Judge James Ho of the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote an opinion last week that attracted a lot of attention. A three-judge panel, including Ho, ruled in favor of further restrictions on access to mifepristone, the abortion pill, which will remain widely available by order of the Supreme Court as long as the lawsuit continues. But Ho also wrote a separate advisory claiming that medical providers could further challenge the drug on the grounds of aesthetic harm, a concept he borrowed oddly from environmental law.

In what seemed like a baffling argument, Ho wrote: Unborn babies are a source of deep joy to those who see them. Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound images with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors love working with their unborn patients and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.

Hos’ opinion cited multiple instances of attempts to protect wildlife or natural landscapes from damage that would diminish the viewing pleasure of nature lovers. For example, he cited the Sierra Club v. Morton of the 1972 Supreme Court, in which the environmental group sought to block construction of a ski resort in California’s Sequoia National Forest on the grounds that the resort would harm the area’s aesthetics and ecology. He also cited the Lujan vs. Defenders of Wildlife of 1992, which involved suing a government agency for spraying pesticides harmful to beetles and butterflies that the plaintiffs wanted to watch.

It is well established, Ho wrote, that if a plaintiff has concrete plans to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff will incur aesthetic damage when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.

Thus, in Ho’s legal analogy, patients undergoing abortions are related to damaged natural landscapes or nature reserves. Anti-abortion doctors, meanwhile, play the role of disappointed tourists who miss out on the expected holiday pleasures.

Critics have pointed to the callous cynicism of Ho, a Trump appointee, who wrapped his support for anti-abortion activism under the cloak of alleged environmental concerns. Feminists have criticized the demeaning paternalism inherent in comparing pregnant women to animals.

Less explored is the critical importance of the term aesthetics here. Unlike most anti-abortion arguments, which equate it with murder, Ho criticizes it as a cause

aesthetic deprivation

, doctors who deny the pleasure they could derive from using medical imaging technology to look inside a woman’s body. His text makes frequent use of words such as view, image

,

and sight.

While this argument has been advanced primarily as a legal maneuver to position the doctors trying to reverse federal approval of mifepristones, it reveals a greater truth about the anti-abortion movement. To view abortion as a crime against the privilege of looking inside women is to view them as objects offered for the visual consumption, pleasure and, of course, the 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 pleasure of the lustful presentation of female bodies in, say, film or television. Scopophilia objectifies women and turns them into visual surfaces to look at, beautify, scale, perfect and consume, in short, commodities.

Hos’s view takes scopophilia to new depths, extending it below the skin’s surface into the body interiors of women, which he treats here as yet another category of visible commodity, subject more to the scrutinizing, pleasure-seeking gaze of medical providers than to the will . of the women themselves.

It is no coincidence that this opinion relates specifically to non-surgical abortion. Being a pill, mifepristone can make abortion invisible, often obviating the need for medical imaging or pelvic exams and thereby eliminating visual access to the procedure. Mifepristone can also reduce or even eliminate it

in

visual access to patients themselves: In many cases, a woman can get a prescription without an office visit and take the pill in the privacy of her home.

Mifepriston thus offers women a powerful form of resistance to the kind of mandatory bodily visibility that Ho advocates. Perhaps that’s why the judge chose the seemingly bizarre grounds of aesthetic injury to deny access to the drug. It allows him to reposition abortion in the realm from which mifepristone effectively frees it: that of prurient visual surveillance.

Rhonda Garelick is a distinguished professor of English and journalism at Southern Methodist University and the author of an upcoming book on fashion and politics.