GET YOUR ECO-FASCISM OFF OUR BODIES
Deconstructing Dangerous Rhetoric in The Fight for Women’s Reproductive Rights
Nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court refused to block Texas’s recent abortion ban, SB 8. And although a federal judge issued an order to halt the bill’s immediate enforcement this month, it went back into effect less than a week later. What’s clear is that the state of abortion access in Texas still remains fraught with paranoia and uncertainty.
Commonly known as the “heartbeat bill”, the law that went into effect on September 1st, 2021 bans abortion in Texas past the six weeks mark in pregnancy, the point when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. At this stage in pregnancy, most women are not yet aware that they are pregnant. Moreover, the law also makes no exceptions for incest, sexual abuse, rape, and fetal anomaly diagnoses, and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and enablers — including those who provide financial assistance to the women or even simply give them a ride to the clinic — without disclosing any connection to those they are suing.
Unfortunately, Texas isn’t the only place that has passed restrictive laws regarding abortion accessibility. Abortion and other reproductive rights, such as the right to a comprehensive sex-education and contraceptives, remain polarized and controversial topics around the world.
Globally, 24 countries fall under the category of complete abortion prohibition, with zero exceptions, and although more women and girls, especially in less developed countries, are utilizing more family planning services than ever before, the least effective methods of birth control (withdrawal, rhythm) still dominate these countries, It is estimated that 214 million women around the world wishing to avoid pregnancy still do not have access to effective methods of contraception.
Increasing widespread access to reproductive rights, services, and education is the most effective method to prevent unplanned pregnancy, curb STIs, and promote gender equity.
But let’s make one thing clear — the fight to expand women’s bodily autonomy should never come at the price of putting vulnerable communities in danger.
In 1920, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger stated that “birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.” She would later go on to conduct unethical trials for the new birth control pill in partnership with biologist Gregory Pincus in Puerto Rico, which at the time was in the midst of a population boom and home to rampant poverty. Birth control centers funded by Procter & Gamble heir and eugenicist, Clarence Gamble, became recruitment grounds for Pincus’s clinical trials which specifically targeted less educated women, desperate to avoid both pregnancy and sterilization, in the poorest areas of San Juan and other Puerto Rican cities.
The women who participated in the trial knew that the drug prevented pregnancy, but they were not informed that the drug was experimental or even that they were a part of a clinical trial. None of the women were given safety risk information and many women experienced serious side effects such as blood clots and nausea. Three women died during the clinical trials but, as autopsies were not performed, it is unclear whether these deaths were linked to the pill. Nonetheless the risks were real: the pill contained much higher doses of hormones than the modern-day birth control pill. A second trial for the pills would later be conducted on women and men in mental asylums, again without proper consent from its participants.
This is the dark history of the birth control movement. And while modern birth control methods are much safer with a wide variety of contraceptives to choose from, advocates for these progressive reproductive rights policies often champion them alongside discussions about population control and climate change — rhetoric that toes the line of eco-fascism, eerily reminiscent of birth control’s eugenicist roots. For example, the Philippines is a country in desperate need of reproductive rights, services, and education — but this kind of advocacy should not get mixed up with language about how these policies’ inevitable effect of lower birth rates would “benefit the planet.”
We must continue to recognize that climate change narratives such as these impose the false notion that the number of people on this planet, rather than overconsumption, is an issue and even more dangerously, that we could use less Filipino people — less poor people of color, that don’t have carbon footprints nearly as high as those living in wealthy countries like the United States.
The fight for sexual education and contraceptives is incredibly important, but advocates must ensure that their intentions lay solely in the promotion of gender equity and women’s rights to bodily autonomy. These issues need to be discussed with care and awareness so we can move away from birth control’s eugenics past, ecofascist present, and towards an intersectional and well-intentioned future.
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