A group of notable fashion designers has partnered with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to design shirts displaying propagandistic euphemisms to promote the killing of preborn children.
The political arm of the nation’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, launched a collaboration with a group of designers who all created t-shirts based on the slogan “We Decide,” specifically meant to show opposition to laws protecting preborn children from abortion.
“Bans on care harm everyone,” Planned Parenthood president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson told Vogue. “But they hit hardest among women, people with low incomes, LGBTQ+ people, as well as Black, Latino, and other communities of color—where systemic racism and discrimination already make it hard to get basic health care.”
Designers participating include Carly Cushnie, Diane von Furstenberg, Fernando Garcia, Fe Noel, Kenneth Cole, Kim Shui, Peshawn Bread, Prabal Gurung, and Willie Norris. They all also chose “muses” to model the shirts, such as singer Saweetie and actors Ariana DeBose, Bowen Yang, Lili Reinhart, and Quannah ChasingHorse.
“Freedom is being in charge,” Von Furstenberg said in a press release. “Freedom is knowing you can make the best decision for your body. Freedom is charting the best course for your life and your future. We will never be truly free until we can exercise our reproductive freedoms.”
But killing another innocent human being isn’t a legitimate freedom or right. It’s not even “reproductive freedom,” because abortion ends a life after reproduction has already taken place. It destroys the body of a genetically distinct human being. Robbing someone of their right to life ends any chance of freedom or liberty for that person.
Regarding the campaign theme, “We Decide,” what is it, exactly, that “we” are “deciding”? Which flavor of ice cream is the best? What kind of shoes to wear? What career we’d like to pursue? No. Obviously, in this case, “deciding” is referencing “what a woman can do with her body” specifically, aborting her own child. After all, laws tell women and men what they can and cannot do with their bodies every single day through something known as “laws.” The problem is, the law is inconsistent here; we have laws against homicide to discourage it. We have laws against rape to punish the act and to discourage it — not because we believe homicide or rape will ever fully be halted in society, but because protecting innocent human beings is the right thing to do. Abortion is an injustice even according to our own laws, because it removes this protection from the most vulnerable and most innocent members of the human family, who have no voices to protest this discrimination.
Additionally, while it is true that women face injustices — many of which often lead women to feel they have no other choice but to get an abortion — that does not make killing one’s preborn child by abortion the solution, nor does it make women free.
Abortion is simply oppression redistributed, promising to empower one person by robbing another person of his or her life. That, by definition, is oppression. Denying one person their humanity does not make another person more free; it makes them an oppressor.
Bread, a Native American designer, explained that she used an Indigenous art form called parfleche to create her shirt — and then gave a contradictory explanation as to why she chose that for her design. She told Vogue that it is the craft of creating carriers to hold one’s belongings:
It’s a traditional art form from tribes of the Plateau and northern and southern Plains. With that, I thought, Aren’t we all vessels that hold precious things, from our wombs to our hearts? Don’t we deserve to be adorned with stories and meaning?
She is correct, particularly for women. Yet abortion is antithetical to this entire line of thinking. Abortion destroys the precious things — preborn children — held by women in their wombs and their hearts.
