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How the vaccine’s enemies co-opted the ‘my body, my choice’ slogan: Shoot

Steve Bova (centre) traveled from Maryland to Los Angeles with the “People’s Convoy” to protest against Covid-19 restrictions. Despite using a phrase derived from the abortion rights movement, he opposed abortion.

Rachel Bluth / Kaiser Health News


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Steve Bova (centre) traveled from Maryland to Los Angeles with the “People’s Convoy” to protest against Covid-19 restrictions. Despite using a phrase derived from the abortion rights movement, he opposed abortion.

Rachel Bluth / Kaiser Health News

In the shadow of LA’s art deco City Hall, musicians crowd the stage, children get their faces painted, and families sit on lawn chairs. In the festive atmosphere, people waved flags, wore sports T-shirts and sold buttons – all emblazoned with the familiar slogan: “My Body, My Choice.”

This is not a protest for abortion rights. It is not a protest against recent Judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States of America that gutted Roe v. Wade. It was “The Beat the Duty Rally,” a jubilant gathering of anti-vaccination activists in April to protest some of the remaining COVID-19 guidelines, such as the regulation of masks for mass transit and vaccination requirements for healthcare workers.

Similar scenes have played out across the country during the pandemic. Armed with the language of the abortion rights movement, anti-vaccination forces have converged with far-right causes to protest against COVID’s precautions.

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And they are succeeding. Anti-vaccines have used “My Body, My Choice,” a slogan inextricably linked with reproductive rights for nearly half a century, to combat the mandates of masks and vaccines around the country – even in Californiawhere legislators have vowed to adopt the harshest vaccine requirements in the US

As the anti-vaccination team hit the ground running, the abortion rights movement fizzled out one after another, culminating in the June 24 Supreme Court decision ending the constitutional right to abortion. of the federal. The ruling is left to the states to decide, and up to 26 states It is expected that abortion will be banned or severely restricted in the coming months.

Now that anti-vaccination groups have made the “My Body, My Choice” claim, abortion rights groups are moving away from it – marking a startling takeover of the news. political message.

“It’s a real co-op that understands reproductive rights and the movement’s framework on the issue,” said Lisa Ikemoto, a law professor at the University of California-Davis Institute for Feminist Studies. “It reinforces the meaning of choice in the anti-vaccination space and diminishes the meaning of that word in the reproductive rights space.”

Ikemoto says that framing the decision to vaccinate as a personal goal also obscures its public health consequences, because vaccines are used to protect not just one person, but entire communities of people by prevent the spread of disease to people who cannot protect themselves. .

Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster based in Washington, DC, said “My Body, My Choice” is no longer supported by Democrats. because they associate it with anti-vaccination sentiment.

The phrase “My Body, My Choice” was ubiquitous during an April protest against vaccine regulations in Los Angeles. The slogan started out as a catchphrase about abortion rights, but has since become a favorite among vaccine skeptics.

Rachel Bluth / Kaiser Health News


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Rachel Bluth / Kaiser Health News


The phrase “My Body, My Choice” was ubiquitous during an April protest against vaccine regulations in Los Angeles. The slogan started out as a catchphrase about abortion rights, but has since become a favorite among vaccine skeptics.

Rachel Bluth / Kaiser Health News

“What’s really unique about this is that you often don’t see one side’s base adopting the message of the other’s base – and succeeding,” she said. “That’s what makes this so appealing.”

Jodi Hicks, president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, admits that using the term abortion rights goes against the reproductive rights movement. “In this moment, agreeing to pick up that message and distract from the work we are doing, and use it to spread misinformation, is frustrating and disappointing,” says Hicks.

She said that the movement was appealing away from the phrase. Even if abortion is legal, some women cannot “choose” to have an abortion because of financial or other barriers, she said. The movement is now focusing more on access to healthcare, using slogans like “Stop shutting down our bodies” and “Let’s say abortion,” Hicks said.

The rise of the anti-vaccination movement

Jennifer Reich, professor of sociology at the University of Colorado-Denver, who has wrote a book about why parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Opposition to vaccines grew in the 1980s among parents concerned about school vaccine requirements. Reich said they did not have enough information about the potential harm of vaccines, but they were not partisan at the time.

Matters explode in politics after a measles outbreak linked to Disneyland sick at least 140 people in 2014 and 2015. When California lawmakers moved to ban parents from claiming exempt from personal beliefs For mandatory childhood vaccines, opponents have organized around the ideas of “medical choice” and “medical freedom”. Those opponents span the political scene, Reich said.

Then came COVID. The Trump administration has politicized the pandemic from the start, starting with masks and stay-at-home orders. Republican leaders and white evangelicals, Reich said, have implemented that strategy on the basis of arguments against vaccine mandates when a COVID vaccine is still just a theory — leaving people are scared by the rhetoric of losing the right to personal choice and the image of the vaccine passport.

Usually, those who oppose vaccine requirements – saying it’s a matter of choice – are against abortion rights, she said.

“What’s really changed is that in the last two years it’s become very partisan,” says Reich.

Joshua Coleman leads V is for Vaccine, a group that opposes vaccine mandates. He said he deploys this phrase strategically depending on the state he’s working in.

“In a state or a city that’s so life-oriented, they don’t connect with that message, they don’t believe in total body autonomy,” says Coleman.

But in places like California, he uses the “My Body, My Choices” rhetoric where he thinks it will work, like the annual Women’s March, where he says he can sometimes get feminists to consider his point.

Co-choosing the slogan

Alyssa Wulf, a cognitive linguist in Oakland, California, says perceptions of the word “choice” have changed over time. It can be centered on the person seeking an abortion, and the person who rejects the vaccine as an individual making a personal health choice, Wulf said.

In addition to linguistics, anti-vaccination activists are playing politics, deliberately trolling abortion rights groups by using words against them, Wulf said. “I really believe there’s a bit of ‘effectiveness’ in that,” says Wulf. “We’ll take your phrase.”

Tom Blodget, a retired Spanish teacher from Chico, California, wore a “My Body, My Choice” shirt – complete with an image of an animated syringe – at the Defeat Commission Rally board in Los Angeles. It was “an irony,” he said, meant to expose what he saw as the hypocrisy of Democrats, who support both the abortion and vaccine mandate. Blodget said he’s “pro-life” and believes The COVID vaccine is not a vaccine but a form of gene therapy, which is not true.

For Blodget, and many other anti-vaccination activists, there is no contradiction in this view. Abortion is not a personal health decision like getting shot, they say: It is simply murder.

“Women say they can have an abortion because it’s their body,” Blodget said. “If that’s valid for so many people, why should I inject some concoction?”

About a week later and nearly 400 miles north in Sacramento, state lawmakers heard testimony on abortion and COVID vaccine bills. Two protests, one against abortion and one against vaccination mandates, converged. Truckers from the “People’s Convoy,” a group protesting against COVID duties that have toured the country with the message of “medical freedom,” testified against a bill that would prevent police from directing them. investigate miscarriages or stillbirths as homicides. Anti-abortion activists have lined up to protest a bill to update reporting requirements to the state’s vaccine registries.

“My Body, My Choice” is ubiquitous: Children are petting police horses in front of the Capitol in T-shirts with slogans on them, and truck drivers are watching signs dance swords overhead.

At the time, two tough legislative proposals to mandate COVID vaccines for students and most workers were dropped without a vote. A controversial vaccination proposal remains: a bill to allow children 12 years of age and older to get the COVID vaccine without parental consent.

Lawmakers have since lowered the measure, raising the minimum age to 15, and it awaits key votes. They have turned their attention to the latest political earthquake: abortion.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom specializing in the production of in-depth coverage of health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation).

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