It’s time to stop policing women’s bodies

As states seek to further restrict access to abortions, feminists should consider expanding their coalition to meaningfully include sex workers. In fact, feminists should embrace a definition of sexual freedom that goes beyond the right to prevent reproduction and which focuses on women’s sexual autonomy — including the autonomy to end a pregnancy or to profit from how women use their own bodies. 

The Supreme Court is poised to severely narrow (by optimistic accounts) or completely eliminate women’s right to obtain abortions. Anti-abortion advocates have embraced paternalistic arguments that assert they know better than women about their best interests and the harms of abortion. Anti-abortion advocates claim to know better than women about how they should exercise their sexual freedom, in much the same way mainstream feminists have claimed to know better than sex workers about how they should use their bodies. 

However, decriminalized sex work and access to abortion allow women in economic precarity escape destitution. In both scenarios, women encounter sexual harassment in the labor market and unfair wage conditions. Conservatives argue that the right to abortion is unnecessary because women have a choice at the moment they have sex. Liberals have argued that women should go into more dignified forms of work than sex work. Research shows that there are several harms that come from criminalization, and women from marginalized groups often experience the criminal system as a form of state violence. Both the conservative and liberal approaches insert outside judgments for that of the affected women.  

While sex worker advocacy groups have championed the need to decriminalize sex work, their advocacy has been separated from mainstream feminist organizations’ sexual freedom agenda. The decriminalization of sex work has been treated as niche or counterproductive to the goal of sexual freedom. Historically, feminists have embraced a narrow conception of sexual freedom, which prioritizes women’s ability to control reproduction while ignoring women’s freedom to profit from non-reproductive sex. This choice has contributed to the political embrace of access to abortion as the priority issue for feminist organizing, while women’s groups have openly contested women’s right to be free from criminalization while engaging in commercialized sex. 

For example, in December 2016, NOW signed onto a brief that opposed the decriminalization of sex work, arguing “Prostitution does not relate to ‘marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, [or] education.’” The non-procreative nature of sex work was a central part of NOW’s argument to support the continued criminalization of sex work. Under NOW’s framing, sexual freedom prioritizes women’s freedom to birth or not-birth. Consequently, autonomy over the productive nature of one’s sexual organs only seem to matter when there is a birth at stake or where there is a threat to the physical condition of women’s reproductive organs. 

However, women do not seem to be free to use their sexual organs in ways that do not reflect the reproductive ideal. 

In many respects, this choice reflects a hetereonormative ideal that prioritizes birth and non-birth and centers the family as the site of women’s choice — even as it protects women’s choices to not create a family. 

This approach to sexual freedom, which is tied to reproduction, is limited and has allowed feminists to see the criminalization of sex work as natural rather than as another way to restrict women’s sexual autonomy. Mainstream feminists have justified support for sex work criminalization by asserting that it is not in women’s interests to engage in commercialized sexual labor, inserting their own beliefs about the choices women make about their bodies. This approach, which enables outsiders to supersede the choice of women to productively use their bodies for economic profit, invites others to insert their views about when women should productively, or in the case of abortion non-productively, exercise their choice over their sexual organs. The preamble of the Texas law restricting abortion states, “Texas has compelling interests from the outset of a woman’s pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the unborn child,” implying the state can insert into its judgments into how women exercise choice over their bodies. 

A broader conception of sexual freedom would provide a principled rationale for prioritizing the autonomy of women to make decisions about their own bodies. Feminists should take this moment as an opportunity to reframe and reexamine the traditional approach to women’s sexual freedom to contend ideological inconsistencies within the existing, dominant feminist framework. 

I. India Thusi is the author of“Policing Bodies,”which examines the policing of sex work. She is a professor of law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute, and legal fellow at The Opportunity Agenda.