‘My Body, My Choice’: How Vaccine Foes Co-Opted the Abortion Rallying Cry
LOS ANGELES — In the shadow of L.A.’s art deco City Corridor, musicians jammed onstage, youngsters received their faces painted, and people picnicked on garden chairs. Amid the festivity, individuals waved flags, sported T-shirts, and offered buttons — all emblazoned with a acquainted slogan: “My Entire body, My Choice.”
This wasn’t an abortion rights rally. It was not a protest from the new U.S. Supreme Courtroom ruling that gutted Roe v. Wade. It was the “Defeat the Mandates Rally,” a jubilant accumulating of anti-vaccine activists in April to protest the handful of remaining covid-19 recommendations, these types of as mask mandates on mass transit and vaccination necessities for health and fitness treatment workers.
Related scenes have played out throughout the place all through the pandemic. Armed with the language of the abortion legal rights motion, anti-vaccine forces have converged with ideal-leaning triggers to protest covid safeguards.
And they’re succeeding. Vaccine opponents have appropriated “My System, My Preference,” a slogan that has been inextricably linked to reproductive rights for nearly 50 percent a century, to struggle mask and vaccine mandates across the country — like in California, where by lawmakers had vowed to adopt the hardest vaccine specifications in the U.S.
As the anti-vaccine contingent has notched successes, the abortion rights motion has taken hit just after strike, culminating in the June 24 Supreme Court conclusion that ended the federal constitutional correct to abortion. The ruling leaves it up to states to choose, and up to 26 states are envisioned to ban or severely limit abortion in the coming months.
Now that anti-vaccination teams have laid claim to “My Human body, My Decision,” abortion legal rights groups are distancing by themselves from it — marking a gorgeous annexation of political messaging.
“It’s a definitely savvy co-option of reproductive legal rights and the movement’s framing of the issue,” said Lisa Ikemoto, a law professor at the University of California-Davis Feminist Investigation Institute. “It strengthens the which means of selection in the anti-vaccine place and detracts from the this means of that word in the reproductive rights house.”
Framing the choice to vaccinate as a singularly personal a single also obscures its community health repercussions, Ikemoto claimed, because vaccines are made use of to secure not just 1 human being but a neighborhood of men and women by halting the spread of a ailment to those people who cannot secure them selves.
Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster centered in Washington, D.C., said “My Body, My Choice” is no for a longer period polling effectively with Democrats for the reason that they affiliate it with anti-vaccination sentiment.
“What’s genuinely special about this is that you really don’t generally see 1 side’s base adopting the concept of the other side’s base — and succeeding,” she claimed. “That’s what will make this so interesting.”

Jodi Hicks, president of Prepared Parenthood Affiliate marketers of California, acknowledged that the appropriation of abortion rights terminology has worked towards the reproductive rights movement. “In this instant, to co-choose that messaging and distract from the get the job done that we’re doing, and employing it to spread misinformation, is discouraging and it’s disappointing,” Hicks mentioned.
She mentioned the movement was already gravitating absent from the phrase. Even wherever abortion is authorized, she said, some girls can not “choose” to get a person since of economic or other boundaries. The movement is now concentrating extra seriously on access to health and fitness treatment, working with catchphrases such as “Bans Off Our Bodies” and “Say Abortion,” Hicks reported.
Vaccination hasn’t normally been this political, claimed Jennifer Reich, a sociology professor at the College of Colorado-Denver, who has created a e book about why mom and dad refuse vaccines for their little ones. Opposition to vaccines grew in the 1980s amid parents concerned about college vaccine necessities. These dad and mom explained they didn’t have enough info about vaccines’ potential damaging consequences, but it wasn’t partisan at the time, Reich explained.
The situation exploded on to the political scene immediately after a measles outbreak tied to Disneyland sickened at minimum 140 people today in 2014 and 2015. When California lawmakers moved to prohibit mom and dad from claiming personal perception exemptions for essential childhood vaccines, opponents structured all over the strategy of “medical choice” and “medical independence.” These opponents spanned the political spectrum, Reich explained.
Then arrived covid. The Trump administration politicized the pandemic from the outset, beginning with masks and continue to be-at-residence orders. Republican leaders and white evangelicals carried out that tactic on the floor, Reich reported, arguing in opposition to vaccine mandates when covid vaccines were being even now only theoretical — scaring people with rhetoric about the reduction of own option and visuals of vaccine passports.
They attained traction irrespective of an obvious inconsistency, she claimed: Usually, the exact same people who oppose vaccine demands — arguing that it’s a make a difference of decision — are against abortion rights.
“What’s definitely transformed is that in the past two or so a long time, it’s grow to be extremely partisan,” Reich stated.
Joshua Coleman leads V is for Vaccine, a team that opposes vaccine mandates. He mentioned he deploys the phrase strategically depending on what point out he’s performing in.
“In a state or a metropolis that is extra pro-existence, they’re not likely to link with that messaging, they never believe in complete bodily autonomy,” Coleman claimed.
But in destinations like California, he will take his “My Body, My Choice” rhetoric where he thinks it will be effective, like the once-a-year Women’s March, wherever he claims he can sometimes get feminists to contemplate his viewpoint.
Perception of the phrase “choice” has altered about time, mentioned Alyssa Wulf, a cognitive linguist centered in Oakland, California. The word now evokes an impression of an isolated conclusion that does not have an impact on the broader local community, she said. It can body an abortion seeker as self-centered, and a vaccine rejector as an individual creating a personalized overall health selection, Wulf mentioned.
Beyond linguistics, anti-vaccination activists are actively playing politics, intentionally trolling the abortion legal rights groups by working with their words in opposition to them, Wulf reported. “I genuinely believe there’s a minimal little bit of an ‘eff you’ in that,” Wulf said. “We’re going to choose your phrase.”
Tom Blodget, a retired Spanish-language teacher from Chico, California, sported a “My Body, My Choice” shirt — full with an graphic of a cartoon syringe — at the Defeat the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles. It was “an ironic issue,” he stated, intended to expose what he sees as the hypocrisy of Democrats who help the two abortion and vaccine mandates. Blodget reported he is “pro-life” and thinks that covid vaccines are not immunizations but a variety of gene remedy, which is not real.
For Blodget, and lots of other anti-vaccination activists, there is no inconsistency in this placement. Abortion is not a particular wellbeing choice akin to getting a shot, they say: It is basically murder.
“Women say they can have an abortion because it is their entire body,” Blodget said. “If that is a valid matter for a large amount of people today, why really should I have to acquire an injection of some concoction?”

About a 7 days afterwards and almost 400 miles to the north in Sacramento, state lawmakers heard testimony on payments about abortion and covid vaccines. Two protests, one from abortion and 1 towards vaccine mandates, converged. Truckers from the “People’s Convoy,” a group that opposes covid mandates that had been touring the nation with its message of “medical freedom,” testified towards a bill that would halt police from investigating miscarriages as murders. Anti-abortion activists lined up to oppose a bill that would update reporting needs to the state’s vaccine registry.
“My Overall body, My Choice” was ubiquitous: Young ones petting police horses in entrance of the Capitol wore T-shirts with the slogan, and truckers viewing a sword dance toted indications above their heads.
At the time, two difficult legislative proposals to mandate covid vaccines for schoolchildren and most staff experienced now been shelved with no a vote. One particular controversial vaccination proposal remained: a bill to allow for small children 12 and older to get covid vaccines with out parental consent.
Lawmakers have due to the fact watered down the evaluate, elevating the bare minimum age to 15, and it awaits crucial votes. They have shifted their interest to the most recent political earthquake: abortion.