“Legitimate rape” and legitimate abortions

A year after then-Rep. Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” fiasco, the National Women’s Law Center has released a report in commemoration: Shut That Whole Thing Down: A Survey of Abortion Restrictions Even in Cases of Rape. The report looks at abortion restrictions from the first six months of this year and, as RH Reality Check summarized, finds:

–86 percent (235) of the 273 provisions that politicians introduced in state legislatures to restrict a woman’s access to abortion apply to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape.

–71 percent (27) of the 38 state provisions restricting women’s access to abortion enacted by the states apply to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape.

–72 percent (18) of the 25 bills introduced in Congress to restrict a woman’s access to abortion apply to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape.

The RHRC coverage acknowledges the potential harm of focusing on abortion restrictions on pregnancies resulting from rape, noting that ‘some pro-choice advocates have argued that there’s an inherent problem with the abortion restrictions framing in that it feeds stigma by ‘legitimizing’ some abortions and not others.”

“But,” the blog argued, “it can be a useful framing to illustrate how extreme the current legislative attacks from anti-choice conservatives are.”

Maybe — but I’m not convinced. This particular set of restrictions is especially extreme only if we believe people pregnant from rape are especially deserving of abortions. Of course rape survivors should have access to abortion care, but so should everyone. The “even” in the NWLC’s report title (“A Survey of Abortion Restrictions Even in Cases of Rape”) weighs heavy: all obstacles to abortion are bad, the single word implies, but aren’t these particularly atrocious?

I don’t mean to deny the particular pain of being forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy conceived from violence. However, the minute we label restrictions on certain people or groups as exceptionally egregious, we stigmatize others lower on the hierarchy of deservedness — the metric of “legitimate abortions” — and abandon the core principle of reproductive justice: true access for all. To do so isn’t an unfortunate side effect of combating the GOP’s anti-choice campaign. It’s playing right into their hands.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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