On Bodily Autonomy

Bodily autonomy is a phrase often thrown around today in conversations regarding the rights of people. It has served as the linchpin for many arguments on more than a few important topics in America today. This would be well and good, if not for the fact that bodily autonomy (at least as it is generally understood today) is not something we are fully in possession of or even deserving of as we conceive it. What can only be described as a modern bodily autonomy absolutism is bereft of precedent and moral justification.

What is bodily autonomy? Bodily autonomy is the belief that humans ought to have full agency over their body, what happens to it, and what happens to the products of it. This is because the body is the essential, original, and inalienable property of the individual. The individual has the executive authority over their own body in the same way you have executive authority over your personal property. Of course, this autonomy is limited in fairly obvious ways. You cannot choose to fly or breathe water no matter how much you “choose” to make your body do such. Your autonomy is limited by what is possible. There are also the moral restrictions on your autonomy. You don’t get to infringe on the rights of others simply because you possess a freedom of choice with what you do with your own body. You have the right to throw a punch, so long as there isn’t an innocent bystander in the way of your fist. Your autonomy is limited by what is ethical. There is also the capacity to lose at least some of your autonomy through your choices. Obviously, this can happen through natural consequence of action (a man who lost his legs cannot choose to run), but it also happens through punishment. A prisoner has lost their right to autonomy as a consequence of their actions. There is, in the case of bodily autonomy, another restriction that makes it unlike most other rights and limits its legitimacy greatly, the issue of obligations.

There are actions which are not just what should be done, but what must be done. This is in stark contrast to the restrictions of other rights we have. For freedom of speech, there are things you cannot say, but there should not be anything that you must say. For property rights, there are things you cannot own, but there should not be anything that you must own. For voting rights, there are people who you cannot elect, but there should not be anyone who you must elect. From this we can divide all rights into two groups, those with categorical obligations and those without. Those with categorical obligations, if they are viewed as rights at all, are lesser rights to those without such obligations. Most “rights” with obligations are debated on as to whether they are rights at all. And so, it must be asked, does the right to bodily autonomy contain any categorical obligations?

In the context of the rights protected by the United States government, it is clear that bodily autonomy does have categorical obligations. You are obligated to serve in the military if drafted, obligated to pay taxes, obligated to show up for jury duty or a trial, and many others. The absence of the right to bodily autonomy goes even further. The government will not only make you do things you don’t want to do, but also do things to you that you don’t consent to. Did the children at Waco and Ruby Ridge consent to what happened to them? What about no knock raids? Did you personally consent to the Patriot Act and all of the surveillance the government conducts on you? The US government has made it viscerally clear that bodily autonomy is not something the citizens have that it respects.

Though the government may not respect bodily autonomy, that is only in one perspective and idea. What of bodily autonomy beyond government? Are there not only government obligations but also moral obligations? Let’s say your son was in a burning building. Let’s say it is 100% certain that if you try to save him, you will succeed, but doing so will burn you terribly. It is also 100% certain that if you do not try to save him, he will die. Do you have an obligation to save your son, even if you don’t want to be burned? I, as well as nearly everyone, would say that you do have an obligation. This is not just because he is a human, made in the image of God and possessing of a soul giving him value, but because he is your son, your dependent, and with that relationship comes necessary obligations that are immoral to not fulfill, barring some major complicating factor (for example, if your son murdered your family, he loses his “dad has to save me” privileges). We are so often consumed in our modern quest for universal rights that we forget the particular rights, the rights and responsibilities that come with relationships. Family and friends are deserving of better treatment than strangers, as well as expected to provide preferential treatment to us. Of course, they can lose this, just as criminals lose their rights, but to focus on that is to ignore that until they are lost, we are obligated to do more for them than for others.

Your right to bodily autonomy is far from absolute in practice and in theory. At its core, bodily autonomy is not a right, because it is too vague, almost certainly intentionally so. If we were to break up “bodily autonomy” into smaller pieces, it would quickly be obvious that it includes many genuine rights (such as the need for consent), many privileges that are not rights (such as access to healthcare), and some things that are neither a right or a privilege, as we are about to delve into, as would inevitably be the case in any writing regarding bodily autonomy.

Obviously, this essay has beaten around the bush as long as it could stand. The issue at the heart of bodily autonomy today is abortion. I believe that this essay has made it perfectly clear that the arguments in favor of abortion based on bodily autonomy are entirely untenable. “My body, my choice” is dead and should stay dead. The mainline abortion argument is something resembling “regardless of the nature of the fetus, it is a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy to force her to carry a pregnancy to term, or for any amount of time, against her will.” In the case of “baby is not alive”, it is essentially universally agreed that this bodily autonomy argument holds at least some water. The “alive” instance, however, is a different case. Abortionists claim that the right to life of the baby does not supersede the right to bodily autonomy of the woman, which is false. Obviously, anti-abortionists believe the opposite; that the right to life supersedes the woman’s bodily autonomy. However, what is not argued, and might be more productive to focus on, is not only the superseding of the right to life, but also the shortcomings of the right to bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy does not even begin to pertain to abortion, because you have an obligation to your dependents. Just as you cannot “evict” a toddler without guaranteeing their safety and survival, you cannot “evict” an unborn child without guaranteeing the same. Not just because they are human, made in the image of God and possessing of a soul giving them value, but because they are your child deserving of privileged treatment from you. On a side note, there is also the issue of being an active versus a passive participant in the ending of a human life. Often pro-abortionists will often argue that because you aren’t obligated to help someone in need, they are not obligated to help their fetus by letting it stay attached to their uterus. Ignoring the already stated issue of obligations to dependents, that would be a fine argument, if the passive act of neglect and the active act of murder were at all comparable. You are not obligated to donate blood, even if there is a blood shortage that will lead to death. You are, however, obligated to not kill people who are in need of blood as a means of removing the need for blood donations. Abortion is not neglect; it is murder. If pro-abortion activists wish to make any cogent arguments, the first thing they must do is abandon the bodily autonomy line of thought. Fortunately, I doubt they will be making any changes any time soon, as bodily autonomy, as stated before, is nebulous in definition and malleable in application. It allows them to lump something like anti-abortionists into the same category of rapist, as they all violators of “bodily autonomy”. Why abortion must be legal must be kept as amorphous as possible, otherwise it would be clear as day that none of the arguments make sense, that none of the pro-abortion positions are defensible, and that those pushing abortions as a right know it makes no sense.

Though this essay will be received as something only on the topic of abortion, as this topic drowns out anything spoken about with it, it is worth giving a final revisit to everything else in this essay. Bodily autonomy is a nebulous idea of a right that, though containing many genuine rights, entails many important obligations that must be contended with. The modern age is overflowing with rights, so much so that it has washed out and obscured many of our responsibilities. Responsibilities are not fun; they do not feel like blessings, but they are, and it would behoove all of us, and in turn our community and nation, to recognize them as the necessary companions to liberty that they are.