The Unsung Death Of 'My Body, My Choice'

The Unsung Death of ‘My Body, My Choice’

Jack Cashill

As late as 3:43 p.m. on Thursday, September 9, the long-lived mantra of the pro-abortion movement, “My Body, My Choice,” was still showing signs of life. It was at that time, that the White House published the remarks made by Vice-President Kamala Harris at a “Reproductive Rights” roundtable.

“The President and I are unequivocal in our support of Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, and the right of women to make decisions for themselves with whomever they choose — about their own bodies,” said Ms. Harris.

“And, needless to say,” Harris continued much too quotably, “the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision; it is their body.”

So far is Harris out of the White House power loop that she may not have known the mantra had less than two hours to live. 

Although clearly on the defensive, Harris was targeting the wrong enemy at the White House roundtable. She thought the threat to “My Body, My Choice” came from those rascally Republicans in Texas that had passed the Texas Heartbeat Act. Despite legal challenges, the new law had gone into effect just a week earlier. Attempts to challenge the terminology of the “heartbeat” bills inevitably reinforced just whose body was being violated, namely the baby with the beating heart. And unlike other heartbeat states, say, Mississippi or North Dakota, Texas was too big to boycott.

On the same Thursday Harris was endorsing “My Body, My Choice,” Biden was endorsing “drastic and Spartan methods.”  Death came suddenly to the old mantra, if not unexpectedly. Just 79 minutes after Harris breathed new life into it, President Joe Biden put the mantra out of its misery. Biden told America in no uncertain terms that the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is his, not theirs. Going forward the new understanding is, “Your Body, My Choice.”

“As your President, I’m announcing tonight a new plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated, to combat those blocking public health,” said the president. “This is not about freedom or personal choice.” That much was obvious. The president’s mandate, by his own estimate, would affect two-thirds of all workers or about 100 million Americans, nearly half of them female. And except perhaps for those women working for the Post Office, there was nothing “negotiable” about this assault on their bodily integrity.

Scarier still, Biden was not talking in euphemism. He was actually talking to women about “their” bodies. Not surprisingly, NARAL remains stone silent, and Harris is not “speaking here.” It is hard to defend a con, even a venerable one like “My Body, My Choice.”