{"id":36414,"date":"2013-06-10T20:00:14","date_gmt":"2013-06-11T00:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"\/news\/?p=36414"},"modified":"2014-09-28T17:04:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-28T21:04:09","slug":"the-false-strength-of-the-bodily-autonomy-argument-for-abortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/the-false-strength-of-the-bodily-autonomy-argument-for-abortion\/","title":{"rendered":"The false strength of the “bodily autonomy” argument for abortion"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

\"Human<\/a>Most arguments for abortion take relatively little effort to dismantle. \u201cIt\u2019s not alive and not a human being\u201d are empirically false<\/a>, which also makes appealing to church-state separation a non-starter. \u201cEmbryos don\u2019t have souls\u201d is an assertion the claimant can\u2019t possibly know or prove. Claiming that human rights depend on awareness or viability raises uncomfortable questions<\/a> about all sorts of afflictions that befall people at every age. The hardships of pregnancy are countered by the ease with which pregnancy can be avoided. And appeals to popularity or emotion are so vapid as to be barely worth mentioning.<\/p>\n

The only argument that gives even the appearance of intellectual heft is the argument from bodily autonomy – that whatever an unborn baby may be, he or she has no right to draw protection and sustenance from a woman\u2019s body, and therefore the mother is justified in expelling the \u201cintruder\u201d via abortion.<\/p>\n

Pro-lifers often have a visceral reaction to this argument. It rightly strikes our deepest moral intuitions as unbelievably heartless to show such a complete lack of compassion for someone one concedes to be a live human baby. But intellectually, it has an internal consistency that can seem daunting to the uninitiated. There aren\u2019t any scientific facts to be corrected, and it sounds like it\u2019s appealing to the same individual-rights framework we are.<\/p>\n

This apparent strength, however, is deceptive. In fact, it can be completely unraveled with two little words: \u201cwhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe baby has no right to live in that womb\u201d is presented like a self-evident point, but it\u2019s actually another eminently questionable premise. And dissecting it is the easiest way to turn the tables on its fans.<\/p>\n

Any claim about individual rights necessarily presupposes there is some kind of source for those rights, a philosophical starting point from which all justice is derived. Before going any farther in discussion with a bodily-autonomy absolutist, challenge him to explain what starting point he\u2019s using.<\/p>\n

Assuming he doesn\u2019t respond by sputtering something inane about it being obvious to everybody but you Christian Taliban nutjobs (at which point you\u2019ve essentially won the argument), these are the most common philosophical foundations for individual rights:<\/p>\n

Rights come from government or societal consensus.<\/strong> This is just a thinly-veiled \u201cmight makes right,\u201d and all but an admission that your opponent is just making it up as he goes along. These are both much too subjective and arbitrary to take seriously. Government\u2019s purpose is to safeguard our rights, and the point of having a constitution is that there are things the majority shouldn\u2019t be able to do to a minority. Not only would adopting this view imperil all of our rights by making them entirely dependent upon the whims of our politicians and our neighbors, but it can\u2019t even be a reliable defense of abortion – there\u2019s no reason abortion rights should be exempt from society\u2019s ability to change its mind about what rights it grants.<\/p>\n

Rights are given by God<\/strong>. Despite being the basis for the Declaration of Independence and therefore the entirety of American law, it\u2019s a pretty safe bet this won\u2019t be a popular explanation for those trying to explain why it\u2019s just to lethally evict God\u2019s children from the womb.<\/p>\n

Rights are derived from rationally examining nature<\/strong>. This is the most sophisticated theory, its foundations dating back to the Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, who shaped much of our Founding Fathers\u2019 ideas about liberty. Basically, the ideas is that we own our bodies because nature has given them to us upon our creation, and nobody else has a natural claim to them. Therefore, we may not be killed, harmed, or forced into servitude without our consent.<\/p>\n

Pro-aborts equate pregnancy with forced servitude, claiming a woman has no obligation to let her children develop within her because she never gave express consent for them to do so, and even if she did, she reserves the right to reassert ownership of her bodily resources and revoke the unborn baby\u2019s right to use them. Superficially, that sounds like it could be a reasonable inference from Lockean natural law theory\u2026until you start to think about it.<\/p>\n

For one thing, there are numerous problems with the analogy. Even without explicit permission, in the vast majority of pregnancies, the mother gave tacit permission by agreeing to risk creating<\/em> the baby, meaning she does indeed have a certain level of responsibility for his or her well being. And even if she did have a right to evict her son or daughter, it wouldn\u2019t automatically follow that the methods by which she may do so are unlimited – if I find some drunk has broken into my house and is passed out on my couch, I have the right to kick him out and have him arrested, but I don\u2019t have the right to put a shotgun to his head and blow him away while he\u2019s sleeping. Similarly, there\u2019s no reason a general right to remove an unwanted baby from one\u2019s womb would entail a right to have him or her intentionally killed by abortion.<\/p>\n

But most importantly, if we\u2019re trying to derive rights from nature, we have to look at what they baby is endowed with, too. Simply put, nature places that baby in that uterus. He or she isn\u2019t some fluke or foreign entity, but a natural result of the reproductive process working correctly. Sustaining developing offspring is the uterus\u2019s biological function. So from a natural-law perspective, the unborn baby most certainly does<\/em> have the right to his or her mother\u2019s bodily resources.<\/p>\n

As Canadian Center for Bio-Ethical Reform executive director Stephanie Gray puts it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The role of woman as mother means that she (like the father) [emphasis added to preempt trolls crying sexism \u2013 CF]<\/strong> has a responsibility to her offspring that she does not have\u00a0to strangers. And while that responsibility does not obligate her to do extraordinary things, such as taking trips to\u00a0Disneyland or donating kidneys, it does obligate her to do ordinary things, such as feeding, clothing, and sheltering her\u00a0offspring.<\/p>\n

To do otherwise would be parental neglect. In fact, Western countries have made it illegal for parents to\u00a0neglect their children. And so, maintaining pregnancy is simply doing for the unborn what parents must do f or the\u00a0born\u2014providing the shelter and nourishment a child needs. It is what is required in the normal course of the\u00a0reproduction of our species.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From there, pro-aborts have few remaining escape hatches, none of which impress. So there\u2019s no need to fear. Just force them to show their work, and the steps they\u2019ve skipped become readily apparent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Calvin is an editor and administrator for TheFederalistPapers.org, and his work has appeared on NewsRealBlog.com, PatriotUpdate.com, LifeNews.com, LifeSiteNews.com, RightWisconsin.com, AmericanThinker.com, Stream.org, AmericanClarion.org, and more. Please check out his official website, ConservativeStandards.com. 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