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Steve Bova (middle) traveled from Maryland to Los Angeles with the “Folks’s Convoy” to protest covid-19 restrictions. Regardless of utilizing a phrase that originated with the abortion rights motion, he opposes abortion.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Well being Information
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Steve Bova (middle) traveled from Maryland to Los Angeles with the “Folks’s Convoy” to protest covid-19 restrictions. Regardless of utilizing a phrase that originated with the abortion rights motion, he opposes abortion.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Well being Information
Within the shadow of L.A.’s artwork deco Metropolis Corridor, musicians jammed onstage, children obtained their faces painted, and households picnicked on garden chairs. Amid the festivity, individuals waved flags, sported T-shirts and bought buttons — all emblazoned with a well-recognized slogan: “My Physique, My Selection.”
This wasn’t an abortion rights rally. It wasn’t a protest in opposition to the current U.S. Supreme Courtroom 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 tips, akin to masks mandates on mass transit and vaccination necessities for well being care employees.
Related 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 so they’re succeeding. Vaccine opponents have appropriated “My Physique, My Selection,” a slogan that has been inextricably linked to reproductive rights for practically half a century, to struggle masks and vaccine mandates throughout the nation — together with in California, the place lawmakers had vowed to undertake the hardest vaccine necessities within the U.S.
Because the anti-vaccine contingent has notched successes, the abortion rights motion has taken hit after hit, culminating within the June 24 Supreme Courtroom choice that ended the federal constitutional proper to abortion. The ruling leaves it as much as states to resolve, and as much as 26 states are anticipated to ban or severely restrict abortion within the coming months.
Now that anti-vaccination teams have laid declare to “My Physique, My Selection,” abortion rights teams are distancing themselves from it — marking a surprising annexation of political messaging.
“It is a actually savvy co-option of reproductive rights and the motion’s framing of the difficulty,” mentioned Lisa Ikemoto, a legislation professor on the College of California-Davis Feminist Analysis Institute. “It strengthens the which means of selection within the anti-vaccine house and detracts from the which means of that phrase within the reproductive rights house.”
Framing the choice to vaccinate as a singularly private one additionally obscures its public well being penalties, Ikemoto mentioned, as a result of vaccines are used to guard not only one particular person however a neighborhood of individuals by stopping the unfold of a illness to those that cannot shield themselves.
Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster based mostly in Washington, D.C., mentioned “My Physique, My Selection” is not polling nicely with Democrats as a result of they affiliate it with anti-vaccination sentiment.
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The phrase “My Physique, My Selection” was ubiquitous at an April rally in opposition to vaccine mandates in Los Angeles. The slogan began as an abortion rights catchphrase, however has change into a favourite of vaccine skeptics.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Well being Information
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Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Well being Information
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The phrase “My Physique, My Selection” was ubiquitous at an April rally in opposition to vaccine mandates in Los Angeles. The slogan began as an abortion rights catchphrase, however has change into a favourite of vaccine skeptics.
Rachel Bluth/Kaiser Well being Information
“What’s actually distinctive about that is that you do not normally see one aspect’s base adopting the message of the opposite aspect’s base — and succeeding,” she mentioned. “That is what makes this so fascinating.”
Jodi Hicks, president of Deliberate Parenthood Associates of California, acknowledged that the appropriation of abortion rights terminology has labored in opposition to the reproductive rights motion. “On this second, to co-opt that messaging and distract from the work that we’re doing, and utilizing it to unfold misinformation, is irritating and it is disappointing,” Hicks mentioned.
She mentioned the motion was already gravitating away from the phrase. Even the place abortion is authorized, she mentioned, some girls cannot “select” to get one due to monetary or different boundaries. The motion is now focusing extra closely on entry to well being care, utilizing catchphrases akin to “Bans Off Our Our bodies” and “Say Abortion,” Hicks mentioned.
The expansion of the anti-vaccination motion
Vaccination hasn’t all the time been this political, mentioned Jennifer Reich, a sociology professor on the College of Colorado-Denver, who has written a ebook about why dad and mom refuse vaccines for his or her children. Opposition to vaccines grew within the Nineteen Eighties amongst dad and mom involved about faculty vaccine necessities. These dad and mom mentioned they did not have sufficient details about vaccines’ potential dangerous results, but it surely wasn’t partisan on the time, Reich mentioned.
The difficulty exploded onto the political scene after a measles outbreak tied to Disneyland sickened at the very least 140 individuals in 2014 and 2015. When California lawmakers moved to ban dad and mom from claiming private perception exemptions for required childhood vaccines, opponents organized across the thought of “medical selection” and “medical freedom.” These opponents spanned the political spectrum, Reich mentioned.
![The movement against abortion rights is nearing its apex. But it began way before Roe](https://i0.wp.com/media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/05/03/gettyimages-694066_sq-ab2918ee999b48ae1d3b00e86915533fcd8abfd4-s100.jpg?ssl=1)
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 applied that technique on the bottom, Reich mentioned, arguing in opposition to vaccine mandates when COVID vaccines had been nonetheless solely theoretical — scaring individuals with rhetoric in regards to the lack of private selection and pictures of vaccine passports.
They gained traction regardless of an apparent inconsistency, she mentioned: Typically, the identical individuals who oppose vaccine necessities — arguing that it is a matter of selection — are in opposition to abortion rights.
“What’s actually modified is that within the final two or so years, it is change into extremely partisan,” Reich mentioned.
Joshua Coleman leads V is for Vaccine, a gaggle that opposes vaccine mandates. He mentioned he deploys the phrase strategically relying on what state he is working in.
“In a state or a metropolis that’s extra pro-life, they don’t seem to be going to attach with that messaging, they do not imagine in full bodily autonomy,” Coleman mentioned.
However in locations like California, he takes his “My Physique, My Selection” rhetoric the place he thinks it will likely be efficient, just like the annual Ladies’s March, the place he says he can generally get feminists to think about his perspective.
Co-opting the slogan
Notion of the phrase “selection” has modified over time, mentioned Alyssa Wulf, a cognitive linguist based mostly in Oakland, Calif. The phrase now evokes a picture of an remoted choice that does not have an effect on the broader neighborhood, she mentioned. It may well body an abortion seeker as self-centered, and a vaccine rejector as a person making a private well being selection, Wulf mentioned.
Past linguistics, anti-vaccination activists are enjoying politics, deliberately trolling the abortion rights teams through the use of their phrases in opposition to them, Wulf mentioned. “I actually imagine there’s somewhat little bit of an ‘eff you’ in that,” Wulf mentioned. “We will take your phrase.”
Tom Blodget, a retired Spanish-language teacher from Chico, Calif., sported a “My Physique, My Selection” shirt — full with a picture of a cartoon syringe — on the Defeat the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles. It was “an ironic factor,” he mentioned, meant to show what he sees because the hypocrisy of Democrats who assist each abortion and vaccine mandates. Blodget mentioned he’s “pro-life” and believes that COVID vaccines will not be immunizations however a type of gene remedy, which isn’t true.
For Blodget, and plenty of different anti-vaccination activists, there isn’t any inconsistency on this place. Abortion shouldn’t be a private well being choice akin to getting a shot, they are saying: It’s merely homicide.
“Ladies say they’ll have an abortion as a result of it is their physique,” Blodget mentioned. “If that is a legitimate factor for lots of people, why ought to I’ve to take an injection of some concoction?”
![This 16-year-old wanted to get the COVID vaccine. He had to hide it from his parents](https://i0.wp.com/media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/19/paynter-teen-vaccine_sq-2bdef69c6fbe57ac58f7621b5be878ff33529e69-s100.jpg?ssl=1)
A few week later and practically 400 miles to the north in Sacramento, state lawmakers heard testimony on payments about abortion and COVID vaccines. Two protests, one in opposition to abortion and one in opposition to vaccine mandates, converged. Truckers from the “Folks’s Convoy,” a gaggle that opposes COVID mandates that had been touring the nation with its message of “medical freedom,” testified in opposition to a invoice that may cease police from investigating miscarriages or stillbirths as murders. Anti-abortion activists lined as much as oppose a invoice that may replace reporting necessities to the state’s vaccine registry.
“My Physique, My Selection” was ubiquitous: Youngsters 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.
On the time, two powerful legislative proposals to mandate COVID vaccines for schoolchildren and most employees had already been shelved with no vote. One controversial vaccination proposal remained: a invoice to permit youngsters 12 and older to get COVID vaccines with out parental consent.
Lawmakers have since watered down the measure, elevating the minimal age to fifteen, and it awaits essential votes. They’ve shifted their consideration to the most recent political earthquake: abortion.
KHN (Kaiser Well being Information) is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about well being points. It’s an editorially unbiased working program of KFF (Kaiser Household Basis).