While denouncing the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on in vitro fertilization last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a point of tying the ban to the misogyny being embraced within the conservative movement.
The ruling effectively classifies frozen embryos as people under state law and prohibits owners of embryos from discarding them, even if an owner isn’t planning on implanting the embryo. Paired with the conservative movement’s ongoing attack on contraception, the IVF ruling highlights what Ocasio-Cortez described as “a patriarchal theocracy” that’s gaining ground in the conservative movement. The movement’s endgame, as the New York Democrat described it, is to deny women their sexual freedom by ensuring that sex is used primarily for pregnancy, rather than pleasure.
She explained it all to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner:
I want to be very clear that this was intentional and that this is exactly what Republicans have been going for. We’ve seen it. You have the Heritage Foundation, you have lots of folks who are on record saying, you know, not only do they want to go after abortion, not only do they want to go after reproductive freedom, they’re going after IVF. They’re going after contraception. We have a mifepristone ruling that is coming down from the Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas enriching himself from the same folks who are saying that they are trying to control women’s bodies quite explicitly. And going beyond that, they also want to control what they call ‘recreational sex.’
Ocasio-Cortez is smart to put these campaigns against reproductive freedom in the context of a broader assault on sexual independence more generally. The effort to restrict access to birth control is based in the belief — long and widely held among many in the conservative movement — that reproductive freedom enables sexual freedom and that this has some kind of corrosive impact on society.
Underscoring Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, the conservative Heritage…
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