Judge James Ho of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals claimed mifepristone inflicts 'aesthetic injury' on doctors looking inside women's bodies.
Less examined has been the critical importance of the term “aesthetic” here. Unlike most arguments against abortion, which tend to equate it with murder, Ho criticizes it as causing, denying doctors the pleasure they might derive from using medical imaging technology to peer into the interior of a woman’s body. His text makes frequent use of words like “view,” “image” and “sight.”
While this argument may have been advanced mainly as a legal maneuver to establish standing for the doctors trying to reverse mifepristone’s federal approval, it reveals a larger truth about the antiabortion movement. To construe abortion as a crime against the privilege of looking inside women is to construe them as objects offered up for the visual consumption, pleasure and, of course, control of others.
This is not a new concept. Psychoanalytic critics use the term “scopophilia” to refer to a presumably male audience’s erotic viewing enjoyment of the prurient presentation of women’s bodies in film or television, for example. Scopophilia objectifies women, turning them into visual surfaces to be looked at, embellished, augmented or reduced, perfected and consumed — in a word, commodified.
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