Article 3 of the Declaration reads: “Reaffirming the rights of women and girls to physical and reproductive integrity.”
Abortion access might be the first issue that comes to mind when you read the third article of the Declaration. However, that is not the only right it covers. Rather, it’s about all reproductive services and rights, surrogacy in all its forms, and the ongoing attempt to use medical research to compromise female reproductive integrity.
Reproductive Services and Rights
First, Article 3 concerns matters related to reproductive health and services, and women’s and girls’ ability to access them effectively.
This includes services such as abortion access, birth control, and reproductive medicine. It also covers comprehensive pregnancy and prenatal care that helps to lower the maternal mortality rate.
As women, we have been defined throughout history by our female reproductive systems. Women have faced discrimination because of our female bodies. In order for women to combat this discrimination, it is crucial that we have the ability to control our reproductive systems. Lawmakers should ensure that women have this ability, as well as the right to access proper reproductive healthcare.
Surrogacy
The second part of Article 3 of the Declaration concerns surrogacy as a violation of the reproductive integrity of women.
According to third wave feminism and mainstream society, surrogacy is a harmless practice. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Altruistic surrogacy tends to be what most people imagine when they think of surrogacy. But the reality is that the commercial surrogacy industry is the most common form of the practice.
Commercial surrogacy is an industry that thrives on classism, racism, misogyny, and profit. In fact, there are many who consider the commercial surrogacy industry to be a modern form of human trafficking.
Female reproductive capacity is not a product that can be exploited, trafficked, or sold for profit. Surrogacy exploits women by reducing them to an “incubator,” and the child to a product. In fact, some women who work as surrogates have been dehumanized by being referred to as “gestational carriers.”
This clearly violates a woman’s right to reproductive integrity and control over her own reproductive system. It also perpetuates the sex-based discrimination and sexism that women face. This is because women and girls, as members of the female sex-class, uniquely face the possibility of exploitation through motherhood.
Female reproduction does not exist for the benefit and profit of men, as has too often been the case throughout history.
Medical Research and Reproductive Integrity
The last part of Article 3 of the Declaration concerns medical research that seeks to enable men to gestate and give birth to children as a form of sex-based discrimination.
With the push to enshrine “gender identity” into law comes the push to consider men as women. To this end, many activists have pushed for the inclusion of males in uniquely female experiences, such as the recent attempt by a man to “breastfeed” his child, or the increasing number of men seeking uterus transplants.
Any medical research that would seek to make this a reality is a violation of women’s reproductive integrity.
For example, the attempt to transplant a woman’s uterus into a man not only would not make the man into a woman, but it would also compromise the woman’s bodily integrity by removing her uterus from her own body.
Moreover, a recent experiment involving transplanting a uterus into a male rat so that it could gestate offspring highlights the futility of this type of medical research and how it compromises female integrity. Even after the uterus transplant, the male rat was unable to gestate without being sewn to a female rat so he could share her bloodstream.
This research demonstrates the centrality and necessity of the female in female reproduction. It is impossible to separate the two.
To do such research on humans would be a violation of women’s rights to control their own reproduction. Because women’s oppression revolves around the exploitation of female reproductive biology, disconnecting women’s reproductive capacity from women is a form of sex-based discrimination.
Even worse, it is a disservice to women and girls to put money towards helping men achieve these impossible and unethical goals. Instead, that money could prevent sex-based discrimination by helping women access comprehensive reproductive services and have safer and healthier pregnancies.
Article 3 of The Declaration in Law and Policy
We need lawmakers across the U.S. to commit to protecting women’s rights to control their own fertility and reproduction, to access reproductive healthcare, and to have female reproductive integrity free from men. To this end, we must preserve the true definition of sex in federal, state, and local law. A definition of sex that does not include “gender identity” and usher in self-ID policies.
Want to read the two previous posts in this series? Read our explanations on Article 1 and Article 2 of the Declaration.
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