Those in the anti-abortion movement are relying on the letter of the law from 150 years ago not simply because it’s convenient. They’re leaning on century-old laws because they want to make America a certain way again, and those century-old laws both sprang from and enabled a particular kind of society. Those laws existed only because women were legally, socially, and economically second-class citizens, their rights and liberties determined by white men who enjoyed exclusive control over every lever of political power.
They come for the mail order abortion drugs first, but mark my words, they will try to use these 1800s Comstock Laws to block mail delivery of birth control too: for what could be more obscene than a woman copulating for pleasure, with no intention of breeding? 😱 Companies have already set this precedent by refusing to cover PrEP on “moral grounds” — they’ve tried before to not pay for birth control because it offends their sensibilities, and they’ll try blocking it again through any means possible, chipping away at access woman by woman. (All the more reason health care should not be tied to employment — we should not be bound by the cruel “morality” of religious CEOs.)
Suppressing “degeneracy” is a fascist obsession. Women’s bodies are sexualized, which then makes them ‘things’ to be controlled. From Women Without Kids:
“In his 1933 classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich introduced the idea that sexual suppression is part and parcel of fascist ideology—since any self-generated feelings of desire, pleasure, and fulfillment that connect us to our individual agency and power pose a threat to existing power structures.” “He also wrote that “the very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation [by society at large] would mean its collapse.””
(And when companies like Meta say they don’t want politics discussed on their site? They mean they want us to roll over and take what’s coming to us. Talking about the theft of our rights is so uncouth — especially when it relates to sex. (Gasp!) It would be so unpleasant for their conservative users to have to see those whose rights they’re working to steal.)
See also:
Oppression against public opinion
Women’s voices, women’s choices
We cannot have bodily autonomy in a surveillance state
Culture war: meat and masculinity
Who is the internet for? Or, the culture war over adult content
Tradwives are comforting propaganda
Umberto Eco