Bodily Autonomy

As often happens, noisy news from the US drowns out what’s happening in my own back yard. With the May 2^nd leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, talk about abortion rights has formed a tsunami of toxic discourse that has washed over the border and threatens to sweep away Canada’s quieter conversational habits.

Then June arrives with Pride and I’m reminded that conversation in one sphere doesn’t happen in isolation, but leaks into other spheres. To the extent that abortion laws concern themselves with matters of bodily autonomy, their language and reasoning ends up contributing to conversations about sexuality, gender and identity, too. To what extent does the state have an interest in the bodies of its citizens? And how far can it go in asserting its interest? These are questions that we can ask in nearly every sphere of public engagement.

Taking a long view of history, we can be forgiven for thinking there is a general trend that favours bodily autonomy. We have shifted away from the view that treats the body as property. Feudalism and indentured servitude give way to natural rights theory. Humans have a transcendent quality that eludes bondage, or so goes the narrative. We abolish slavery. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in women which means that women are not subject to masculine authority. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in people who express their sexuality differently. And so it goes.

Until it doesn’t.

I find it odd that the pro-life crowd lean to the libertarian end of the political spectrum. A rational person who enjoys coherence in their public conversation might expect a libertarian to favour bodily autonomy. I guess we shouldn’t expect coherence from people who call themselves pro-life while renewing their NRA memberships. As a famous American poet once said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” It seems an incidental fact that the poet in question was also gay.

If we are to be consistent, we should also reinstate laws that criminalize suicide since those laws were premised on the view (from feudal times) that suicide is an offence against the state because the body exists by right of the state. We abolished such laws because they were cruel. That was the same motivation for the abolition of abortion laws. But these days people seem inured to cruelty. For the sake of consistency, maybe we should abolished compassion altogether and be done with it.