Jill from Feministe has tackled the gargantuan task of remaining measured and polite while arguing for freedom of choice over at Dawn Eden’s soundstage. I can’t imagine how she keeps her cool as the oh-so-enlightened wingnuttery labels her a Nazi and such; she’s got real Christian patience, that one.
Like Jill and many of our friendly scientists, I don’t believe a fetus is a human being. But for some reason, maybe you do. Jill responds to the implications for choice:
But that said, even if we could demonstrate that a fetus was the full equivalent of a human being, I would still be in favor of abortion rights, because I don’t think that any human being has the right to use another’s organs and body for its own survival without that person’s consent.
Dawn counters:
If one believes that the humanity of the unborn child does not matter because a mother is not responsible for the human life growing inside her, then no one is responsible for another in any way. Parents are not responsible for their children and children are not responsible for their elderly or disabled parents. Husbands are not responsible for their elderly or disabled wives, and vice versa. No one has any responsibility to the poor, unfortunate, or suffering.
I’m too angry at Dawn’s ignorance to respond as politely as Jill might, so I’ve asked an associate to guest-blog a response for me. Punkassfriends, please meet my pal, Bluey, the Body Rights Thingamabob:
Bluey wants to transmit a message of body rights and tolerance that the young and Dawn Eden should be able to grasp…
—————————————————————–
Bluey:
Hi kids!
Kids:
Hi Bluey!!
Bluey:
Do you know where I escaped from?
Kids:
The Land of Forced Body Mutilation!!
Bluey:
That’s right! The Land of Forced Body Mutilation, where Grumpus Tuskamorts lurk around every corner waiting to steal parts of your body, whether you like it or not. Do you kids like Grumpus Tuskamorts?
Kids:
Noooooo!!
Bluey:
That’s good! Because Grumpus Tuskamorts don’t like you, either. They just like themselves. Why, look at me! I used to have a heart this big until one took it from me so he could use it. Now I can barely love anything at all.
Kids:
Awwwww!
Bluey:
Lucky for me, I was able to get away so I could warn you kids about the dangers of other people controlling your body. Now, I want to ask you kids a question. If your brother or sister was sick and needed one of your kidneys to live, would you choose give it to him or her?
Kids:
Yes, Bluey!!
Bluey:
That’s great! You would choose to give up your kidney to help out someone you love. You kids have big hearts… hey, can I have one?
[audience giggles]
Now, instead of your brother or sister, let’s say that a man from Nicaragua is sick and wanted your kidney so he could live. Would you choose to give him your kidney?
[audience murmurs, a few children raise their hands]
It’s okay, kids, there’s no right answer. Some of you would, and some of you wouldn’t. That’s the beauty of choice! Now, let’s say that same man flew here, cloroformed you, cut out your kidney, and left you in a pool of ice with a note to call 911 without asking permission first. Would that be okay?
Kids:
Noooooo!!
Bluey:
Good! He coerced you into giving up part of your body so he could live. And even though he was going to die if he didn’t, he had no right to take your body from you against your will. Only you can choose what to do with your body, kids. It’s the one thing to which you have an inalienable right. Can you say inalienable?
Kids:
[silence]
Bluey:
….anyway, it’s all yours. If a baby or a fetus or a fireman or Saddam Hussein wanted to use your body so it could live, you have the right to say “no.” Now, does that give you a right to kill them if they don’t need to use your body to live?
Kids:
Noooooo!!
Bluey:
That’s fantastic! Now you kids understand why Dawn Eden’s “natural law argument” is a complete fallacy. There’s a big difference between killing someone and being required to give up part of your body against your will so they can live. I think you kids are ready to do battle with the evil Grumpus Tuskamorts now, don’t you?
Kids:
Yeah!!
Bluey:
Great! Let’s celebrate! Anyone got some blow?
—————————————————————–
Err, I think I’ll cut Bluey off there, but I hope he made the argument for body rights as clearly and simply as possible. Even if a fetus is somehow a human being, which it isn’t, no woman has to give up any part of her body for it against her will, the same way she shouldn’t be forced to give up or rent any part of herself to save Saddam Hussein. She can’t just up and _kill_ anyone, either, but I hope everyone can see the difference now.
Everyone but those pesky Grumpus Tuskamorts, anyway.
Bluey, will you marry me?
[...] Luckily, Bluey the Body Rights Thingamabob is here to help! Thanks, Bluey! Perhaps next, Bluey can take on statements like these (and the irritating insistence of commenters to use the word “dialogue” as a verb): Why is this still about women dying? Isn’t it agreed that abortion would probably stay legal if the woman is dying? Why won’t any abortion advocates discuss people who simply had irresponsible sex before marriage? Is it not PC to talk about? [...]
Dawn Banned me cause I used the “Choice” argument to throw all their crap out about when it’s a life.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a life or not. It’s in my body, I get a right to choose.
Life, liberty, and justice and all that jazz.
If it’s compared to the constitution. They don’t have a leg to stand on.
I had like 6 comments, she deleted them all and banned me.
Loosely Twisted — that doesn’t surprise me, unfortunately. She really hates to be proven wrong. You’re also exactly right about this:
Body rights provide the entire foundation for the concept of personal rights. The body is a concrete object and easily distinguishable from other bodies. No matter what you have or don’t have in this world, it’s the one thing that is always in your possession. As such, it is the one thing we can all agree that defines _you_. It is the most basic core of your identity.
If you don’t control your body, then the most basic, inarguable definition of the self has been violated. There ceases to be a self, and thus there is nothing upon which to confer any liberties or rights.
Thanks Bluey! Came here via Feministe. I’ve got a follow-up question because I actually was using the “can’t force me to donate my kidney argument” in a discussion a few days ago & was responded to with an argument that “that’s a bad argument because the person being forced to donate didn’t contribute to the condition requiring the donation.” I responded by saying, “so are you saying you want to punish women for having sex – that simply having sex signs us up for forced body donation?” Just wondering if you know of a better response than the one I came up with b/c I definitely plan on hashing this out with the person again. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks for the fabulous post!
A public service announcement for all the kids in the audience…
I ♥ Bluey, the Body Rights Thingamabob…….
“that’s a bad argument because the person being forced to donate didn’t contribute to the condition requiring the donation.”
From there, I’d ask that person if they would allow abortion in cases of rape.
j0lt,
Thanks for stopping in!
Your argument is spot on. Having sex does not imply intent to get all preggers, and while it is a risk of the activity, risk awareness does not negate your rights.
I stopped by Bluey’s, and he offered what he called “the driving risk defense:”
——
Bluey: Intent is awfully important, kids, especially when someone accuses you of “contributing to the condition” of something that could be used to take away your body rights. Now, if you are driving down the street and you get hit and maimed by a drunk driver, are you at fault?
Kids: Nooooo!!
Bluey: Wait, you mean even though I contributed to the condition of getting hit by choosing to drive on the road? Didn’t I give up the rights to my body?
Kids: Nooooo!!
Bluey: Good! Even though getting hit by a drunk driver is a risk of driving, you did not drive on the road intending to be hit by one. That means you didn’t give up your body rights to the drunk driver or anyone else.
——
Thanks, buddy.
If you didn’t intend to get pregnant, even though it was a risk of sex, you do not lose your body rights just because that risk became a reality. Now, the zygote thingy isn’t at _fault_ like the drunk driver, but it has no more rights to use or abuse your body against your will than he does.
I can already see the wingnut response, though: “okay, that means if anyone intends to get pregnant and does, they can never change their mind and have an abortion, even the next day!” Wrong again. Bluey reminds such a misguided soul that the body is always ours and no one else’s:
——
Bluey: Now, kids, let’s say you had been regularly donating blood to someone who needed your blood to survive. You chose to give up part of your body to assist them, even though you weren’t required to do it. But let’s say that donating blood became a threat to your health. Should you still be required to donate it?
Kids: Noooo!!
Bluey: Very good! You didn’t give up the right to your body just because you were doing someone a favor. In fact, you don’t ever need to justify the decision to stop donating blood — your body is yours and yours alone. It’s inalienable, remember? That means no one can take it from you. Because if anyone takes away your right to control your body, the basic definition of a person becomes blurred and arguably there’s no such thing as “personal rights” anymore. Are you still with me?
Kids: Mostly!!
Bluey: Good enough!
——
Also, one of Bluey’s pals reminded me that no man gives up any autonomy as a result of engaging in sex, and thus no woman should, either. That’s why it’s a 14th amendment issue.
I’m ALL ABOUT abortion rights, but if you really want to get through to these anti-choice people, and I assume you do, since you seem to spend a lot of time at their blogs trying in vain to talk some sense into them, you’re going to want to go a different route, I think. Because the idea of an embryo or a blastocyst trying to use my body against my will makes it sound a little malignant, and I think that’s assigning too much credit, or perhaps blame, to a mass of rapidly developing cells.
Just ask the anti-choicers how we should enforce abortion laws–are we going to jail single mothers who opt to not have another child for homicide while her kids get shuffled around in foster care? What are we going to do when women who’ve been injured after an illegal abortion seek medical help? Stitch ‘em up and take them to jail? Are we going to let rape victims bleed to death in their beds because they’re too afraid to seek medical treatment after terminating a pregnancy that they never, ever wanted? Because that’s what a country without choices looks like.
I understand the POINT of people who are morally opposed to abortion–I think that conception is a pretty sacred process no mater what the circumstances, but we can’t make abortion illegal. If you want to be against it, adopt some kids or help make sure sexually active men and women from all walks of life have all the contraception they need–in short, do some of the work that the pro-choice movement is doing to STOP abortion, a point Jill makes on her blog. The morning after pill? Prevents abortions. Condoms? Also prevent abortions. Not giving women access to adequate medical care and refusing to dispense prescriptions for contraception and abortion related antibiotics? Kills women and increases the number of abortions every year. So there you have it.
To me, that’s the crux of the whole argument.
I was struck by a speeding truck and sustained liver damage. It’s conceivable that at some point the condition of my liver will have degraded to the point where I need a transplant. If that were to happen, could the driver who hit me be forced to donate part of his liver since he contributed to the condition of my damaged liver?
Hi Robyn,
Good points all around.
I am more concerned about placing potential blame on the wingnuts, politicians, churches — anyone who would try to stop a woman from making a choice about her body — than the zygote thingy. Coercion comes from those other guys who are trying to tell a woman what to do with her body in relation to said thingy.
I will ask Bluey to make sure he more clearly villainizes the right people in the future.
“that’s a bad argument because the person being forced to donate didn’t contribute to the condition requiring the donation.”
So, in the case of a parent whose genes contributed to the child’s kidney defect…?
As old as it is (relatively) speaking, Judith Thomson’s argument is still as potent as ever. Moreso when reiterated by a big blue cartoon.
This entry makes me feel all warm inside.
The major problem is that these kids did not willingly participate in behavior with a known likelihood of making the man in Nicaraugua need their kidney. Any woman who understands the human reproductive system and engages in sex is taking a risk of creating a dependency situation.
When an airline pilot willingly taxis and takes off with a planeload of passengers, she cannot opt to strap on a parachute and bail out half an hour later. The law coerces her to keep her body alert and in the cockpit until she safely lands the plane. This includes the circumstance where something goes wrong, and the pilot might have a better chance of survival by bailing out. The pilot knew that risk upon take off.
This isn’t “punishment for sex” and it doesn’t mean having sex implies intent to become pregnant. It means that having sex implies the acceptance of a risk of becoming pregnant. When you toss the dice in Vegas, you accept the risk of losing your money. It’s not a huge risk – in healthy people, with no protection, during the optimum time of the month, the odds of conception are only 5%, and there are various choices available that lower that risk to almost nothing. Try and find a casino that will give you those odds. Yet, what you’re talking about here is STILL wanting the house to give you your money back. In the end, you’re arguing for a shallow desire to enjoy benefits without risk, hardly a basis for claiming the moral high ground.
Doesn’t abortion actually kill the fetus involved? Isn’t that the goal of abortion?
If you wish to respond to a more sophisticated critique of the bodily autonomy argument, please respond to this post here http://prolifetraining.com/pro-life_blog/?p=240
Bluey must have studied with Judith Jarvis Thomson.
http://www.utdallas.edu/~jfg021000/thomson.html
Doesn’t abortion actually kill the fetus involved?
Why does that matter? And if I get liposuction, I’m discarding genetic material that could be grown into an autonomous person. That doesn’t mean, at least in any sane world, that I have no right to discard of that material my body creates. In other words, you still haven’t dealt w. the body autonomy issue.
When an airline pilot willingly taxis and takes off with a planeload of passengers, she cannot opt to strap on a parachute and bail out half an hour later.
Bad analogy. A pilot’s primary purpose is ferring passengers from one place to another. I don’t see how this maps onto male/female vaginal sex.
Craig writes:
I think this illustrates an important point, and reveals a huge flaw in the standard absolute-right-to-control-my-body argument.
(BTW, I’m very strongly pro-choice; I just don’t buy some of the common arguments. I think there are better arguments, but they are deeper and more subtle, and don’t make good sound bites.)
In the typical “moderate” anti-abortion view, a woman who becomes pregnant is not just an innocent bystander who happens to be the only person in a position to donate her bodily resources to save someone’s life. She actively took a risk of becoming pregnant; the embryo/fetus/”child” did not. (Rape is a different matter, for many “moderate” anti-abortion folks.) If she loses the gamble, that doesn’t give her the right to evade responsibility at the expense of someone else’s entire life.
She is more like the truck driver, who knowingly took a risk by driving at all, and likely took unnecessary risks by speeding or something.
Many but nowhere near all people who see it that way are anti-sex, which amplifies their opposition and especially their indignance. They think taking a risk of conceiving and aborting a child is especially important if you shouldn’t be having that sex anyway. But many others are not particularly anti-sex, and just see it as a matter of personal responsibility—if you take a gamble and lose, you don’t have the right to kill an innocent party, or allow that innocent party that you brought into the situation to die. Sex for fun does not justify killing somebody; the “child” has much more at stake than a woman who wants to have sex for fun without accepting the possible consequences.
That argument bears a lot of weight for many people who don’t think that a fetus is really a person with full rights; they think it’s sort of a personish thing with interests, at least, and even if it doesn’t “weigh” as much as a woman, it clearly has more at stake. (A certainty of death as opposed to a certain amount of bodily damage and discomfort plus a much smaller risk of grave damage or death.)
Yes, this is sexually discriminatory, because it’s generally the woman who bears the major burden of pregnancy. But if that’s the problem, I think that (1) there are ways to ameliorate the unfairness to some extent—e.g., having the fathers pay reparations to unwilling mothers—and that (2) the residual unfairness does not outweigh the unfairness of killing an innocent party who is anything like a person with interests.
I think the right grounds for abortion rights have to address the issue of whether a fetus is a person with rights, or even a person-ish thing with interests.
Personally, I don’t regard a fetus as a person or anything like a person in the requisite sense; it is still only a potential person, like any other potential combination of a sperm and an egg. Conception doesn’t make a possible person an actual person.
(A zygote or fetus hasn’t done anything to deserve to be gestated, raised, or sent to college, any more than a sperm-egg pair that may be allowed to die before conception—as most inevitably will and must. For example, if a broken condom allows a sperm and egg to meet and make a zygote, that zygote is no more morally valuable than a sperm and an egg that haven’t met yet. Likewise, a fetus that has developed to hamster-like complexity is still not a person, either; in itself, it’s just hamster-like. And its main value is in the potential for becoming an actual person—but a random sperm and egg pairing has that main value as well. So its value is basically that of an uncombined sperm and egg, plus a hamster; moral personhood is something else.)
Dweeb:
You are making completely false comparisons. In both instances you describe, the individual is entering into a risky situation accepting the potential outcome of the risk. They are pre-scripted circumstances. The apt analogy would be a woman having sex, knowing she may become pregnant and already deciding she will carry the child to term. However, she may instead understand the risk and choose not to be pregnant. Such a situation would be akin to getting a splinter while hiking in the woods. It was a risk, but that is in no way mean the person taking the risk has accepted to refrain from removing the splinter.
Willing participation does not equal acceptance to suffer any and all potential consequences. You may as well argue that people shouldn’t treat diseases.
That’s true, you don’t have the right to kill an innocent party if you gamble and lose. That person is not dependent on your choice to donate part of your body for him/her to live, nor is s/he coercively controlling your body.
Bodily coercion is the key element — if you deny a person the right to control access to his/her body, then you deny the very essence of self (see above comments for implications).
“Doesn’t abortion actually kill the fetus involved? Isn’t that the goal of abortion?
If you wish to respond to a more sophisticated critique of the bodily autonomy argument, please respond to this post here http://prolifetraining.com/pro-life_blog/?p=240 ”
okay
you’re not actually critiquing the body autonmy argument, your simply providing examples where body autonomy isn’t respected and then claiming that it is proof that body autonomy isn’t a valid argument
“This argument may be compelling if and only if we recognize that a woman’s right to control her own body is so absolute that carrying another human being inside of her has absolutely no bearing on that right. In other words, pregnant mothers have the absolute right to do whatever they want with their bodies regardless of what it does to the child they are carrying.”
see what your saying here is basically “the argument is compelling only if i believe it”
your examples then go on to show that the current medical establishment often doesn’t follow that ‘absolute right of control’ with out any argument as to why current medical practices and laws are proof of a moral/ethical concepts invalidity.
One way in which abortion differs from many of the analogies above is that the mother is the ONLY person who can donate her body to save this fetus’s life. If someone needs A kidney or A piece of liver, there are plenty of people who could give it to that person with a high probability of success. Here the life is entirely dependant on one woman’s choice. I don’t think that this means abortion should be illegal, but if the fetus were a person, it would make it morally reprehensible to allow it to die. I agree with Paul that the question is whether a fetus is a person with rights, and I also agree (with most everyone here) that it is not.
Dweeb,
The pilot entered into an explicit contract to fulfill these duties. Requiring him to fulfill that contract is not coercion of his body. Having sex is not an explicit contract to make babies and see them to term.
At the very least, pro-choice people should be very careful not to fuck anti-choice people.
Thanks for responding axel.
I cite these examples to challenge the notion that the “right of bodily autonomy” is not recognized as an inalienable right as Mr. Bluey asserts. As a physician, it is considered unethical for me to give a pregnant woman anesthetic medication that could harm her fetus even though she may request it. There are either two options: either this ethical principle is wrong and it is actually unethical for me to deny a pregnant woman a benzodiazepine, or the right of bodily autonomy is not inalienable. If you choose the first option, you need to provide an argument why the current practice is in fact unethical.
There also is another issue. Where does the inalienable right of bodily autonomy come from?
Thanks again for your thoughtful response.
Serge
One more thing axel – I just read the other post above this one about methamphetamine. On the basis of the inalienable right of bodily autonomy, is it ethical for a pregnant woman to smoke crystal simply because she wants to? In other words, according to McBoing:
It is right to deny these benefits to a pregnant mother?
Serge: I see that as a choice. If a woman chooses to be pregnant, she’s choosing to give up a part of body. There are then moral questions about things such as you mention after the fact that that choice has been made. However, I find it hard to believe that a woman that has made the choice to give up her autonomy to support her potential child would then lightly choose to endanger it.
I would agree such a choice is rarely considered lightly. However, that does not bear on the question. I have had this occur in real life – a pregnant teen absolutely wanted me to sedate her for a procedure despite the risk to her fetus. If the right of bodily autonomy is can be overruled in the case where a pregnant mother wished to take a substance that could harm her fetus (but do her some benefit), than it is not inalienable, is it?
In practice, no probably not. But in practice it is quite hard to find a right that is truly inalienable. There are certainly grays and exception to be considered and worth being morally weighed individually.
I think that pretty well blows Bluey’s simplistic argument out of the water. It hinges on a woman’s absolute right to control her body absolutely trumping any other consideration, so that we don’t have to think about whether something worse is done to somebody else who counts, as a consequence of her choices.
I don’t buy the idea that absolute bodily autonomy is the sine qua non of rights. It’s not the fundamental right from which all other rights are derived.
We violate people’s bodily autonomy all the time in minor ways. (E.g., various risks due to “acceptable” levels of pollution, “responsible” driving, etc.) I may have problems with which levels of risk are considered acceptable, and whether we have appropriate reparations to fix damage in bad cases, but not with the general idea that we have to do some cost/benefit and risk/benefit analyses and allocate rights accordingly.
Similarly, I don’t think that absolute freedom of coercion is the central idea of rights. What counts as coercion depends on other rights, in general, so the latter can’t simply be defined in terms of the former.
Of course I meant “freedom from coercion” in my last paragraph above.
There’s no god on punkassblog, at least none that I can see or rely on, so all rights I discuss come from the same place: rational constructs we try to create for the social good.
I argue that the body is the key element to defining the self.
If you want a right to free speech, or you want a right to privacy, or you want a right to anything, I first have to understand the you. If I cannot define you as your body, then I don’t know a reliable, widely agreeable way to define a single individual.
If the single object that defines you can be coercively used or abused against your will, then your other rights are equally vulnerable b/c they are dependent on that object as their reason for being. If the foundation can be fucked with, so, too, can its extensions.
So I contend it’s inalienable.
———-
Now, as for the pregnant woman and the sedative, there are a lot of subtle issues at play in this example, mostly because you two have willingly entered into a specific relationship/contract/agreement together relating to her health and body. Note that this is _way_ different than saying that living in a country means you agree to let the government coercively violate the self. I do not believe that to be true.
First, the doctor has rights, too.
I would say the woman who is pregnant does have the right to ask you to treat her body how she pleases, but she can’t coerce you or your will to do something you don’t want to do to her unless it’s part of the agreement you implicitly or explicitly undertook as her doctor.
You do not have the right to do things to her she doesn’t want done, no matter what, I would say. That is very different than saying she has the right to make you violate your own principles to fulfill any request she has relating to her body.
Thus, forcing you to sedate her isn’t part of your mutual agreement.
Saving her life is part of the deal, and so are many other things. The convenience stuff, things that help her but aren’t life-critical, probably are at your discretion as an implicit part of the deal. Doctor knows best.
Finally, it’s arguable she wants you to care for both of them and _that_ is part of the contract.
Assuming she wants to keep her baby, she has entered into a deal with you whereby she receives treatment with the understanding that you best know how to care for both of them. She has _chosen_ to hand over authority to you in this matter by agreeing to you as her doctor. If she doesn’t like your methods, she can stop treatment and try to find someone else. She is not being coerced.
I can’t be clear enough about this last part. There is a monstrous gulf between asking someone to do something to your body and legislation _forcing_ you to do something to your body (bring a child to term, in this case).
As Bluey would say, I can’t make you give me a tattoo if you don’t want to, but that doesn’t mean you can pass a law preventing me from cutting my hair.
And Paul, I think my comment there sufficiently demonstrates that Bluey is doing perfectly fine. Nice try, though.
Not at all. It is an ideal. The whole choice debate is largely one of ideals. The argument isn’t that this is how reality is, but rather how it should be. And by that train of thought we can consider how to change reality to better approach the ideal. In this case, how to make bodily autonomy as close to an inalienable right as we can.
This has been a great discussion thus far, but I want to point out two things in general about the counterexamples presented to Bluey’s arguments.
1) If we enter into an agreement together, that is not coercion. The patient has agreed to trust the doctor with her body, the pilot has agreed to fulfill his responsibilities to the passengers. These are not coercive.
2) Bodily autonomy means that you can’t come jack up my physical body against my will. That’s it. Making me bring a baby to term would count as that, so you can’t make me do it. But it doesn’t give me the right to force you to do random things like tattoo or sedate me or anything of the kind.
[...] If you answered c), congratulations! You have what it takes to be a big shot lawyer making an argument in a law journal. This article was sent to me by a reader and I have to admit, I was blown away. I’m used to reading two-bit morons like Dawn Eden argue that “unnatural” equals evil or unhealthy, but you expect that from people too slow to realize that they just argued against wearing clothes and using a toilet. But this article by Patrick Shrake that’s seeking desperately for a way to get around that inconvienent right of women not to have your body commandeered by the state for the creation of new citizens (as explained to the slow wits by our new friend Bluey) gives this bizarre argument that there’s something fundamentally wrong with using medication to prevent your body from creating new gametes a veneer of respectability. [...]
Do you believe a lack of decision whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, if it enters into say the 3rd trimester of pregnancy, implies by inaction a decision to keep the baby? Or would the abortions deemed “partial birth” at this point still be within the rights(in terms of bodily autonomy) of the mother to pursue (outside of concerns such as rape or the health of the mother)? In other words, given the ideal of bodily autonomy, should we allow such “partial birth” abortions?
Thom,
It’s not always a popular opinion, but, yes, I think bodily autonomy extends to protect the option of a third trimester abortion. The same principles still apply. It is my contention that one human is never required to give up his or her physical body against her or his will, even to save or nurture another life.
To be realistic, though, no one has ever presented to me a compelling piece of evidence that any 3rd trimester abortions have ever been done for any reason other than to protect the life of the mother. Every account I have ever seen describes what a harrowing, awful process this is, and I have no reason to believe these are ever undertaken lightly or for the wrong reasons.
Would it be _possible_ to have a casual third trimester abortion in this moral construct? Yes. Is it likely? Nope.
I thought it all out a long time ago. It doesn’t matter if the fetus is in there reading the New York Times–it has no more right to use my body than the person sitting next to me on the subway. The personhood of the fetus does not matter unless we are willing to change our moral code to demand sacrifices that should be voluntary. We honour those who risk their lives to save others; but in general we don’t conscript them.
That “innocent life” lark doesn’t wash either: it’s not as if a fetus has had a chance to go out and rob a bank yet.
So you must support conscious clause legislation which would protect health care professionals from being coerced to provide treatment that they find morally objectionable. Color me surprised. Personally, I have concerns about such legislation (See http://prolifetraining.com/pro-life_blog/?p=352 for an example), but I’m glad you’re for it.
Doctor knows best? You have a very naive idea of a doctor patient relationship.
You seem to misunderstand my argument. A pregnant woman is not given sedation because of one physician’s personal views. Giving a pregnant mother a known teratogen on the basis of her inalienable bodily rights would go against all American Society of Anesthesiology guidelines and would almost certainly land any physician in front of their state medical boards. Which is precisely my point. A medication that causes no harm to a mother, gives a definite benefit to her, and which she desires is not given in this circumstance regardless of her choice due to the possible efects on the fetus. Why isn’t this a gross violation of her bodily rights?
Also, you can address the other examples that I used in the original post. What about a mother who wishes to have a child but does not wish to be nauseous? She wishes to take thalidomide. She doesn’t care if her child has a deformity. She finds a doctor and he agrees to get her the medication. Is this OK? The medical community and the law certainly doesn’t believe so, but if she has an absolute inalienable right to her own bodily autonomy, it will certainly supercede any responsibility she has to her offspring. Why do we deny her this choice?
Serge:
Nope. I said:
So I argued you don’t have to follow convenience requests, but you have to do “many other things” as part of your choice to be a medical professional. If a med professional blocks access to RU-486, for example, s/he is implicitly forcing a woman to carry a baby to term — especially if said professional is the primary or only professional in her area (which isnt uncommon in rural areas). Not okay.
Funny that you say that and then immediately invoke the American Society of Anesthesiology guidelines as why you would not give teratogen. You are saying that doctors know best. And as I said very clearly, a woman cannot ask for teratogen “on the basis of her inalienable bodily rights.” I stated:
So I hope that rereading that concise comment closely explains why not sedating her isn’t a gross violation of her bodily rights. It also explains why a mother can’t just up and force you to give her thalamide to prevent nausea. Preventing nausea — say it with me — is a convenience. Refusing to give it to her is also not the same thing as messing up her body. _Please_ see above on that. Forcing her to carry a baby to term is forcing her to mess up her body. The distinction is so obvious even Bluey’s Kids can see it.
Thank you for the fantastic post. It’s actually the first time I’ve been able to understand a pro-choice argument for abortion. This issue is usually so buried in abstract ideology that it’s a relief to read a simple, logical argument.
I don’t think it does. I don’t think you’re really addressing the issues that have been raised.
I really don’t buy the argument that since your body is (obviously and crucially) important, absolute bodily autonomy trumps all other considerations. It simply doesn’t follow.
For example, I don’t think that being forced to donate a pint of blood, once, would be a more basic violation of my rights than confiscating all of my property, forever, or denying me the right to speak my mind on weekdays, for a year.
One kind of right doesn’t simply trump another across the board because it’s “more basic.” Sure, if you take away all of my bodily rights, e.g., forcing me to donate all of my tissues, that will kill me and make my other rights moot.
But we weren’t talking about that; the fact that absolute denial of a right might kill me doesn’t mean that the right must be absolute for me to live, or to exercise my other rights. Being conscripted to donate a pint of blood would NOT kill me, or prevent me from voting, or making a living, or marrying, etc. Pregnancy probably wouldn’t, either. (Especially if we allow abortion in cases where it likely would.)
It seems to me you’re making a slippery slope argument, or something like it—that we mustn’t allow any bodily harm or coercion because some bodily rights are necessary for other freedoms. I don’t see it.
Really, though, that’s mostly a red herring. Even if bodily rights were more basic and trumped all other kinds of rights, that doesn’t settle this question—we’re talking about a conflict between bodily rights of both parties. If you say the mother’s bodily rights trump the fetus’s, the anti-abortion side can say no, you’ve got it backwards—the fetus’s bodily rights clearly trump the mother’s.
If a fetus is a person with rights, certainly killing it (or putting it into a situation where it will die) will make it unable to exercise any of its rights.
To whatever extent bodily rights are trump cards over other kinds of rights, I’d say the fetus still clearly wins relative to the mother, if the fetus is also a person, and if the mother knowingly took a gamble that created the conflict of rights.
You seem to place a high value on whether a contract has been entered into, and whether it’s “explicit.”
Consider Craig’s case in that light. (Especially the hypothetical version where the driver is the only possible life-saving donor.) Did the careless driver who hit him “enter into a contract”? In the crucial sense, yes. People are in general responsible for the consequences of their actions which infringe others’ rights; if they take a risk, and somebody has to lose, it is the risk-taker who bears responsibility, not the innocent person who they put in a conflict-of-rights situation.
Even if you think bodily autonomy rights trump other kinds of rights, the careless driver’s right to bodily autonomy does not trump Craig’s rights of that very same type, if he created the conflict between his bodily rights and Craig’s, and Craig has more to lose. If it did, that would give the driver the right to irresponsibly and completely destroy Craig’s bodily autonomy, to avoid a comparatively minor bodily cost to himself. That can’t be right.
Likewise, if a fetus is a person with full rights, including bodily rights, the mother’s bodily rights can’t simply trump the fetus’s bodily rights, if she created the conflict situation. Taking a risk with somebody else’s rights is always “entering into a contract.” It is not the fetus’s fault that its rights conflict with the mother’s; it is at least partly the mother’s. (In the usual case of voluntary sex.)
Obviously, it’s a horrible, horrible thing to violate a woman’s bodily autonomy by forcing her to bear a child. But by the same token, if a fetus is a person, it’s an even more horrible thing to force the fetus to not survive an abortion. Both are violations of bodily rights, but the latter is a worse violation than the former. The fetus will never have the right to speak freely, vote, make money, marry, or the right that you claim is most basic and “inalienable”—the right to decide what happens to its own body.
The anti-abortion argument is that yes, like a careless driver, a person having voluntary, optional sex is “entering into a contract” in the absolutely usual sense of being responsible for the consequences of one’s actions. Some risks are unjustified and are a violation of that very general “contract” at the outset; other risks are justified but the risk-taker is still responsible for bad outcomes for others. If you gamble and lose, it’s a violation of the “contract” not to pay up.
If I thought a fetus was a person, I’d have to be anti-abortion on those grounds.
I’ve learned today that I’m a radical.
None of these “Oh, but certainly you’d agree to drop bodily autonomy in this case?” arguments have moved me in the least.
I do think that bodily autonomy is a right and that to violate it whatever the reason is a monstrous act. To me, carving up that truck driver to save his victim is as monstrous as making rape a punishment for rapists.
I feel this way for essentially the reasons that Punkass Marc outlined; if we can’t have bodily autonomy, then there is nothing that identifies “us”. Individuality becomes essentially meaningless, as we are entirely subsusmed into something else.
Additionally, we can’t step in and force one being to sacrifice their rights in order to secure the rights of another. To do so makes a mockery of the very concept of rights. Also like other rights, we don’t have an obligation to help others achieve said rights; we merely have an obligation to ensure that we don’t do anything to diminish their ability to excercise their rights. This is why newspapers don’t have to publish anything submitted to them, even though we have a right to free speech.
Paul W.:
I have 2 main contentions with your comparisons. One, you seem to be implying intent or motive. In both unwanted pregnancy and a car accident, this is not the case (admittedly with some few exceptions). Two, you are trying to compare a case where a person has done injury and can be seen to owe the other person for having caused that injury. In a pregnancy that is not the case. While the woman’s actions might have placed the fetus in its situation of existence and reliance, her responsibility is not based on a reparation model (again assuming the fetus is considered to be an entity with rights).
Now, the question is, should someone be obligated, in fact forced, to give up their own wellbeing to save another for which they have become responsible. Now while it may admirable that one might make a choice to sacrifice themselves, it could also be admirable that they do not. Making a judgment to which is best for everyone isn’t something that can be done with a blanket decision. Since we like to use analogous situations, I’ll attempt to provide one.
Think of a day care worker. Said worker is responsible for a number of children. If one of the children were to be endangered, it is reasonable to expect the worker to attempt to remove the child from danger. However, if doing so places the worker at risk, then the wellbeing of the worker must be weighed against that of the child’s. What I think should be done would of course depend on the exact details of the situation, and I’d expect the same of anyone else’s opinions. How much harm is the child likely to come to vs the worker. Will the worker’s actions to save the one child put at risk the other children? etc… However, the person that is likely going to be in the best position to make an accurate decision at the time is in fact the worker. So, do we trust the worker? Do we trust women?
Christopher says:
OK. Suppose we didn’t need to make an incision in the truck driver. Suppose all we needed was a tiny tissue sample, swabbed from the inside of his cheek—just scraping a few cells off, painlessly—but he refused. It’s his body.
That, too, would be a violation of bodily autonomy. Would it be monstrous to require the truck driver to submit to this procedure, to save Craig’s life? (Assuming as before that he’s the only possible life-saving donor?)
That makes no sense to me. For example, suppose we impose some minimal bodily obligations on people who are at fault to save the lives of their victims—e.g., a cheek swab to save Craig’s life. Is that really so monstrous, in itself, or are you just afraid of a slippery slope?
Sticking to that case, what is the alternative? It is to take away other people’s rights, such as Craig’s. Craig no longer has the right to his life—the truck driver can drive carelessly and kill Craig, refusing even the tiniest bodily sacrifice in order to save his victim’s life. I’d say that’s far more monstrous.
No, it doesn’t. Consider the right to drive. Allowing people to drive puts other people at risk. Even good drivers have a small chance of screwing up and running over a pedestrian or a bicyclist. (That happens thousands of times every year.) But the freedom to drive is so valuable that we consider the risks of normal driving justified. If you run over somebody and kill them, you are not a murderer; it may not even be negligent homicide. But if you drive carelessly and run somebody over, you are at fault and you are responsible; if you drive, you must accept that responsibility.
If we don’t make you accept that responsibility—a diminution of your rights—then we reduce somebody else’s rights. (E.g., Craig’s right to cross the street and not be killed.)
In general, absolute rights conflict. You can’t give everybody all the rights all the time. Allocating rights necessarily involves imposing some obligations. (E.g., either the driver is obliged to accept the consequences of his actions, or his victims are.)
Failing to impose obligations on drivers—e.g., to drive safely or at least accept consequences when they don’t—makes a mockery of the rights of others.
In general, exercising a right must often entail acceptance of some obligations, or others’ rights are diminished much more.
[...] Some folks still don’t understand the bodily autonomy issue. [...]
Paul,
No rights conflict at all. And I am irked by the suggestion that I didn’t “really address the issues that were raised.” I was so irked, in fact, that I reeeeeeally carefully made the case for bodily autonomy and why you’re off base in a post of its own:
Git yer damn hands off my body, philosophically speaking
Come and get it. I think you’ll see that your arguments for a rights conflict are faulty. If you don’t, make sure you look closely at which assumption you’re questioning before responding. I tried very hard to spell out every step along the way so we could see right where we disagree.
Thinking a bit on the idea of the right of bodily autonomy, I’ve come to the conclusion that some people just aren’t going to feel it to be that important. Some people place higher value on other things. I do not understand why a person would rather be beaten than have their material possession stolen. I do not understand why someone would rather be a slave than destitute. Never the less, some people seem to have those preferences. However, I see the right to bodily autonomy as the pinnacle of rights. To deny someone such a right is to say to them that they are a lesser person, that they are inferior, and/or that they have a less knowledge of themselves than others. As such, we do violate the rights of some, children, criminals and the mentally handicap. However, to do so is to make that person a second class citizen. Some people of course believe some adults should be, women and criminals being the ones relevant to the conversation thus far. I think that is why some people are willing to not hold bodily autonomy highly.