Rex Kerr
3 min readJul 23, 2022

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You have some decent arguments here, but I think your take-home point is fundamentally flawed. You haven't given any of the right examples.

Most fundamentally, the difference between our positions comes down, I think, to this: when your body is doing something that is undesirable, you may stop it yourself and, if need be, others may help you (if they wish--no compulsion).

For example, your rules would say that laws against liposuction don't violate bodily autonomy. Laws against removal of lung cancer ("if you smoked") don't violate bodily autonomy. Laws against repairing a self-inflicted vasectomy don't violate bodily autonomy.

This all sounds like gobbledygook nonsense to me. Of course those are covered under bodily autonomy because "autonomy" means "you are in charge of it". How is not getting your lung cancer removed being "in charge of" your body in any reasonable sense of the word?

(The whole consenting to sex thing is...utterly irrelevant? You're chosing sex not pregnancy when you choose sex. If it happens anyway--well, sometimes people fail to correctly judge the consequences of your actions. How does that have any bearing at all on whether others are even permitted to help you alter what your body is doing? "You smoked--so you get to die from lung cancer, fool!")

We can declare words to mean whatever we want, but "bodily autonomy" has got to include this stuff or it's a terrible misnomer. And heck--if it is a terrible misnomer in exactly this way, then the logic of society affording certain things to its members still doesn't change based on our dumb labeling of things, and if you want to call this bodily heteronomy or something, I don't really care. The principle is: your body is yours to decide what to do with.

Now, we might choose to make some exceptions. You gave some decent examples (e.g. forcing someone to take medicine to control a psychotic episode rather than being forced to shoot them later when they're going to violate someone else's bodily autonomy in a dire way).

But it's all autonomy, all this stuff. Deciding things about your body is what autonomy means.

Pregnancy is something the woman's body is doing. Until the baby is considered a person, pregnancy is 100% a bodily autonomy issue for women.

Once the baby can legitimately be considered a person, it gets more complicated. Of course, the biology doesn't make things so simple--you don't suddenly POOF turn into a person in any meaningful sense. So babies gradually develop more and more into people. (Oh ugh! Biology! Why did you have to make this so hard for us!) The closest to a poof--the merging of sperm and egg--is incredibly far in every other way from anything like personhood and is a terrible choice.

Regardless, once the baby is a person (whenever we decide that is), it doesn't stop the bodily autonomy issue--the woman's body is still doing pregnancy. It just makes it an issue of potential conflict of autonomy because the baby's body is doing its side of pregnancy too.

Once the baby is born, it's simple again.

So the complexity of the issue is still there (but not for early pregnancy), but the bodily autonomy thing is 100% wrong or 100% a red herring (and although you might love fish, I think you'd agree that this is a mighty suspicious color for a herring).

Now, all this is separate from whether any of this is a universal right that the state should provide. Providing basic healthcare is not an issue of bodily autonomy. It's an issue of well-being and quality of life, but not of bodily autonomy because this no longer concerns you making choices about your body and getting them implemented by enlisting others yourself, but rather others following your wishes who otherwise wouldn't. Whether abortion should be a state-provided right is, therefore, a separate issue (I say yes, and I believe I have very good reasons, but it requires additional justification).

However, pregnancy is absolutely an issue of bodily autonomy, or the term is worthless.

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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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