In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s anti-abortion laws as unconstitutional. The court ruled these laws put women’s lives in danger and had no place in a free society that valued human life. (Sounds a lot like Bedford, doesn’t it?)
Birth control is a very important part of a sex worker’s life. Women sex workers, like women in general, would like to prefer to choose when to have children, if at all.
However, sometimes condoms break. Sometimes IUDs fail. Sometimes women are raped. Access to abortion was considered by the Court a medical necessity, and denial to that access was a sexist attack on all women.
So in 1988 when those laws fell, sex workers were amongst the ones celebrating. When the then-governing Conservatives tried to create a new law, women and political opposition parties were successful in stamping out any legislative attempt at controlling women’s bodies.
Today abortion is decriminalized; in spite of the whining from social conservatives the sky hasn’t fallen. Women are healthy and safe and babies are still being born. Under decriminalization, the only places in Canada today where abortion is unsafe are places like PEI (which doesn’t provide the procedure and refuses to admit doctors who will perform it) and New Brunswick (which enacted laws in violation of the Supreme Court decision, which 25 years later still remain) – in other words, places where the procedure is explicitly attacked.
It’s a given that a number of controlling, paternalistic men, along with women raised to respect them, would be against abortion. It’s also a given that those same controlling, paternalistic men, along with women raised to respect them, would be against sex work. Abortion and sex work are both issues of women’s bodily autonomy. No one or nothing has any right to a woman’s body without her consent, be it a zygote or a penis; paternalists instead believe women’s bodies are their property and can be used as they please.
But what’s strange about sex work is that there’s an odd breed of “feminist” who are against women’s bodily autonomy on this one specific issue. They’re referred to as “SWERFs” – Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists – who believe the normal, healthy rules of consent and bodily autonomy do not apply when it comes to sex work.
I cannot comprehend the internal battle, if there even is one in the SWERF mind, between these two positions: they say they’re against paternalistic, social conservative men controlling women’s bodies, except for when it comes to the Swedish/Nordic Model or C-36; in those cases they’re completely on board with paternalistic, social conservative men controlling women’s bodies. All of those methods of sex work criminalization turns sex workers’ bodies into 24-hour crime scenes, and declares their bodies as property of the state.
This, unfortunately for all women, has had a severe blowback. The SWERF-endorsed idea that sex work must be stamped out at all costs has had a devastating ripple effect against women worldwide. In the US, carrying condoms is used as evidence of sex work; so if you’re a woman who believes in safe sex don’t carry condoms, lest a cop, the SWERF’s hero, charges you for unrepentant harlotry. In Sweden, a place with a progressive reputation because of their social safety net, women who have had the nerve of not being born white can have their ethnicity used against them as evidence of sex work and can legally be refused business.
If you’re a Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminist you’re neither radical nor feminist – you are, frankly, tools of male social conservatives, no different than an anti-abortionist, taking the side of the oppressor in this centuries-old war of violence against all women.
Like preachy social conservative men, SWERFs would be boring if they weren’t so dangerous; both of them working together against women, as they did with C-36, they’ve brought a nightmare to Canada.
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