Rex Kerr
1 min readAug 30, 2022

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But they don't put the positive right to do stuff to yourself above very much.

You don't have a right to take cocaine.

Some states allow you to kill yourself; others make it a crime. Almost no states allow assisted suicide. (Women generally need assistance for abortion.)

Female genital mutilation is illegal in most places (even self-requested).

Positive rights and negative rights, for good or ill, have very different bounds on them.

It's simply not the case that you have unlimited positive bodily autonomy rights. Negative rights are very strong, but abortion is not negative. (You have the right to have a miscarriage: this is a negative bodily autonomy right.)

This is part of why exceptions in case of rape are so common and so widely supported (I grant that they're not universal). In the case of rape, a negative bodily autonomy right is being violated: not to have to gestate the child of your rapist. In other cases, abortion is a positive autonomy right: your body is doing pregnancy, but you wish it wouldn't, and you want help intervening to make it stop.

Regardless of what we think about other positive autonomy rights like assisted suicide, at the very least the issue isn't settled, and thus you require a real argument, not just the observation of a fairly robust negative right.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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