Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one: Bodily autonomy means every person has control over how their body is used. It’s why you can’t be forced to donate organs, even if you’re dead. By saying a fetus has a right to use a woman’s body, you’re making it so that women have less bodily […]
We’ve all heard the argument that begins “You must not really care about saving lives because you don’t [fill in the blank with the policy preference du jour]. You’re just about controlling women’s bodies!” And when we’re feeling uncharitable, we can always throw it right back at them: they don’t really care about bodily autonomy, […]
Many people argue that abortion is justified because of bodily rights. The idea is that it doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person or not, because no person can use your body against your will. If that principle is generally true and generally applies to abortion, it makes sense to be pro-choice regardless of […]
Illustration of artificial womb technology sustaining a young lamb Xavier Symons, writing for BioEdge, a news website that focuses on bioethics, wrote an article about ectogenesis. Ectogenesis refers to a human embryo or fetus developing in an artificial environment outside of the woman’s uterus. Scientists recently kept premature lamb fetuses alive in an artificial environment, […]
Anyone who argues the pro-life position is likely to come across a series of logical fallacies about bodily autonomy. Often this is packaged in the form of a story about a fictional violinist. This illogical and highly implausible story was created by Judith Jarvis Thomson, an MIT professor, in her 1971 essay A Defense of […]
[Today’s guest post by Todd Pettigrew is part of our paid blogging program.] On those rare occasions that I tell my friends that I have a pro-life stance on abortion, their reaction is typically surprise followed by a quick objection along the lines of “Well, if it’s her body…” and then they seem to think […]
You probably read the about the woman who received her fifteen minutes of fame last week for her decision to blind herself, with the assistance of a psychologist: A North Carolina woman says she is happier than ever after fulfilling her lifelong wish of becoming blind. Jewel Shuping, 30, has Body Integrity Identity Disorder, which is […]
Bodily autonomy. It’s a term that has essentially lost all meaning in our culture today. Not because it doesn’t have an objective meaning, but because the cry for “bodily autonomy” (e.g. “my body, my choice”) has been accepted uncritically as a modern slogan, despite most pro-choice people being unable to defend the proposition that bodily […]
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about one of the major problems I have with the bodily autonomy argument: that it’s totally at odds with people’s real-life experiences with abortion. In keeping with that theme, here’s another issue I have with the bodily autonomy argument. If the bodily autonomy argument were genuine, abortion supporters […]
Here’s one of the problems (by no means the only one) that I have with the bodily autonomy argument for abortion. Abortion advocates often compare the decision to continue an existing pregnancy to the decision to donate an organ. I don’t think it’s a great analogy (for reasons touched upon here), but for purposes of […]