Usually, when we cover a thread that doesn’t need much commentary it’s because the thread is just that good HOWEVER, it would appear the same can be said when a thread is just that bad. Granted, we can’t even begin to claim we have any real understanding of what this Sophie Lewis person is babbling about, but it only seems fair that if we have to read it, so do you.
You’re welcome.
Pretty sure she’s against any sort of regulation around abortion.
Yeah.
My thoughts on abortion and the current moment are going to be published long-form (hopefully online first, too) in an attractive leftist magazine soon, but I'm going to post a thread now with some of my main points. I'm calling this "Free Anthrogenesis: Antiwork Abortion."
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Not just a leftist magazine, but an attractive one.
(Anthrogenesis, n., the production of human beings.)
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
K.
On May Day, as usual, workers all over the earth massed together in rejection of work. We gathered as a sign to the ruling classes that we have not forgotten our goal—as a class—of self-abolition. They are the enemies of all life worth living, we being its creators.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Rejection of work. You can see where this is going already, right?
Then, the next day, we learned that withdrawal from gestating looked set to be illegal in half of the United States within weeks.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Withdrawal from gestating.
Abortion.
US states will be permitted to ban what the French call “voluntary interruption” of pregnancy. At least half the states will do so—they’ll ban such interruptions—promptly. Where trigger mechanisms are ready and waiting, abortion will become a crime the instant the law allows it.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Or you know, just call it abortion.
Despite holding supermajorities multiple times since 1973, the Democratic Party has not codified the right to abortion-access. I have not a scintilla of doubt that now, though, Dems will act decisively to bend gravity, end the filibuster, and pass abortion protection laws.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Well, they tried.
And failed.
Yup, Democrats failed.
The liberal media are reporting how, in a doomed plan led by Chuck Schumer today, “Democrats in Congress are trying to protect abortion rights.” Frankly it is difficult, then, to imagine what not trying would look like. Pelosi just endorsed the pro-life ghoul Henry Cuellar.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Being pro-life makes someone a ghoul?
Weird.
Make no mistake: the Christocapitalists desire an end to all forms of nonproductive and nonreproductive bodily autonomy, including exit from pregnancy, but also contraception, queer sex, and the freedom to delay puberty, shape one’s sex, and use public bathrooms while trans.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Make no mistake, this is some serious batsh*ttery.
They’ve been winning for some time. They've long been candid about what they intend. Much of the South has lived in a post-Roe reality for years. People who conceive and miscarry there face suspicion, surveillance, traumatizing cross-examinations, and all-round criminalization.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
No. They don’t.
Supposedly only the male-coded, profiteering “abortionists” are destined for prison (in reality, abortion doulas, for millennia, have of course typically been women). The proponents of forced birth protest that they don’t wish to jail “the women.” Demonstrably, this is a lie.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Nobody is destined for prison but you know, she’s rolling so … yeah.
There is a life-or-death need for many more groups (like @ifwhenhow) that are equipped to do militant repro-justice lawyering in defense of proletarian gestators, right now, without being squeamish or moralistic about legal gray areas, substance use, and the sex industry.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
We saw Proletarian Gestators open for the Raging Beavers in 99.
Repro justice organizers from criminalized communities did not, for instance, wait for Planned Parenthood to respond last month when Lizelle Herrera was arrested for "murdering" her fetus. The effective orgs are, alas, battle-scarred outliers to the mainstream prochoice movement.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Fetus.
How did it come to this? For decades, Dems have put a blind faith wager on the survival of Roe—specifically a hollowed out Roe, perpetually under threat, perfect for fundraising off the back of—as a vote-stabilizing tactic within the eternal genteel dance of 2-party power sharing
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
They trusted the process, and now there’s practically nothing they can do to stop the attack on sexual liberty and reproductive labor integrity in this country. It is absolutely their fault.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
But let’s imagine for a moment that the progressives nominally in control of this territory weren’t auto-hamstrung. Let’s imagine they were capable of uttering the word “abortion,” which Biden did for the first time—what a great guy—after the anti-abortion draft opinion leaked.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
What does the best of the blue team offer people who gestate? Privacy and choice: these are the limits of conceptual & discursive possibility for this nation’s gestational politics. An American gestates, in the best case scenario, in their "own" sovereign body, on their own dime.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
People who gestate.
Or, you know, women.
That’s it. There is, discursively, no freedom to withdraw from manufacturing a fetus. There is no real prerogative to decide not to produce new human life. There are no labor rights in the domain of anthrogenesis.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Manufacturing a fetus.
Right.
The logic of capitalism’s deeply naturalized repro-social order is one of anti-life natalism. Its method is pithily encapsulated by Evi Nakano Glenn: forced care. Forced gestating is best understood as the most physiologically invasive stratum of people’s coercion into care.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
We think she’s saying capitalism bad.
The so-called pro-lifers crusade, not just for forced gestational care of the fetus by the gestator, but for lifetimes of forced, privatized care. This is why, inasmuch as care is romanticized, flattened, abstracted from capitalism, there can be no left counterpolitics around it.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
You know, this would be an easier thread to read if she just called women, women.
The meatiest parts of the politics of care dwell in questions like: care how, care why, care where? And these are necropolitical, not just biopolitical questions. Chewing on them inevitably means asking: who and what shall we withdraw care from?
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
I’m not suggesting voluntaristic action against, say, capitalists, patriarchs, fragile whites, and despotic fetal tissue. I am interested in what we want to see “desist” as part of our, necessarily selective, reproductively “assistive” vision.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Fragile whites.
Despotic fetal tissue.
Dafuq are we reading?! LOL
What lives, households, social relations, worlds, must we unproduce, in order to produce the ones we desire? Because life is inseparable from its opposite. The good life is possible, in fact, only because of all the decisions *not* to give other forms of life breath.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
OK, I'm going to stop here, even though I'm only half way through, because my editors will be annoyed otherwise
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Tl;dr: Let's learn to celebrate, without recourse to healthcare, necessity, or special pleading, the beauty & power of a gestator’s decision to unmake life. Antiwork anthrogenesis deromanticizes care by vindicating withdrawals of gestational labour-power, for any reason and none.
— Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia) May 11, 2022
Gestator’s decision to unmake life.
Yeah, we got nothin’.
We knew a thread from a pro-abort would be nutty but WOW.
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