NCJ Number
206446
Journal
Sexual Assault Report Volume: 7 Issue: 6 Dated: July-August 2004 Pages: 81-82,95,96
Date Published
July 2004
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This open letter to the domestic violence and sexual assault community by the founder and executive director of Stop Family Violence (SFV) -- an online grassroots activist organization whose mission is to organize and amplify the Nation's collective voice against all forms of violence against women and children -- argues that the loss of reproductive rights (the legal right to abortion and access to contraception) is nothing less than the legalization of violence against women.
Abstract
When SFV was founded 4 years ago, it consciously avoided taking an organizational position on reproductive rights and the controversy associated with girls' and women's access to contraceptives and abortion. This neutrality changed, however, in the face of recent organized efforts in various States to prohibit women's legal access to emergency contraception and abortion even under the circumstances of rape or incest. At the core of preventing violence against women is the protection of women's bodily autonomy, i.e., the right of women to have ultimate control over what happens to their bodies. To uphold the fetus's rights over the woman's rights can only be done by requiring the woman to compromise her bodily autonomy by giving up her own freedom, choices, and right to self-determination in order to maintain the pregnancy. The demand for a fetus' right-to-life over the rights of a woman is a demand for women's subjugation to the fetus and to the state. Just as a woman has the right to assert her bodily autonomy by saying "No" at any point during the sexual act, no matter how much she drinks or how she is dressed, a woman should have the right to assert her bodily autonomy at any point in her pregnancy, regardless of the circumstances under which she became pregnant. As to the fetus' right to bodily autonomy, until such point as it is viable, it is literally nonautonomous and hence has no such rights. Neither the government, nor the church, nor husbands, physicians, or fathers should be entitled to force a woman to do something with her body that is against her will.