Anti-abortion activists have been bashing away at abortion’s legality and accessibility for decades, but the past two weeks have been especially dramatic. On May 15th, Alabama passed the most restrictive law in the nation, which would grant no exceptions for rape or incest victims; this on the heels of Georgia’s so-called “heartbeat” bill that aims to ban abortions after six weeks, before the vast majority of people will even realize that they’re pregnant.
Inside this maelstrom of terrible laws came Alyssa Milano’s ill-conceived and not even real sex strike, which continued to show up in news stories and across social media as Missouri passed its own near total abortion ban. Milano’s announcement (which can be read in its original tweet form here) justifiably set off an avalanche of angry (and witty) rebukes, most of which lodged the same objections: such a strike is predicated on heteronormativity and gender essentialism; it positions sex as labor, as though we have sex with as our bosses; it doesn’t account for the striker’s own desire for sexual pleasure and intimacy; and it flirts with the conservative talking point that fertile cis women shouldn’t have penis-in-vagina (PIV) sex unless they intend to carry any resulting pregnancy to term.