The Personal is Political
The Personal is Political by Ragen Ashlie Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
I read a Scripture passage this week with fresh eyes. It explains one reason for trafficking of women and children: a supply shortage.
Today’s shortage of women, and the overriding reason for the worldwide pandemic of sex trafficking, is not due to war, as it was then. It is due to abortion.
ACTUALLY—
This is true. During the 1950s it was part of U.S. foreign policy to encourage and promote abortion as a form of birth control in order to curb population growth in certain countries. In places like China, India, and Korea, sex-selective abortion has been endemic for several generations and has upset the natural ratio of male to female children. Demographers estimate that there are at least 160 million “missing women” (that is, female fetuses that were aborted rather than born) and the gender imbalance has far-reaching implications, INCLUDING increased trafficking in women.
Abortion rights are an important part of reproductive justice, but not the only part.
It’s not true. It’s misleading and dishonest as the quote is being used as an argument to support illegalizing abortion. Blaming ‘abortion’ on that is bullshit when you should be blaming the ideas behind sex-selective abortion. It centers abortion as some kind of evil while taking all responsibility off of, say, the misogynistic framing of women by things like the bible.
Can we please not talk about Jill Stanek like she cares about reproductive rights? Gimme a break.
It’s also ridiculous because omfg women (especially Women of Color who are the people most often the victims of human trafficking thanks to imperialistic notions that they are hypersexual and animalistic and colonialist ideas that they are the owned property of their conquerers) are NOT effing commodities for men to use, men do not require the use of female commodities at all costs, and not all people live heteronormative lives! For fuck’s sake what the hell is wrong with these people?! A man who wants to fuck a woman doesn’t need to fuck a woman and women are human fucking beings, not objects for whom the “laws” of supply and demand apply!!! Y
es, sex-selective abortions are problematic (which does NOT mean that abortion in and of itself is problematic because it’s just the sex-selective part that is and that only exists because of rampant misogyny) but a “shortage” of available willing females for men to fuck is NOT the cause of sex trafficking! The idea that men who want a woman to fuck actually “need” one and are therefore entitled to obtain access to one by any means necessary combined with the idea that women aren’t actually agentic human beings in their own right but in fact only exist as objects to be used as men desire is the cause of sex trafficking and anyone who believes otherwise is not only seriously deluded but is also absolutely part of the problem. People who choose to remain ignorant of the socially constructed oppressive systems responsible for sex trafficking are complicit in maintaining them and are therefore just as much a part of the industry as the people actively buying and selling people against their will for the purposes of rape (not sex, because that’s not what this is since trafficking is the antithesis of consensual).
TL;DR - Blaming abortion and thereby blaming people for actually attaining and maintaining agency over their own bodies and their own lives instead of blaming the systematic objectification of women, imperialistic notions of white supremacy, and the patriarchal notions that take heteronormative male wants and make then into needs to which these people are necessarily entitled is so heinously fucked up and obscenely oppressive I honestly can’t even handle it.
