Anti-Abortion = Pro-Slavery

Misogyny and slavery are equally ancient, equally pervasive, so this should be as unsurprising as it is illuminating.

JoAnn Wypijewski at The Nation:

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as m is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.

The courts and Congress of the nineteenth century understood contracts, and even a little bit about labor. Women they understood wholly by their sex and wombs, and those they regarded as the property of husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to live with the failure of later courts to apply the Thirteenth Amendment to claims for sexual and reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical context out of which the Fourteenth Amendment also emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of privacy—or to the partial, white-centric history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights.

Sandra Fluke is not a slut…

What of it if she were? By any other name, ain’t she a woman? A human being? The descendants of slave masters have no more right to control her sexuality and reproductive organs, to deny her self-determination, than did their predecessors. Mother or slut, prostitute or daughter, law student or lazybones who just wants to have sex all day, she is heir in her person to a promise of universal freedom, one that does not make such distinctions but that recognizes an individual’s right to her life, her labor, her body and self-possession all as one. Forget trying to shut up a gasbag on the radio; there is a basic constitutional liberty to uphold.

The preachers and lay men and women now raising the “personhood” banner for their side have taken to calling the fetus and fertilized egg the new slave, and the movement for their legal personhood the new civil rights movement. The director of Personhood Florida compares himself to William Wilberforce, the nineteenth-century English abolitionist. A Catholic priest posting on Planned Parenthood’s “I Have a Say” video thread likens defenders of women’s bodily autonomy to slave traders. On their blogs and other propaganda the foot soldiers of this movement call Roe v. Wade a latter-day Dred Scott decision; they invoke the Thirteenth Amendment and vow to fulfill its promise.

These people are not stupid, and some are sincere, but they are wrong. They pervert morality and history in the guise of honoring both, and thing-ify women according to the logic of our cruelest past. There is another logic, and it calls us to complete the unfinished business of emancipation.