Scholars have identified at least TEN WAYS of treating persons as mere things. THIS SERIES discusses each.

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Our next deep dive, which is set for publication on Monday morning, discusses objectification via Violability. Below, is a preview of a portion of Monday’s article.

Enjoy!

S. P. Rogers

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When a group of people is objectified, as history attests, this objectification results in increased rates of violence and abuse against members of the objectified group — sometimes of the most horrifying kind.123

Objectification is the seeing and treating of someone as an object.4 As such, objectification is “a particular form of dehumanization.”5 Thus, objectification not only reduces a person to a thing, it also strips away a person's humanity.6

Women, girls (including prepubescent girls), and pregnant people are especially vulnerable to being perceived and treated as things.78

Because objectification is form of dehumanization, it reduces human beings to mere things that exist “for others’ use or benefit”9 and strips them of their humanity.10 ── And “when people are no longer thought of as fully human, they are no longer treated with the respect that such humanity warrants… This results in an increase in the physical violence they experience.”11

Violability

The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into

Research shows that the objectification of women and girls “can elicit aggression toward them, even in the absence of a provocation.”12 Furthermore, research shows that objectification is connected to “downplaying concerns about consent”13 and treating pregnant people “as public property (e.g., ogling and touching without their permission while ignoring consent)”;14 and that objectified persons “are perceived as less deserving of moral treatment and more deserving of pain, that is, as more violable.”15

In other words, objectifying persons “facilitates violating them.”16

Dr. David N. Hackney is a Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist (MFM), otherwise known as a high-risk pregnancy OB-GYN. In the second chapter of his recently published book, Impossible Choices: A Physician's Guidance on High-Risk Pregnancy in a World Without Roe (which rePro-Truth highly recommends), Dr. Hackney discusses a subject so heart-rending and so tragic that many people prefer to not even think of it: childhood pregnancy.

Visualize for a painful moment a ten-year-old at a full forty weeks gestation, struggling to stand from a chair or walk down a hall pulled under the weight of a term uterus: an image not only heartbreaking but clearly dangerous.17

According to FBI crime data, “51% of reported rapes are perpetrated against people ages 0-19.”18 ── “That’s approximately 61,754 young rape victims every year, including our most vulnerable children, adolescents navigating middle and high school, and young adults just beginning to move through the world.”19 According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), “41% of the kids who survive child sexual abuse are ages 0-11. The youngest are infants; the oldest is in 5th or 6th grade.”20 Data from KIDS COUNT Data Center shows that there were approximately 1,730 live births by children under the age of 15 in 2024.

Sexual assault and abuse “may be the most obvious illustrations[] of violability; the perpetrator physically penetrates the other’s body.”21 This violation is intensified when it results in pregnancy, especially when the victim is a child. As Dr. Hackney notes in his book, “Carrying a pregnancy in a small ten-year-old body risks injury for obvious reasons of physical size.”22

Making matters worse, the rapist is not alone in objectifying his victim. The objectification of women, girls, and pregnant people saturates our culture and percolates through all levels of society, from the President to the frat house to the police station, with harmful effects. Studies show that “objectification increases dehumanization and victim blame and reduces perceptions of perpetrator responsibility in cases of stranger and acquaintance rape.”23

The rapist tells his victim, with brutal efficiency, that she is violable: that he can use her body for whatever he wants and abuse her body whenever he wants; that her body is not hers; and that what she wants simply does not matter. — Society denies her pain and tells her she deserved it.

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By far, abortion ban defenders’ favored defensive move is to point out that every abortion ban contains a ‘life of the patient’ exception. This exception, the abortion banistas insist, “protects” the pregnant person’s life.

For example, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) - an arm of the anti-rights group SBA Pro-Life - maintains a page advantageously describing the ‘life of the patient’ exception contained in each state's ban, which CLI periodically reposts on social media, usually in the wake of news that another person has been harmed by an abortion ban. On this page, titled “Pro-Life Laws Protect Mom and Baby: Pregnant Women’s Lives are Protected in All States,” CLI says that each Ban State “permits abortion… when it is necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman.”

The presence of a ‘life of the patient’ exception in these states’ bans is presented as if this exception were a statutory protection safeguarding the lives of pregnant people. — This claim is the subject of this article. Let's dive in…

Allowances Vs. Protections

Let's get one thing straight: Exceptions are allowances—not protections. A statutory protection safeguards something. It enforces. It has teeth. An allowance is a fragile, discretionary, political concession. It is revocable, subject to the changing whims and interpretations of those in power. It has no teeth.

The ‘life of the patient’ exception is a statutory allowance granted to medical providers by the State. Ultimately, “whether an abortion was legal is still up to prosecutorial and judicial discretion.”1 Hence, the ‘life of the patient’ exception allows medical providers to perform an abortion that is necessary to save a pregnant patient’s life, with the understanding that doing so has the potential to trigger a criminal investigation.

The ‘life of the patient’ exception is not a statutory protection for the patient's life. It's merely an unenforceable allowance. It has no teeth.

The exception does not require the doctor to perform an abortion that is necessary to save the pregnant patient’s life.

The exception does not establish legal liability - neither civil nor criminal - for failure to perform an abortion that would have saved a pregnant patient’s life.

The exception does not even apply to all patients for which an abortion is necessary to save their lives.

The exception merely allows a doctor to save some pregnant patient’s lives if the doctor so wishes, and if the doctor (and the hospital's attorney) is confident that a criminal investigation will not afterwards ensue.

In other words, the ‘life of the patient’ exception says to healthcare providers, “Eh, I guess you can save her life, if you really feel like it. We probably won’t prosecute you for it—but maybe we will.” ── That’s a fragile, discretionary allowance—not a protection.

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A Necropolitical Regime

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in 2022, that “a State can always force a woman to give birth… despite [the Constitution’s] guarantees of liberty and equality for all,”2 the conservative-dominated Court “decided that true sovereignty belongs only to those who were considered sovereign by the drafters of the Constitution and of the Fourteenth Amendment.”3 In so doing, the Supreme Court transformed American constitutional law into necropolitics.4

Necropolitics is the term used by historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe to describe regimes invested with the power “to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”5

Under a necropolitical regime, the government sorts the population in those who are sovereign and those who are not (called others).6

The sovereign’s life, well-being, autonomy and physical integrity, and safety are valued.7 Sovereigns can defend themselves from bodily harm with lethal force. The beliefs and values of the dominant group of sovereigns are privileged by the government and may be forced upon the broader populace.

The segments of the population deemed to be others, however, are without personal sovereignty. They have no power to determine their proximity to death. Rather, others are afforded fewer rights and protections; are unequally regulated; and are actively exposed to suffering, the risk of premature death, danger, and abandonment by the State,8 “rendering their existence fundamentally precarious and contingent upon the whims of” the government.9

A necropolitical regime holds the power over life and death, and it makes some people live under conditions where harm or exposure to harm is built in. In other words, a necropolitical government does not merely regulate people; it actively pushes people into extreme vulnerability.10

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided that “sovereignty belongs only to those who were considered sovereign by the drafters of the Constitution and of the Fourteenth Amendment,” it allowed states to enact their own necropolitical regimes that leave pregnant people, including children, “at the mercy of the death, injury, and other suffering inflicted by” forced gestation and childbirth, hesitant medicine, risky procedures and non-standard care, and the changing whims of the State and those deemed sovereigns.11

Hence, for those who are or who may become pregnant, to live under an abortion ban is to live in a necropolitical zone. — And to live in a necropolitical zone “is to be constantly reminded that your life is not truly your own, but a precarious existence allowed only by the temporary whim of power.”12

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Some of You May Die

“Some of you may die—but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.” This line, spoken by the evil Lord Farquaad in the 2001 movie Shrek, captures the necropolitical State's attitude toward those designated others—those the state is willing to sacrifice and expose to suffering, danger, abandonment, and death.

“The inevitable consequence of blocking people from ending their pregnancies is that pregnancy ends people’s lives.”13

The ‘life of the patient’ exception is part of a necropolitical regime wherein State power determines access to life-saving healthcare. This is most evident in the fact that some people are explicitly excluded from this exception.

For example, of all the Ban States, only one (Alabama) allows medical providers to perform abortions necessary to save the lives of people with mental health disabilities. What's more, in the majority of Ban States the ‘life of the patient’ exception explicitly excludes mental health conditions — thus marking these patients’ lives as unworthy of saving.

Mental health conditions are a leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths.14 Yet, necropolitical governments grants no allowance to medical providers to save the lives of those with mental health disabilities, “putting[] those with mental health conditions in danger[] by denying them care.”15

As this example illustrates, the ‘life of the patient’ exception is not a statutory protection safeguarding the lives of pregnant people. It is a fragile, discretionary, and exclusionary allowance. ── Not a statutory protection for life.

As an allowance, the ‘life of the patient’ exception has no teeth. It's a political concession, begrudgingly given to medical providers so that forced birth politicians and activists can protect conservatives’ electoral odds by passifying the public with false guarantees of life-saving healthcare. It's a P.R. tool, employed by abortion ban defenders to shift the blame for the horrors their pet policy produces onto others. And as a mere allowance, it can be taken away or narrowed to exclude more and more patients.

Deemed others by the necropolitical State, pregnant patients have no power to determine their proximity to death. Rather, they are afforded fewer rights and protections; are unequally regulated; and are actively exposed to suffering, the risk of premature death, and medical abandonment at the behest of the State, “rendering their existence fundamentally precarious and contingent upon the whims of” the government

When the State dictates who may live, who must die, and who is exposed to the risk of death, “the very essence of human dignity is under siege, and death is no longer a natural end but a political tool.”16

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Infantilization 

"Infantilization is the term for when one person treats another in a way that’s inappropriate for their age and/or abilities.” [5] People may, intentionally or unintentionally, infantilize women "by giving them unsolicited advice, trying to control their life decisions, or insinuating that they shouldn’t have their own agency and can’t do things on their own." Infantilization "shows that you don’t trust their intelligence or decision-making skills, and that only you know what’s best for them.” [5].

The infantilization of women and "the undermining of pregnant women’s decision-making capabilities is evident in the women-protective antiabortion rhetoric.” [2] 

Ambivalent/benevolent sexism 

"Rather than experiencing [either] benevolence or hostility toward women, ambivalent sexism" describes the phenomenon where "people who hold sexist beliefs feel both, hence their ambivalence, depending on the degree to which" a female person "conforms or violates conventional norms of" traditionalist female gender roles or ideas of femininity. [3]

"[R]esearch has connected ambivalent sexism to anti-abortion attitudes (e.g., Huang et al., 2016; Osborne & Davies, 2012). Scholars have also started to acknowledge a shift over time from viewing people who have abortions in uniformly negative ways to viewing them in seemingly positive, but infantilizing ways. In other words, people who seek and have abortions are treated with condescending paternalism masquerading as positive regard and protectiveness (e.g., as helpless, fragile, naive; Duerken & Lawson, 2017; see also Glick & Fiske, 1996) as well as with overt misogyny and disrespect (e.g., selfish, bad; Cockrill & Nack, 2013). Although both hostile and benevolent sexism contribute to the continued subordination of people who seek and have abortions, the shift toward the benevolent sexism of women-centered anti-abortion rhetoric portrays pregnant people as needing to be protected from having abortions. This shift positions them as less capable, competent, and independent, and as property for men to defend." [3]

"Ambivalent sexism, particularly benevolent sexism, has also been connected to objectification (see also Calogero, 2013; Calogero & Jost, 2011). Consistent with benevolent sexism, the notion that pregnant people are precious and unknowing objects is inherent to women-centered anti-abortion rhetoric (e.g., Hooberman & Ozoguz, 2022; Osborne & Davies, 2012)... In the context of abortion, objectifying treatment is characterized by the diminution of people who have sought or had abortions, and efforts to prevent them from having abortions when that is the pregnant person's decision." [3]

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Discussion 

A piece published by The Christian Post titled, “The abortion chatbot is cruel — and not just to preborn children,” is illustrative.

The piece was written by Roxy Lamorgese, the Executive Director of Pre-Born!, a faith-based, anti-abortion organization that provides digital marketing strategies and grants for ultrasound machines, evangelism training, and other resources to a network of faith-based, anti-abortion pregnancy centers.

Ms. Lamorgese criticizes Charley, a chat bot designed with women in mind who are living in states with abortion bans and who are considering or have already decided to terminate their pregnancies. Charley points these women toward vetted clinics, telehealth providers or support resources, and is completely confidential. 

While it is unsurprising that the executive director of an anti-abortion organization would oppose efforts to provide women with information that they may (or may not) use to obtain abortions, Ms. Lamorgese presents her objection to Chatbot Charley in woman-protective language infused with the infantilization of women characteristic of ambivalent/benevolent sexism. She wrote: 

Put yourself in an abortion-minded mother’s shoes for a moment… The mothers considering it are often — though not always — under intense emotional pressure, in addition to suffering emotional and physical vulnerability…

They often say they chose to abort because of financial or social insecurity. They say they “can’t afford” a baby, or that they aren’t prepared for single motherhood. 

Women don’t need a chatbot when these fears are swirling through their mind….

They need another person to accompany them through the decision, regardless of their ultimate choice. They need another person who can help them feel safe and think clearly. 

Implicit within Ms. Lamorgese's woman-protective argument is the idea that women's faculties are overcome by their emotions upon experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, and thus their judgment and thought processes are clouded. To overcome this emotional stupor, Lamorgese explicitly states that women require the intervention of a third-party in order to "think clearly."

In essence, "pregnant women considering abortion are described as incompetent decision makers because they are emotional." [2] They are infantilized.

The “weaker sex”

The mainstream "Pro-Life" movement's "benevolent and protective attitude should not be interpreted as harm-free for women." [2]  Psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske note that "benevolent sexism may involve positive attitudes toward women, but that these sexist beliefs also 'reflect very traditional and controlling presumptions about women, such as ‘the weaker sex’," and thus they are in need of protection. [2]

As a member of "the weaker sex," a woman's perceived "weaknesses" are therefore treated "as more authentic than her own statement of desire to not be pregnant." [2]

This infantilization characteristic of ambivalent/benevolent sexism "operates as Glick and Fiske suggest: the attitude toward women is positive, but it is based on ideas of women’s inferiority with respect to decision-making abilities." [2] Hence, women are not treated "as equal citizens capable of making decisions for themselves. Women’s ability to bear children is respected, but their ability to make decisions is undermined." [2]

Conclusion 

The woman-protective, paternalistic language employed by much of the mainstream "Pro-Life" movement, "especially as it appears in anti-abortion legislation" and in anti-abortion advocacy such as the piece written by Roxy Lamorgese, infantilizes women and "creates the assumption that women are inherently reactionary, incapable of sound decisionmaking, and so endangered by their own choices as to require third-party protection (Abrams, 2015) (Jesudasen & Weitz, 2015)." [4] 

People may, intentionally or unintentionally, infantilize women "by giving them unsolicited advice, trying to control their life decisions, or insinuating that they shouldn’t have their own agency and can’t do things on their own." [5] Infantilization "shows that you don’t trust their intelligence or decision-making skills, and that only you know what’s best for them." [5]

"The infantilization of women has many social implications and consequences. Socially, it indicates the status of women as lesser than men. For example, infantilizing women in the workplace implies that women are worse at or incapable of performing their job. The consequences of infantilizing women are serious because they further entrench existing sexist ideology and impede women's autonomy. In the past, the infantilization of women has justified legal limitations applied to women. For example, before women gained the legal right to work in the same fields as men, infantilization was used to argue against equality in the workplace. Infantilization falsely reaffirms claims that women cannot perform the same functions as men, just as a child is incapable of performing the same tasks as adults." [6]

"Today, infantilization remains a sexist practice" used to undermine women’s autonomy, opportunities, and status as equal citizens. [1]

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Citations

[1] Adams, B. (2021, December 19). Infantilization of Women | Definition & Examples - study.com. Study.com. https://study.com/learn/lesson/infantilization-of-women.html

[2] Davies, C. (2009, March 66). Stereotyping and the new women-protective antiabortion movement. Bora Laskin Law Library. https://library.law.utoronto.ca/cara-davies-stereotyping-and-new-women-protective-antiabortion-movement

[3] Dyer, R. L., Checkalski, O. R., & Gervais, S. J. (2023). Abortion Decisions as Humanizing Acts: The Application of Ambivalent Sexism and Objectification to Women-Centered  Anti-Abortion Rhetoric. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843231173673

[4] Martin, Cherie H., "Self-Infantilizing Women: Paternalism in Abortion Lawmaking and Legislator Gender" (2016). University Honors Theses. Paper 325. https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.289

[5] Team, B. E. (2023, September 12). The causes and symptoms of infantilization. BetterHelp. https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/general/the-causes-and-symptoms-of-infantilization/

Hey, rePro-Truth Community!

I’m recovering from a week-long cold and have spent the last 7 days sleeping instead of writing. As such, two of my planned articles for this week have been postponed.

But I couldn’t let this week go by without at least a brief post to let you know that this week is World Childless Week. This week is near and dear to my heart.

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“World Childless Week aims to raise awareness of the childless not by choice (cnbc) community and enable every childless person to share their story with confidence. It's for anyone who is childless despite their longing to be a parent because they have never been pregnant (for any reason), not carried full term or have suffered the sadness of a baby born sleeping. World Childless Week is here to support those who have felt the heartbreak of knowing they will be childless for life.”1

Involuntary childlessness brings with it pain and grief too deep to put into words. It is sharp, isolating, and othering, and it effects everything from mental health to interpersonal relationships with friends and family, to one’s sense of identity and self-worth.

Millions suffer this pain in silence.

Perhaps you, precious one, are presently existing with the oft-consuming heartache of the disenfranchised grief of being childless not by choice (cnbc). — I see you. You are not invisible. Your pain and your grief are real, valid, and important.

I am right there with you in this experience.

Because World Childless Week is about raising awareness, I am asking the rePro-Truth Community to read the paper linked here.👇

READ PAPER HERE

The paper illuminates some of the aspects of being involuntarily childless. While the paper focuses on several women in Evangelical communities, their experiences coupled with the research and experiential overview of involuntary childless offer a deep and meaningful opportunity to understand your own feelings and experiences, to understand what your loved one is going through and learn how to better support them, and to question the grip which antiquated, cultural and gendered scripts continue to have on us all.

S. P. Rogers

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The objectified person is seen in ways that are fundamentally inaccurate, as a person is not a thing. Having been made into a thing, the objectified person is treated in ways one would treat things, but not persons.

Scholars have identified at least ten ways of objectifying others—that is, of seeing and treating persons as mere things. This series discusses each.

It was 2022. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had just been released. Roe v. Wade had been overturned and a new, terrifying countdown had begun: Soon, all terminations of a pregnancy in Tennessee would be a felony—including those necessary to avert a patient's death. If I were to become pregnant, the State was going to keep me pregnant—even if it killed me.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Tennessee’s trigger ban looming, a sudden and wholly unfamiliar feeling washed over me.

I felt owned.

Abruptly alienated both from my own body and from the beneficence of my own state, I felt as though I had been demoted from a person to State property, from human to thing.

If my body, my health, my future — even whether I lived or died — were all to be controlled by the government should I become pregnant, then my body, my health, my future, and even my life did not belong to me.

I didn't belong to me.

And I wasn't the only one feeling this way…

Ownership

The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, or that can be bought or sold

Objectification via Ownership “is acted out when people control others’ freedom,” such as the freedom to make healthcare decisions, “presuming[] that control of others is their right.”2 “Countless anti-choice propaganda sends the message that women of reproductive age do not fully own their bodies.”3 Instead, those bodies are presented as belonging to men, to the fetus, and to the State.4

Shortly after the Dobbs decision, researchers conducted a study “to understand how the Dobbs ruling impacted the way women experience their bodies.” Participants told the researchers that “they felt as if their bodies were not their own.”5

For example, one of the study participants, a 25-year-old Black woman in Georgia, told researchers the following.

“The decision makes me feel like my body doesn’t belong to me. Like I’m a piece of property owned by the state. It makes me feel like I don’t matter at all.”6

Just as had I felt as though I had been demoted from a person to State property, one of the study participants said she felt that the Dobbs decision “reduced her to a lower moral status in the eyes of others.”7 Another participant in the study told researchers the following.

“[The Dobbs decision] makes me feel like a political prisoner trapped inside of a body of a milking cow on a lucrative dairy farm.”8

These and other quotes “illustrate the various ways that restricted access to abortion was experienced as objectifying and dehumanizing to participants.”9

The Dobbs decision, at its core, is an act of usurpation: The Dobbs Court stripped the individual of power and then handed power over the individual to the State, to be wielded against the individual according to the State’s own whims.

The sudden loss of power, rightly belonging to individuals, to make private medical decisions for themselves — decisions that directly affect their health and wellbeing — caused many of the study participants to feel:

• “less than human”;

• “devoid of personal preferences and needs”;

• “lacking control and ownership of their bodies and their future.”10

Participants in the study described experiencing their body as:

• “a site of regulation and surveillance”;

• “a site controlled by others, specifically by men and/or the government”;

• a site of alienation, “as if their bodies were not their own.”11

“Participants described abortion access as fundamentally humanizing and shared that they felt that the overturning of Roe signified that the government did not see them as fully human. Several participants explicitly stated that they felt like an ‘object.’”12 “Others drew comparisons to specific types of objects as a way to describe how they were made to feel less than human.”13

Though often overlooked, scholars have pointed out that the notion that states have ownership of pregnant human beings — as if those human beings are mere things — is central to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, beginning with the oral arguments at the Supreme Court.14

During oral arguments, “the Mississippi Solicitor General functionally argued that pregnant people are under the ownership of their state given that states should be able to make decisions for pregnant people ‘however [the state] thinks is best.’”15

When a group of people, based on a biological condition or trait—be it skin color, sex, or gravidity—is treated “as something that is owned by another,” then that group of people has been treated as an object, a mere thing.16 During oral arguments, when Mississippi insisted that the State should be handed the power to make healthcare decisions for every girl and woman in the state, so that the State of Mississippi could then wield that power over and against them “however the state thinks is best,” Mississippi was claiming a right of possession of the bodies of women and girls.

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It should not be surprising that the oral arguments in a case that ultimately brought asunder the national compromise that existed under Roe v. Wade featured a former Confederate state claiming a right of possession of and control over the bodies of human beings. As rePro-Truth previously noted in Abortion Bans Constitute Involuntary Servitude, “long before states began to ban abortion for free, White women in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception were already banned for enslaved women and girls,” because “forced reproductive labor was the backbone of hereditary chattel slavery in America.”

Forced reproductive labor under the American system of hereditary chattel slavery took objectification via Ownership to the extreme. Inexcusably, remnants of reproductive slavery persist to this day. “Anti-abortion laws in the former slaveholding states” for example, “perpetuate structures of slavery in the form of state control over the Black female body.”

In Resuscitating the Black Body, Black legal scholar Jill C. Morrison notes that, “Inasmuch as enslaved Africans were the property of their owners, the sexual and reproductive capacities of women were also owned. Women’s sexuality and reproduction merely reinforced their status as property.”17 “Current methods of reproductive oppression, in which the State holds property rights over Black women’s bodies through restrictive laws and policies, replicate what was once owners’ private property interest in their female slaves.”18

“Black women in the United States have always been burdened with advancing others’ priorities with regard to their reproductive decision-making.”19 Anti-abortion “discourse about Black women’s reproductive and sexual capacities is still influenced by the notion developed during enslavement that Black women’s reproductive labors are for the benefit of others; that they are the property of others, be it individual masters or the State acting as master.”20

“Current attempts to marginalize and objectify Black women vis-à-vis their reproductive capacities reflect this centuries-long history of oppression, and must be explicitly rejected on this basis.”21

And don't forget that three states are trying to increase the teen birth rate in order to get more federal dollars and hold onto political power. Like total creepers.

As rePro-Truth reported, “The Plaintiff States’ argument here is functionally a slaver’s argument: A caste of humans must perform unpaid, involuntary labor so that the Master can maintain power and reap financial benefits.”

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As rePro-Truth discussed in previous post in this series on objectification, Fungibility: Exchangeable Parents and the 'Domestic Supply of Infants,' Justice Samuel Alito, in his Dobbs opinion, brazenly claimed that no one needs an abortion anymore because those who States may now force into involuntary reproductive servitude can simply terminate their parental rights after birth. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Alito wrote, “a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.”

To support these claims, Alito cited a 2008 CDC report. In the citation, Alito chose to include the following quotation from that report.

“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.”22

Alito’s rhetoric in Dobbs, along with the CDC quote in the footnote, “assumes that families are fungible. It matters not what family a child is raised in — they are all interchangeable. Consider all the care we take at hospital nurseries to match parents and newborns — unnecessary in this worldview. We should parcel them out on a first-come, first-served basis!”23

“[W]ithin the capitalist math of supply and demand,” observes Peggy Phelan, forcing human beings into involuntary reproductive servitude by outlawing abortion will “solve the adoption ‘supply’ issue.”24 In this equation of family separation, infants exist as a product (Ownership) supplied for the enjoyment of prospective parents, and women exist to produce (see Instrumentality) a supply of infants for prospective parents.

The rhetoric and phrasing surrounding adoption and abortion that is used by opponents of reproductive health, rights, and justice, reflect objectification via Ownership, as pregnant individuals and their children are framed through an industrial supply-chain lens.

Implicit herein is the seeing and treating of babies as commodities and women as producers of a scarce resource. As legal scholar Sharon Bassan emphasizes:

“This implicit narrative, reinforced in the Dobbs opinion, works against contemporary liberal values that emphasize the importance of individual autonomy, equality, and the rejection of any form of dehumanization or commodification, because it objectifies and reduces women to property, valued only for its economic outcomes. This narrative diverts the focus from the child and their best interests, redirecting it toward the desires of prospective adoptive parents, with children being positioned as means to fulfill those desires.”25

In the anti-choice world of supply and demand—of objectification via Ownership—“adoption as a child welfare measure, where children without family are provided one,” instead “becomes an operation to produce children to satisfy the wants of prospective adoptive parents.”26 This is a gross inversion of what adoption ought to be. “There are social costs in the commodification of children in this manner.”27

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📽 Video language warning: The below video contains cuss words (that I don't even normally use). Here, I'm raw. I'm angry. I'm downhearted. Because I'm just so damn tired of women not counting as full persons under the law. And you should be angry too!

Remember when Idaho argued in a court of law pregnant women facing limb amputations from septic shock can’t get emergency abortions healthcare? Well, Idaho still hasn't changed it's tune.

Idaho thinks it has a legal right to maim you. And the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is playing along.

This effects all of us—both inside and outside of the potato-growing Maim You State.

Last month, an Idaho court ruled that women who are pregnant have a constitutional right to self-preservation when their health is seriously jeopardized by a previability pregnancy. In other words, the State doesn't have a right to maim you and push you to deaths door just because they like the person inside you more than they like you.

For Idaho, however, the very thought that pregnant women might finally receive an abortion when never to avoid limb amputations or septic shock was intolerable. So, the state appealed.

In response, the Idaho lower court narrowed its decision to cover one single doctor and his patients. But even that was too intolerable to the potato-growing Maim You State.

Today, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused the lower court's ruling until the full Court can hear the case, even though it had narrowed to a single doctor — Dr. Stacey Seyb, a maternal fetal medicine specialist who care for patients with dangerous and high-risk pregnancies.

That means Idaho gets to keep demanding women's limbs as a sacrifice to their fetus fetish. That means Idaho gets to keep pushing women to the verge of death. ‘Cause that's Idaho's kink.

All because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in the free state of California, thinks Idaho will suffer harm if the lower court's ruling is left in place until the full trial. As for the women pushed into kidney failure or respiratory arrest, well that's not real harm.

Only human persons can be harmed by sadistic abortion bans, and sadly, women still aren't persons under the law.

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“What is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb,’ some say.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

We've all heard people (often men) refer to women as tits and ass or a piece of ass, reducing women to body parts that exist for the use and pleasure of others. Referring to a person as womb is no different. Both constitute objectification via Reduction to Body.

“At its core, objectification encompasses beliefs that it is acceptable to use someone’s body for another’s benefit, to reduce them to their physical body, and to deny their thoughts, feelings, and consent.”1

Scholars have identified at least ten ways of objectifying others—that is, of treating persons as mere things. This series discusses each.

Reduction to Body

The objectifier treats the object as identified with its body, or body parts.

Amicus briefs (“friend-of-the-court” briefs) are filed by individuals, groups, or organizations who have a strong interest in the subject and outcome of a particular court case but who are not themselves a party to or directly involved in litigating that case. Amicus briefs are submitted to the court presiding over a case in hopes of influencing the court's decision.

In a 2024 study, researchers examined the language used in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in the milestone abortion cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—spanning a fifty year time period. Researchers discovered that, over time, the briefs submitted by those wishing to curtail bodily autonomy, medical privacy, and abortion access “increasingly referred to pregnant people by smaller, segmented, anatomical parts (e.g., womb).”2 In so doing, these briefs “isolated the womb as the entirety of the pregnant person.”3

The researchers also observed a notable overuse of grammatical structures containing womb within briefs submitted by conservative religious entities. This overuse, the researchers note, advanced the amici's fetal personhood agenda by “removing the pregnant person from the writing and analysis.”4 Through “the complete erasure of the pregnant woman,” the womb “became an abstract site disconnected from the human actor”; doing so “foregrounded a fetal-centered analysis that conveniently ignored the physiological relationship of the womb to the pregnant person and only situated the fetus in or out of the womb.”5

The “usage of items like womb” within the amicus briefs submitted by those wishing to curtail bodily autonomy, privacy, and abortion access, “described the fetal environment, effectively removing the woman and her labor from the discussion.”6

We've all heard people (often men) objectify women by referring to them as tits and ass or a piece of ass. Referring to a person as womb is no different. — Both constitute objectification via Reduction to Body.

This “occurs whenever a woman’s body, body parts, or sexual [or reproductive] functions are separated out from her person, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or regarded as if they were capable of representing her.”7 Hence, “when objectified, women are treated as bodies—and in particular, as bodies that exist for the use and pleasure of others.”8

In the context of pregnancy, Reduction to Body is part of what scholars refer to as reproductive objectification.

Researchers note that “pregnant people, and especially women, may experience a specific form of sexual objectification grounded in reproductive function, namely reproductive objectification. As a form of sexual objectification, reproductive objectification reduces pregnant women to their bodies while denying their personhood and deprioritizing their autonomy, subjectivity, and voice; it is tied to using women… for sexual reproduction” while “prioritizing others’ interests (e.g., fetuses, medical providers, and society) over women’s interests” and wellbeing.9

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Reproductive objectification via Reduction to Body occurrs when “the physical body and functions are separated out from the person as a whole and treated as if they represent the person. In other words, a complex and multifaceted individual is considered and treated solely as a physical body” that exists to be used by others and for others.10

In the 2024 study discussed above, researchers found that, within the amicus briefs submitted in support of curtailing bodily autonomy, medical privacy, and abortion access, pregnant people were referred to as womb with high frequency (787.23/million words) — reducing human beings to a fetal-centric environment and existing for the use and pleasure of others.

Pregnant persons’ worth, value, and identity were reduced to an anatomical body part, stripping them of their humanity—of personality, individuality, competency, and intrinsic value. As the researchers observed, this “effectively removed[] the woman and her labor from the discussion.”11

Once rendered invisible, a pregnant person is no longer comprehended as a full human being deserving of moral treatment from others—the objectified womb-person's wishes, needs, health, life, and dreams are given no consideration.

Referring to a human person as tits and ass or womb isn't the only way people are objectified by being reduced to their bodies. Imagery, linguistic forgrounding, as well as ingrained and unexamined cultural expectations can reduce a human being to a mere body or pody part(s).

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Groups that are opposed to bodily autonomy, medical privacy, and reproductive rights and justice frequently reduce pregnant persons to womb or to a mere body. Consider the following two “Pro-Life” memes.

In the above image, we find a fetus personified as born infant: smiling, chubby, and cuddly, with rosie cheeks. The fetus is floating within a dark pink circle, the uterus, and is connected to it by the umbilical cord. The uterus appears to be floating underwater, surrounded by bubbles. Hence, what we see is a happy, chubby, fetus-baby happily floating along through the sea in it pink container — like a little message in a bottle soon to arrive upon shore where a smiling mommy and daddy wait for it.

Here, the disembodied uterus is an abstract site disconnected from the pregnant human being.

Foregrounded is a fetal-centered message “that conveniently ignores[] the physiological relationship of the womb to the pregnant person.”12 The pregnant person is side-stepped entirely by simply erasing her from the picture, her disembodied uterus presumed capable of representing her.

In the above image, we find a fetus, its fleshy-colored body presented in great detail. The humanity of the fetus is made clear. In contrast, the pregnant human being is cropped, headless — “reduced to only the part of her body that contains her reproductive organs… her body is little more than an outline, shaded and indistinct.”13 The pregnant person has been reduced to a mere body, “depicted as nothing more than the physical surroundings of the fetus.”14

Another means of objectifying human beings via Reduction to Body is by reducing them to their reproductive capacity.

Let’s consider the case of a child impregnated through rape…

Dr. Ingrid Skop—an anti-choice ideologue who travels the country testifying in court in support of any and every cruel law the forced-birth movement dreams up—has argued in favor of forcing victims of rape as young as nine to carry pregnancies to term. In 2021, Skop told the House oversight committee, “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant and reach sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby.”

Scholars have observed that puberty “marks a critical period when visible bodily changes alongside societal beliefs about girls and women as objects may intensify [] objectifying treatment.”15 This is evident in Skop’s comment.

Skop reduces a nine-year-old child to her body’s pubescent capacity to become pregnant. Foregrounding her capacity for pregnancy, the child becomes less than fully human and no longer deserving of moral treatment by others. By narrowing attention to her reproductive functions, the objectified womb-child's wishes, needs, health, life, and dreams were hidden from view and denied all consideration.

This is objectification by Reduction to Body.

[End Note: “Pregnancy at such a young age is shown to carry significant health risks, including pre-eclampsia and infections.”16]

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In the late 20th century, abortion providers were the main targets of the hostile rhetoric used by the organizations and activists within the militant wing of the anti-abortion movement. Predictably, this hostile vitriol increased the statistical risk of ideologically motivated violence by random individuals and lead to the assassinations of multiple abortion providers and bombings, including the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, abortion providers remained the main targets of hostile anti-abortion rhetoric; however, the use of this rhetoric was no longer confined to militants—it had become mainstream. Predictably, the hostile, absolutists, and inflammatory rhetoric increased the statistical risk of ideologically motivated violence by random individuals and lead to multiple attacks of violence, including the assassination of a physician, as well as multiple murders.

Since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, several of the more fanatical activists and groups within the anti-abortion movement have directed their hostile and inflammatory rhetoric at a new target: women and families who speak about the harm they endured from state abortion bans. This is a concerning development.

Jennifer Adkins and John Adkins, Ashley Brandt, Samantha Casiano, Kate Cox, Dr. Austin Dennard, Jessica Djukanovic, Taylor Edwards and Travis Edwards, Kayla Smith, Lauren Miller, Megan Kling, and Jillaine St.Michel: these thirteen individuals were all harmed by their states’ abortion bans.

In July, lawyers with Amplify Legal representing the above thirteen individuals harmed by their states’ abortion bans sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Lila Rose, founder and president of anti-abortion media organization Live Action, and to the organization's assistant editor Nancy Flanders. The letter meticulously details alledged instances in which Live Action falsified and/or twisted details of the thirteen individuals’ stories and experiences in cruel, incendiary, and defamatory ways.

For example, one of the individuals, Kayla Smith, has a history of a dangerous form of pregnancy hypertension called preeclampsia. She was 19 weeks into an already high-risk pregnancy when she and her husband learned their fetus, a boy they'd named Brooks, had a fatal and inoperable heart abnormality and would die shortly after birth. This also meant that Kayla was even more likely to develop preeclampsia, but because of the state's abortion ban, she and her husband were forced to travel out of state to induce early labor and delivery (labor induction abortion). ‘Baby Brooks,’ as his parents affectionately call him, did not survive the delivery.

Live Action claimed that Brooks died “by lethal injection in the name of pro‐abortion propaganda.” While fetal asystole is sometimes performed prior to the induction of labor and delivery, it was not undertaken in this case and it is never undertaken in service of propaganda.

Live Action also falsely claimed that Brooks’s fatal and inoperable heart anomaly was operable, and that the abortion was not medically necessary, and suggested Kayla was flippant in regards to the value of her son’s life.

In addition to what is quoted in the cease and desist letter, the 2024 Live Action article cited (archived here) further claims that “the goal” of Kayla Smith’s labor induction abortion “was to ensure Brooks did not survive” (italics in original); that Baby Brooks was intentionally killed and that his death was a “murder”; and that Kayla hadn’t “truly been worried about the development of preeclampsia.”

Accurate details of Kayla Smith’s experience, detailed in a legal complaint against the State of Idaho, have been publicly available since 2023, before the Live Action article in question was published.

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The cease and desist letter also reveals what appears to be a pattern of recycling of several similar, predetermined narratives against multiple individuals. For example, Live Action accused multiple individuals of carrying out eugenic killings. — Really awful stuff!

Live Action is using mass communications to disseminate, repeat, and amplify hostile and incendiary rhetoric to target individuals who have been harmed by abortion bans, predictably increasing the statistical risk of ideologically motivated acts violence by random individuals against Live Action’s targets.

This is stochastic terrorism.

As documented by Amplify Legal, has already lead to death threats against several of the individuals and their families.

In the cease and desist letter, Amplify Legal informed Lila Rose and Nancy Flanders that death threats were being made against their clients and demanded that all false accusations be retracted.

Lila Rose, Nancy Flanders, and Live Action could have chosen to oblige. Doing so would have demonstrated a proper concern for the safety of the individuals they've targeted. Instead, Lila Rose, Nancy Flanders, and Live Action responded: “The answer is ‘No.’”

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Objectification is “the seeing and/or treating of someone as an object.”1 The objectified person is seen in ways that are fundamentally inaccurate, as a person is not a thing. Having been made into a thing, the objectified person is treated in ways one would treat things, but not persons.

Objectification permeates the ideology, rhetoric, propaganda, and policies of the movement against sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR). The six right-wing justices, which hold a supermajority on the Supreme Court, are a part of this movement.

Fungibility

The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types

In the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the legal recognition of the right to end a pregnancy, Justice Samuel Alito brazenly claimed that no one needs an abortion anymore because those who States may now force to into involuntary reproductive servitude can simply terminate their parental rights after birth. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

To support his claim, Alito cited a 2008 CDC report. In the citation, Alito chose to include the following quotation from that report.

“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.”2

The choice to include this quotation is telling: “[W]ithin the capitalist math of supply and demand,” forcing human beings into involuntary reproductive servitude by outlawing abortion will “solve the adoption ‘supply’ issue.”3 In this equation of family separation, infants exist as a product (see Ownership) supplied for the enjoyment of prospective parents, and women exist to produce (see Instrumentality) a supply of infants for prospective parents.

“If you believe in fetal personhood, or that ‘abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman’s life,’ while directing shrinking resources toward parental leave, child hunger, health care, and poverty, and while threatening to cut off contraception access, you must justify forcing women to carry pregnancies to term regardless of the dangers to their own health and lives, regardless of cost, and regardless of the misery they or their children may suffer. One way around that thorny ethical dilemma is to simply assert that such children will be efficiently transferred to alternate parents who will value them.”4

Hence, the Dobbs decision “baselessly implies that [] proceeding with an unwanted pregnancy is of negligible impact as long as the mother does not have to raise the child”5 who can “be efficiently transferred to alternate parents.”6 Importantly, “this suggests that families, kinship, and parenthood are all exchangeable.”7

(While there is much more to be said about Alito’s reference to “the domestic supply of infants,” this article focuses specifically on Alito’s treatment of human beings as fungible. Fungibility is one of the ten features of objectification.)

To be fungible is to be interchangeable (like one ballpoint pen is interchangeable with another); it is to be discardable (like discarding a pen in favor of a word processor); and it is to be exhangeable (like one model of vacuum cleaner can be exchanged for another). We treat and see many types of objects as fungible.

When a human being is treated as a fungible object, that human being is being treated “as if they are dispensable or can be traded or discarded by another person.”8 Instead of recognizing a person’s uniqueness and humanity, the objectifier sees and treats the person as a mere thing which is replaceable, exchangeable, or identical to any other thing that fills a similar role or performs a similar function.

Justice Alito’s adoption rhetoric in Dobbs “assumes that families are fungible. It matters not what family a child is raised in — they are all interchangeable. Consider all the care we take at hospital nurseries to match parents and newborns — unnecessary in this worldview. We should parcel them out on a first-come, first-served basis!”9

The Dobbs court fails to recognize parents’ humanity and individuality, and instead sees and treats them as faceless, mindless, interchangeable things that perform a particular function, placeholders of a particular role. Shortly after giving birth, a new mom can simply be swapped out for a different one. This is what it looks like to view parents—human beings—as fungible objects.

The fungibility inherent in the Dobbs decision's disrespectful, consumerist, and transactional treatment of parents erases the individuals—their distinct voices and unique histories—and fails to recognize the human and parental qualities of those forced to give birth against their will. It treats every parent as though they are fungible objects which can be copied or substituted. This is objectification.

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Reduction to Appearance

The objectifier treats the object primarily in terms of how it looks, or how it appears to the senses.

In 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to restrict access to mifepristone nationwide at the behest of anti-reproductive health denists and doctors. One of the judges on the court, James Ho, issued a separate opinion in which he claimed that forced-birth doctors suffer an “aesthetic injury” when pregnant people end their pregnancies with medication. If people are allowed to access medication abortion, Ho reasoned, then forced-birth doctors won't get the opportunity to stick a sonogram probe into women’s vaginas and peep at 7-week embryos in their natural “habitat.”

“It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal,” Judge Ho wrote. “Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” and therefore, according to Ho, doctors “experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

To back up his bizarre (and downright creepy) assertion of “aesthetic injury,” Ho cited “multiple cases involving attempts to protect either wildlife or natural landscapes from harms that would diminish the viewing pleasure of nature lovers.”4 For example, Ho cited Sierra Club vs. Morton, a 1972 Supreme Court case “in which the environmental group sought to block construction of a ski resort in California’s Sequoia National Forest on the grounds that the resort would harm the ‘area’s aesthetics and ecology.’”5

[Judge Ho's opinion lead to a Strict Scrutiny podcast episode entitled “The Aesthetic Enjoyment of Other People's Uteruses.”]

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Judge James Ho's opinion objectifies both human embryos and the human persons who are pregnant with those embryos.

Ho refers to human embryos and early fetuses as “unborn children,” a term conveying the standard anti-choice idea that an embryo is equivalent to a freckle-faced kindergartener. — And yet, Ho reduced these children to things that exist to be viewed and be protected for the sake of the viewer's sensory enjoyment—like a Monet painting.

Precious, yes. But a precious object is still an object nonetheless.

And as for the living, breathing, thinking, and feeling human persons who are pregnant? Judge Ho likewise reduced them to viewable things. As one commentator observed:

Women are public parks in other words. Or pretty little birds. Or flowers that are lovely to look at when pregnant and in full bloom. And it would make certain people sad to not have that. You will be harming them if you deprive them of pregnancies to behold. A bountiful crop of full bellies stretching as far as the eye can see. Nature as it was meant to be.6

Making frequent use of words like view, image, and sight, Ho conjured up a legal argument wherein abortions cause aesthetic deprivation, abortion patients are akin to damaged natural landscapes or wildlife habitats, and anti-choice doctors who want to invasively gaze upon the interior crevasses of a woman’s body and “see women give birth against their will [are placed] on the same footing as conservationists who want to see gopher frogs before they disappear” from extinction.7

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Rhonda Garelick, a distinguished professor of English and journalism at Southern Methodist University, astutely observed that Judge James Ho's opinion “reveals a larger truth about the antiabortion movement. To construe abortion as a crime against the privilege of looking inside women is to construe them as objects offered up for the visual consumption, pleasure and, of course, control of others.”8 At the LA Times, she wrote:

Scopophilia objectifies women, turning them into visual surfaces to be looked at, embellished, augmented or reduced, perfected and consumed — in a word, commodified.

Ho’s opinion takes scopophilia to new depths, extending it below the surface of the skin into women’s bodily interiors, which he treats here as yet another category of viewable commodity, more subject to the controlling, pleasure-seeking gaze of medical providers than to the volition of the women themselves.

It’s no accident that this opinion pertains specifically to nonsurgical abortion. By virtue of being a pill, mifepristone can make abortion invisible, often obviating the need for medical imaging or pelvic exams and thereby eliminating visual access to the procedure. Mifepristone can also reduce or even eliminate visual access to patients themselves: In many cases, a woman can get a prescription without an office visit and take the pill in the privacy of her home.

Mifepristone in this way offers women a powerful mode of resistance to the kind of compulsory bodily visibility that Ho advocates. Perhaps that’s why the judge chose the seemingly bizarre grounds of “aesthetic injury” to argue against access to the drug. It allows him to reposition abortion in the very realm from which mifepristone effectively frees it: that of prurient visual surveillance.9

In studies, researchers found that drawing people's attention to a woman’s appearance—specifically, to her body rather than her face—“reduced the degree that she was perceived as having characteristics typifying human nature (i.e., that which separates humans from objects)”; hence, “objectified women are perceived as less than fully human.”11

Unfortunately, as scholars have observed, “anti-abortion propaganda often weaponizes images of highly feminine, visibly pregnant people.”12 This “romanticizes motherhood and foregrounds its importance as a tactic to subsequently dissuade people from seeking and having abortions, despite most abortions occurring in the first trimester before ‘baby bumps’ typically appear.”13

As such, scholars note, “anti-abortion propaganda exploits the appearance of pregnant bodies to reify idealistic notions of pregnancy that undercut the humanity of the pregnant person. Feminized baby bump iconography simultaneously perpetuates misconceptions about who has abortions and when they have them, all in favor of a pronatalist agenda.”14

These visuals are frequently “paired with infant and fetal images visually depicting pregnant people as vessels for fetuses,” rather than as full human persons with thoughts, feelings, and inner life who are deserving of moral treatment by others.15

Precious, romanticized objects, yes. But a precious object is still an object nonetheless.

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This hyper-focus on the pregnant body results in the objectification of living, breathing, thinking, and feeling human beings by Reduction to Appearance, stripping them of the human qualities that differentiate people from objects.

Making persons into things may or may not be a conscious goal of those who agitate against reproductive health and human rights, but the perception of pregnant people as objects permeates their subconscious.

The result is still the same: policies treating humans as things.

As Sarah Jones at New York Magazine observed, “Abortion bans weren’t written for human beings. As written, they strip women of their humanity and reimagine them as vessels. A vessel is not a person. A vessel has no rights. A vessel is only useful as long as it is functional. When it is no longer fit for purpose, it is cast aside; there are plenty more where it came from.”16

HOMEWORK:

Review the 10 ways of treating persons as objects. Besides Reduction to Appearance, what other ways are people being treated as things in the Judge Ho's opinion and in the anti-choice visual propaganda discussed above? This activity will help train your brain to recognize objectification. Leave a comment below to help others recognize it, too.

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In her seminal 1995 essay, philosopher Martha Nussbaum identified seven ways (or features) of treating others as things instead of as humans. Philosopher Rae Langton later added three more features to Nussbaum’s list, bringing the total to ten.

Because objectification is a cluster concept, any one of the ten core features is a sufficient condition, on its own, for the objectification of persons to have occurred; more often, though, a plurality of features is present.

Ten features of objectification

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As scholars Meghan M. Boone and Benjamin J. McMichael note, “Such objectification results in almost certain abuse, sometimes of the most horrifying variety.”13

“The objectification of individuals or groups has, historically and cross-culturally, resulted in increased rates of violence and abuse towards those individuals or groups, sometimes of the most horrifying variety. When people are no longer thought of as fully human, they are no longer treated with the respect that such humanity warrants within shared cultural values. This results in an increase in the physical violence they experience.”14

Scholars have “linked objectification to the capacity to bear children, menstruate, and lactate, suggesting that women’s reproductive functions may serve as a basis for objectification.”1516 Concomitantly, fetal personhood ideology, along with essentialist views of gender and biology that center antiquated views of women’s “purpose” as that of childbearing, strip women and pregnant people of their personhood and human attributes. All this increases the risk of gender-based violence.

And because, in the United States, the treatment of women and those asigned female at birth as things—especially when pregnant—is so prevalent, it mostly goes unnoticed, unquestioned, and unchallenged. It’s time for us to change that.

It’s time to make sure objectification gets noticed, gets questioned, and gets challenged. — That’s why rePro-Truth will publishing a series of posts addressing each of the core features of objectification utilizing real-world examples, from anti-choice rhetoric and policies to fetal personhood propaganda materials, to male supremacists court opinions. And, as the saying goes, ‘once you see it, you can't not see it.’

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SBA Pro-Life America is circulating a “Declaration of Independence for the Unborn.” Yes, really.

BREAKING: The Unborn recently came together, at a session shrouded in secrecy, to lay out their grievances in a document. The session voted unanimously to declare independence. SBA Faux-Life America has obtained a copy.

The “Declaration” is a written masterpiece, exuding the liberal ideals of individual rights, justice, and liberty. With a unified voice, the Unborn declare their independence from the biological tyranny of windowless confinement. — Just kidding. I made that up. Exactly what or who the Unborn are declaring independence from remains a mystery; the “Declaration” doesn't say. It seems the Unborn are few on words.

In fact, when you open the link, you discover that, despite the title at the top of the page, there's no declaration of independence to be found. Weird, I know.

Instead, what you find is a different declaration: “The Unanimous Declaration of the Unborn.”

It declates, “Where our people live does not determine whether or not they have the right to live.”

I have my doubts about the unanimous part. In fact, I would like to— no, I demand! to see the roll call vote record! In the name transparency and accountability!

Audit the vote!

Is there a P.O. Box to which I should submit my request? Or do I just politely ask the next pregnant gal I see at Kroger if I should insert my request into, umm, her box?

And to what Unborn agency should I address my request?

Furthermore, why wasn't anyone informed of the Unborn Continental Congress? Was this the First Unborn Continental Congress? The Second? Where did they meet?

I'd also like to know who paid for this. It's time for the Unborn to release their tax returns.

And how were the delegates chosen? What are their credentials? Did the delegates include Unborn Democrats and Unborn Independents, or were only Unborn Republican delegates permitted to participate? Release their names!

Why the secrecy? What are the Unborn trying to hide? The Born Public has a right to know!

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“to remove a dead fetus” — This phrase (or a derivative thereof) appears, as an exclusion, within high-control states’ definitions of abortion. For example, Tennessee law states: “‘Abortion’ means the use of any instrument, medicine, drug, or any other substance or device with intent to terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with intent other than to increase the probability of a live birth, to preserve the life or health of the child after live birth, to terminate an ectopic or molar pregnancy, or to remove a dead fetus” (TENN. CODE ANN. § 39-15-213).

It sounds straight forward. A pregnant patient arrives at the hospital. The embryo/fetus is “dead” but the patient's body hasn't yet expelled that tissue (incomplete early pregnancy loss). Surely it is perfectly legal for the doctor to perform a quick aspiration to clear the patient's uterus of any remaining tissue, preserving the patient's health.

Unfortunately, it's not so simple to determine if/when an embryo or early fetus is “dead.” Not only is '“dead” not medical terminology in this context, but it also doesn't reflect the ways early pregnancy loss is determined and diagnosed.

“In some instances, making a diagnosis of early pregnancy loss is fairly straightforward and requires limited testing or imaging. For example, early pregnancy loss can be diagnosed with certainty in a woman with an ultrasound-documented intrauterine pregnancy who subsequently presents with reported significant vaginal bleeding and an empty uterus on ultrasound examination. In other instances, the diagnosis of early pregnancy loss is not as clear. Depending on the specific clinical circumstances and how much diagnostic certainty the patient desires, a single serum b-hCG test or ultrasound examination may not be sufficient to confirm the diagnosis of early pregnancy loss.”1

Additionally, 2013 guidelines issued by the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound Multispecialty Panel on Early First Trimester Diagnosis of Miscarriage and Exclusion of a Viable Intrauterine Pregnancy, which have been criticized by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are unnecessarily conservative in their approach to diagnosing embryonic demise, “setting[] standards that went beyond cutoffs associated with 100% [certaintly in determining embryonic/fetal demise] in prior studies.”2 Now navigating a post-Roe environment with steep criminal penalties, doctors are being extra cautious about diagnosing fetal/embryonic demise by delaying care while they gather enough evidence to defend themselves against possible criminal charges prior to terminating a pregnancy—even when it is firmly believed that the embryo/fetus has already expired (you can read more about this here).

In early pregnancy loss (EPL), physicians have reported that abortion bans have “compelled additional, sometimes unnecessary, confirmatory testing to demonstrate that a pregnancy was nonviable. This often required multiple ultrasonograms or serial measurements of β–human chorionic gonadotropin levels, even when clinical assessment was consistent with EPL. Physicians described delaying intervention despite clinical findings highly suggestive of EPL.”3

The ways in which abortion bans alter medical care have heightened Americans’ need to decipher the difference between what is legal on paper from what is likely in practice when criminal penalties are introduced into a risk-averse field such as Healthcare, Professor Penelope Deutscher explains (Duke University Press).4

Abortion bans “operate[] through environmental deterrence or the management of behavior’s likelihood. In antirisk environments, providers avoid possible ambiguity by overimposing the law: the eight-week cutoff might be informally implemented as a seven-week cutoff. Medical practitioners might interpret conservatively the degree of life endangerment that would legalize their intervention unambiguously… A hospital’s legal advisers might assess the possibility of a malpractice suit before determining that denying care to a patient is preferable to the risk of prosecution for illegal abortion provision.”5 As the legal counsel of an Arkansas hospital stated, “We cannot rule out the possibility of an overzealous prosecutor.”

This is exactly what we see at play in the case of the determining embryonic demise in order “to remove a dead fetus” without fearing criminal prosecution.

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Lastly, it's important to note that while removing a “dead” fetus (which is not medical terminology) is excluded from high-control states’s definitions of abortion, it is not excluded for the benefit the pregnant patient. Rather, it’s excluded for the benefit the embryo. — Specifically, this exclusion is designed to function as a restriction on when a patient may receive medical and procedural management for pregnancy loss.

The sole purpose of the exclusion is to benefit the embyo by delaying the delivery of miscarriage care until after embryonic demise has been so redundantly documtented that doctors, hospitals, and hospitals’ attorneys feel they are sufficiently protected from the ever-present risk of criminal prosecution.

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Recognized as the nation’s second independence day, Juneteenth National Independence Day commemorates the day— June 19, 1865 —on which Union Army soldiers, many of whom were Black, made their way into Galveston, Texas, with the Emancipation Proclamation in hand, and “announced to the people of Texas that all enslaved African Americans were free.” Because the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to Confederate states, slavery would not be abolished throughout the whole United States until later that year, on December 6, 1865, with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.1 Texas was the last of the Confederate states to receive the proclamation, a monumental moment. From henceforth, Juneteenth has been a celebration of freedom and self-ownership.

“Juneteenth places Black people at the center of the conversation about freedom, it's meaning and manifestation in this nation.”2

Unfortunately, today I bring you upsetting news: One of the nation’s most powerful anti-human rights groups has seized upon the occasion to hijack Juneteenth for its own repressive aims, going so far as to appropriate the words of a formerly-enslaved civil rights activist and suffragist—brazenly purloining her words, her name, her image, and her legacy. Even as someone who reports on anti-human rights groups’ lies, this shocked me.

Ida B. Wells (later Wells-Barnett)—born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862—was a tireless suffragist and a foundational civil rights leader. She was also an investigative journalist, a sociologist, an educator, and one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Like other suffragist of her time, Wells advocated for voluntary motherhood, the radical notion that every woman should have autonomy of body, be able to reject unwanted sexual advances from her husband, and choose if and when she has children. In other words, the right of every woman to be “the owner of her own body.”3 Unfortunately, even today, this is still considered radical to some people.

Wells “often encountered racism within the suffrage movement itself.”4 During Reconstruction, “there were sometimes ‘calls for unity’ between Northern and Southern suffragists”;5 this lead to compromises being made “by Northern activists with Southern racism.”6 This, in turn, lead to a dispute between Wells and another suffragist, Frances Willard, after Willard made racist remarks in 1890. Willard responded by claiming that her words weren’t meant to be taken literally.

“Wells was unequivocal in her expectations that the white women in the suffrage movement must embrace Black women and stand by them in their fight against racial discrimination and violence.”7 She never hesitated to call out racism—even among friends and allies.

In 1895, Wells published A Red Record, an investigative and statistical report documenting the horror of lynching in the United States. Wells dedicated an entire chapter of the book to condemning Frances Willard for using racist rhetoric that promoted violence against Black people. The chapter is titled, “Miss Willard's Attitude.” Wells concluded this chapter with the following words. [*Note the portions which I have emboldened for emphasis, because we'll revisit it below.]

“… [M]y love for the truth is greater than my regard for an alleged friend who, through ignorance or design misrepresents in the most harmful way the cause of a long suffering race, and then unable to maintain the truth of her attack excuses herself as it were by the wave of the hand, declaring that ‘she did not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used.’ When the lives of men, women and children are at stake, when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the obloquy of the most infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today and tomorrow to repudiate the apology by declaring it a figure of speech.”

“Wells was relentless in fighting for anti-lynching laws, but she was equally unrelenting in her fight for universal suffrage. Wells organized Black women around voting as a way of increasing civic engagement and as a tactic to promote anti-lynching laws.”8 In “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” a 1910 pamphlet, “Wells said states that denied the right to vote were emboldened in denying Black people the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”9 She wrote, “With no sacredness of the ballot, there can be no sacredness of human life itself.”

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (henceforth referred to as SBA Pro-Life) is an anti-human rights group that “sees[] trimming the electorate as essential to achieve their goals.”10 SBA Pro-Life opposes the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act11 and the For the People Act,12 and works with other anti-voting rights groups “to drive the state-by-state GOP efforts to limit voting.”13 *Of significance, some of those voting restrictions specifically target the Black community.

SBA Pro-Life also opposes granting full equality to women under the law14 —which, even in 2026, American women still do *not* have.

The organization was founded by a “pro-life feminist.” It's leaders claimed—and continue to claim—that Susan B. Anthony, the famous suffragist, was an anti-abortion advocate. The trouble is, that's a lie.

This lie began when “pro-life feminists” misattributed another person's words to Anthony, and then intentionally continued to misattribute those words even after being made aware of their error. In fact is, “Anthony spent no time on the politics of abortion. It was of no interest to her, despite living in a society (and a family) where women aborted unwanted pregnancies.”15 Like Ida B. Wells, Susan B. Anthony was an advocate for voluntary motherhood.

This week, SBA Pro-Life took its devilishly calculated misappropriation—and fabrication—of women’s history to a whole new, jaw-dropping level. On Monday, the anti-human rights, anti-voting rights group tweeted:

“Kicking off #Juneteenth week by honoring the profound legacy of Black women who paved the way as fearless pro-life advocates: civil rights icon Ida B. Wells and Dr. Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School. Let's carry their courage forward.”

The tweet included the following image. (Featured in the image is SBA Pro-Life America’s logo—a small, circular silhouette of Susan B. Anthony.)

The image features portraits of Ida B. Wells (left) and Mildred Jefferson (right). In large, neon green lettering are the words, “The Legacy of Black Women Who Were Pro-Life Advocates.” Both the image and the text of SBA Pro-Life's tweet tell readers that both of these women were anti-choice activists. The trouble is, that's a lie.

While Mildred Jefferson was an anti-choice activist, Ida B. Wells was not. In fact, there is no historical evidence that Ida B. Wells opposed abortion nor that she supported the abortion bans that were passed in the wake of the Civil War. Like the claim that Susan B. Anthony was an anti-choice activist, the claim that Ida B. Wells was an anti-choice activist has been invented out of this air.

SBA Pro-Life's tweet contains a second image of Wells. At the top of the image, above her portrait, Wells’ words are quoted—again in large, neon green lettering: “When the lives of men, women and children are at stake… it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today.”

Do those words sound familiar to you? They should! — Those very words are emboldened in the above passage from Ida B. Wells's book, A Red Record, that documents the lynching of Black Americans. The words come from the chapter entitled, “Miss Willard’s Attitude,” in which Wells condemned White suffragist Frances Willard for using racist rhetoric that promoted violence against Black people.

Missing in the quote, after the ellipsis, in the image above are the words, “when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the obloquy of the most infamous of crimes.” — This is a remarkable omission for the Juneteenth occasion. First, SBA Pro-Life America ripped Wells's words out of the context of racist lynch mobs and of Wells's repudiation of Willard's racist rhetoric. Then it omitted her words about race.

The full sentence repudiating Willard is as follows:

“When the lives of men, women and children are at stake, when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the obloquy of the most infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today and tomorrow to repudiate the apology by declaring it a figure of speech.”

One of the main rules for using an ellipsis to omit words from a quotation is that doing so must never change the meaning of the original quote. And as you now well see, SBA Pro-Life’s use of an ellipsis, in combination with its false claims about Ida B. Wells, did indeed change the meaning of her original words.

When I saw these images and when I read SBA Pro-Life’s claim that Wells was an anti-choice advocate along with the shortened, decontextualized quotation, my jaw hit the floor. I felt sick. Like I needed to shower away the filth of SBA Pro-Life America’s sleazy lies, dirty politics, and opportunistic exploitation of a Black woman’s name, image, and legacy for unearned legitimacy.

TO BE CEAR: To “celebrate” Juneteenth, a majority White organization—which stands in opposition to much of Ida B. Wells's life's work—falsely labeled her a “pro-life advocate” and then chopped up her words, making it appear that the “butchers” she's referring to in her quote are OB-GYNs—not White lynch mobs.

To hide its White Supremacist policy goals behind the name and face of a Black historical figure.

To control Black women’s bodies and reproduction, a legacy of hereditary chattel slavery.

To snatch the focus of Juneteenth away from liberation to domination.

To center the archetypal (usually White) fetus, instead of the Black community and their continued struggle for full emancipation from systems of oppression and violence.

To legitimize its authoritarian policy agenda that causes out-sized harm to Black people.

Even as someone who reports on anti-human rights groups’ lies, this shocked me. I honestly can’t find the words to adequately describe such shameless depravity. So, I’ll close with the words of Ida B. Wells, from the same passage of A Red Record:

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This week, rePro-Truth revealed that Students for Life of America (SFLA)—through its dark money arm SFLAction—has become the first major, mainstream “pro-life” group since the fall of Roe v. Wade to publicly endorse a bill explicitly criminalizing pregnant people for abortion.

Thanks to rePro-Truth's coverage, SFLA has publicly reversed its support for the portions of the bill that criminalize women.

Yesterday evening, Lane Koch, Vice President of SFLAaction, announced that the organization would withdraw its support of the South Carolina bill (S.1095) if the Senate committe fails to strip criminal penalties for pregnant people from the bill.

SFLAction also urged its supporters to contact Medical Affairs Chair, Sen. Danny Verdin, to tell him to “remove[] prosecution language against women immediately.”

This is a small, but significant win.

It shows that—despite being far outmatched by the money and influence of Goliathan groups who seek to control every aspect of our most intimate lives—we are not without power.

Although Koch and SFLAction both sidestepped the organization's true support for prosecuting people for their private healthcare decisions, they backtracked in the aftermath of accurate reporting exposing this support.

They blinked.

This is why independent reporting is so important.

This is why you and the pressure you are able to exert in the public and political arena, when armed with knowledge and truth, are so important.

Together, we make change.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that the bill won't pass. In fact, it's already moving forward. 👀 Be on the lookout for rePro-Truth’s upcoming breakdown on what else is in this horrible bill.

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❗️UPDATE: Following rePro-Truth's coverage, anti-abortion group backtracks endorsement of prosecuting women

This article is free to the public. Truthful information and insightful analysis should never be pay-walled, as freely accessible misinformation runs rampant. With every small gift, you ensure that the independent journalism at rePro-Truth remains freely available to all.

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For the first time since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, a “mainstream” anti-choice group has officially endorsed an abortion ban that explicitly criminalizes pregnant and previously pregnant individuals for abortion and abortion-related activities.

Students for Life of America (SFLA) has endorsed a bill introduced in the South Carolina Senate and is lobbying for its passage. The endorsement was announced through SFLA's dark money arm Students for Life Action (SFLAction).

The bill, S.1095, is entitled the “Unborn Child Protection Act.”

SFLAction's announcement notes it's contribution to the bill:

Students for Life Action (SFLAction) President Kristan Hawkins celebrated the introduction of the SFLAction-modeled “Unborn Child Protection Act” (S.1095). The bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard Cash (R), is modeled after SFLAction’s own language in the “Life Begins at Conception Act” (H.3457) and SFLAction’s model “Anti-Chemical Abortion Pill Trafficking Act” legislation.

South Carolina currently bans abortions at six weeks LMP (which is ~3 weeks after the start of pregnancy). — S.1095 would change this by banning abortion prior to 6 weeks LMP, resulting in a full ban.

South Carolina’s current abortion ban also includes several exceptions, including fatal fetal diagnosis and rape or incest. — S.1095 would change this by eliminating the statutory exceptions for fatal fetal diagnosis and rape or incest.

S.1095 also bans the possession of “any drug or chemical, or any combination of drugs or chemicals, or any other substance when used with the intent to cause an abortion of a clinically diagnosable pregnancy including, but not limited to, RU-486, the Mifeprex regimen, misoprostol, or methotrexate.”

Criminalizing pregnant and formerly pregnant individuals

S.1095 explicitly criminalizes people who are or were pregnant by adding several new sections to South Carolina code of law: §44‑41‑611, §44‑41‑612, and § 44‑41‑614. Below is the relevant text for each of the sections.

*Note: The bill uses the word woman, but does not define that term to exclude minors. It is therefore possible that minors would be subject to adult criminal penalties.

§ 44‑41‑611 (Unlawful Procurement of Abortion)

“It is unlawful to knowingly and intentionally use or employ any instrument, device, means, or procedure upon a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing an abortion… A woman upon whom an unlawful abortion was performed pursuant to this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be imprisoned for up to two years or fined up to one thousand dollars, or both.”

§ 44‑41‑612 (Unlawful Consumption of Abortion-inducing Drugs)

“It is unlawful for any person to knowingly and intentionally administer to, prescribe for, deliver to, provide to, or sell to an abortion‑inducing drug to a pregnant woman, with the intent to cause an unlawful abortion… A woman who ingests an abortion‑inducing drug with the intent of inducing an unlawful abortion is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be imprisoned for up to two years or fined up to one thousand dollars, or both.”

§ 44‑41‑614 (Unlawful Possession of Abortion-inducing Drugs)

“It is unlawful to possess, manufacture, mail, distribute, transport, deliver, or provide an abortion‑inducing drug; or aid or abet the performance, induction, or attempted abortion, or the manufacture, mailing, distribution, transportation, delivery, or provision of an abortion‑inducing drug… A pregnant woman who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, must be imprisoned for not more than two years or fined one thousand dollars; or both.”

*Note: There are other portions of the bill that may subject pregnant people to additional criminalization and the possibility of even harsher punishment, but do not explicitly do so. I'll be discussing this in the next post.

Moving the Overton Window

The Overton Window represents the range of policies that are acceptable to the mainstream population at any given time. Policies that fall outside the Overton Window, like prosecuting currently and formerly pregnant people for abortion and abortion-related activities, are not likely to gain broad support.

But the Overton Window also moves over time, and anti-SRHR groups have long employed a strategy of moving the Overton Window to get their unpopular policies enacted. SFLA’s support for S.1095 is this strategy in action.

Mainstream “pro-life” groups benefit from the introduction of extremist legislation, such as homicide bills put forth by so-called “abortion abolitionists.” Mainstream groups depend on such legislation to create the illusion that mainstream legislation is mild.

The tactic of adopting a more moderate position in order to seem reasonable by comparison is at the heart of S.1095.

The bill prescribes two-year prison sentences, fines, or both, for people who obtain or seek abortion. It is unquestionably extreme to take away a woman’s freedom for two long years—knowing the negative long-term effects of doing so will befall her or her existing children—because she made the decision not to go forward with the grueling and risky labor of producing a new human within her own body in consideration of her health and her lived circumstances.

Imposing fines upon someone is no less extreme. It's still amounts to arbitrarily punishing women for exercising moral agency in matters directly affecting their health and lives. It's still based upon the grotesque, sexist belief that anyone with a uterus is primarily a reproductive object that exists for other people's use and benefit.

But for a public now-used to hearing about of the “abortion abolitionist” homicide bills that punish abortion with life imprisonment or the death penalty, the contrast of homicide bills with S.1095's callous, arbitrary, and dehumanizing cruelty creates the illusion that S.1095 is mild in comparison—when, in reality, any form of punishment of whatever degree is extreme.

This is all part of a calculated effort to manifest a shift in the Overton Window—to shift what the public considers normal.

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Duplicitous Knaves and Media Dupes

Like nearly all other anti-choice groups and activists, SFLA and its leaders are duplicitous schemers.

Take SFLA's queen bee, Kristan Hawkins, who has repeatedly told members of the press that the prolife movement, herself and her organization included, “opposes throwing mothers in jail.” She even co-authored an article with Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA-PLA), titled, “We’re Two Pro-Life Women Who Say ‘No’ to Prosecuting Women for Abortions.”

She was lying.

To emphasize Hawkins's duplicity, let's look back to February 2025. In a post on social media that month, Hawkins again insisted that she opposes “jailing women.” — Meanwhile, that same month, Hawkins admitted, in the middle of her hour-long podcast, that she and other major, mainstream anti-rights leaders are actually pro-prosecuting women. They just want to keep that little tidbit a secret until criminalizing people for making decisions about their health becomes more popular (I discussed this strategy here).

Her organization, Students for Life of America is equally duplicitous.

In a January 2023 post on social media, SFLAction said, “YOU 🙅‍♂️ WILL 🙅‍♀️ NOT see @StudentsforLife or SFLAction looking to prosecute mothers.” — Yet, three years later, that's exactly what SFLA and SFLAction are doing.

As discussed in “Five ways mainstream press is failing us on repro health,” far too many reporters have a contemptible habit of playing the role of stenographer rather than reporter, mindlessly repeating the anti-choice groups’ bogus assertions that they do not support criminalizing pregnant people.

As rePro-Truth has repeatedly pointed out (see here, here, here, and here), that mainstream groups opposed to sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR) support punishing abortion patients and criminalizing pregnancy—despite what they tell media dupes who print anti-choice lies like good little stenographers.

But unlike court stenographers, who perform an important and noble public duty, reporters acting as stenographers for the duplicitous knaves and schemers of a radically anti-rights movement do a serious disservice to the public.

Just think about it: How might things today be different had there been accurate reporting in the mainstream press of the pro-prosecution stance of so-called “pro-life” groups throughout the nearly four years that have passed since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, instead of the uncritical regurgitation of anti-SRHR bullsh*t?

We will never get that time back. And how much more time will be lost before legacy media picks up this report and/or begins to cover this issue with the critical accuracy that such an impactful matter demands? How long will the broad American public be deprived of important information—information that is material to their literal freedom?

Wait, There's More…

S.1095 is a behemoth of a bill, and there's a lot more in it than just further banning abortion and prosecuting pregnant and formerly pregnant adults and minors.

Effecting more than just abortion, S.1095 is a smorgasbord of terrible policy ideas that would that demands further discussion and examination. rePro-Truth will break it all down for you in the next post.

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I've been working on an in-depth piece for yall that I won't be finished with until next week, but I just had to stop and remark on breaking news out of Texas…

In 2022, as you may recall, Texas officials arrested, jailed, and charged a young woman with murder for self-managing an abortion—which is not a crime in Texas! A grand jury indicted her. After her name and mugshot were splashed all over the news around the world, the prosecutor begrudgingly dropped the charge and was reprimanded.

An investigation by the State Bar of Texas found that the prosecutor “sought to pursue criminal homicide charges against an individual for acts clearly not criminal.”

Not only did the prosecutor know that the young woman's actions were completely legal, but he allegedly paid for his side piece to get get an abortion.

Despite the charge being dropped, for the young woman the damage to to her had already been done. So, she sued the officials for violating her constitutional rights, false arrest, and malicious prosecution.

Her hopes of holding the county officials accountable ended today, when Republican U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton—a Trump appointee—ruled that the Texas officials are immune from being held accountable for violatinf the yound woman's constitutional rights by arresting, jailing, charging, and getting an indictment against her for perfectly legal behavior.

Pretending like the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. ​Constitution don’t exist—which, by all appearances, is the Republican Party’s official anti-America stance now—U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton said that county officials are immune from accountability because they didn’t violate a clearly established law.

Republican U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton based his decision on a so-called doctrine that is found no where in the U.S. Constitution: this legal, practical, and moral failure is known as qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity is a totally made up thing that was imposed upon the country by the whims of the Supreme Court in 1967 (Pierson v. Ray). The “doctrine” was brazenly expanded beyond all justification via the judicial fiat of a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in 1982 (Harlow v. Fitzgerald).

There's no longer any qualified about qualified immunity. It's just immunity.

(As for the prosecutor mentioned above, the judge ruled that he is protected by absolute immunity.)

So here we are.

Forced-birth officials are free to bring bogus murder charges against people who have abortions or who miscarry much-wanted pregnancies, or who suffer stillbirth while Black. Meanwhilr, the misogynistic jerks who maliciously bring such bogus charges are protected—by judicial fiat—can just keep on doing it without fear of accountability. In a post-Dobbs words, that's a very dangerous thing.

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Anti-rights groups are morally bankrupt. They indulge in all manner of deception and trickery. Every time a woman's life is snuffed out or maimed psychologically traumatized by their policies of control, they immediately refuse to take any responsibility, lie, deflect blame, and engage in elaborate cover-ups. Every time an abusive man wants to maintain control over a woman he has victimized, they eagerly come to his aid in an unholy alliance, filing lawsuits on the man's behalf to bring the abuser’s dream of control into a reality.

And, importantly, anti-rights groups nimbly and subversively appropriate the language used by human rights activists and victims’ advocates in order to devilishly conceal the chief goal of their initiatives—to restrict and control women's autonomy—behind language that is more appealing to the modern public. Their language changes but their goal and their mechanism - coercion - are set in stone.

And because the majority of anti-choice leaders are opportunistic, self-serving, and morally bankrupt, they are currently engaged in the contemptuously disingenuous exploitation of reproductive coercion. Just this week, the National Right to Life Committee published an article hailing the political expediency of using the concept of reproductive coercion as an advantageous vehicle for persuading those who aren’t yet pro-life to get on board with advancing anti-choice groups’ own goal of restricting and controlling women's autonomy through State coercion.

But they aren't merely co-opting language of human rights activists and victims’ advocates.

And they are merely subversively exploiting a the very real problem of reproductive coercion.

They're watering down the characteristics of this specific type of abuse to such an extent that it could harm the people experiencing reproductive coercion and hamper the fight for justice.

But anti-rights groups don't care if they hurt people or perpetrate injustice. They're bulldozing ahead without caution, without any sense of responsibility, and without any awareness of their own deprativy.

Demonstrably, anti-rights groups and activists don't give a damn about reproductive coercion. In fact, their entire immoral agenda is to perpetrate it—to be the abusers they so eagerly support.

That's why I'm reposting the below article, “Abortion Bans are Reproductive Coercion.” 👇

Abortion Bans are Reproductive Coercion

(Part II of How to Talk About Abortion Bans and Restrictions)

The movement against reproductive health, rights, and justice has long worked to obscure the fact that its “so-called ‘pro-life’ view on abortion is both coercive and grounded in an illiberal political philosophy.”1 But the “pro-life” view invariably holds that “a just society would use the coercive authority of the State to force pregnant people to conform to [the ‘pro-life’] moral and metaphysical worldview and… enforce this conformation through punishment. The State is therefore permitted, indeed required, to coercively prohibit abortion on this illiberal view” (emphasis added).2 “This is the aim of the pro-life movement: to control all reproductive decisions… so that they are made in accord with the movement’s substantive” worldview.3

Movement leaders and activists, of course, employed woman-protective anti-abortion arguments (WPAA) to obscure the coerciveness at the heart of their ideology. It's out job to bring it back out into the light.

How we talk about abortion bans matters.

For years, I was a part of the so-called “Pro-life” movement. I was a true believer in the movement’s promises that it cared about the wellbeing of the pregnant person as much as the “unborn.” When movement leaders said they wanted to “protect women from coercion,” that resonated with me deeply. But it never occurred to me that the “Pro-life” solution to coercion was really just more coercion.

I didn't realize that I was part of an abusive movement built on coercion and force, because I never heard anyone talk about abortion restrictions for what they truly are: reproductive coercion. That's why it is so important for supporters of reproductive justice to speak to the realities of abortion bans. Our words really do have power. Your words have the power to make change.

Reproductive Coercion

The United States “has long operated under interlocking, constructed systems of power and oppression.”4 Two of these systems are patriarchy and White supremacy.5

• Patriarchy is “a social system wherein male-bodied people dominate, exploit, and oppress female-bodied people.”6

• White supremacy is “a social system in which White people overwhelmingly control power and resources, and ideas of White superiority are widespread and continually reenacted.”7

In the reproductive sphere, these two systems of power and oppression manifest as reproductive coercion.8

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Reproductive Coercion (RC) is a pernicious form of abuse and violence “characterized by interference in a person’s reproductive health and autonomy as a means of asserting power and control” over the coerced person.9

Reproductive coercion(RC)—also called Reproductive Coercion and Abuse (RCA)—can take many forms, including interference with contraception; forced sterilization or limiting contraceptive options; using pressure, deception, or violence to force someone to become pregnant; forced birth or forced abortions; withholding information about health and healthcare; obstructing access to health services or healthcare providers; attempting to ban services, treatments, or procedures outright; and empowering third parties to impose their views upon others.101112 Because RC involves the “deliberate restriction of options”13 in order to maintain power and control, it necessarily “undermines reproductive health.”14

While people often connect RC with intimate partner violence (IPV), reproductive coercion “within the United States [is] an integrated system of reproductive control” that operates at four ecological levels.12

1. Societal

2. Institutional

3. Interpersonal

4. Internalized

Policies, such as abortion-restrictive regulations, “that interfere with an individual’s reproductive autonomy are [] manifestations of coercive intimate partner violence”;15 and “under abortion bans, the lines between policymakers and abusive partners are increasingly blurred.”16 In fact, under abortion restrictions, the State is the abuser.17

Abortion Restrictions are Reproductive Coercion

As noted in Part 1 of this series, abortion restrictions are the exercise of raw, coercive, hegemonic power through governmental force that both *prohibits private actions and *compels individuals to perform private labor *unwillingly, without regard for their wellbeing.

Abortion restrictions are also reproductive coercion at the societal level.

State Reproductive Coercion

Societal Level Reproductive Coercion — which some refer to as State Reproductive Coercion — a long-studied occurance in the anthropology of reproduction.18 State Reproductive Coercion is state control over reproduction19 through policies that deploy the police powers of the State to “constrain and destroy reproductive autonomy”20 as a means of “achieving broader objectives of social control.”21

Societal-level Reproductive Coercion can take many forms, including, but not limited to “withholding information, obstructing access to health services or providers, attempting to ban services outright and empowering third parties to impose their views on others.”22

“Individuals who experience [interpersonal] reproductive coercion at the interpersonal level,” which is linked to higher rates of unplanned/unwanted pregnancies, “are often additionally burdened by” societal-level policies of reproductive coercion, “further compromising their ability to control their own reproductive health and future.”23 While “reproductive health care centers are primary sites of intervention for victims of reproductive coercion,”24 societal-level efforts at reproductive coercion often directly target these vital points of access to help. Through TRAP laws and attacks on funding, countless reproductive health care centers have closed or have otherwise been made inaccessible, especially to the underprivileged, the disempowered, and the vulnerable.252627 “Overall, this system of public policy functions to maintain a stratified reproduction system that pressures for or against pregnancy to the same effect as” interpersonal reproductive coercion and control.28

As “policies that interfere with an individual’s reproductive autonomy,” abortion restrictions are societal-level “manifestations of coercive intimate partner violence.”29

Under abortion bans, not only is intimate partner violence and interpersonal reproductive coercion far more prevalent;3031 the State both enables abusers and itself becomes the abuser.32 The result of this societal reproductive coercion is a “legal climate and political reality… in which abusers and the U.S. government present a conjoined threat to pregnant people and survivors’ bodies and lives.”33

Importantly, societal-level reproductive coercion carried out through abortion bans is an assault on one's very identity and sense of self. When forced to continue a pregnancy against one's will, “a woman loses the ‘authority to construct pregnancy and motherhood for’ herself; she is simultaneously separated her from, and reduced to, her reproductive capabilities. As Professor Julia Hanigsberg has written, ‘taking away women’s ability to control their decision not to become mothers can be severely damaging to their very sense of self, for this denial of decisionmaking divides women from their wombs and uses their wombs for purpose unrelated to women’s own aspirations.’”34

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Additionally, in the United States, “gendered and/or racialized power dynamics permeate many efforts to control a person’s bodily autonomy and reproductive health.”35 Recent research indicates that societal reproductive coercion through abortion bans is employed as a means of “using the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order.”36 Hence, this societal-level system of reproductive coercion “frequently functions to privilege White [male] control over reproduction and compromise the reproductive control of communities of color.”37

Reproductive coercion through abortion-restrictive legislation is also a means of enforcing patriarchal gender roles and prescriptive behavioral expectations.3839 For example, research links support for abortion restrictions to a desire “to suppress others’ casual sexual behavior.”40

*Furthermore, as research shows—and current events in America prove—a governments’ decisions to institute abortion restrictions foretell broader human rights violations,41 especially Physical Integrity Rights (PIR) abuses.42 —Abortion bans “directly serve as a testing ground for authoritarian governments,” and for governments with authoritarian aspirations, “to gauge public response and expand their control over citizens’ rights more broadly.”43 Abortion restrictions also “create greater inequality and societal divisions, weakening support for diversity and tolerance, and undermining collective efforts to resist further human rights abuses.”44 This research underscores how abortion rights are deeply interconnected with broader human rights frameworks and how these rights can significantly impact overall societal well-being and democratic integrity.45 [And as scholars have warned, the curtailment of women’s reproductive autonomy and rights are an early indication that a democracy is in danger.]

“Denial of bodily autonomy is the essence of violence against human beings. Reproductive coercion by the government— is a form of violence against women. Women have a right to control what happens to their bodies at all times. Forcing a person to continue a pregnancy is first an assault and then servitude.”46

As the above information makes clear:

Abortion bans are societal-level reproductive coercion wherein the police powers of the State are employed to constrain or destroy reproductive autonomy to achieve broader objectives of social control, undermining reproductive health, bodily integrity, and human dignity.

To maintain power and control over people's bodies, lives, and futures, abortion bans use the police powers of the State to enforce coerced pregnancy and birth, working in tandum with abusive partners and family members, exacerbating intimate partner violence and coercion without regard for pregnant individuals’ safety or wellbeing, with the goal of achieving broader objectives of social control.

If your solution to reproductive coercion is more reproductive coercion via abortion-restrictive policies, you're not concerned about coercion at all - or about women.

Your only concern is keeping women pregnant.

Against their wills.

Without concern for their wellbeing.

As I pointed out in Part I of this series, there are non-coercive ways to decrease the number of abortions and help those who wish to parent do so. It matters that opponents of reproductive rights and justice have chosen instead to exercise raw, coercive, hegemonic power through governmental force to both *prohibit private actions and *compel individuals to perform private labor *unwillingly, without regard for their wellbeing.

Abortion bans are reproductive coercion and we need to be shouting that from the rooftops.■

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A 20-year-old man—whom I am not naming because he doesn't deserve the name recognition—has confessed to plotting to assassinate a Montana physician because the physician provides abortion care. He also confessed to firing bullets through the front door of an abortion clinic in 2023, when he was 17 years old, and he admitted to plotting to bomb a second abortion clinic in 2024. In addition, he said that he was planning to assassinate the head of Planned Parenthood.

As rePro-Truth recently reported, acts of anti-abortion terrorism is on the rise.

On March 8, 2026, the man drove to an abortion provider's home. Peering through the window, the man said he watched the physician and his wife eat dinner.

As the man climbed onto the back porch with a .327 revolver, he said that he suddenly changed his mind. Instead of shooting the doctor, he threw the gun through a sliding glass window and into the home.

He told police that he doesn't know why he changed his mind.

The man was reportedly radicalized when he was in high school. That's when he started idolizing anti-abortion terrorists who assassinated doctors and bombed health care centers.

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As rePro-Truth has previously discussed, frustration with the persistence of abortion and a belief that anti-choice groups and/or anti-choice officials are not doing enough to stop it, has led abortion foes to commit acts of terror and violence. When anti-choice leaders’ actions are out of sinc with their moralizing and outrageous language and claims, that incongruity can be a source of radicalization. According to the police report, the man who confessed to plotting to kill the Montana abortion provider “felt the modern pro-life movement was 'just pathetic and was not accomplishing anything.’” So he took direct action.

He has been charged with two counts of assault with a weapon (felony), one count of intimidation (felony), and criminal trespass (misdemeanor).

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