“My body, my choice” only makes sense when someone else’s life isn’t at stake.
Fun fact: If my younger sister was in a car accident and desperately needed a blood transfusion to live, and I was the only person on Earth who could donate blood to save her, and even though donating blood is a relatively easy, safe, and quick procedure no one can force me to give blood. Yes, even to save the life of a fully grown person, it would be ILLEGAL to FORCE me to donate blood if I didn’t want to.
See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon.
Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy.
To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died.
You’re asking people who can become pregnant to accept less bodily autonomy than we grant to dead bodies.
reblogging for commentary
But, assuming the mother wasn’t raped, the choice to HAVE a baby and risk sacrificing their “bodily autonomy” is a choice that the mother made. YOu don’t have to have sex with someone. Cases of rape aside, it isn’t ethical to say abortion is justified. The unborn baby has rights, too.
Ah yes, the “you gave up your right to bodily autonomy when you chose to have sex and risk pregnancy” rebuttal.
Later today I am going to get in my car and run some errands. I am fully aware that driving is a risky behavior. I could get into a car accident. It might be my fault, it might be someone else’s fault.
By the logic above, I should be left on the pavement to die. I mean, why shouldn’t I suffer the consequences of my choice to drive? I knew it was risky! I accepted those risks when I got behind the wheel. It’s a moral imperative that anything that happens to me afterwards not be mitigated by medical intervention.
The reason this sounds stupid for car crashes but people use it as an actual rationale to deny women abortion rights is that driving doesn’t come with a boatload of moral patriarchal bullshit about women’s sexual agency.
Everything we do has risks. Just because we accept those risks and do things anyway doesn’t mean that any and all consequences must be endured.
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