"Your Body, My Choice": The Misogynist MAGA Attack Explained

Since the election, a rise in sexist attacks online have taunted “your body, my choice.” Students have also reported hearing the phrase on campus. This phrase pits men against women and seems to threaten sexual violence.

The misogynist slogan is an attempt to co-opt the powerful feminist slogan, "my body, my choice," from decades ago. Vox journalist Anna North interviewed Laura Prieto about the historical origins of the idea and its relationship to Our Bodies Ourselves. The original publication "Women and Their Bodies" (1970) opened its chapter on abortion with the sentence: "Abortion is our right -- our right as women to control our own bodies."

The feminist phrase ‘my body, my choice” was used regularly in chants at rallies by 1970, though it’s not clear who originally coined it, said Laura Prieto, program director of Our Bodies Ourselves Today, a digital platform that is an iteration of the iconic reproductive health book Our Bodies, Ourselves. In the years before Roe v. Wade, it was a call for abortion rights, but it was also ‘a statement about women demanding their right as equal human beings to have decision-making power over what happened to them,’ Prieto said.

Variations in phrasing include "my body, my decision" and the more recent "my uterus, my rules," as well as "bans off our bodies." But they all assert the importance of bodily autonomy to women's rights.