We learned that the people pushing for anti-abortion laws are actually pushing for forced abortion and c-section laws; they are one and the same.
"Why We Marched"
This quote is very important because it tells us the truth about antichoicers. Their goal is not to prevent abortions, but to control women. One way to control women is to deny them the right and ability to abort. Another way to control women is to tell certain groups of women that they cannot have sex and or cannot get pregnant and have a child.
I recently learned that a couple of the antichoicers on twitter believe that it is wrong for a woman who is HIV+ to choose to get pregnant and have a baby. This surprised me, because antis are so often talking about babies as miracles and the best thing about life.
It seems not everyone is allowed to enjoy the best part of life.
One of the antis said that a couple who is HIV+ should just refrain from having sex (or at least that's how they came across). I believe it's perfectly acceptable for people to refrain from having sex; if that is what they want to do. But what about the couple who wants to have sex? Why shouldn't they be "allowed," like all other consenting adults on the planet, to have sex? The other anti said that the risk of HIV transmission to a fetus/baby was too great to risk getting pregnant, but then said that a couple could still have sex. If the risk is too big to risk pregnancy, and sex has a risk of pregnancy, I'm not sure how you can hold those two views together.
But what I really don't understand, is where antichoicers got the idea that they could tell other people they couldn't have kids and expand their families. Women and men with HIV shouldn't be punished just for having HIV. If they want to start families, they should have every right to do so- in as safe a situation as possible! Teaching people with HIV that there's a stigma against them isn't going to encourage them to seek out treatment or reveal their HIV+ status to their doctors.
I'm sure other people are worried about risk of HIV transfer. I hadn't done much research myself, but @ashleyrebeccah was nice enough to share a link with me.
Antiretroviral therapy administered to the mother during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and then to the newborn, as well as elective cesarean section for women with high viral loads (more than 1,000 copies/ml), can reduce the rate of perinatal HIV transmission to 2% or less [12]
"Mother-to-Child (Perinatal) HIV Transmission and Prevention"
This means that as long as the mother knows she is HIV+, the risk of HIV transmission is 2% or less.
I'm sure some people will think that's too big of a risk to take. But for other people, perhaps people with HIV, that's not too big of a risk to take.
At 45 years old, women have a 3% risk of delivering a child with downs syndrome. Women who have already had a child with a neural tube defect have a 3% risk of having another child with a neural tube defect, like Anencephaly. Do antichoicers believe these women too should not be "allowed" to have a family?
It is a slippery slope which antichoicers are willing to go down towards eugenics, I'm sure. First women with HIV cannot have children- then women at risk for other diseases. Will they require everyone to have genetic testing to see if they will be allowed to have sex? Or will they just force sterilization upon the people they do not want to have kids?
Women are individual human beings, who deserve to have individual control over their reproductive organs and choices. Whether they be HIV+ or not; whether they have a genetic disease or not.
