Thanks But No Thanks

[Content Note: War on agency, violence, and a description of a perineum tear. NB: Not only women need access to abortion.]

Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker, who totally wants to be president so bad he's considering legally changing his middle name to IHeartIowa, has decided to go all in on the war on agency, in order to make sure conservative primary voters know he's serious terrible enough to be their dude:

Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday embraced a move to ban abortion after 20 weeks after repeatedly declining to spell out where he stood on the issue in last year's re-election campaign.

Wisconsin Right to Life has touted as its top priority legislation that has yet to be introduced that would prevent women from seeking abortions in most cases after 20 weeks.

Walker said in last year's campaign he opposed abortion, but refused to say whether he supported banning the procedure after 20 weeks. At one stage, he ran an ad saying earlier restrictions he approved were aimed at patient safety and that he understood the decision to terminate a pregnancy was an "agonizing one."

"I'm pro-life, so that part shouldn't shock anybody," he told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors and reporters in October. "It doesn't shock anybody, the legislation I've signed in the past."

In a Tuesday letter, he addressed specific legislation head on.

"As the Wisconsin legislature moves forward in the coming session, further protections for mother and child are likely to come to my desk in the form of a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks," his letter said. "I will sign that bill when it gets to my desk and support similar legislation on the federal level. I was raised to believe in the sanctity of life and I will always fight to protect it."

Walker will always fight to protect the sanctity of life. By which he means, of course, only the potential life of fetuses. Which is valued more highly than the actual lives of the people who carry them.

Which is never challenged by the media. The crucial follow-up question—"How is it protecting women to deny them their agency?"—never gets asked.

The absurd claim that one is "fighting to protect the sanctity of life" is never held up for public scrutiny, never examined to reveal that the lives of pregnant people are not sacred, that their free will is not sacred, that their right to be free of violence done to their bodies is sacred.

As I've said before (and will almost certainly have occasion to say many times again), the anti-choice position is inherently violent, no matter how politely it is stated. If anyone else suggested that I should be forced to submit my body against my will to nine months of potential discomfort and pain, followed by an act that might include the skin and muscle between my vagina and anus being torn open, I don't think we'd mince words about whether they were using violent rhetoric. But because we can couch it in the bullshit terminology of "a pro-life position," that's supposed to be evidence of civility.

That's supposed to evidence of "protecting me" and an unyielding belief in the sanctity of human life.

Fuck. That.

I am a human. That does not in any way feel like a respect for the sanctity of my life, or the quality of my life, or the agency over my life to which I am meant to have a public (and, according to Walker's own religion, divine) right.

No one can argue, with any honesty or credibility, that they give a fuck about the sanctity of life if they would force a person to carry to term an unwanted or unviable pregnancy against her will. That is the opposite of a respect for life, if the definition of "life" is to have any meaning at all.

And I really wish the media would start pointing that out.

This isn't about the sanctity of life, and it sure as shit isn't about protecting "mother and child," to quote Walker. If Scott Walker really wanted to protect women (and other pregnant people), then he would be unapologetically pro-choice, make sure abortion was accessible and affordable, and trust women to make the best decisions for themselves, instead of limiting our choices and pretending that's helping us.

This isn't protection. It's oppression.