Going Somewhere?
QAnon-style invocations of "trafficking" are entering debates about IVF and abortion rights. They're an open threat against the right to travel for reproductive care.
When trying to understand right-wing politics in 2024, one of the most useful shortcuts is to acknowledge that a significant fraction of Republican voters is animated by the belief that children are being trafficked, en masse, by a shadowy network of Satanic pedophiles and cannibals.
I’m not embellishing their beliefs here, or exaggerating the influence of these conspiracy theories. A 2022 survey found one in four Republicans to support the idea that “true American patriots” might soon have to use violence in order save the country from a Satanic trafficking ring that they believe controls government, media, and the financial sector. Those beliefs were crystalized in the QAnon conspiracy theory and its predecessor, Pizzagate, which led a conspiracy theorist to shoot up a pizzeria full of children, under the false impression that the restaurant was trafficking kids to prominent Democrats.
Today, most elected officials on the right will disavow QAnon in name, but its underlying paranoias and promise of violent purges still echoes in right-wing rhetoric and official policy.
For instance, when Senate Democrats attempted to pass a bill protecting in vitro fertilization last week, leaders on the religious right accused the bill of abetting the “trafficking of human embryos.” The following day, Missouri’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood in the state, accusing the reproductive health organization of “trafficking” children across state lines to receive abortions.
These accusations are rooted in fiction. Tony Perkins, head of the evangelical Family Research Council, claimed the IVF bill not only enabled “trafficking” but also “animal-human hybrids.” And Missouri’s Planned Parenthood lawsuit is based on edited footage from the far-right video operation Project Veritas. In that video, a Project Veritas worker with a hidden camera pretends to be enquiring about an abortion for a fictional, 13-year-old niece.
In tying these fantastical stories to the “trafficking” rhetoric of QAnon, the right can frame its actions within a legible narrative of shadowy cabals and righteous violence. It’s easier than contending with the real people whose lives are upended by forced pregnancies, whose dreams of parenthood risk shattering under anti-IVF rulings, whose right to travel stands threatened by anti-choice legislation, and whose bodily autonomy stands threatened by the anti-IVF movement’s belief in “fetal personhood.”
Missouri’s Planned Parenthood lawsuit relies on Project Veritas footage, in which a man asks how his 13-year-old niece might obtain an abortion despite the state’s near-total abortion ban. (Missouri Republicans voted down an exemption for rape and incest last month, with one state senator declaring “God is perfect. God does not make mistakes.”) In the footage, a Planned Parenthood employee advises the cameraman to go to Kansas, where the fictional girl can legally obtain an abortion, potentially without her parents’ knowledge if she obtains a legal bypass. (A Planned Parenthood spokesperson called the video “heavily doctored and edited.”)
While the child discussed in the clip was not real, some 13-year-olds do become pregnant by rape. The rights of these children are not acknowledged in the Missouri lawsuit, which instead addresses “parental rights” and “parental consent,” describing the abortion as a harm inflicted upon the child’s parents, rather than a procedure the child might seek out voluntarily, especially if a parent is involved in the child’s abuse.
The argument erases any of the agency of the person seeking an abortion. The suit seeks to ensure “the fundamental right of parents not to have their kids trafficked, without their knowledge or consent, across state lines for the purpose of inducing abortion.”
If “abortion trafficking” lawsuits are a cheap opportunity to disguise repression as a rescue mission, then the right’s “anti-trafficking” opposition to IVF is an even more ridiculous effort to control parenthood through the language of paranoia.
“It is simple, @SenDuckworth,” Perkins tweeted at Sen. Tammy Duckworth last week. Duckworth, who introduced legislation to protect IVF rights, conceived her two daughters through IVF. “No one is going after the IVF industry. Your bill is just an attempt to legalize human cloning, animal-human hybrids, trafficking of human embryos, and more.”
Duckworth’s legislation was ultimately blocked last week by a Republican Senator who invoked similar fears about the creation of mutants. Those paranoias feature prominently in QAnon-style conspiracy theories on the right, where language about chimeras and lizard-people overlaps with the false belief that prominent Democrats are kidnapping children and drinking their blood.
A 2021 Fox News segment took the side of anti-choice organizations in pushing for an amendment that would restrict scientific research. “Mutants are coming!” read the Fox News chyron, as a host warned that the research is “obviously from Hell.” The segment then featured a guest appearance from conspiracy theorist Lara Logan who, the following year, would go on an on-air rant in which she claimed that immigration is “Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges,” and that elites “want us eating insects, cockroaches and that, while they dine of the blood of children.”
These theories are unhinged. But they’re foundational to many conservatives’ worldview, and to their vision of imminent, cleansing violence. And while the conspiracies are fake, the theories are used to bolster very real anti-choice legislation.
Republican opposition to IVF is a logical extension of fetal personhood arguments. In order for the right to uphold the extreme view that a fertilized egg has rights equal to or in excess of an adult, they must also argue that the frequent occurrence of non-viable IVF embryos is akin to a mass-murder program.
Under this schema, anyone who moves an embryo might be accused of “trafficking” a person. After Alabama’s supreme court issued a ruling that effectively blocked IVF last month, some companies suspended transport of IVF embryos into and out of Alabama, citing legal concerns.
A similar logic is at play in efforts to stop people from traveling for abortions.
After describing the fictional 13-year-old’s trip to Kansas for an abortion, Missouri’s lawsuit against Planned Parenthood goes on to suggest that all interstate abortion is suspicious, and potentially supportive of Missouri’s “trafficking” claims.
“The managing director of the Kansas Planned Parenthood clinic confirmed that people come in from out of state ‘all the time,’ including minors,” the lawsuit reads.
Well, yes, that is describing the fundamental right to travel interstate, which would be less necessary if states like Missouri stopped banning common reproductive care. In this context, however, the movement of women and girls is made into evidence of “trafficking,” a term that suggests they are not acting voluntarily, but are being tricked or coerced.
Such language is already on the books in Idaho and in some Texas jurisdictions that ban “abortion trafficking,” or the practice of driving someone interstate for treatment that is banned in their home state. Several Texas counties have passed ordinances prohibiting people from driving another person through their borders to reach an abortion, and Idaho has passed a law against helping a minor, who is not one’s child, obtain an out-of-state abortion (a judge recently blocked the law on constitutional grounds).
These laws and lawsuits suggest abortion-seekers to have no will of their own, reducing people to objects shuttled across state lines for nefarious purposes. In doing so, they lay the logic for a systematic crackdown on the rights of anyone who might become pregnant. It’s a conspiracy, no shadowy cabal required.