On September 8, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to Twitter to connect the recent abortion ban in Texas and other attacks on Roe v. Wade to rape culture writ large.
“Sexual assault is an abuse of power that attempts to seize sexual control over another person’s body. Anti-choice laws are also an abuse of power that attempts to seize sexual control over people’s bodies en masse. And that’s [one] way rape culture informs anti-choice legislation,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
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Earlier in 2021, AOC came out as a survivor of sexual assault, and shared on CNN that she feared another assault during the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Ocasio-Cortez continued the thread by connecting reproductive rights broadly to struggles for LGBTQ+ rights, highlighting Texas’s specific history: “TX had ‘anti-sodomy’ laws in place until 2003 (!) that made non-PIV sex illegal until the Supreme Court overturned it on the basis of Roe v Wade’s right to privacy,” AOC explained. “The gutting of Roe v Wade imperils every menstruating person in the US, every person who engages in sex, and every person who values our constitutional right to privacy.”
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And, as AOC rightly pointed out in the thread, those dangers aren’t specific to cis women: Anyone with a uterus, regardless of gender identity, is impacted by reproductive rights, but anyone whose sex life is regulated by the state — which includes queer people — is impacted by Roe v. Wade. “Just one reason Roe isn’t a ‘women’s issue,’ beyond the fact that people who aren’t women can menstruate too!” AOC added.
AOC has used her platform to respond to the latest abortion legislation in Texas multiple times since it was enacted on September 1. That day, Ocasio-Cortez used an Instagram Live during Hurricane Ida’s deluge on New York City to raise $28,000 for Houston-based Clinic Access Support Network of Texas; a member of AOC’s team says that an online fundraising page for a group of 10 Texas-based abortion funds raised $157,000.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How You Can Help Fight the Texas Abortion Ban
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