By Laura Briggs
When Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption and safe-haven laws were an adequate substitute for abortion care for people who did not want to be pregnant, she was essentially insisting that they do a kind of high-risk, uncompensated labor to produce a baby or child for adoptive families like hers.
Like the anti-abortion movement that supported her nomination for the Supreme Court, Coney Barrett is not shy about acknowledging that she is in favor of forced pregnancy, and that this labor — in both senses of the term — could benefit other people who were childless or had fewer children than they wanted.
We know this work has value; people who hire women in the United States to carry a surrogate pregnancy pay them $30,000 to $50,000. Denying abortion to women who want them, and then expecting them to relinquish the resulting baby for adoption, is asking them to do that same labor for free.
As Black feminist legal scholar Pamela Bridgewater has pointed out, there is a word for forcing people to do unpaid reproductive labor on behalf of others: enslavement. In fact, as she argues, forced pregnancy was key to the historic labor system of slavery in the United States — the children of enslaved mothers were themselves enslaved, and once the importation of African people for purposes of enslavement was banned in the United States in 1808, it was how slavers kept the system going and increased their own wealth, including by raping enslaved women. Slavery was outlawed in the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, but Coney Barrett apparently means to reinstitute a version of it.
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