It’s Not Your Body, AOC

Last updated on: May 17, 2019 at 10:41 am by Scott Eric Alt

It’s Not Your Body, AOC 2019-05-17T10:41:08-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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I have made no secret of my admiration for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That said, I must point out how wrong she is to resurrect, in the wake of the Georgia and Alabama abortion laws, the tired old “my body, my choice” rhetoric. She did this on Twitter, a place she frequents almost as much as the Dear Leader himself. I support her choice in this.

Now, it is worth noting here that even Christopher Hitchens, atheist and abortion rights advocate, rejected this argument in its favor. Here he is in God is Not Great:

As a materialist, I think it has been demonstrated that an embryo is a separate body and entity, and not merely (as some really did used to argue) a growth on or in the female body. There used to be feminists who would say that it was more like an appendix or even—this was seriously maintained—a tumor. That nonsense seems to have stopped… Embryology confirms morality. The words “unborn child,” even when used in a politicized manner, describe a material reality.

Let us not be anti-science:

The unborn child has its own DNA, distinct from the mother’s;
The unborn child has its own bloodstream, and sometimes its own blood type;
In half of all pregnancies, even the sex of the child is distinct from the mother’s;
It is possible for a woman’s immune system to reject an embryo because it interprets it as a separate harmful invader;
A mother and her unborn child can die independently from the other

An unborn child is simply not “a woman’s own body,” and the argument needs to be retired. An unborn child is its own body, its own life, worthy of the same respect as the mother’s. There may be many arguments in favor of the pro-choice position, or against the recent laws in Georgia and Alabama. There may be many reasons to admire AOC. But this is not one of them.

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Abortion

Politics

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Christopher Hitchens

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