Anti-abortion US Republicans are hypocrites
In the US, particularly for the Republican Party who emphasise self-rule, the pandemic saw a time for party legislation to be focused on the individual being freed from the state.
Alabama enacted a bill obligating employees to provide vaccine exemption forms. Texas, following suit, saw Governor Abbott authorising an executive order which prohibited any entity or business from enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine on an employee.
Simultaneously, however, severe abortion bans were being established by the same lawmakers. Alabama’s anti-abortion bill abstracted a woman’s freedom of choice in replacement of a physician’s judgement which does not extend to 'emotional conditions or mental illnesses'.
It defends its conditions by oddly comparing the '50 million babies' being aborted since Roe v Wade as three times the number of deaths amassed in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, China’s Great Leap Forward and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocide combined.
Whilst members of the Republican Party have struck back that the act of an abortion does not compare to the act of refusing a vaccine, it must be recognised that vaccines are a public health issue.
Choosing to keep a baby is a personal issue. The scope of effect of refusing a vaccine is much wider than the decision to abort a baby, which, primarily, will affect the woman making the choice the most. The spread of disease is halted when herd immunity is reached, yet this is not possible when many refuse to uptake the vaccine.
For Republicans, vaccine mandates are of a different moral code since they are not directly killing lives in the act of refusal. However, it is apparent that the undoing of herd immunity has extremely harmful effects across the population.
It’s not only a reluctance towards Covid-19 vaccines, as measles outbreaks have been appearing across vaccinated children due to parents' anti-vaccination stances. If cases continue to rise into the thousands, the effects could be fatal from what was considered an almost extinct disease. Surely this is a contradiction in terms of the Party’s “commitment to life”.
As many GOP legislators recommended, getting a vaccine is a “personal health choice”, so why can’t the same be said for terminating one’s pregnancy? It would not seem that this arises from a legitimate care for the child.
These states with the harshest abortion laws also have the lowest capacity for childcare services. Mississippi, for example, completely banned legal abortions last year.
Meanwhile, the state has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the country, extremely low cash handouts for single mothers and declined the Medicaid postpartum expansion.
Evidently for those on the right, terminating a pregnancy isn’t a personal issue as it involves the threat of another being’s life. Republican philosophical theory therefore puts the unborn child’s right to life above the mother’s freedom of choice. Yet the same theory values an individual’s freedom above the same threat to others’ lives, as they can choose whether to be vaccinated.
These recent bills aimed at making all abortions illegal, imply that from conception these embryos have rivalled personhood to the mother. If this is true, then why can a person’s individual decision to ultimately affect another’s life be accepted indisputably?
This inconsistency in the Republican argument concerning freedoms is critical to engage with due to the web of implications involved when restricting a woman’s freedom.
By limiting a woman’s access to freedom, inequalities will only deepen. Those who can’t afford to travel to a pro-abortion state, will be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy, increasing economic insecurities amongst many other psychological traumas.
This month in South Carolina, repeated attempts to outright ban all abortions have been overturned by five female senators. One of these efforts would have made abortion a criminal offence, resulting in the death penalty.
It is therefore vital that we uproot these inconsistencies in the application of freedoms for all individuals, to end the subordination of women.
Sylvie Macdonald is a political and media consultant at Bridgehead Communications.
