Not just YOUR body we’re talking about

I wish members of the antiscience crowd were creative enough to come up with their own slogans. Barring that, I’d settle for them explaining their signs.

If you’ve ever sung the ballad of “My Body, My Choice,” you know the tune has taken a weird turn of late. Decades ago, the phrase was embraced by feminists who support a woman’s right to have agency over her own body — her whole body, including her womb.

In these times when credentialed scientists are vilified or worse, a certain breed of conservative still wants very much to regulate women’s bodies, but they don’t want scientists to tell them how to live. That’s because scientists would tell those conservatives that viability in the womb doesn’t begin nearly as early as they’d like to think. And those same scientists have been telling those conservatives to wear a mask throughout this entire pandemic, as they’ve been telling them for months to get in line for a vaccine.

(But then, we know the abortion question isn’t really about whether a fetus is a person. The question is whether a woman is a person. Historically, conservatives have had a hard time answering that question in a way that science would support.)

Early in the pandemic, “My Body, My Choice” started showing up on signs hoisted by the antiscience contingent, as an argument that they not be required to wear a mask that science told them would cut the spread of COVID. Later, they embraced the slogan to say they didn’t want to get a vaccine that science told them could save their lives.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that such a cluster cannot be bothered to distill their philosophy into a phrase they didn’t plagiarize. In a stunning break with decency and a shocking lack of understanding about racial injustice, antimaskers also appropriated “I Can’t Breathe,” the last words of Eric Garner, who in 2014 was killed by chokehold by the New York police for selling loosies.

This kind of appropriation isn’t just an American thing. Anti-science protesters have done the same thing in Canada. In Germany, anti-mask protesters co-opted the legacy of an anti-Nazi activist, Sophie Scholl, much to the horror of historians and others.

The Supreme Court wrote the newest stanzas for “My Body, My Choice” last week when they threaded the needle in decisions about two of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates. Per the court’s decision, certain health care workers must continue to get vaccinated, but the justices reimposed a stay on the administration’s vaccine mandate — or weekly testing — for businesses with 100 or more employees. The court’s decision hinged on whether the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which imposed the mandate, had the authority to do so.

So now it’s up to individual employers to decide whether to keep their workforce — and the rest of us — safe. Large employers appear to be moving toward mandating vaccines on their own, and that’s promising, as we’re stalled at roughly 63 percent fully vaccinated nationwide and 76 percent fully vaccinated in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, people who avoid the stick — and the courts that support them — have helped a host of the vaccine-hesitant (a fancy way of saying “moron”) to extend this pandemic long past its sell-by date.

(Ask your nearest vaccine-hesitant loved one why they’ve made their awful choice. If they say it’s because they don’t want to put anything in their bodies that they don’t recognize, ask them if they know what’s in Mountain Dew, Cheez-Its or whatever snack they regularly push down their gullet. Only if they can recite the snack’s list of ingredients in its entirety — right down to erythorbic acid and soy lecithin — can they legitimately use that excuse about a vaccine.)

(If your vaccine-hesitant loved one says they’re waiting for the country to reach herd immunity, mention that was not how it worked with polio or smallpox. Ending those scourges took vaccines.)

(If your nearest vaccine-hesitant loved one starts spouting conspiracy theories or mentions Bill Gates tracking their movements, walk away. Life is simply too short.)

Before long, we will have lost 1 million souls to COVID in this country. That number gives added urgency and makes the conversation even more frustrating. The impact of an anti-masker/antivaxxer’s choice — unlike a woman’s choice to abort — doesn’t stop with one person. The decision to not wear a mask and/or not get a vaccine slops over on the rest of us. Considering the transmissibility of omicron, the dominant variant, that doesn’t sound very pro-life, does it?

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.