Nothing is new about liberal feminists allying with the right in a war against sex work; they have been working together for two decades now. But the dissonance of hearing NOW, a group which has placed keeping abortion safe and legal at the center of their mission, appropriate some of the tropes of anti-abortion rhetoric, was only underscored by the testimony of Deepika Srivastava, president of the DC Abortion Fund, which supports sex work decriminalization. “We need to say enough to outdated and nonsense laws and policies, that reflect bad public health, that legislate away bodily autonomy, and endanger communities,” Srivastava told the council, “whether those policies encroach upon abortion access or upon sex workers’ rights.”

Nor was this the only outlandish pronouncement from NOW leadership. “Prostitution is the only form of employment that intersects with forms of violence and other illegal activities, such as drug abuse, coercion, rape, physical abuse, and trafficking,” Nunes informed the council—a myopic and dismissive claim on multiple levels. Many people, across the globe, are presently trafficked into industries as varied as farm work, care work, and garment work, where they, too, face violence and abuse. The International Labor Organization estimates there are three times as many people who are victims of all other forms of forced labor than there are victims of forced labor in the sex trade. And for the past two years, the entire country has been exposed to the powerful men who engage in sexual abuse and violence with their women co-workers and subordinates, across (and systematically excused within) media and entertainment industries.

Though asked a few hours after their leadership testified at the hearing, NOW has not answered my question for Nunes, about how she came to believe “forced abortions” are an issue in sex work. Neither have they provided Van Pelt’s response to my question asking if she misspoke when she said all NOW chapters oppose sex work decriminalization. One local chapter president told me on Twitter, however, that national leadership “does not speak for all NOW chapters on this.”

NOW and their allies across the political spectrum did express concern for victims of trafficking, but at the end of the day, they had one message for the D.C. City Council: to decriminalize sex work is to “increase demand” for sex workers. “Demand,” they emphasized over and over, is at the root of why women sell sex: the power and problem of unfettered male lust. Ending demand—not debt, not employment discrimination, not housing instability—is the solution. And that, NOW says, is a solution which law enforcement must help them deliver.