Co-opting the tragedy of others is a longstanding tactic of the anti-choice movement.
From the equation of abortion with the Holocaust and slavery to flagrant lies about abortion increasing the risk of breast cancer, those dedicated to making a woman’s biology her destiny have stopped at nothing to prop up the pro-life cause — not even the pleas of Holocaust, slavery and breast-cancer survivors or their descendants to stop misusing their tragedies.
The latest chapter in this sordid tale is the misappropriation by anti-vaxxers of the pro-choice slogan “My body, my choice”. Abortion is always the first demand of modern women’s movements, and always the right most under assault, because fertility control is indispensable to women’s quest for equality.
As lawyer Julie Rikelman told the US Supreme Court this week in the Mississippi abortion case that could hand control of the fertility of about half of American women to their state legislature, legal abortion has changed the arc of American women’s lives: “The data has been very clear over the last 50 years that abortion has been critical to women’s equal participation in society.”
This includes, Rikelman tried to explain amid repeated interruptions by the chief justice, it leading to improvements in women’s health, educational attainments and wages, the latter of which had reduced the number of single-parent families living in poverty.
What does the quest for gender equality encapsulated by “my body, my choice” have to do with the demands of anti-vaxxers and the unreasoned assemblage gathered around them in person and online to refuse COVID vaccinations?
In short, absolutely nothing.
The reason why is simple. The consequences of a pregnancy that ends in abortion are confined to the woman and, if she has one, her partner. In contrast, every infection with the Delta strain of COVID spreads the potentially lethal virus to between five and eight others, with the unvaccinated 10 times more likely to catch it and 20 times more likely than the vaccinated to spread it.
Also, by allowing the virus greater opportunity to replicate, unvaccinated people increase the likelihood that an even deadlier and/or more transmissible and/or more vaccine-evasive variant will arise, which could put us all back into lockdown. This is why vaccine refusal has long been castigated by philosophers as “free-riding” on the beneficial actions of others.
No such thing has or will ever be said about those who choose abortion. The pro-choice assertion of bodily autonomy is a claim for women to the same rights and respect long afforded by religion, philosophy, the law and the state to men. In particular, the unquestioned freedom men have to make decisions critical to their own health and future without state interference. A privilege that because women are the ones who end up pregnant after joint sexual activity of the consensual or coerced kind, they need abortion and other fertility control measures to realise.
The pro-life movement understands this. Indeed, as studies repeatedly show, its religious-based commitment to the second-class status of women is the reason most are in the movement.
This is why pro-life officials in Mississippi can keep a straight face in court as they defend a law that guts the right of American women to choose to control their body by ending a pregnancy, while simultaneously demanding a stay on President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for what the judge who granted it agreed was the importance of “maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions”.
The bodily choices of some, it seems, are more important than those of others.
‘with the unvaccinated 10 times more likely to catch it and 20 times more likely than the unvaccinated to spread it’.
And the source provided by the writer for this claim is a link to an online publication The Conversation, (no actual data provided) which in turn links to a Sky News (?) article that references anonymous ‘Victorian health officials’ claiming ‘the unvaccinated are ten times more likely to catch coronavirus than someone who was doubled dosed with a vaccine.’ (again, no actual data included).
Is this what substitutes for actual, peer reviewed scientific analysis?
As the rates of transmission in highly vaccinated countries continues to rise, you will need to stop apportioning blame for a failed therapeutic onto the very people who chose not to receive it.
As Prof. Dr. Gunter Kampf stated recently in The Lancet (Nov. 19 2021)
’The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies four of that top five countries with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated population (99.9%-84.3%) as ‘high’ transmission countries. Many decision makers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission’.
Oh dear. Studies have been done in the UK and they are peer-reviewed. They have shown that people in the initial stages of double vaccination, are much less infectious that unvaccinated people. The final quote you give is consistent with double vaccinated people being less likely to infect others but not with their being not infectious at all.
Hi Ian,
Can you please send me links to these articles?
I was sent this one recently, and as a vaxxed person, it makes for difficult reading…we are just as likely to spread Covid-19 as the unvaxxed, according to their research.
I too have problems with the math in the Conversation article. It is very clear that vaccination reduces the severity of infection/symptoms, so when the authors use the numbers of symptomatic infections to calculate the 10-fold increase in likelihood of catching Covid-19, it is clear this will skew the numbers as vaccinated ppl are more likely to be asymptomatic (which, to be fair should be seen as a good thing!). Vaccination doesn’t prevent the virus from entering the body, like a bodily force field, rather, after the virus has infected the body, the vaccine helps marshall the immune response more effectively to prevent the virus taking over and making one ill (symptomatic).
The more I look into this, the more the altruistic arguments about vaccination become shaky.
It appears the only unshakeable benefit of vaccination is it reduces the severity of disease in the vaccinated.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00648-4/fulltext#seccestitle160
Your research article is about transmission in households. Its conclusion is that vaccinated households will not differ from unvaccinated households wrt transmission in the case of the delta strain. They note that peak viral load drops away more rapidly if a person is vaccinated. This supports the claim that transmission between more time-limited contacts than you get in households is likely to be less with vaccinated people. The trouble with a household is that its other members are likely to encounter a vaccinated member at peak viral load, even if the period of peak viral load is much less than it is in the case of unvaccinated people. I will try to dig up the US papers that claim less likelihood of infection.
Covid infects more than just “my body”. My infectious body infects everyone else’s. Vaccination serves the greater good as well as it serves me.
Yes, pregnancy isn’t contagious….and neither are abortions.
There’s not much ‘intensely personal’ about transmitting covid to a bunch of other people.
It’s interesting that you write a whole article about abortion without once mentioning the unborn child. There are more arguments against abortion than the desire of men to subjugate women.
Where did the idea that a person is present from conception come from? It is religious doctrine. Is there any evidence that foetuses act like persons before 20 weeks? We can speak of an unborn child in the third trimester of pregnancy but who advocates abortion at this stage, unless it is necessary to save the mother’s life? The religious ideology has more than a little to do with men subjugating men.
This won’t get posted because the moderators are deleting comments that disagree with the author. Life from conception is found in any medical book. Yes there is evidence that a foetus acts like a person before 20 weeks, they have beating heart beats, suck their thumbs and roll over in the womb. Besides, is “acting like a person” the determinant of life? does a person who is asleep “act like a person” ? or a person in a coma?
Spell checker error: “men subjugating women” is what last phrase should say.
It’s interesting that the “religious” right is fixated on abortion, euthanasia, women, LGBTQ, gay marriage and gun rights. But hardly whispers about the broad range of moral issues. In US, now we have AC Barrett saying that adoption can supplant abortion. The law can do as she pleases, rich white women will always have abortion access.
It’s the left who are fixated on it, that’s why they are pushing it so hard
It is an embryo till 11 weeks. Then it is a fetus. Unborn baby is a highly emotive phrase used historically by reliously based anti abortionists who seek to use masking language to deny any primacy or autonomy to the pregnant woman and/or child ( in cases of child sexual abuse resulting in pregnancy.) The theory is that undifferentiated embryonic cells then a fetus have greater human and legal rights than an existing human who happens to be pregnant.
The collection of cells that is removed during an abortion could hardly be called a child.