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Martha's avatar

I'm still not convinced that this isn't the other way around. Anti-abortion efforts seem more like a cover for undoing democracy and establishing a Christian fascist state.

- They've never *actually* cared about life (obvi)

- They've succeeded in gerrymandering and stacking the courts

- They are enshrining turning neighbors against neighbors into law

- They are eliminating electoral means of popular revolt (ballot initiatives)

- They are creating sweeping laws that can lock up anyone with pro-abortion, pro-Trans kid perspectives > basically any political opponent

Abortion is a great cover because their supporters will go along with anything 'to protect the babies' even the full on destruction of our democracy.

That isn't to say that covering all the anti-abortion leg you're doing isn't vital! I just worry that it's buying into their argument that this *is* just about abortion when it sure looks like so much more.

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Laura Terrell's avatar

I think reproductive justice should stop calling it fetal personhood and start calling it fetal coverture. Fetuses are a legal fiction conservatives made up to force women back into coverture. Marriage under coverture made wives and daughters invisible by law. In 1765, Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England described coverture and the legal rights of wives, "by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband..." Conservatives can't force them back into marriages to make them invisible under their husbands so they're forcing them into pregnancies to make them invisible under their fetuses, passing laws that declare the uterus as property of the state.

Fundamentalist ideologies like the Curse of Eve Doctrine are based on the premise that motherhood is God's justice system for women's sexual behavior and children are the instrument by which this sentence is carried out. Abortion or contraception is escaping God's justice. If fetuses are persons, the state of pregnancy renders a person's body property of the fetus suspending their individual rights. Since fetuses are not constitutionally considered people until birth, 'fetus' is used as a legal fiction so the state can act as their ward. Meaning fetuses are the property of the state. The pregnant person is therefore carrying the property of the state who can now justify the usurpation of the rights of the pregnant person. By asserting pregnant people carry the property of the state renders anyone possessing a uterus property of the state by extension. Having a womb therefore erases a person's existence from the law. They exist de facto but not de jure. According to the law, they are not people. They're not even chattel. They're public property.

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