How to Talk About Abortion Bans, Part 1

Abortion-restrictive regulation is state action compelling pregnancy and birth

Jul 31, 2025

Note: There are many ways to ban abortion besides outright bans. Even if abortion remains technically legal, legislative restrictions can function as a ban on abortion, especially for vulnerable and disempowered groups. For this reason, this series* uses the words ‘bans’ and ‘restrictions’ interchangeably.

Abortion bans 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.

When I was a part of the so-called “Pro-life” movement, I was never forced to confront the brutish realities of the policies I was supporting. Arguments or slogans, like “My Body, My Choice,” were never particularly convincing and never caused me to actually stop and think about the morality of my own position. I was “pro-life,” damn it. That meant I always held the moral high ground over the “baby killers.” Or so I thought.

I was wrong.

For far too long, opponents of reproductive freedom and justice have been allowed to control the narrative about abortion. Calling themselves “pro-life” or “abortion abolitionists,” antis have claimed that their policies “save babies” and “protect women.” Without pointed, explicit pushback against antis’ false narrative, these claims have kept antis insulated from the ugly realities of their feel-good policies. In other words, antis haven't had to confront what their laws really do to people or require of people.

But abortion bans aren't benevolent policy.

Banning abortion isn't a benign act.

In order to take back the narrative and force antis to confront and own the ugliness of their policy positions, we must talk about abortion bans for what they truly are:

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.

As explained by Reva Siegel, the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School, explains in the Stanford Law Review, “Abortion-restrictive regulation is state action compelling pregnancy”;1 that is, state action compelling gestation and childbirth — “work of the most intense and physical kind.”2 As such, abortion bans both *prohibit abortion and *compel pregnant individuals to perform private, exhaustive labor against their will.

This simple fact - that abortion bans are state action compelling pregnancy - “cannot be evaded by invoking nature or a woman's choices to explain the situation in which the pregnant woman subject to abortion restrictions finds herself.”3 Put simply, “a pregnant woman seeking an abortion has the practical capacity to terminate a pregnancy, which she would exercise but for the community's decision to prevent [] her. If the community successfully effectuates its will, it is the state, and not nature, which is responsible for causing her to continue the pregnancy.”4 Hence, “a woman's choice to engage in sexual relations is no longer significant as a cause of [the continuation of] pregnancy, if she would terminate that pregnancy, but for the interposition of communal force.”5

Because it is the hegemonic community, through state action, who is forcing an unwilling person to stay pregnant, that person’s choice to engage in sex “does not absolve the state from responsibility for compelling the pregnancy of a woman it prevents from obtaining an abortion.”6 Justifying the imposition of forced gestation and childbirth by appealing to a person's choice to engage in consensual sexual activity is a mere attempt to “obscure the fact that the state's decision to enact abortion restrictions rests on [gendered] social judgments about the pregnant woman” and “the fact that such restrictions are an act of communal force against her.”7 That the majority of abortion bans include no exceptions for survivors of rape - not even for raped children - betrays this fact.

Just to reiterate:

It does not matter how someone became pregnant.
It is the state that's keeping them pregnant.
Against their will.

“To be pregnant is to be inhabited. It is to be occupied… To mandate continuation of gestation is, quite simply, to force continuation of such occupation. To mandate that the woman remain pregnant is to mandate that she remain in a state of physical intertwinement against her consent.”8 Whatever the motives for enacting abortion-restrictive legislation, it matters that such legislation “forces[] others to have another entity live inside them” and to undertake gestation and childbirth against their will, without regard for their wellbeing.9

There are non-coercive ways to decrease the number of abortions and help those who wish to parent do so.10 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.

How we talk about abortion bans matters. “For too long, the anti-abortion movement has controlled the terms of the debate, framing themselves as ‘pro-life’ and the reproductive justice movement as ‘anti-life’. In reality, our humanity and bodily autonomy are not up for debate. The freedom to choose when and how to become a parent is inherently life-affirming.”11

Abortion bans are not life-affirming.

When those who support banning abortion speak approvingly of abortion-restrictive regulations, they are speaking approvingly of exercising 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. Neither invoking beneficent motives, nor appealing to pregnant people’s sexual choices or to nature, will change this fact.

So, when you talk to anyone about abortion bans, talk about bans for what they really are. Strip away the heavenly glow of antis’ feel-good smokescreen by speaking truth to power, revealing the hegemonic brutishness of their position. Give voice to the ugly realities of the policies they are supporting. This is how we plant out stake and claim our ground. This is how we take ownership of the narrative. This is how we make change. ■

rePro-Truth

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