adoption system, which is, you guessed it, typically run by religious organizations. Who then claim religious freedom to be able to discriminate on who they adopt to (affluent, white, straight Christians), and make big money while doing it (adoption of newborn infants isn't cheap.)
They restore traditional female roles, which puts them back in the home at the mercy of those who can financially provide for them. And it's a great way to subjugate transpeople back into their traditional gender roles as well.
And let's not forget where this originally started from, politically, in the US - abortion rights served as a proxy for mobilizing evangelical voters to vote into power politicians who wanted to keep "State's Rights" - which is a dog whistle for racism. If anyone has seen the documentary The 13th, along with the forming of the anti-abortion moral majority of the Reagan era, the war on drugs was implemented. These laws disproportionately disadvantaged POC. And once in the system, they served longer prison times than white people. This relished black POC back into a legal form of enslavement. Abortion bans will result in laws that will criminalize people for having abortions and WOC will be disproportionately affected. Once in the system, they will serve longer sentences than their white counter parts. This will leave their reproductive years out of jail shorter, and make it harder for them to start families. This is a racist wet dream. And single issue evangelical voters are playing into that reality.
So when we see the true fruits of their labor - advancing religious imposition, atonement, poverty, traditional gender roles, transgender people kept chained to their biology, politicians mobilizing racist causes, money for the church, babies adopted to the "right" people - when we go beyond the cursory reading of the cause, a much harsher reality is revealed.
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