Steve Bova (heart) traveled from Maryland to Los Angeles with the “People’s Convoy” to protest covid-19 restrictions. Despite utilizing a phrase that originated with the abortion rights motion, he opposes abortion.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Health News
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Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Health News
Steve Bova (heart) traveled from Maryland to Los Angeles with the “People’s Convoy” to protest covid-19 restrictions. Despite utilizing a phrase that originated with the abortion rights motion, he opposes abortion.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Health News
In the shadow of L.A.’s artwork deco City Hall, musicians jammed onstage, children obtained their faces painted, and households picnicked on garden chairs. Amid the festivity, individuals waved flags, sported T-shirts and offered buttons — all emblazoned with a well-recognized slogan: “My Body, My Choice.”
This wasn’t an abortion rights rally. It wasn’t a protest towards the latest U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gutted Roe v. Wade. It was the “Defeat the Mandates Rally,” a jubilant gathering of anti-vaccine activists in April to protest the few remaining COVID-19 pointers, equivalent to masks mandates on mass transit and vaccination necessities for well being care employees.
Similar scenes have performed out throughout the nation throughout the pandemic. Armed with the language of the abortion rights motion, anti-vaccine forces have converged with right-leaning causes to protest COVID precautions.
And they’re succeeding. Vaccine opponents have appropriated “My Body, My Choice,” a slogan that has been inextricably linked to reproductive rights for almost half a century, to struggle masks and vaccine mandates throughout the nation — including in California, the place lawmakers had vowed to undertake the hardest vaccine necessities in the U.S.
As the anti-vaccine contingent has notched successes, the abortion rights motion has taken hit after hit, culminating in the June 24 Supreme Court choice that ended the federal constitutional proper to abortion. The ruling leaves it as much as states to determine, and up to 26 states are anticipated to ban or severely restrict abortion in the coming months.
Now that anti-vaccination teams have laid declare to “My Body, My Choice,” abortion rights teams are distancing themselves from it — marking a surprising annexation of political messaging.
“It’s a really savvy co-option of reproductive rights and the movement’s framing of the issue,” stated Lisa Ikemoto, a regulation professor at the University of California-Davis Feminist Research Institute. “It strengthens the meaning of choice in the anti-vaccine space and detracts from the meaning of that word in the reproductive rights space.”
Framing the choice to vaccinate as a singularly private one additionally obscures its public well being penalties, Ikemoto stated, as a result of vaccines are used to guard not only one particular person however a group of individuals by stopping the unfold of a illness to those that cannot shield themselves.
Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster primarily based in Washington, D.C., stated “My Body, My Choice” is not polling effectively with Democrats as a result of they affiliate it with anti-vaccination sentiment.
The phrase “My Body, My Choice” was ubiquitous at an April rally towards vaccine mandates in Los Angeles. The slogan began as an abortion rights catchphrase, however has turn into a favourite of vaccine skeptics.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Health News
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Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Health News
The phrase “My Body, My Choice” was ubiquitous at an April rally towards vaccine mandates in Los Angeles. The slogan began as an abortion rights catchphrase, however has turn into a favourite of vaccine skeptics.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Health News
“What’s really unique about this is that you don’t usually see one side’s base adopting the message of the other side’s base — and succeeding,” she stated. “That’s what makes this so fascinating.”
Jodi Hicks, president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, acknowledged that the appropriation of abortion rights terminology has labored towards the reproductive rights motion. “In this moment, to co-opt that messaging and distract from the work that we’re doing, and using it to spread misinformation, is frustrating and it’s disappointing,” Hicks stated.
She stated the motion was already gravitating away from the phrase. Even the place abortion is authorized, she stated, some girls cannot “choose” to get one due to monetary or different boundaries. The motion is now focusing extra closely on entry to well being care, utilizing catchphrases equivalent to “Bans Off Our Bodies” and “Say Abortion,” Hicks stated.
The progress of the anti-vaccination motion
Vaccination hasn’t at all times been this political, stated Jennifer Reich, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, who has written a book about why mother and father refuse vaccines for his or her children. Opposition to vaccines grew in the Eighties amongst mother and father involved about faculty vaccine necessities. Those mother and father stated they did not have sufficient information about vaccines’ potential dangerous results, nevertheless it wasn’t partisan at the time, Reich stated.
The subject exploded onto the political scene after a measles outbreak tied to Disneyland sickened at least 140 people in 2014 and 2015. When California lawmakers moved to ban mother and father from claiming personal belief exemptions for required childhood vaccines, opponents organized round the thought of “medical choice” and “medical freedom.” Those opponents spanned the political spectrum, Reich stated.
Then got here COVID. The Trump administration politicized the pandemic from the outset, beginning with masks and stay-at-home orders. Republican leaders and white evangelicals carried out that technique on the floor, Reich stated, arguing towards vaccine mandates when COVID vaccines had been nonetheless solely theoretical — scaring individuals with rhetoric about the lack of private selection and pictures of vaccine passports.
They gained traction regardless of an apparent inconsistency, she stated: Often, the identical individuals who oppose vaccine necessities — arguing that it is a matter of selection — are towards abortion rights.
“What’s really changed is that in the last two or so years, it’s become highly partisan,” Reich stated.
Joshua Coleman leads V is for Vaccine, a bunch that opposes vaccine mandates. He stated he deploys the phrase strategically relying on what state he is working in.
“In a state or a city that is more pro-life, they’re not going to connect with that messaging, they don’t believe in full bodily autonomy,” Coleman stated.
But in locations like California, he takes his “My Body, My Choice” rhetoric the place he thinks it is going to be efficient, like the annual Women’s March, the place he says he can generally get feminists to think about his perspective.
Co-opting the slogan
Perception of the phrase “choice” has modified over time, stated Alyssa Wulf, a cognitive linguist primarily based in Oakland, Calif. The phrase now evokes a picture of an remoted choice that does not have an effect on the broader group, she stated. It can body an abortion seeker as self-centered, and a vaccine rejector as a person making a private well being selection, Wulf stated.
Beyond linguistics, anti-vaccination activists are enjoying politics, deliberately trolling the abortion rights teams through the use of their phrases towards them, Wulf stated. “I really believe there’s a little bit of an ‘eff you’ in that,” Wulf stated. “We’re going to take your phrase.”
Tom Blodget, a retired Spanish-language teacher from Chico, Calif., sported a “My Body, My Choice” shirt — full with a picture of a cartoon syringe — at the Defeat the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles. It was “an ironic thing,” he stated, meant to show what he sees as the hypocrisy of Democrats who assist each abortion and vaccine mandates. Blodget stated he’s “pro-life” and believes that COVID vaccines aren’t immunizations however a type of gene remedy, which isn’t true.
For Blodget, and plenty of different anti-vaccination activists, there isn’t a inconsistency on this place. Abortion is just not a private well being choice akin to getting a shot, they are saying: It is just homicide.
“Women say they can have an abortion because it’s their body,” Blodget stated. “If that’s a valid thing for a lot of people, why should I have to take an injection of some concoction?”
About per week later and almost 400 miles to the north in Sacramento, state lawmakers heard testimony on payments about abortion and COVID vaccines. Two protests, one towards abortion and one towards vaccine mandates, converged. Truckers from the “People’s Convoy,” a bunch that opposes COVID mandates that had been touring the nation with its message of “medical freedom,” testified towards a invoice that will cease police from investigating miscarriages or stillbirths as murders. Anti-abortion activists lined as much as oppose a invoice that will replace reporting necessities to the state’s vaccine registry.
“My Body, My Choice” was ubiquitous: Kids petting police horses in entrance of the Capitol wore T-shirts with the slogan, and truckers watching a sword dance toted indicators above their heads.
At the time, two powerful legislative proposals to mandate COVID vaccines for schoolchildren and most employees had already been shelved and not using a vote. One controversial vaccination proposal remained: a invoice to permit kids 12 and older to get COVID vaccines without parental consent.
Lawmakers have since watered down the measure, elevating the minimal age to fifteen, and it awaits essential votes. They have shifted their consideration to the newest political earthquake: abortion.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about well being points. It is an editorially unbiased working program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation).
