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Abortion rights demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington,...

Abortion rights demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.  Credit: Bloomberg/Valerie Plesch

Suddenly, the "user group" for the declaration “My body, my choice” regains some of its original membership. Abortion-rights advocates promoted the concept for many years. Amid the COVID-19 scourge, anti-vaccine and anti-mask protesters picked it up and hurled it in defiance of health professionals and public officials.

But with the sense of emergency that justified those mandates now fading, so does the relevance of that recent battle cry of the contrarian political right. This week, a leak of evidence that the right-tilting Supreme Court will soon overturn the national reproductive rights upheld in Roe v. Wade prompted opponents of new state abortion bans to shout for their bodily choices as volubly as ever.

Slogans are slogans. Web memes are web memes. Just how thin, fungible and perishable they can be, as substitutes for genuine dialogue, is showed in this latest “my body” rhetorical shift.

Long before the internet, the accepted story goes, British redcoats sang the song “Yankee Doodle” to mock the American patriots, who later sang it back at them in turn. It was an early form of trolling. In the U.S. today, right and left do this sort of thing more and more. It’s as easy for one side as the other to proclaim “stop the steal” or “America first” depending on circumstance and intent. Even if Donald Trump once took out a trademark on the widely-proclaimed, widely-mocked "Make America Great Again," nobody really owns a slogan.

We see this hurling-back of political rhetoric all the time. When the leak of the court’s draft opinion on Roe broke this week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts announced an investigation of what he called “a singular and egregious breach of … trust.”

Naturally, critics immediately asked in public whether Roberts would also investigate a potential "breach of trust" when his colleague Clarence Thomas ruled on a matter that might have touched on his wife’s role in efforts to reverse election results on behalf of the defeated Trump. If and when the motive for the leak is revealed, we'll find out which side of the Washington political divide calls the leaker a whistleblower and which side calls that person a subversive.

Last month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the first Black mayor in a generation, grabbed attention with his anti-crime spin on Black Lives Matter, the phrase and the loosely-organized movement that has protested instances of police abuse in American cities in recent years.

Adams, speaking in a televised interview just after the arrest of accused subway shooter Frank James, said: “If Black lives matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when [George] Floyd was murdered should be on the streets right now stating that the lives of these Black children that are dying every night matter."

At another point in the interview, in responding to criticism from the organization Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, the mayor gave the same line. "Where are all those who stated Black lives matter?” he said. “Then go do an analysis of who was killed or shot last night. I was up all night speaking to my [police] commanders in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The victims were Black. Many of the shooters were Black.”

All slogans, buzzwords and bromides are ripe for reflection and dissection — if only to get people to think about what they might really mean.

Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.

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