Can you be required to lend your body to someone else?

The question hinges on an important moral distinction: refusing to let someone use your body is not the same thing as intentionally killing them. In law and ethics, self-defense justifies stopping an unjust threat to your life, but it does not automatically justify lethal force in every case of bodily intrusion or dependence.

If someone were forcibly connected to you and required nine months of kidney support to survive, it could be morally and legally permissible to refuse that bodily assistance by disconnecting—even if the dependent person later dies from their underlying illness. In that case, the death results from the disease they already had, not from a direct act of killing. You are declining to help, not making the person worse off than they already were.

That moral logic changes if separation itself requires intentionally causing death. If the only way to unplug were to first hack the dependent person to death, the act would no longer be a refusal of aid. It would be an intentional killing. Even when neither party is at fault, and even when the dependent person is unconscious and innocent, there remains a crucial difference between letting someone die of an existing condition and directly causing their death.

Applied to pregnancy, this reasoning suggests that while people may argue about obligations to provide bodily support, that debate does not establish a right to directly kill an innocent human being. Abortion is not merely a passive refusal of bodily assistance; it involves intentional actions that cause the unborn human’s death. On this view, one may decline to lend their body, but one may not intentionally kill an innocent person in order to do so.