Ethan Boyles of Seattle is upset with a pro-life student display at the University of Washington and he writes about it for the Socialist Worker. In it, he states:
Reproductive freedom is a foundation of women’s liberation. Women can never have full equality if they cannot control their own bodies, and we cannot have a fundamentally democratic society if half the population is denied this essential freedom.
There are numerous responses, including:
1) Women have control over their own bodies when they partake in sex;
2) No one should have power over another human being (in this case the unborn);
3) Socialists never believe that people should have absolute control over their own bodies in other circumstances (smoking, gun ownership, what school children can attend);
4) Why limit the right to end an unwanted pregnancy to just women; if “full equality” is a necessary component of democracy, why limit the right to abortion to only the mother?
To some degree, these four responses are unserious and non-sequiturs, but so is the argument they attempt to rebut.
