"My Body, My Choice" Argument
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Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The gist of this pro-choice argument is that a woman’s body is her own domain. She can do with it as she sees fit. Since it would be her body that’s pregnant, then it’s her choice whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. That right to choose what happens to one’s body is commonly known as “bodily autonomy,” and it’s generally implied within the wider range of constitutionally protected human rights. While abortion isn’t necessarily a constitutional right (Dobbs v. Jackson 2022), bodily autonomy is.
Phrased as a formal argument, “My Body, My Choice” would look something like this:
Premise 1:
The bodily autonomy of women includes authority over their own pregnancies.
Premise 2:
Bodily autonomy includes the right of women to terminate their pregnancy (abortion).
Conclusion:
Therefore women have the right to abortion.
Strengths
1. Popular:
This is perhaps the most compelling and popular pro-choice argument.
2. Autonomy:
By appealing to bodily autonomy – a woman’s right to do as she sees fit with her own body – this argument appeals to widely accepted sentiment. Namely, her body is hers to manage. Phrased negatively, no one else should be allowed to tell her what she can and can’t do with her body.
3. Liberty:
Bodily autonomy is a kind of liberty, and western civilization is known for placing a high value on personal liberty. As such, this bodily autonomy argument carries great intuitive appeal as it seems to flow from a liberal western worldview.
4. Consent:
Women who consent to sex are not necessarily consenting, consciously, to pregnancy. Therefore, as long as consent is understood in a strict sense of conscious active assent, then women cannot be assumed to “consent” to pregnancy just because they consented to sex.
5. Rape:
The bodily autonomy argument is compounded when the woman neither consented to the sex, nor to the pregnancy. As such, “my body, my choice” carries even more force when the sex-act was not her choice.
6. Negative Examples & Equality issues:
History is replete with bad examples – patriarchal oppressors, abusers, systemic sexism, etc. – illustrating why women need strong legal fortifications to protect their bodily autonomy. Abortion-choice activism, over the years, has often framed abortion-choice as a bodily autonomy issue precisely because history has often subjugated women’s bodies to oppressive men and oppressive systems. Roughly stated, “bodily autonomy” sounds like “women’s equality.”
Weaknesses
1. Not a License to Kill:
One can grant that women have bodily autonomy, yet challenge the abortion-choice advocate to show that bodily autonomy includes a license to kill innocent human beings. In this way, one can directly challenge Premise 2 in the above argument. No other human right includes a license to kill innocent non-threatening human beings. So why should we think this right does?
2. The Child Is Not Her Body:
Obviously, pregnancy occurs within the mother’s body, and insofar as her bodily choices are hers to make, she can rightly decide whether to get pregnant, how to handle the pregnancy, and so forth. But, the child-in-utero is his or her own body, and not just an extension of the mother’s body. The child is a distinct, albeit dependent, body from the mother’s. She does not have 2 heads, 4 arms, 4 legs, a penis, two sets of DNA, etc., just because she’s carrying a boy child in her womb. As long as there is more than one body involved, the “bodily autonomy argument” is a bit more complicated than just “my body, my choice.”
3. Weak on Bodily Autonomy:
Ironically, pro-choicers are weaker on bodily autonomy compared to pro-lifers. The reason is simple: pro-lifers affirm the bodily autonomy of all human beings, not just for the pregnant mothers, but also for every child-in-utero. Of course, the child-in-utero isn’t fully conscious yet, but he or she already has a body, and that body is not the mother’s body. There are at least two bodily-autonomy claims at stake here.
4. Life over Liberty:
We can, and should grant the mother’s bodily autonomy. Yet since there’s a human life on the line here, then the moral weight of that situation favors protecting the child’s life over the mother’s preferences for her body. Generally speaking, moral choice should favor life over liberty – since live human beings can go on to exercise liberty, but no one can exercise liberty after being killed.
5. Do No Harm:
A normal humanitarian principle that traces back through the history of medical ethics is, “First, do no harm.” As a general moral principle, this is a basic boundary line for all human rights. Individuals can have a wide range of freedoms, but not when their free acts involve harming others. Civil rights, human rights, and the right of bodily autonomy does not normally entitle one person to go hurt and kill someone else, especially if that other human being is innocent, non-threatening, and was forced into that perilous position by no choice of their own.
6. Liberty, Not Anarchy:
Bodily autonomy is a matter of personal liberty, yet liberty without responsibility isn’t liberty at all but anarchy. When human lives are on the line, the normal humanitarian responsibility we all carry is to not kill innocent human beings. In this way, when pro-choicers stretch bodily autonomy to include the fiat killing of innocent human beings, that is not liberty they’re arguing for, but tyranny – where one class of human beings is allowed to own, oppress, and kill another class of unwanted inconvenient human beings, treating those human beings as disqualified from even a provisional, latent, or presumptive claim to any “human rights.”
7. Humanitarian ethics:
When personal liberty is set above the rights of others to live, that is not properly a “humanitarian ethic” but more like a libertine ethic. Since the central defining feature of that ethical stance is the personal liberties of some human beings at the expense of “equal rights for all human beings.”
8. Bodily Sovereignty:
Bodily autonomy is one thing, but when it includes the privilege of killing innocent non-threatening human beings that is no longer the liberal and humanitarian realm of bodily autonomy. Instead, it’s bodily sovereignty, like how kings of old could kill other human beings for no other reason than being disliked, unwanted, or inconvenient. In this way, the bodily autonomy argument is more precisely understood as a bodily sovereignty argument, where the mother is (supposedly) allowed to behave like a fickle monarch who can own, oppress, and even kill her subjects (children-in-utero) if they ever prove unpleasant or inconvenient.
9. Consent Isn’t Everything:
We can grant that consent is normally very important, but human beings have their own bodies and their own lives, regardless of anyone else’s “consent.” We cannot assume that a mother has the right to “consent” or forbid her child from living – since that would require a tyrannical/sovereign relation between mother and child. While parents have many privileges and rights over their children, they don’t have the patria potesta (or matria potesta) to kill their children, like an emperor over her domain.
10. With Rape, Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right:
Rape clearly violates the mother’s bodily autonomy. That horrific evil should be mourned as a grave injustice. Rapists should face the fullest measure of justice the law allows. If anyone should be killed because of a rape, it should be the rapist, not the child-in-utero. When a rape results in pregnancy, the mother’s bodily autonomy was clearly breached, but that’s no excuse to violate the child’s bodily autonomy – as if the child is to blame for the sins of the father. It is unjust to punish a child for his or her father’s sins. Abortion doesn’t undo the evil or trauma of rape, if anything it adds a felt sense of murder – since it’s literally killing the mother’s child-in-utero. In this way, abortion multiplies trauma. It’s another “wrong” and two wrongs don’t make a right.
