‘My Body, My Choice’: How Vaccine Foes Co-Opted the Abortion Rallying Cry

...Vaccine opponents have appropriated “My Body, My Choice,” a slogan that has been inextricably linked to reproductive rights for nearly half a century, to fight mask and vaccine mandates across the country — including in California, where lawmakers had vowed to adopt the toughest vaccine requirements in the U.S.

As the anti-vaccine contingent has notched successes, the abortion rights movement has taken hit after hit, culminating in the June 24 Supreme Court decision that ended the federal constitutional right to abortion. The ruling leaves it up to states to decide, and up to 26 states are expected to ban or severely limit abortion in the coming months.

Now that anti-vaccination groups have laid claim to “My Body, My Choice,” abortion rights groups are distancing themselves from it — marking a stunning annexation of political messaging.

“It’s a really savvy co-option of reproductive rights and the movement’s framing of the issue,” said Lisa Ikemoto, a law professor at the University of California-Davis Feminist Research Institute. “It strengthens the meaning of choice in the anti-vaccine space and detracts from the meaning of that word in the reproductive rights space.”

Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster based in Washington, D.C., said “My Body, My Choice” is no longer polling well with Democrats because they associate it with anti-vaccination sentiment.

Beyond linguistics, anti-vaccination activists are playing politics, intentionally trolling the abortion rights groups by using their words against them, Wulf said. “I really believe there’s a little bit of an ‘eff you’ in that,” Wulf said. “We’re going to take your phrase.”

Precisely. I also hate that phrase “reproductive rights”. Hello? It sounds like what China violated with forced abortions during the One Child Policy era. Americans have the right to reproduce. If you don’t want to reproduce, keep your pants on. Or double up on birth control or get a vasectomy or get your tubes tied. What they really mean by “reproductive rights” is “preborn baby killing rights”.

Seriously, though, why do we have this problem to begin with? Out-of-wedlock births were once fairly rare, despite common modern misconceptions. Parents and social custom conspired to ensure a young lady was never alone in the company of a man not her close relation. Virginity, now despised and an embarrassment to be done away with as quickly as possible, was once prized.

I don’t see a way back to these age-old customs, though. We can’t put the genie (The Pill) back in the bottle. Without The Pill, the Sexual Revolution would have been impossible. Before The Pill, abortion was was widely abhored. After The Pill, it was “needed” as a backstop for birth control failure (or neglecting to use it properly).

Men are not going to stop expecting sex on the first date (or at least by the third) nor give up hookup culture. Women will continue to oblige, as plenty of other women *will* oblige the men, who quickly drop a girl who insists on waiting until marriage or at least engagement — in favor of those who do “put out”. Nowadays guys just wanna get laid and girls just wanna have fun (while the fun lasts).

So here we are. It’s quite tragic, but ours is no longer a child or family friendly society. It’s all about adult sexual “happiness” and “fulfillment”.

Now that women are chemically sterilized creatures from puberty through menopause and viewed almost exclusively as sex objects, no longer as powerfully fertile beings who were potential wives and mothers, now that sex is merely and almost exclusively seen as recreational and only accidentally procreational (and oh the horrors if procreation “accidentally” happens!), I fear abortion will always be with us. The Pill has fundamentally changed us.

Across time and cultures, marriage was an institution guaranteeing the rights of children to both biological parents, and parents’ rights to their biological children. The idea of same sex marriage would have been laughed out of town. Now marriage is seen as a couple agreeing to mostly have sex with each other for the time being, so why not same sex marriage? After all, “it’s just about sex.”

Now that we have legalized same sex marriage, the last link between sex and babies (and the attendant mutual rights and responsibilities of married parents and their children) is broken. Anything goes: deliberately creating fatherless children by ordering from the sperm bank or motherless children by renting the womb of a surrogate. Gone are the rights of children to both biological parents.

The idea that men and women are the same and practically interchangeable, save a bit of plumbing and superficial appearance, would likewise have been laughable before The Pill. The notion one could change into the opposite sex by surgically altering said plumbing plus a bit of cosmetic resculpting would have been met with utter consternation.

Now sex is “just sex”, and we believe we have a “right” to it, whenever, wherever, however, with whomever or whatever. If a pregnancy should (gasp) just “happen” if said sex occur between a man and woman — it wasn’t supposed to! — it’s a strange and unwelcome anomaly to be done away with. And the pro-abortion crowd believes they have the “right” to do away undo this “mistake” by killing the baby before it can be born.

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