CORNER
CONVERSATION
It's 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. No other human right includes a license to kill innocent non-threatening human beings. So why should we think this right does? 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 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.” 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 being at the expense of “equal rights for all human beings.” 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. 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. 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.
My Body My Choice
Everyone has an opinion on what you should do with your body. But if it's your body, then it's none of their business whether you choose abortion or not... right? Popular: This is perhaps the most compelling and popular pro-choice argument. 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. 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 flow from a liberal western worldview. 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. 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. 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.”
Personhood Might Not Be Enough – Pro-choicers have a batch of arguments that allow for fetal personhood, but argue, nevertheless the right of bodily autonomy still favors abortion-choice policy. The flagship example is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “Violinist Argument.” Similar arguments revolve around organ donation and blood donation. They contend that even if forced blood donation, organ donation, or organ-sharing were able to save a person’s life, it’s still wrong to force someone to lend/donate/sacrifice their body to save someone else’s life. None of these pro-choice arguments, however, involve active killing – which is what abortion is – so they are weak analogies for abortion. In that regard, these Pro-choice Personhood arguments might not work. Nevertheless, pro-choicers can argue that – with some plausibility – that fetal personhood isn’t enough discredit abortion-choice. Semantic Debate – in practice, the personhood debate often descends into a nuanced debate about what exactly is required for personhood. This isn’t a lost cause for pro-lifers (see below), but it can be distracting and burdensome, especially since all the time spent haggling over definitions is time not spent exposing the brutality, horror, and injustice of the abortion industry. Personhood Might not be Necessary – it’s not clear that human rights require something more than biological humanity before an individual can quality for human rights. In that regard, human rights are commonly understood to be based in one’s humanity, even if the “personhood” debate were never solved. The pro-choicer still has the burden of proving that fetal humans aren’t human enough to qualify for human rights, even if the personhood argument was never brought into the conversation. Philosophical Problems – Personhood, ultimately, is a philosophical category not a biological/scientific category. Yet philosophers have debated personhood for centuries with no established consensus/solution to the problem. What exactly constitutes human “personhood”? Some say it’s mind, will, and emotion. Some say a body is required. Other says a soul/spirit is sufficient. Some say sentience is required, others say sentience doesn’t have to manifest but can be unrealized “potency.” Opening this philosophical door is a tactical risk for pro-lifers since it allows the abortion debate to get bogged down in an age-old, unresolved, dispute about what exactly is required for personhood. Overuse – the personhood debate is so widely known, pro-choice defenses are often well-prepared against it. When pro-lifers have dozens of pro-life arguments to choose from, they often limit themselves, unnecessarily, by using just this one tool from their tool bag. As a result, the abortion debate often gets stale entrenched, and loses persuasive power – just as repeated jokes fail to amuse, repeated overly familiar arguments fail to persuade. Misuse – some prolifers use the personhood argument in cavalier and foolhardy way saying things like, “If abortion is wrong only if it kills an innocent person,” or “if abortion doesn’t kill a person then it’s okay.” In other words, they bank the whole pro-life case on the personhood debate, sacrificing dozens of other arguments and lines of evidence in the process. In reality, abortion could be wrong for any number of reasons besides just the wrongful killing a person. It could be death-profiteering, sexist, racist, cruel and unusual, harmful, theft, moral vice, anti-humanitarian, child abuse, animal abuse. Even if abortion were theoretically justified, it could be so fraught with practical constraints that it isn’t fit for public policy.
Personhood
It's wrong to kill innocent human beings. Abortion does that. So abortion is wrong. It’s Simple – this argument is straightforward. It does not require a graduate-level education in philosophy of mind, bioethics, anatomy and physiology, fetology and embryology, etc. to understand. As long as people have a working sense of what “person” is, this argument can be fairly easy to understand. Popular – this is perhaps the most widely used argument among pro-lifers. It’s a staple in pro-life apologetics training at Life Training Institute and Equal Rights Institute. Legal Weight – since personhood is a legally weighted concept, this manner of argumentation helps the morality of the abortion debate translate into legal and policy categories. One-and-Done – If fetal personhood is established then, arguably, the pro-life case wins. It’s easier and more efficient to appeal to just one argument, instead of a set of arguments in a cumulative case approach. Humanitarian Appeal – the central premise, that we should not kill innocent human beings (persons) is very appealing on humanitarian grounds since human life is normally treated with a measure of sanctity (i.e., legally protected; morally special; immeasurably valuable). This preemptive ban on killing innocent human beings is readily granted in almost every other context (medical hospitals, mental health clinics, schools, civilian populations in war zones, corporate America, government). Intuitive – It’s also pretty intuitive, given it’s humanitarian appeal. Namely, people want to care for and protect defenseless human beings as they are part of our kind, our species, our young. This intuitive aspect applies even negatively, for example, when abortion-choice advocates object to calling the child-in-utero a “baby” but in the course of discussion unwittingly call it a baby, a human being. And, at least for later stage pregnancy (say 12-42 weeks), the child-in-utero “looks” human-shaped, to where most everyone who hasn’t been deeply indoctrinated in pro-choice posturing would admit that that’s a baby. Effective – while no argument in these sorts of debates is “100%” effective, the personhood argument has been used enough, and with enough success, to where it’s earned a place as one of the leading pro-life arguments. It’s simplicity, it’s humanitarian appeal, and intuitive force have made it a reasonably effective argument, at least in the hands of capable many trained pro-life advocates.
Opponents consider this argument to be a disanalogy and/or logically fallacious. It’s not yet proven to be persuasive to opponents, since abortion could be wrong for other reasons that aren’t analogous to the JJT’s thought experiment — ex., parenthood, active killing. It’s contrived and strange, making it difficult to conceptualize in its finer details and thus empathize with its protagonist. It’s basically science-fiction. It does not analogize the parent-child relation that might be needed for a strong thought experiment. It’s a disanalogy because in the violinist scenario, the person’s involvement was non-consensual while in pregnancy the person consented to sex wherein she then became a mother-with-child. It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario is ad hoc/artificial while the parental relation is fundamental/natural. It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario lacks the legal precedent and natural-law jurisprudence fortifying one’s duty to non-family medical dependents whereas there is a bounty of legal precedent and natural-law jurisprudence fortifying duties to one’s children. It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario has a passively victimized woman, whereas normal sex relations actively invites pregnancy whether intentional or accidental, so the woman is not victimized; she is getting the natural, normal, and known consequences of her actions. It’s a disanalogy because pregnancy from consensual sex is not a violent assault, whereas the violinist scenario involves the woman being kidnapped and violently assaulted albeit for a life-saving purpose. It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario is passive killing while abortion is active killing — to fix this, Thomson would need to have the woman invite the doctor to actively dismember or poison the violinist. It’s a disanalogy because in the violinist scenario the disease, not the doctor, is the killer. It’s a disanalogy because the child is not an intruder, while the violinist is. — The child is “precisely where he or she belongs at that stage of development.” Klusendorf, The Case for Life, 188. It’s a disanalogy because going to sleep is not as ethically weighted as “sleeping with” someone. “That a woman looks upon her child as a burglar or an intruder is already evil.” Stephen Schwarz, The Moral Question of Abortion [Chicago: Loyola Univ., 1990], 118. Sex is an entry into the baby lottery see above meanwhile the hypothetical victim in JJT’s argument did nothing which is a lottery entry to “link with a violinist.” It can be rebutted by analogy: what if the violinist was instead the woman’s own 2-year old child? see Koukle, “Unstringing the Violinist,” Stand to Reason Ministries, [Signal Hill, CA: STR, 4 Feb. 2014], para. 25-28. The parental relation would be maintained—making it a stronger analogy—but then the presumed outcome ethical detachment would be questionable, and we should be biased towards life in such cases. Children have a prima facie right to be protected by their parents, whereas violinists—even great ones—have no prima facie right to be sustained artificially by strangers. Parents have a prima facie duty to protect their children, not to protect strangers. Abortion does not merely “withhold support” as Thomson suggests, abortion actively kills a human being. The child’s right to life is not simply ignored, it’s actively violated with willful and malicious intent. The relevant part of the analogy can be maintained without drawing the same conclusion: One may “throw out” an unwanted intruder to your house, who is entering only for the sake of medical attention i.e., akin to parental dependence but not if that means killing them. That general right of autonomy is not a free-pass to maim, mutilate, and murder another human being. The violinist scenario lacks consent, and to that extent is more akin to rape. The sex act itself is natural consent to pregnancy though it can be admitted that a woman may have sex and still try to contradict that natural invitation by desiring non-pregnancy and using contraception. If rape is understood as “unnatural” defying the natural law principle of informed consenting adults and normal sexual relations are understood as “natural” being nature’s mode of reproduction then the violinist scenario parallels rape, not consensual sex. The expansion from 9 mos. to 9 years to a lifetime is a stretch, yet that’s how JJT develops her argument. That time frame isn’t arbitrary—one could reacquire his or her old job after 9 mos. but not after 9 yrs. All her remaining birthing years could be sacrificed in those 9 years. Even if the whole argument is granted, it fails to show that abortion is “good” or even “ethical” preferable but only that it’s ethically permissible. The argument admits the greater action would be to stay connected to the violinist. Hypothesis contrary to fact: by suggesting expansive time-frames—9 years/lifetime—that are dissimilar from the normal 9 mo. gestation, she’s dealing in a relevantly different hypothetical scenario which, if it were the case, would radically reorient biology and practical ethics. Hence she errs by trying to use the rules of a different “game” to judge this “game.” That is, she’s committing a fallacy of hypothesis contrary to fact by imagining a counterfactual that would stipulate a radically different ethical landscape and then using it to judge the present facts.
The Violinist Argument
Should anyone be forced to donate an organ, their blood, or their body to save someone else, such as a famous violinist? Perhaps the most famous argument for abortion-choice, surfaced in a 1971-article by Judith Jarvis Thomson title “A Defense of Abortion” (Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 [Fall 1971], 47-66). In this article Thomson argued for abortion-choice by using a thought-experiment to illustrate how it’s wrong to force someone to lend an organ to save someone else’s life. This line of argument took root in the wider abortion debate, and has been adapted and discussed ever since. This argument is also known as the “Good Samaritan Argument,” (Boonin, A Defense of Abortion [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2003], 133ff). Other variations on are the “organ donation argument” and the “blood donor argument.” This argument is one of the strongest for the pro-choice camp because it can still “work” while granting fetal personhood. It’s also relatively easy to understand. It’s emotional weight and the presumed response are nearly universal. People generally agree that the woman should not be obligated to lend her kidney to the violinist. It helpfully distinguishes erogatory required acts versus supererogatory good, but not required acts.
What about Non-Humanitarians? – The Don’t Know, Don’t Shoot Argument works well within a humanitarian framework, namely, the belief that all human beings are created equal, endowed by their creator [be it nature, God, or both] with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In that humanitarian framework, the Life-Bias is a moral default, and for fear of wrongly killing an innocent human being, we should erect a high burden of proof to protect against that fate. But what if someone rejects humanitarianism? People can deliberately or unwittingly reject humanitarianism and instead favor a kind of libertinism where liberty is prized above the right of life, or a religious hyper-fundamentalism where the lives of believers are prized above the non-believers, or some brand of anarchism and dog-eat-dog darwinism where “only the strong survive natures bloody tooth and claw”. Ideally, society could align on some robust humanitarianism, but it would be naïve to think that everyone is generally willing to adhere to humanitarian ethics and culture, especially if it were to mean sacrifice or restraint on their part. Reasonable Doubt Can still be Doubted – The concept of “reasonable doubt” has a legal definition of 95%+ certainty, and/or only unreasonable or absurd doubts remain. Unfortunately, there’s a long history in philosophy of scrutinizing any effort at reasonable certainty to where whole schools of thought have arisen which deny any certainty or knowledge. While the category of “beyond a reasonable doubt” can be a valuable legal category, and an vital intersection between policy debate and judicial standards, when it comes to popular level discourse and public debate, many people either don’t know or don’t allow for such a category. In their view, everything is open to reasonable doubt.
Don't Know, Don't Shoot
If there’s a rustling in the bushes, and it might be your hunting partner, then don’t shoot. Likewise, if there’s any reasonable doubt over abortion, then it shouldn’t be allowed. Humanitarianism – the life-bias is a humanitarian basic, intuitive and compelling, as it treats human life as something to be protected, all else being equal. Medical ethics – the life-bias aligns well with the normal and historic sense of medical ethics, namely, the two-fold principles of: (1) Do no harm and (2) Do good. As long as society has a humanitarian aim, we cannot safely assume that half of the human beings involved in an abortion are invisible to medical ethics. As such, they should be treated, at least, with the most basic principles of medical ethics – do no harm to the child, and do good as far as the child is concerned. Minimally, that would include, don’t kill them unless the reason for doing so is beyond a reasonable doubt. Doesn’t require personhood – one can remain agnostic on fetal personhood here, and instead let the known scientific evidence do the work. Biologically speaking, there’s no real debate about whether new human beings begin at conception. As such, we’re dealing with a genetically distinct, new human being, from the moment of conception onward. Regardless of the personhood debate, every abortion is leveraged against a biological human being. The burden, therefore, is on the abortion-advocate to show that those human beings aren’t human enough to qualify for human rights. Again, the debate over personhood can be suspended while the abortion debate, here, focuses on the different wrong wrapped into abortion that can disqualify it on humanitarian grounds. Lower burden of proof – Instead of trying to prove fetal personhood, or some other wrongs committed in abortion, the Don’t Know, Don’t Shoot argument requires only reasonable doubt. That is low bar. Yet it’s well-placed since abortion is known to kill living human beings, and as long as there’s reasonable doubt about whether that act of killing is justified, the humanitarian bias should be to refrain from that act of killing. Why raise the bar, requiring a higher burden of proof for pro-lifers, when reasonable doubt is normally enough to derail a capital punishment conviction where the defendant might in fact be guilty? Reasonable doubt should be entirely sufficient grounds for abstaining from killing someone, especially if we know he or she is a legally and morally innocent human being. Abortion-Focus – while the personhood argument can detour into a semantic debate about philosophical and legal definitions of “personhood” or preoccupy with scientific minutia, distinguishing haploid and diploid genetics, developmental stages, and so forth, the Don’t Know, Don’t Shoot arguments keeps abortion at the center stage. This framing allows for a vast and scouring investigation into the many areas of reasonable doubt that can be leveled against abortion choice culture, abortion ideology, abortion-choice policy, and the abortion industry itself. This abortion-focus is a tactical advantage since the ugly reality of abortion favors the pro-life position, whereas a sterile semantic dispute can favor the pro-choicer by distracting people away from the bloody, deadly, and repulsive images of abortion practice. Fewer Concessions – It makes fewer concessions compared to the personhood argument, where it’s often conceded that abortion is wrong only if the fetus is a person. The Don’t Know Don’t Shoot Argument, instead, allows for a wide range of wrongs besides just child-murder, and any number of these could discredit abortion. Reasonable doubt can lurk in racial disparities higher abortion rates among black and minority populations, gender disparities sex-selective abortion, ability-based discrimination eugenic abortion, death profiteering, theft if one’s life is their own property, it’s wrong to take it, child abuse, animal abuse, desecration, lack of due process issuing the equivalent of a capital punishment without a trial, dehumanization, selfishness, anti-family, anti-motherhood, harmful, traumatizing, and more.
It’s counterintuitive: To be a “necessary evil” abortion must serve a redeeming purpose greater than the harm/evil is causes. But, since human life is normally considered immeasurably valuable, that’s a tall order. Especially since abortion kills an innocent human being, often in torturous abusive ways, for trivial reasons (convenience, embarrassment), and at an alarming rate. When clearly stated, the “necessary evil” argument is intuitively implausible. Crime Against Humanity: Abortion-practice is as a crime against humanity, given the scale, nature, and practice of abortion. It would be too problematic (i.e., a losing battle) to argue that Apartheid, or the Holocaust, or Sex Trafficking are “necessary evils” because of how they “benefit” some members of those societies — we can likewise suspend the “necessary evil” argument for abortion, on comparable grounds. “Necessary Evils” Might not Exist: As a point of clarification, there’s a good case that “necessary evils” don’t exist because either those sorts of dilemmas don’t exist, or if they do exist, one must do the greater good — and “evil” means are thereby redeemed as instrumental goods such as a surgeon’s scalpel, or the heroes sacrifice. Unqualified Candidates and Humanitarian Problems: For this argument to work, there must be some redeeming good somehow associated or identified with abortion. But, unless those candidates are morally equal or greater than the value of a human life that’s taken in abortion, then that moral calculus doesn’t add up. In this way, abortion-choice reasoning tends to devalue human life so it can be outweighed by these other “reasons.” Often moral calculus means denying the notion of “equal human rights,” or even denying intrinsic human rights altogether — as if “human rights” are not based in one’s humanity (intrinsically), but rather are extrinsic, superimposed on the child by the whim of a government, or the choice of one’s parents, or the conventions of the community. As such, abortion-choice logic is often fraught with anti-humanitarian assumptions, pitting libertine preferences over and above humanitarian protections. Therapeutic Abortions are a Red herring: Pro-choicers and Pro-lifers generally agree that therapeutic abortion should be allowed when it comes to saving the mother’s life. That was never the core contention in the abortion debate. Therapeutic abortion has been legal before Roe v. Wade, during the Roe v. Wade era, and so far is legal in every U.S. state after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the Dobbs decision (2022). Therapeutic abortion was never at the heart of the abortion debate, that space is saved for elective abortion (A.K.A., abortion-on-demand). In that regard, the self-defense objection and life-saving “necessary evils” are a distraction, a red herring fallacy. When we remember that the kind of abortion disputed here is over elective abortion, where the mother’s life isn’t clearly imperiled by her pregnancy, the “necessary evil” argument dissolves. It’s Evil, but not Necessary: in defending elective abortion, pro-choicers can offer many different reasons to justify abortion-choice policy. But, as a general rule, these “justifying” reasons do not measure up to the inestimable value of the child’s life. They don’t actually justify abortion. It may be evil, but it’s not necessary. This becomes clear when we refuse to dehumanize the fetal victims of abortion. What if we were talking about toddlers, for example? Which of the following reasons would justify killing a toddler: Personal convenience, job advancement, personal preference, keeping a feckless boyfriend around, maintaining physical appearance, avoiding financial hardship, appeasing disappointed parents? If these motivations would justify killing a toddler, and children in utero are likewise fully human then we cannot safely assume those reasons can justify killing a child-in-utero.
Necessary Evil
No one said abortion is easy, pretty, or pleasant. But, it’s still necessary for the sake of women’s rights? It’s flexible: There’s no set number to the many different “greater goods” one can call-upon in support of this argument. Dilemmas: It also admits the ugly reality of moral dilemmas. For anyone’s ethical system to be well-rounded and translate effectively into the real-world, it should account for dilemmas possible or actual. It’s candid: The abortion debate can grind to a halt when either side refuses to admit what should seem plain to all parties. By candidly confessing that abortion is regrettable, ugly, perhaps even “evil” this can earn credibility by showing self-awareness and honesty about the harsh reality of abortion. Utility: This is a pretty useful all-purpose, supplemental argument, as it’s already implied in other arguments. For example, it wouldn’t matter very much if bodily autonomy trumps fetal life, if abortion were itself entirely good, devoid of any drawbacks, and entirely without negative consequence. Instead, the autonomy argument can seem plausible precisely because people tend to admit that abortion is regrettable, and feels wrong, but bodily autonomy — they claim — is a greater good justifying abortion-choice policy as a “necessary evil.” Self-Defense: Pregnancy complications can threaten a woman’s life if she were to carry the pregnancy to term. In those cases, abortion can be a life-saving procedure. Even if we grant that abortion is evil, when it can save the life of the mother, it becomes a “necessary evil”