Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
I just came across an old post on Feministe, responding to a conservative woman who explained why she supports Bush (guns, public funding for private schools, the “war on terror”, and because America just gives wa-a-a-a-y too much back for what it receives from the rest of the world). The comment thread, as such things do, quickly turned to a general libera-vs.-conservative slagfest, particularly on the subject of abortion.
One of the commenters came up with a strong statement of the autonomy-based defense of abortion that I thought was as good a job of putting it in a nutshell as I had seen, and which makes an interesting and useful analogy between autonomy over pregnancy and the unquestioned autonomy rights even conservatives recognize over other bodily invasions. It’s worth noting.
From “Dana“:
I’m afraid I have to differ on what makes abortion a moral choice and keeping it legal a moral necessity.
The simple fact is that it does not matter what a blastocyst, an embryo, or a fetus is–whether they’re “a life,” whether they’re “a human life,” whatever. Doesn’t matter. Not one iota.
What matters is whether any other living thing has the right to use my body for sustenance against my will.
The answer is no.
If I want it to do so? Fine. And I’ve definitely sustained other people’s lives in the past. I’ve donated blood and plasma. I’ve borne two children. I intend to be an organ donor when I die. (Speaking of which, I’d better update my paperwork.) The point is that I have consented to do all of these things.
Consent is not a contract. It truly is a matter of whim. I can change my mind about a blood donation at any point up until that blood goes into another human being, and they have to throw out the pint I sat around for an hour donating. [Not exactly, but nevermind. - KTK] My family can throw a monkeywrench into the works about my organs if I die, before they ever go into another human being.
Aaand, it is entirely possible for a blastocyst to impose a pregnancy on me that I did not consent to. It is also possible for me to change my mind and cease consenting after the pregnancy has begun.
And I have the right to end that pregnancy in the safest possible manner for me. Even later in pregnancy, it is safer to abort than to give birth up until fairly late in the third trimester. It is my right to control my own body and to make decisions for my own body. If asserting that right kills another person, I’m sorry, but I am nobody’s life support machine unless I want to be.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can refuse to be blood donors on account of needles make ‘em feel icky, and nobody bats an eyelash even though blood loss patients die every damned day for lack of available blood to transfuse–nobody is suggesting we make blood donation mandatory–but let a woman assert control over her own body and that’s murder? Bullshit.
[emphases original]
Here, she offers essentially a capsule version of the famous argument of Judith Jarvis Thomson, complete with a blood-transfusion analogy, grounded on a strong right to bodily integrity and autonomy. Whatever putative interests of another (hypothetical) person may be at stake, no one is required to make their body, their health and safety, and their liberty the property of another to use without permission.
This argument is well known (and strongly compelling; the failure of the anti-choice position to deal with it in any way would have ended their movement long ago if policy regarding women’s liberty were made in any rational fashion). It is the blood-donation fillip at the end that really catches my attention.
The comparison she makes is striking: as she says, perfectly correctly, we would never demand that anyone submit to even a blood donation involuntarily, even to save another person’s life - yet the extreme right demands that women allow a living entity, not even a person, to grow inside them for most of a year, with not-inconsiderable risks to their lives and health. Is there a starker example of their contempt for women’s autonomy? We protect personal liberty and bodily autonomy to an almost-extreme degree . . . as long as it doesn’t touch on the right-wing taboos of sex or women’s freedom. When those issues arise, and in particular when the perfect storm of unrepentant sexuality, women’s autonomy, and anti-maternalism arises in the context of abortion, no mere human rights of mere women can stand in the way.
What is the possible response to this? Even granting – as Thomson famously does – a full “right to life” on the part of the fetus, no one believes that right entails a right to a claim on the body itself of another person. The evidence is everywhere: we simply do not recognize such claims in any context other than that of abortion. The same woman who argued against abortion rights in the Feministe thread was aghast over her (grossly inflated) perception of American support for reproductive health programs in other countries.
Why is it our responsibility to pay for this? . . .
I don’t see how ‘reproductive health care around the world’ should be a priority. . . .
I presume she’s against forced blood donations as well (or, I’m sure she would be if it were ever her autonomy at risk). But forced pregnancies? No problem (for other people). And the contrast between “taxes for reproductive health are a violation of my rights” and “forced gestation in someone else’s uterus is of no concern”? Also apparently not an issue.
I like the blood-donation analogy (separate from Thomson’s more elaborate scenario, that is), because it puts pregnancy and abortion in the appropriate realm: unwanted invasions of the body in a medical context. We don’t allow those under any other circumstances – whether or not a person’s life is at stake, and no matter how trivial a sacrifice is called for. We must not allow them when even greater invasions are planned for much lesser reasons.
3 Responses to “A Good Analogy”
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May 24th, 2006 at 6:35 AM
I’ve been thinking over the whole abortion debate and come to an interesting conclusion. I am also pro-choice due to the autonomy argument but I also think that we can give up a part of our autonomy, at least for a limited time. In essence, I am coming towards the view that if a woman intends to get pregnant and does, then barring unforeseen circumstances (threat to health etc) she has a moral obligation to go through with the pregnancy, at least if she is past the stage when we can confidently say that the foetus has no consciousness.
In the case of accidental pregnancy, a woman does not consent to the consequences of her actions, and cannot be forced to bear a child she did not choose. However, when she did choose it and there are other potential rights at stake (the foetus’ rights, which is again why I would explicitly exclude foetuses at such a young stage as to be certainly incapable of such rights), it would seem that she can have no right to assert the autonomy she partially gave up against those rights.
I would be interested in your views.
May 25th, 2006 at 12:27 PM
Your autonomy is limited by the interests of other moral persons, who themselves have interests and autonomy rights that deserve protection. You may not exercise your autonomy in a way that infringes unduly (leaving aside what constitutes “unduly”) on someone else’s liberty to do the same. In addition, you may voluntarily limit your autonomy by entering into agreements with others that then bind you to certain actions. You take on a moral obligation to do, or refrain from doing, certain things, and thus limit your freedom to some degree (presumably in the hope of obtaining compensating benefits thereby), when you enter into an agreement with another person to do so.
Absent the limiting case of the competing interests of other moral persons, or your choice to limit your own autonomy by binding agreement, you retain your freedom to do as you will. That includes the freedom to change your mind about what you are doing, and the freedom to act to ameliorate the inconvenient consequences of your prior choices. The fact that you have voluntarily done something does not mean you cannot stop doing it, or that you cannot act to undo the consequences of it upon you (as long as what you have done does not bring you into conflict with another person’s interests, or entail a voluntary obligation to limit your right to change your mind).
If the fetus is not a moral person and does not have moral interests at stake – as seems obviously to be the case – then there is no clash of interests that would limit the woman’s autonomy rights.
And, in that case, the question of “voluntariness” is not a limiting factor either. (For one thing, if the fetus is not a person, it is obviously absurd to talk of it entering into a binding agreement with the woman.) As before, the woman has the freedom to change her mind. Voluntary pregnancies in which the woman changes her mind partway through are not different from non-voluntary ones in this respect. She may terminate the pregnancy in either case; nothing about how she came to be pregnant impinges on that liberty. (Notice that we do not make such distinctions in other cases of voluntary acts: if you decide halfway through that getting your girlfriend’s name tattooed on your butt is actually a bad idea, nothing requires that you continue with the tattoo, or says you can’t erase it afterwards. In some cases, you can even break agreements where the liberty interest in changing your mind outweighs the binding obligation imposed by the agreement – for instance, you can call off a wedding even after the engagement has been announced, and you can get divorced if the wedding doesn’t work out.)
If you hold that the fetus does have moral interests at stake, again the question of how the pregnancy began does not enter into the equation. A pregnancy may set up a “maternal/fetal conflict” – a clash of interests – in which the priority of their respective moral interests must be resolved, but it is clearly not a binding agreement between the woman and her fetus such that would limit her autonomy after accepting the agreement. Even a voluntary pregnancy – certainly a deliberate act – is not an agreement between two parties. So again, here, voluntariness is not the operative moral consideration. Only the “clash of interests” matters. Thus even in this strong case – the case where the fetus is assumed to be a person with moral interests – it is only those interests, and not the woman’s action in becoming pregnant, that carry moral weight. And there are well-known arguments regarding the morality of abortion construed as a maternal-fetal conflict.
So, in the end, while there may be some question of the interests of the fetus in the woman’s pregnancy, those interests (if they exist) merely are the moral factor to be taken into consideration in their own right. How the woman became pregnant, and even whether or not that was a voluntarily-assumed risk, or even a deliberate choice, are not morally binding factors – both because, at the time of the act, there is no second moral person who becomes a party to a morally binding agreement, and because the woman retains the right to change her mind about her chosen course of action.
July 12th, 2006 at 11:26 AM
Hi Kevin – it has been a while since we have crossed swords.
If the bodily autonomy argument allows a woman to have an abortion even if the fetus is a human being with moral status (which I acknowledge that you deny), then what ethical principle would make it wrong for her to take thalidomide? Should a pregnant teenager be able to continue with her accutane treatments? Why not – if the fetus inside of her has no right to life let alone an environment free of pathogens.
More on this from this post here: http://lti-blog.blogspot.com/2006/07/do-no-harm-except-for-that-killing.html
I would be greatly interested in your response.
Blessings,
Serge