In a lot of ways, we really are witnessing a historical precedent, not just for women, but for us all.
Following the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s 5-4 Roe v. Wade judgement where access to abortion has now been placed in the hands of state lawmakers rather than being fixed in federal law, for the first time, perhaps in human history, the disingenuous outpouring of rank hypocrisy from every element of our western culture reached a truly insurmountable level.
“The US Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade Is draconian and does not support the right of women to choice. How can this happen?”
Nanaia Mahuta, New Zealand’s Minister for Foreign Affairs
‘How can this happen?’ indeed a question asked not twelve months ago as New Zealanders, like their Commonwealth brethren abroad, stared down the barrel of truly ‘draconian’ government diktat in which a “no jab, no job” vaccine mandate policy was implemented in various public (and private) industries, including health and education, both of which are almost exclusively staffed and governed by women.
Such a discriminatory intrusion upon a person’s, indeed, a women’s ‘right to choice’ in this case, however, was not only rammed through parliament as law in ‘urgency’ (the primary ‘Covid Public Health Response’ and ‘Vaccination Legislation Act’ bills were authored by male Labour Party ministers), but welcomed by many, especially in the education sector itself as an unavoidable safety barrier.
Sarah Alexander, chief adviser to New Zealand’s Office of Early Childhood Education — the board of which consists of ten women from eleven seats — said at the time, “Delta is finding the unvaccinated people, and children can’t be vaccinated.”
But for most people, let alone toddlers, if it must be said once more, the risk of serious Covid injury was, and is, almost negligible; to cite just two of many studies, a peer-reviewed paper published in November 2020 (summarised very well here), and a meta-analysis in The Lancet journal in February 2022, data offered similar results regarding the likelihood of death after infection across all age groups; this is also known as the Infection-Fatality Ratio (IFR).
Notably, in the most ‘severe’ scenario, the lethality of Covid for ages 1-5 (preschool age), the IFR reached no higher than 0.005 per cent; up until 12-years-old (the starting age for any ‘adult’ vaccine rollout) lethality reached no higher than 0.004 per cent.
Nevertheless, employees across all school settings (mostly women) who chose to refuse a vaccine to continue working with those they had known for years, were soon warned by the powers that be that their contracts would be almost immediately terminated if they didn’t abide the new vaccine regimen.
This, in New Zealand at least, a directive later found by the High Court in April 2022 to be entirely ‘lawful’ in direct opposition to the 1990 Bill of Rights Act when Justice Francis Cooke — a middle-aged man — determined that ‘the right to be free to refuse medical treatment is a significant one which is based on individual autonomy…It is also reflected in the concept of informed consent that is central to the practice and ethics of medicine. But I do not accept that it is an absolute right.’
Yet, in stark contradiction, the same judge ruled just two months previously in February that the vaccine mandates were ‘unlawful’ for the police and armed forces.
Indeed, bodily autonomy mattered for the front lines, but somehow no one else.
Never one to avoid jumping atop a moving bandwagon, a straight-faced Jacinda Ardern was quick to release a statement:
“Watching the removal of a woman’s fundamental right to make decisions over her own body is incredibly upsetting…Here in New Zealand we recently legislated to decriminalise abortion and treat it as a health rather than criminal issue. That change was grounded in the fundamental belief that it’s a woman’s right to choose.”
And thus from this very small corner of the world, but applicable to all, the rules of engagement relating to individual sovereignty were laid bare for all to see:
Whilst it seems it is a woman’s ‘fundamental right’ to access government-funded medical intervention, it is not her — or anyone’s — fundamental right to refuse government-funded medical intervention, at least without harsh penalty.
Think about that just for a second. That is how much power they made for themselves.
Rank hypocrisy, you see, has reached such absurd levels, that gaslighting our earth’s entire population where personal rights and choices are concerned, before the dust of prejudiced Covid protocols has even begun to settle, has become the newly accepted direction of travel for the innately perverted.
“No government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body,” dripped the jowls of Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as he passed reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision, despite passing laws so extreme in the midst of peak Covid hysteria that unvaccinated citizens were banned from travelling on public transport in or out of their own nation for almost seven months.
A man (if one can call him that), for this period, apparently, was able to tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.
Righteous outrage to such federal overreach, however, remained contained, and the silence of the abortion-active ‘My body, My choice’ cheerleaders, was deafening.
This, perhaps, not quite as unsurprising when one considers demographics.
A US poll released in November 2021 to gauge the support of federal and/or state-run vaccine mandates from ‘young people’ found that 69 per cent of 13- to 29-year-olds, including 90 per cent of self-declared Democrats, supported the mandates.
These were, and still are, mandates, we mustn’t forget, promoted and fed by the likes of Anthony Fauci (another middle-aged man), and imposed and encouraged by President Joe Biden, who is also relatively identifiable, just about, as some kind of maladroit male.
This may correlate, in some measure, to the statistics surrounding abortion itself, whereby 75 per cent of ‘unintended pregnancies’ were found among teens aged 15- to 19-years-old, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) records; furthermore, among those aged 18-24, unintended pregnancies were found to be at their highest rate, while the abortion rate per 1,000 women for females in their 20s, specifically, accounted for a high of 56.9 per cent as of 2019.
As an interesting aside, American under-30s, again, were recently found in a Pew Research Center poll, to be the most likely to identify as ‘transgender’ or ‘nonbinary’ with 5.1 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds avowing either identity, which works out to approximately 17 million people compared to the US population as a whole.
In essence, then, the same people who one may assume fall into the category of being the most ardently ‘pro-choice’, and therefore the most animated since the opinions of an egregiously ‘white male’-dominated Supreme Court, are the same group of people who not only embraced a white male-dominated Covid mandate dynamic that was anti-choice to its core, but they’re the same people, alongside many ‘liberal’ pundits and politicians, who one may also assume have a hard time defining what a woman actually is.
Herein lies, where ‘social justice’ paradigms exist, the paradox of this post-Covid age:
Demanding recognition of your ‘basic human rights’ having supported their erosion.
Regardless of such a critical negation, this didn’t stop a large swell of pro-choice Kiwi commentators, in the same vein as their prime minister, lauding their own domestic abortion bill passed pre-lockdown in March 2020 as if it were some kind of ‘progressive’ gold standard to cherish and defend to the death.
Making up one of the most extreme abortion bills in the developed world, the current law stipulates a number of striking factors:
- Abortion services can be provided up to 20 weeks for all women for any cause without the requirement of a specialised doctor (at possible risk to the mother’s health); on average this is eight weeks longer than most European countries
- A woman may be provided an abortion after 20 weeks gestation up to birth on the basis that two qualified “health practitioners” (not necessarily medical doctors) approve the process
- in polling taken two-years before the bill passed, this action was supported by just 2 per cent of women
- Sex-selective abortion i.e. abortions based on the parental preference of the baby’s sex, are “opposed” per government bill, but not banned
- in the same poll, this directive was opposed by 90 per cent of respondents
- Abortions for babies diagnosed in the womb with disabilities such as Down syndrome, cleft lip and club foot are permitted at any stage
- No legal requirements to keep a baby alive after a ‘failed abortion’ exist nor are there any restrictions regarding the appropriate abortion method
Not for the faint of heart, such ‘methods’ can be heard in more detail here by former pro-choice turned ‘pro-life’ obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr Anthony Levatino, a vastly experienced abortionist who quit his practice following the tragic death of his five-year-old daughter.
“[At 20 weeks] the abortionist uses this clamp to grasp an arm or leg. Once he has a firm grip, the abortionist pulls — hard — in order to tear the limb from the baby’s body. One by one the rest of the limbs are removed, along with the intestines, the spine, and the heart and lungs…The head is grasped and crushed. The abortionist knows he has crushed the skull when a white substance comes out of the cervix. This was the baby’s brains.”
Although it’s important to note that legal abortions have steadily declined in the US since the 1990s, all in all, since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalising abortion nationwide, roughly 63 million abortions have taken place—more than the entire populace of Italy, and just shy of the density of France or Great Britain.
Significantly, the Court’s latest ruling is not a total ban; abortion laws will no doubt evolve to New Zealand-like extremities and will continue to be available in states that wish it, like California, while others will restrict and limit its practice to follow specified guidelines.
But the nuances living within such a heated debate have and will always be present, however much the ‘pro-choice’ movement’s protests might like to claim the issue is clear-cut.
Such nuance is demonstrated in various findings via Pew’s latest polling efforts from May 2022 where ‘56 per cent’ of people who believe abortion should be legal in ‘most’ or ‘all’ cases concluded that the timing of the pregnancy should play a part in whether a termination is legal or not.
In the same poll, around ‘a third of Americans who generally support legal abortion’ (33 per cent) admitted the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” describes their own view at least “somewhat” well, aligning almost exactly with the broad majority of the pro-life caucus.
Compromise, then, must surely be found.
What’s incredible, though, is the sheer gall with which an entire swathe of people who not long proclaimed that ‘choices have consequences’ when challenged with the concerns of an ostracised unvaccinated class who refused an untried vaccine (a reactive response), are now the same swathe of people who believe that welcoming (or initiating) unmitigated sex with undesirable partners in undesirable circumstances, shouldn’t have any consequences whatsoever despite this being much more of a proactive or conscious behaviour.
In other words, merely saying ‘no’ to a physical advance, medical or otherwise, should be met with penalty, but saying ‘yes’ to or instigating one, as we saw with vaccine passports, should open one up to every available service and product possible, just so long as it lines up with the political trajectory and ideology of the sitting establishment at the time.
One position, punishable, the other, affirmed.
This, the politics of the corrupted, not principled.
Either we have one rule for everyone’s human rights, or we have none.
Suffice to say, those of you who propagated and placated the infringement of other people’s human rights, choices, and bodily autonomy for the past two-years of clinical Covid catastrophe, perhaps sit this one out, give up the pathetic pretence, find some damn humility, and begin to acknowledge the damage you yourselves have done to the long-term conception of one’s personal sovereignty.
After all, choices have consequences, don’t they?