Day 4/10

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"Abortion Arguments Series: Day 4 of 10

Bodily Autonomy / "My body, my choice."

This is the argument I hear more than any other.

It goes like this: you have the right to decide what happens to your body. Nobody can force you to donate blood or give up a kidney, even to save a life. So how can the government force a woman to remain pregnant?

Here are four reasons it doesn't hold up.

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1. Your child isn't a stranger.

Every organ donation analogy treats the fetus like a stranger who needs your kidney to survive. But the child in the womb is your son or daughter.

If I see an unfamiliar child alone on a curb, cold and hungry, I SHOULD help. But I can't be arrested if I don't. If I put my own child on that curb and drive away, I'm charged with criminal neglect.

We treat these as totally different legal obligations because parents owe their children things they don't owe strangers.

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2. You're the reason the child exists.

Nobody wakes up randomly connected to a stranger's body. But that's the scenario the pro-choice thought experiments require even though that's not how the overwhelming majority of pregnancies happen.

The child exists because of an act the parents chose. (yes, rape is different, and I'll address it directly on Day 10.)

"But consent to sex isn't consent to pregnancy."

Consent isn't the issue. Responsibility is. We don't let people resolve the consequences of their choices by ending another person's life.

Say you invite someone onto your two-seater plane, and halfway through the flight you regret it. He's cramping your space. You still can't push him out.

Even if he were a stowaway you never invited, you couldn't push him out. You land first. You can't kill someone to end a temporary dependency.

Now make it your own child, who exists because of choices you made and who never chose to be there. His claim is even stronger.

Can you name one other situation where we let someone escape the results of their own choices by killing someone who had no part in making them?

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3. The womb isn't a kidney.

Every other organ in your body exists FOR YOU. The uterus is the one organ that exists for someone else. Every month, it prepares for a child.

That's why comparing pregnancy to organ donation is a category error. Donating a kidney is extraordinary care, and we don't require it. The womb sheltering and feeding a child is the ordinary way every human being, including you, is sustained at that stage of life.

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4. Declining to save someone isn't killing them.

If you refuse to donate a kidney, the other person dies of their disease. You didn't cause their death. You declined to prevent it.

Abortion is different. It's a procedure whose explicit purpose is to end a child's life. Left alone, the child would live. The default outcome of pregnancy is birth, not death.

That’s the difference between a bystander who doesn't jump into a river to save someone and a person who actively holds someone's head underwater.

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"But banning the procedure still forces her to remain pregnant. That's compelling bodily use."

I won't pretend the burden isn't real. It is. But I'm not arguing we strap women down or punish them. I'm arguing we prohibit doctors from performing a procedure that intentionally ends a child's life.

Yes, that law affects her body as a downstream effect of protecting someone else.

But child neglect laws work the same way. They don't exist to control parents' bodies, but they still require parents to use their bodies to work, feed, carry, and stay up all night with a sick kid. Nobody calls that a violation of bodily autonomy.

If you want a law whose entire purpose is compelling bodily use, look at the military draft. The government conscripts a man's body and sends it into combat where he might die, all to protect strangers. That's not a side effect. It's the whole point.

If the government can do that, it can prohibit a doctor from ending the life of a woman's own child.

And even if you call it "withdrawing support" rather than killing, points 1 and 2 still apply. This isn't a stranger you're unplugging from. It's your own child, whose dependency you created.

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Here's what the argument really boils down to:

Wanted? protect him.

Unwanted? end him.

If a pregnant woman plans to keep her baby, almost everyone agrees she shouldn't drink heavily or use meth, even before viability. Why? Because it harms the baby.

The government goes further. A woman can't get the acne drug Accutane without monthly pregnancy tests, because it causes severe birth defects, and that rule applies even if she says she'd abort.

Almost nobody objects to it on "my body, my choice" grounds.

So if he’s wanted, we protect this child from being harmed. But if unwanted, we kill him?

Nobody accepts that a newborn's protection depends on whether his parents want him. The same principle should hold before birth.

Bodily autonomy was never really the principle. If it were, it would cover the meth and the Accutane too.

"My body, my choice" is great sloganeering. It just leaves out the second body.

Tomorrow: "It's between a woman and her doctor." / “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one”"