No.

Ilya:

40 FICTIONAL FEMALE DYNAMICS 5. Kate Sharma & Edwina Sharma (Bridgerton)

See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon. 

Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy. 

To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died. 

And here’s another point: When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument.

Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all.

If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other. 

When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting.

When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.” 

Firstly, I was very clear that I’m perfectly comfortably saying that a fetus is a person. That’s the point of the analogy with the organ/blood donation- that even when another person is in danger, my body is my body.

Secondly, bodily autonomy doesn’t argue that we have NO obligations to others/our children. But it does say that those obligations don’t extend to our *flesh and organs* like we are the God damn giving tree, legally forced to slice off a pound of flesh to sustain another against our will. We are obligated to care for the people that we have legal guardianship over, to provide food and safety, but that doesn’t extend deeper than the literal skin- we don’t have to deny ourselves medical care for others.

Banning abortion access, forced pregnancy, stripping people of the ability to control their own reproduction- all of it fundamentally says that we do not own our own bodies. That our bodies, our organs and blood and flesh, are now government property. That the physical flesh we occupy can be used without our permission or consent because the government wills it. And that should scare you.

Roe specifically was built on an assumption of a constitutional right to *privacy*- which gives us a related but separate reason to be very very scared. Because if there is no constitutional right to privacy, then all the other rulings from the last 50 Years that invoked the right to privacy are fair game now too- and do you know what that includes? Access to birth control, same sex marriage, interracial marriage, Sodomy laws.

The Supreme Court, specifically the justices that were put in place by Presidents who lost the popular vote, specifically the ones put in place by a president who tried to orchestrate a coup- has now decided that the government has the power and right to reach into your doctors office, your marriage, your bedroom, your *body* and legislate what it finds there.

I understand that when you frame the entire argument as “murdering babies”, it is easy to feel very very justified and ignore all the other implications. It’s easy to ignore the reasons that people seek abortions, their difficult situations, their abusive relationships, their medical emergencies, their personal tragedies that inspire that choice. It’s easy to not think about the legal implications and how this can cascade into a thousand other issues and facets of life that you didn’t realize were connected, the marriages it threatens, the lives it puts at risk. Because what could possibly justify murdering babies, right?

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