Some folks still don’t understand the bodily autonomy issue.
I can’t make ‘em agree, I suppose, but I will do my best to make them understand. I asked Bluey to join me today, but he’s pissed he got accused of “not really addressing the issues” despite what he thought were some pretty solid efforts on that front. So I bought him a little bag of happy dust and decided I could handle this one myself.
Let’s start at the beginning, then we’ll get into reader Paul’s points.
How do you define the body?
Take off all your clothes and jump up in the air. Everything comes with you is your body.
How do you define the self or the person?
As the body. If I make a funny about “you” jumping in the air naked, what “you” do you picture? You picture your body. When I get tore up and point and yell at some obnoxious Spurs fan during the NBA playoffs, I am pointing and yelling at his body. I think of “him” as everything that is contained in that unit. If he were in a different place, in different clothes, with different people, I would still recognize the same him and be irritated by him. You are your body. It’s the one thing no one can separate you from and thus it forms the core concept of the self.
What about a soul?
Pfff. Perhaps you’d be happier over here. Or to be proper (Hammer time!), no body = no self because then I can no longer empirically prove you exist. And if you want to start saying that “you” are something that can neither be seen nor heard nor felt nor verified by any other person, well, we’re not having a rational discussion any more. Go play in the pews, friend.
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Okay, so I hope we can all agree with the above assumptions for the purposes of what follows. The body is what you keep when you jump in the air naked and the person/self is the body. If you want to take issues with those, fine, but don’t attack what follows if your real issue is with those 2 points, mmkay?
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Paul makes his first claim:
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.
Ah, but it does follow. Here are some easy steps to understanding why:
#1) Personal rights depend upon the concept of the person. The “person” — ie, the self — is the only reason we have personal rights.
#2) Violating bodily autonomy is a violation of the person. If I am forced to cede control over the one thing we can all agree on as the definition of “me” over to anyone else — if I am forced to have my body messed up by you or the government or whoever against my will — then the essence of the person has been violated.
#3) If you allow the person to be violated, the person’s rights can also be violated because _the person_ is the fundamental value here. You care that people have the right to free speech because you care about _people_, not that free speech is floating in the aether and must be protected. So once you can violate the core value behind free speech, the person, you can violate free speech.
Before we move on, let’s be clear about one more assumption:
What exactly is bodily autonomy?
My working definition: Bodily autonomy means no one can forcibly mess up my body. This is crucial to understand and keep with you during this discussion. For example, bodily autonomy would be violated if you coerce a woman into bringing a baby to term because it would forcibly mess up her body against her will. It does not mean I can use my body against you or make you give me any part of yours to help me (ah hah!). It’s a lot more about “protection from” than “access to” something. You might say, then, “well, what about doctors? Don’t you expect them to keep you alive?” Doctors aren’t required to keep patients alive because they are forced to give in to the right to bodily autonomy; they are required to keep patients alive because they _chose_ to be doctors and that’s part of the deal.
Think of bodily autonomy as “you stay out of my body and I’ll stay out of yours.”
Next, Paul says:
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.
This is not a “slippery slope,” Paul, this is logical deduction. This is the fundamental precept of legal and philosophical argumentation. You cannot hold any right sacred if the one thing it is based on, the one true value at the core of it, isn’t sacred.
This is why your claim that “One kind of right doesn’t simply trump another across the board because it’s “more basic.”” doesn’t apply here. The person/self and right to not have it coerced is the basis of all other rights, not more basic than them. You only extend rights _to_ the person because you care about the person. That means the person/body comes first. You can’t violate the core value and keep the other rights based on it. The person is described as the body, so the body is the value, so violating the body is violating the value. Hell, by undercutting their core value, violating the body is violating _every_ right, technically speaking.
Continuing on, it sounds like we agree that forcing me to give up a pint of blood against my will would constitute a violation of my bodily autonomy. Good. I hope you understand now why allowing you to violate my body conditionally, even if you perceive the particular violation as slight, would mean it would be silly to expect you to care about my property or my right to vote. If the core value is only conditionally respected, you only conditionally respect my rights. No slope about it.
Think about speech again, Paul. We all say things like “I wish I could ban that Neo-Nazi from speaking for just one night, but I can’t because free speech is important to me.” Just like forcing me to donate blood sounds like a very small crime against my bodily autonomy, making a Neo-Nazi shut up for just one evening sounds like a tiny crime against speech. It’s for a good cause, it’s only one night out of his whole life of free speech, and so on. But no free speech advocate would support doing that to the Neo-nazi because they know it could be done to others. And they know that if you violate free speech for one evening you’ve made it okay to start slapping restrictions or conditions free speech, which immediately and necessarily means it is no longer free. So what I am arguing for is just like the common rights talk we engage in on an everyday, conversational basis in America. Nothing wonky about it at all.
But you know what? If I were “forced to donate a pint of blood” (your words), it wouldn’t be that small of a violation of bodily autonomy. What if I refused? Can you imagine standing in a room and having to watch someone strap me to a table and forcibly extract that pint while I was fighting against it? Would you really not want to help me? Would it really seem like they weren’t violating me, or that it wasn’t a big deal?
Forcing me to donate a pint of blood by law is the legal equivalent of accosting me and ripping it from my body. If you actually saw someone doing that to your mother, it wouldn’t be small potatoes. You wouldn’t look the other way; you would go and help her.
Settled, right? Oh, wait, you call this whole thing a red herring:
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.
No sir. See the definition of bodily autonomy, which I also gave at least 3 times yesterday. That autonomy protects a person from having their body messed up against her/his will. It does not extend the right to demand someone else be forced to give up their body to keep you, me, or a fetus alive. I will say it once more:
There is no bodily rights conflict between a fetus and a mother. Neither the goverment nor the fetus has the right to violate the mother’s body to keep anyone else alive. If a mother doesn’t want a fetus and someone makes her keep it and bring it to term, only the mother has suffered a bodily rights violation. If a mother chooses against giving up her body so a fetus can live, that is acceptable. I can not make the mother give up her body for my life, nor can the government or fetus make her give it up for the fetus. Are we clear?
Paul continues:
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.
That’s true. Putting it into a situation where it will die means it cannot exercise its rights. But those rights are all founded on the concept of a person. Body = person, person = justification for all rights. If you force a woman to give up her body — the definition of herself — and make her keep that baby alive with her body against her will then you have violated the premise for all personal rights.
Rights are founded on the value of the person. A person _is_ their body. Violating a person’s bodily autonomy is violating their body. Doing so to give another person access to the rights _based_ on the person/body is silly. Sound repetitive? Good. Maybe it’s sinking in.
More from Paul:
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.
The driver who hit Craig and Craig didn’t enter a contract. Contracts are mutually agreed upon, and neither willingly entered into any deal. No, something even more crucial happened here: Craig’s body was all jacked up by this asshole driver. That means Craig’s bodily autonomy was violated. That means the driver has to be punished for abusing the very thing upon which all personal rights are founded.
But you know what you _can’t_ do? You can’t violate the driver’s body in response. Once you do that, you once again devalue the notion of the self, and it suddenly makes what the driver did to Craig less wrong. Life in prison? Maybe. Extracting an organ against his will? No. It is merely another version of what was done to Craig, and just like the forced blood donation example, we know that’s not okay.
Preventive aside: putting someone in prison is not violating bodily autonomy. Prisoners retain their bodily autonomy because no one is going in and jacking up their body. By living in this society, we agree that if we break the laws of the land, we can be punished in this way. What _isn’t_ allowable is passing laws that invade his body (presumably the death penalty does that, yes) or jailing any of us for refusing to have _our_ body coercively violated. Esta bien? Gracias.
Paul again:
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.
No conflict of rights between them in any way. One person violated another’s bodily autonomy. It’s a one way road here, and the driver has to be punished as described above.
Paul:
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.)
Nope. Again, there is no conflict of rights here. The mother has a right to bodily autonomy, and the fetus does not have a right to make her give it up so it can live any more than I can make her give it up so I can live.
Paul:
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.
Again, it may seem like a worse violation to you, Paul, but it’s not. Did the fetus get a chance to exercise all of its personal rights? No. But only because we protect the core value behind those rights for someone else — the person of the mother. I can’t violate your body so I can keep voting. No one can make her give up her body to allow a fetus to vote, either. And if you care about all those other personal rights, you have to care about the person, first and foremost.
Paul’s summary:
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.
Man. Harsh on sex here, Paul. The careless driver analogy doesn’t mean one or both people humping are the “careless driver” –neither are. The analogy only serves to illustrate that just because a particular risk of something you do becomes a reality, it doesn’t mean you’ve given up your right to your own body. If I choose to drive, I don’t give up the rights to my body to a drunk driver. If I have sex, I don’t give up the rights to my body to the government or a fetus or my partner. And you can never make me give them up, or you have urinated all over the foundation for personal rights.
Let’s wrap up with a big ol’ general recap so everyone knows where we stand.
The 10-point philosophy of bodily autonomy:
1. Personal rights are only important because we care about the person.
2. That means the person is the core value for any and all personal rights.
3. Violating the person is violating the core value of all personal rights and thus it negates them.
4. The body is the only reliable, empirical way to describe/define a particular person.
5. The body is the junk that comes with you when you leap in the air naked.
6. Having bodily autonomy means that a person’s body is protected from being messed up against that person’s will.
7. Violating bodily autonomy is violating the protection of the very thing we understand to be a person.
8. That means violating bodily autonomy is violating the core value for any and all personal rights.
9. Because the person/body is the core value for all rights, protecting it comes before those rights. They are built upon it.
10. Any violation of the core value of all rights, no matter how conditional, necessarily means it is also acceptable to conditionally violate any of those extended rights.
[Bonus #11. Just like we don't like conditional or slight violations of the right to vote or have free speech, we _really_ shouldn't like the idea of even a slight violation of the thing that causes us to care about those rights.]
The particulars regarding the right to choice:
1. Forcing a woman to carry a baby to term is a violation of her bodily autonomy.
2. Therefore, protecting her from that is essential to retaining the value of all personal rights.
3. That means neither the government nor the fetus has the right to make a woman give up her bodily autonomy for that fetus to live any more than I have the right to make her give up her bodily autonomy so I can live.
4. If it dies, the fetus can not exercise its rights. If I die, I can not exercise my rights. Neither of us can force another person to give up their body for us so we can keep exercising the rights that are founded on the value of the person/body.
5. Therefore, there is no rights conflict. Violating the core value so someone can get access to the rights based on the core value is unjustifiable.
I am so late for work, it’s not even funny, but I hope this clarification session was worth it. Defend your bodies, folks — it’s the key to defending anything else.
“In other words, suppose the fetus did in fact become incontestably a person, but the woman simply chose not to give birth to it, or allow anyone to cut it out by c-section or whatever.
Suppose this physically dwarfed, stunted person lives in its mother’s belly for decades, fully aware of who it is and where it is—it is trapped in its mother’s belly. Suppose it wants to get out and live something like a normal life, but she won’t let it. She says “it’s my vagina, and I don’t have to let you through it.”
Suppose, even, that the woman chooses to do all of this on purpose, because she likes the idea of having a helpless small person stuck inside her body for its entire life. She lives to a ripe old age of 90, at which time the person inside her has lived a full 70 years of fully aware helpless misery—and then she dies and her 70-year-old “child” dies with her—because right up to the end, it’s her body and that’s how she wants it.”
Sigh. You really do have a problem with this “bodily integrity” thing, don’t you? No doubt it’s a horrible tragedy for the theoretical 70 year old dwarf fetus who likes to stalk people in cars while watching them die and cackling, you’ll never, never, never get my liver, but um, no. You can’t force someone to undergo a medical procedure against her will. You can’t do it, because she’s a human being, she has basic human rights, all of the rights which accrue to an individual AFTER BIRTH. (Think of it this way, as long as he’s in her body, he’ll live by hER rules, young man!) She has a fundamental right to her body and she can’t be forced to submit to medical procedures that will adversely affect her health to benefit anyone else. Not even to protect the innocent dwarf and unleash him on unsuspecting pedestrians does the state have the right to strap her down and force her to give birth or strap her down to release the elderly dwarf from his wombly prison. Hell, they don’t even have the right to go around and preemptively force women who are more likely to give birth to liver witholding vultures to abort. It doesn’t so much matter what he is, as it matters where he is. If he’s INSIDE HER, then his rights, to the extent that they exist, are trumped by hers.
“Assuming that your analogy is correct (which it is most definitely not), you would be right. We have a right to get rid of unwanted people from our property. I celebrate that right. *Nonetheless*, we don’t have a right to kill unwanted people while they are on our property, even if it is in the process of booting them out.”
That’s not true in many places, and it’s also irrelevant. You may not have the right to kill the unwanted person, but you’re still allowed to eject him even if he can’t possibly live outside of your residence. If your house is the only place on earth where he can live, and he’ll die if he’s escorted outside, that does not mean you have a legal responsibility to allow him to stay or to nourish and sustain him. He has the right to live, he just doesn’t have the right to live inside you without your continuing consent, and you have no responsibility for what hapens to him after he’s ejected, which you have every right to make happen.