While some abortion supporters couch their language with safe-sounding terminologies like ‘choice’, ‘women’s health’, ‘tough-decision’ and more – others aren’t being so careful.
One such person is Sophia Lewis, whose new book which details abortion as “necessary violence.”
In a new video for Verso Books, Lewis explained the context of her new book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” in which she defends abortion as a morally acceptable and even necessary option.
In her book, Lewis describes pregnancy as “gestational work” and abortion as “an acceptable violence” and “a form of killing that we need to be able to defend.”
In the promotional video shared to Twitter, Lewis argued that “We’re facing a really terrible attack on abortion. In the U.S. where I live, in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.”
Lewis argued that the pro-choice movement needs to stop conceding to the pro-life movement by admitting that abortion is bad because according to Lewis, it is what it is: “a form of killing that we need to be able to defend.”
“We have very little to lose at the moment when it comes to abortion and I’m interested in winning radically,” Lewis argued. ” I wonder if we could think about defending abortion as a right to stop doing gestational work. Abortion is, in my opinion, and I recognize how controversial this is, a form of killing. It is a form of killing that we need to be able to defend.”
After admitting that abortion is, in fact, killing, Lewis argued that it is a form of killing that we need to defend and accept as a society.
Lewis further pointed out that she does not care what is deemed a human life, and can “see the forms of making and unmaking each other as continuous processes.”
“The other end of the spectrum is learning how to die well and hold each other and let each other go at the end of our lives, as well as at the beginning,” she added.
She pointed out that violence is only unacceptable when a women does not want to have an abortion, but when she does its acceptable.
Referring to pregnancy as “gestational work,” Lewis compared aborting a baby to going on strike at work.
“The violence that the gestator meets out to essentially go on strike or exit that workplace is an acceptable violence,” she argued.
In Lewis’s new book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” she argued that the family structure itself should be abolished and that the only way humans should reproduce is if they use a surrogate.
Lewis “specifically links family abolition to a radical reconceptualization of pregnancy itself. The act of carrying a child to term, she insists, is work—labor that has long been exploited and overlooked by the academy—and so is mothering,” according to the magazine The Nation.
The responses
The responses on social media were swift. “Openly admitting that abortion is murder that should be accepted is really where we are going as a society..? These are dark times, friends,” one user added.
Another user tweeted: “if we can defend the right to kill an innocent person, then where does it end?”