When your body doesn’t belong to you

ACB is a big fan of forced pregnancy.

Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court nominee, signed off on an advertisement in 2006 that called for the overturning of Roe v Wade, and called the landmark abortion rights decision “barbaric” and a “raw exercise of judicial power”.

The two-page ad, published by the St Joseph County Right to Life group, an extreme anti-choice organization in South Bend, Indiana, is the most striking evidence to have emerged to date of Barrett’s personal opposition to Roe v Wade.

And thus to women’s right to decide whether to be pregnant or not.

The first page of the ad, which is signed by Barrett and her husband, Jesse, states that life begins at “fertilization”. The ad, which the organization publishes every year to mark the anniversary of Roe v Wade, was signed by Barrett while she was working as a law professor at Notre Dame.

When “life begins” isn’t the issue. Viruses are alive*, bacteria are alive; so what? We don’t consider it murder, or bad, to kill them when necessary.

On the second page of the two-page spread, the group condemns Roe and claims that “the majority of those abortions were performed for social reasons”.

Meaning, reasons having to do with the woman’s life and plans and wishes. Apparently ACB thinks women have no right to let their plans and wishes decide whether or not they want a human growing in their abdomens for nine months. Apparently ACB thinks women’s abdomens don’t belong to them but instead belong to any egg that happens to get fertilized. This amounts to thinking that women are public property and have no personal rights of their own.

*Updating to add: Viruses not really alive:

Since viruses were first discovered in 1892 by Dmitri Ivanovsky, our ideas of what they are have shifted from poisons to biological chemicals. Some years after their discovery, scientists first raised the idea that viruses were living – albeit simple – organisms because they caused diseases like bacteria, which we know to be alive. However, viruses lack the hallmarks of other living things. They don’t carry out metabolic processes, such as making the energy molecule of life, ATP, and they don’t have cells and therefore the cellular machinery needed to make proteins by themselves. The only life process a virus undergoes independently is reproduction to make copies of itself, which can only happen after they have invaded the cells of another organism. Outside of their host some viruses can still survive, depending on environmental conditions, but their life span is considerably shorter. This complete reliability on a host for all their vital processes has led some scientists to deem viruses as non-living.

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