The author mixes up the health crisis, which is almost in its entirety an intentionally created phenomenon as can be seen by anyone who wishes to look up the present death rate in comparison to the same week or month in previous years. It can be done for any country with varying degrees of reliability. The UK is reasonably up to date on this and the UK Gov register shows that the pandemic is largely, if not entirely, of political making. The media's frenzy from Day 1 is not supported by the facts. Don't take my word for it, look it up yourself.
Now onto the second issue, of control over women's bodies.
In the UK, as elsewhere, pregnant women who are in jobs that have not been trashed or postponed by the current crisis are generally having to carry on working. The threat from this coronavirus is no different to working alongside anyone who has bad flu, parasites, aids, sores, fungal infections, etc, and, like all the above, you may not even be aware they are ill. Additionally, this year's coronavirus is particularly virulent only if you are old or with an impaired immune system, in which case you are unlikely even to be working. Pregnant women, especially in the second half of a pregnancy should, in a better world, have the option of parking their job, or changing to a less taxing one, if their job holds dangers for pregnancy. This is often not the case, coronavirus o not.
But the title of the article refers to "state control" over women's bodies, and the risks involved in working are not proportional to state control. Indeed, quite the contrary: more state control would be a good thing, in the sense that women might not need to continue working in a dangerous job merely to keep the salary going, if the state were more involved and if a job did not depend entirely on the economic whims of the company owners. The same could be said for men and children - no one should be forced to work in a dangerous environment.
Marx (yes, you won't die if you mention his name) understood that reproduction is a form of production and should be recognised as such. When women get maternity leave, the state recognises that the creation of the next generation of citizens is necessary and useful, and companies collectively should also value the creation of the next generation of workers.
Then, in the same article, there is the question of whether the UK government should allow medical abortions at home or not. The right to abortion was won only relatively recently and after a great struggle (and is an ongoing struggle in many places). There are so very few women who, if they receive a decent education on sexuality and have the means to control their reproduction, would choose to have an abortion unless they had extremely good reasons for it (malformation in the baby, risk to the mother, or unforeseen circumstances, financial or otherwise).
All evidence shows that the means should be facilitated to the woman who wishes or needs to abort, the earlier the better. But, as any form of abortion brings risks of many sorts to the mother, and bodily harm to the foetus, it should not be treated as if it were an entirely insignificant matter. The government could easily allow doctors to evaluate their patients via an interview conducted online and prescribe medical abortion without the woman having to see the doctor in person. The coronavirus is no excuse for abortion rights being denied.
But to assume that medical home abortions are not a form of control over women's bodies is a mistake. To douse your body with hormones is not in fact having much control over your body. We all of us have given our governments a great deal of control over our bodies, starting with the sort of food we eat and the effects it has on our health; and the type of society we have, which puts huge demands on women especially, as the functions of producing babies, nurturing them, caring for other members of the family, etc are all but incompatible with the demands of an industrial, or post-industrial, society. If you think this is refuted by the many men who do the nurturing, you have not understood why women in general are paid less and given less rewarding jobs. The causes are systemic.
In the same article, we are told that the government is currently suspending IVF treatments, while the crisis lasts. I should imagine that all elective plastic surgery has also been postponed. There is a range of procedures that could well be viewed as bodily harm in a more perspicacious sort of society: unnecessary plastic surgery, caesarians, episiotomies, tooth veneers. There are so many of them, and the majority affect women disproportionately.
IVF is nowadays treated almost as routine, despite the very considerable side-effects of this "toxic cocktail of hormones and hope", including a significant increase in female tumours, lower fertility of the offspring, and the medicalisation of pregnancy and birth. More importantly, why are so many couples (or individuals) needing IVF treatment in the first place? What are we doing as a society to make people so infertile? If whatever-it-is isn't an extraneous control of women's bodies I don't know what is.
The current "coronavirus crisis" is maybe a different control of women's bodies. It is, in a wider sense, a control of almost everybody's body. The rich seem to be able to move around as they like, but the poor's bodies are increasingly confined to being indoors or at work. But in the narrower sense, women's bodies are being controlled more or less as they always have been.
