Quit Comparing Abortion Bans to Vaccine Mandates
By: Walter Rhein
Tags: Women, Abortion, Politics, Health, Pro Life

Quit Comparing Abortion Bans to Vaccine Mandates

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

Conservatives will often say, “Well, if it’s my body my choice, then I should be able to choose not to take a vaccine!”

They think it’s an irrefutable “gotcha” argument, but all it shows is that they’re still working with finger paints while the rest of us have moved on to oils.

Their pitiful exercise in applied logic is absolutely wrong.

It’s also dishonest, malicious, mean-spirited, and evil. Pro-lifers are dishonest. Their philosophy amounts to little more than frenzied calls for violence against women and they end up hurting more people than they help.

False equivalency

If you don’t take a vaccine, or fail to wear a mask, you end up spreading sickness to your whole community. This kills people.

If you prohibit women from having access to appropriate reproductive healthcare, again, people are killed through lack of access to lifesaving treatments.

Conservatives are on the side of massive, preventable death on both these issues.

Quit comparing them, it’s a false equivalency. You can’t insist that your right to deny a vaccine or not wear a mask is the same as a person’s right to make decisions over their reproductive health. That’s like comparing apples to the annotated history of the Byzantine empire. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Masks and vaccines don’t change your life forever

Wearing a mask doesn’t require you to undergo a dramatic transformation to your body which claims around 300,000 lives a year.

Wearing a mask doesn’t require you to have an expensive medical procedure which is probably going to leave you bankrupt.

Wearing a mask is for a few hours a day. It’s not a responsibility that changes absolutely everything about the course of your life.

A vaccine is a quick poke. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to sex, not motherhood. There’s absolutely nothing about receiving a vaccine that remotely resembles becoming a parent. Yet activists demand they shouldn’t have to endure the burden of a vaccine, even as they insist others must take on the responsibility of a child.

The only way you’d even consider comparing masks and vaccines to parenthood is if you’re the absolute worst parent in the world.

A parent who refuses to give his or her child a vaccine effectively has an abortion. Therefore, any anti-abortion laws are inherently vaccine mandates.

How about that for a “gotcha” argument? Mine has the advantage of actually being logically valid.

Conservatives simply don’t comprehend the concept of rights

There aren’t two sides to every issue. There are people who are rational, and there are people who are stark, raving lunatics.

Conservatives are the stark raving lunatics.

For some reason, the anti-mask crowd has come to believe that they’re entitled to perform acts of violence when confronted with completely reasonable mask requests.

Police arrested a 40-year-old Arizona dad after he stormed into an elementary school principal’s office with a friend wielding plastic handcuffs, insisting the administration broke the law by asking his child and six others to wear a mask and quarantine after being in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 — Justin Rohrlich, Angry Men With Zip-Ties Ambush School Principal After COVID Masking Request

Now, this isn’t asking somebody to gestate a mask within their organism for nine months and then raising it to adulthood. What does a quarantine last these days? A week or two? Yet this request is enough to get grown men storming the principal’s office with the intent to take hostages?

These are the people we listen to?

If anyone should be resorting to this kind of violence, it should be those who demand the women of the United States of America have access to appropriate reproductive healthcare.

But our side isn’t insane, so we’re always at a disadvantage.

Conservatives are so pro-life that they’ll kill you over it

That heading isn’t even hyperbole.

A Texas lawmaker has filed a bill that would abolish and criminalize abortions, leaving women and physicians who perform the procedure to face criminal charges that could carry the death penalty. The legislation, filed Tuesday by state Rep. Bryan Slaton, does not include exceptions for rape or incest — Shannon Najmabadi, Another Texas GOP lawmaker is attempting to make abortion punishable by the death penalty

So, if somebody rapes you and you have an abortion, you’re dead. This is how conservatives think. That’s how precious life is to them.

But they won’t wear a mask that could potentially stop thousands of people from getting killed.

If a pregnant woman gets COVID from an unmasked conservative and dies…

Would they consider that an abortion?

Do they consider it an abortion when some neo-Nazi zealot takes an AR-15 to a classroom of schoolchildren?

Nope. They’re fine with both those scenarios.

This isn’t about saving lives. It’s about ownership of women’s bodies and turning them into breeding factories.

The Texas bounty law

Like it or not, legal abortion is the law of the land. Well, conservatives don’t believe in things like elections or laws, so they figure out workarounds.

Because you can’t use state law enforcement to enforce an abortion ban, brilliant Texas lawmakers decided to put the power in the hands of private citizens. Heck, they already have AR-15s right? We all know how great people are at doing their own research and tracking down “villains.” When has a mob ever been wrong?

According to the law, private citizens can sue the physician who performed an abortion after the sixth week, as well as anyone who helped facilitate it, from counselors to anyone providing financial support for the procedure to someone who simply drove the woman to the clinic with the knowledge that she was getting an abortion. The complainant can receive up to $10,000 in damage compensation if the accused is found guilty, on top of any legal fees, even if they don’t have any connection with the woman who received the abortion. Depending on the verdict, the court could enforce the collection of the debt, which could include seizing property if the person found guilty doesn’t have sufficient available funds to pay — Annalisa Merelli, Texas’s new anti-abortion law turns citizens into bounty hunters

This is the party that uses “preserve your freedoms” as a campaign slogan. They’re going to come after your money, your land, and your liberty on the suspicion that you might have had a discussion with somebody about reproductive rights.

This law is so idiotic it could only have come from Texas.

These are the lengths conservatives will go to in order to stop people from claiming ownership over their own health or their own bodies.

Don’t let the government encroach on body autonomy

Part of me wants to call for a law that allows people to sue for a million dollars if they get COVID and can trace it back to a person who was not vaccinated or was not wearing a mask.

But I’m not going to call for that because it implies equivalency.

I’ll say it again, a woman’s right to an abortion cannot be compared to a mask or vaccine mandate.

Reproductive rights are about body autonomy. Do you own your body, or is it the property of the government? Is your body yours or does it belong to your rapist?

Vaccine and mask mandates protect the rights of private citizens to own their bodies. They help keep people alive.

Bans on abortion steal a woman’s right to her body. If she dies because of the pregnancy, the government has murdered her.

Vaccine and mask mandates protect individual body autonomy.

Abortion bans revoke body autonomy.

They’re not the same. They’re the exact opposite. Quit trying to argue otherwise.