October 8, 2021 - 7:30am
Last week, Gloria Steinem testified at a House Oversight hearing in response to a Texas bill allowing people to sue anyone that helps a woman get an abortion. “What’s happening in Texas is not only a women’s issue, but a step against democracy, which allows us to control our own bodies and our own voices,” she said.
Steinem is right: in a democracy, all people should have autonomy over their bodies and the choices they make about their bodies. Across America, women came out to protest the Texas bill, holding signs reading: “My body, my choice,” the classic second wave feminist slogan advocating bodily autonomy for women.
But a glaring hypocrisy has arisen this year, undermining feminists’ demands for bodily autonomy in the form of vaccine mandates being imposed across North America. When feminists say: “My body, my choice” do they really mean it?
In Canada, “feminist” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was re-elected for a third term last month, recently announced that all employees in federally regulated workplaces would be required to show proof of vaccine, as well as anyone travelling within Canada; in California, Governor Gavin Newsom recently announced all students and teachers would be required to get the Covid vaccine in order to attend school; and in New York, Northwell Health, the largest health care provider fired 1,400 of its employees for refusing to comply with the state’s Covid vaccine mandate. Across the country, healthcare workers across America are walking out in protest of mandatory vaccination.
While there is a history of schools in the US and in Canada requiring immunisation against diseases like the measles and mumps, the Covid vaccines function differently, in that they don’t prevent vaccinated individuals from catching or spreading the virus, but mainly prevent people from developing more serious symptoms. In other words, declining to get the Covid vaccine isn’t really about other people’s health outcomes, but your own.
Vaccination should therefore be an individual choice. In a democracy, as Steinem points out, people should have the right to make informed choices about their own bodies and health. But far too many feminists and progressives who loudly pronounce their pro-choice politics, vilifying anyone opposed as repressive, misogynist, and authoritarian, blindly support vaccine mandates and the censorship and punishment of anyone critical.
Famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred recently debated Dave Rubin on the issue of vaccine mandates, arguing on one hand that it is one’s “right to choose” what one does with their body, but that in the case of the Covid vaccine, this doesn’t apply because choosing not to get vaccinated endangers others. Putting aside the fact Allred lacks a basic understanding of how this vaccine works, it is appalling to suggest, as she did, that individuals should lose rights, freedoms, and their employment should they decline the vaccine.
For the record, the argument goes both ways: Right-wingers who support bans on abortion but argue against vaccine mandates on account of an individual’s “right to choose” should rethink their belief that the government should be allowed to dictate what choices women make about their own bodies.
This kind of hypocrisy undermines our arguments for freedom, rights, and autonomy — something we should all be able to agree on.
Either we live in a free and humane society wherein people get to make choices about their own lives and health or we live in an authoritarian society where the government dictates what individuals do with their bodies.
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer, exiled in Mexico. She hosts The Same Drugs on YouTube.
Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer, host of the Same Drugs podcast and People’s Party of Canada candidate in Vancouver East.
FeministCurrent
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“…its president, provost and deans would no longer make public statements on current events…”
So, a handful of administrators will remain studiously mum while–wink wink–thousands of faculty are free to continue indoctrinating students in progressive orthodoxy. These are meaningless actions meant only to silence critics without changing the underlying source of the problem.
Correct, this has got mainly to do with appeasing sponsors. A very important stakeholder in US Ivy league education.
Not so fast. President Pollack was pushed out and her successor is on thin ice while they search for a new Prez. The Cornell Free Speech Association has been at the forefront of bringing pressure to bear on the administration. Things are changing. CFSA will continue to monitor and act on any official actions of the university like deplatforming of speakers, harrassment, etc. I expect the Admin will become neutral.
That’s all you can expect. Individual professors have as much right to speak freely as you do.
Unfortunately many of those professors are still indoctrinated and insist on doing the same to their students. It will take much longer for universities to shed the neo-marxism that has contaminated higher education.
I’m not being fast. You are slow to appreciate the current state of academia. You seem to take comfort in the ability of “individual professors having the right to speak freely” but that is moot if the professors are homogeneously progressive, which they are. Generations of potential conservative professors have opted out of academia for the last quarter century because they rightfully perceived as undergrads that a university neither offers them opportunity for advancement nor even welcomes their presence. They’ve gone into other professions instead. Many existing conservative faculty left academia when they saw the handwriting on the wall. The demographic compositions of faculties is now above 90% liberal. Contracts for new faculty require the signing of progressive compliance documents that make a mockery of free thought. And institutions blatantly discriminate in hiring against those known to profess conservative ideas. So what good is free speech if the composition of faculties are effectively unanimously progressive? There are no longer significant numbers of alternative faculty voices willing to confront the status quo. Academic “freedom” policies in such a context only codify coverage for leftist faculty’s continued condemnation of the rara avis conservative. We also have recently seen the hollowness of university administrative actions vis a vis recent protests where in the overwhelming majority of cases the miscreants who defied policies and (seldom) received some type of suspension or dismissal saw the punishments quietly vacated. Only the credulous would expect administrations to enforce policies in the future if doing so is inconvenient to the prevailing established orthodoxy.
Additionally, the lock on thought-expression in academia extends beyond universities to the realms of academic journals, where heterodox ideas are professionally dangerous to submit and usually rejected, and to professional associations that have become politicized in conformance with progressivism. University administrations have no control over these entities but these entities police and enforce academic orthodoxy. Finally, MY “speaking freely” that you refer to is on any platform like this contingent upon the whims of some nameless, faceless, content mediator and algorithm. Many of them would block what I’ve written or, in the case a social media, withdraw amplification of it.
Institutional neutrality, most famously articulated in the 1968 Chicago Statement
I’m always proud of my alma mater’s continued commitment to academic freedom.
There you are. No speech without responsibility for what’s said.
So a handful of universities are starting to appear to be fair-minded. Whoop-de-do ….
These are important universities that the less famous ones will follow. This represents an early step in the new, conservative march through the institutions to take them back to sanity.
Not a conservative match, thank goodness, but the simple acknowledgement that statements confer responsibility. If you can’t take it, don’t make it.
And the pendulum continues to swing, back and forth, back and forth…
Now only if the major news outlets will get the hint!
Time will tell whether these universities really live up to these commitments, but it is most certainly really encouraging that the dawn following a very dark night of wokism is really breaking in the USA. It is such a shame that the UK is heading further into the darkness with freedom under attack from every direction at the moment. The US experience does however show that it is possible to wake up from the woke nightmare.
Sorry, it’s a dawn following a very dark night of ‘free speech’.
Here are some well developed thoughts on free speech.
Doesn’t seem that complicated.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/not-in-our-name
To find Cornell’s position on anything look up Harvard’s six months earlier.
Ouch!
Which shows how little novelty of thought exists in academia and how much pure mimesis.
I have zero confidence this will make one iota of difference. Progressives are accustomed to, and take actual pride in, being heartily disliked by ordinary people. They will redefine doing the same thing as making a huge change and then carry on as usual.
It’s ‘ordinary people’ who push for progress. That’s what reactionaries can’t stand.
I strongly suspect that most ordinary people want to not have obstructions imposed on their lives and to not be told what they should think. In our times, that would be progress.
Greek life?
I wondered that.
Fraternities and Sororities. Think “Animal House”.
Sounds great…on paper. But will these woke institutions really permit free speech, or will they find ways to continue speech codes and censorship of non-woke beliefs as they have tried to skirt SCOTUS rulings on affirmative action?
What a morose and skeptical (US spelling) collective reaction here! Of course these moves don’t establish a sincere or total change of campus atmosphere, but they are a legitimate good start—right? Even 12-plus years of your favorite MAGA strongmen—for those who are fans of such flame-fanners— won’t create the ideal conservative/radical-right Academy of one’s dreams, but why not relax your pessimism and gloom for a moment?
Those charlatans Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are exposed—though way belatedly—and Woke Racism by John McWhorter and The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk are more in line with the zeitgeist. That’s better than nothing.
How staggeringly stupid for an institution ever to have taken any other position. That they did speaks volumes for the intellectual mediocrity of these universities.
What matters more than staying mum is that university presidents are not DEI types and know how to handle issues. It is also important that university life is not brought to a halt by any side in a debate.
I’m deeply sceptical. Vast swathes of academia have basically given up on empiricism and trying to think beyond one’s biases. I’m not just trying to be insulting here – many academics across the social ‘sciences’ and humanities will freely admit to that, though language like ‘prioritising individual subjectivities and reflective analysis’ or all things ‘critical’ (which specifically sets out to ‘counter hegemonic narratives and elevate marginalise voices’, meaning ‘I write what I do to further social justice’)
You can’t have free and open debate at an institution when over half of the professors there don’t rely on rationalism as a means of deriving truth, and will hound and isolate anyone who does fundamentally disagree with them as a bigot. It’s like expecting the Catholic Church to be home to spirited debate about the existence of god, it’s not a neutral environment for that discussion.
True political neutrality at these institutions would mean that half of all faculty will need to be replaced by conservatives and/or right wingers. That the administrators will henceforth hold their tongue on political issues is just a gesture to ensure continued enrollments into what are really left-wing indoctrination centers.