Recently I’ve had a few exchanges with anti-lifers who were actually trying to defend the “bodily autonomy” argument that I discussed in my previous post on this subject. I’m not used to hearing this instead of “clump of cells” so I suppose it was a nice change of pace. I found that the exchanges confirmed my previous conclusions that the move from “clump of cells” to “bodily autonomy” is in fact a shift towards the pro-life viewpoint and is thus more difficult for the anti-lifer to defend. My impression was that these exchanges did not come off particularly well for the abortion defenders, or at the least, they could have put up a much better stone wall by simply sticking to “clump of cells.”
Anyways, during one of these exchanges one of these people said something that got me thinking along the lines that ultimately lead to this post. This person stated that even if a parent injures their own child in a drunk driving accident such that the child now requires a kidney donation to survive, the parent is not legally required to donate their own kidney. Legally I suppose this is true. I can even imagine that, if a parent were to intentionally surgically remove both of their own child’s kidneys, our legal system would not require that they donate their own kidney to rectify the offense.
Obviously, this is meant to prove that killing the unborn via abortion is justified because “bodily autonomy.” But the immediate thought I had was: Yes, the law doesn’t currently specify that one must donate their kidney in this hypothetical situation, but should it? If a parent destroys their own child’s organ through negligence or malice, and they are then legally required to donate their own organ as restitution, would I really have a problem with that? No, I don’t think I would, nor do I think society at large would feel much outrage over such an outcome. This might be the case even if the organ donation were one that would kill the parent, such as donating the heart; but it is most definitely the case with a non-lethal donation such as a kidney.
This simple realization led me to conclude that the law does not work this way, at least in large part, because the hypothetical situation outlined here is so outlandish and bizarre. I would imagine that maybe a parent has drunk-driving-injured their child in such a way that the child requires a kidney donation and the parent is a compatible kidney donor, like, maybe once ever, somewhere? Maybe twice. I would expect that it probably has happened. But if someone told me this has actually never happened, that wouldn’t really surprise me either.
Thus the reason we don’t have a law for this situation is because the legal system simply never has to deal with it. This is obviously not true of abortion! If the legal system had to face the drunk-driver-parent-child-kidney dilemma tens of millions of times per year, we can easily imagine that the law might evolve so as to more actively consider how to best deal with that scenario.
So, once again, we have a version of “Thomson’s Violinist” which has not been properly specified so as to analogize with the reality of abortion. Here would be the correct version of this analogy, if we wished to try and use it as a hypothetical frame of reference to then transpose onto the issue of abortion: Suppose that as part of the natural human life cycle, a child’s kidneys become obsolete in a manner similar to their first set of teeth and wither away. The child requires a donation of one of its mother’s kidneys in order to survive and mature into adulthood, and somehow the human body has proper biological mechanisms for all of this. This is a necessary process that every human being must undergo in order to survive past a certain point in childhood.
Now, in such a world, do we imagine that our moral norms would dictate that this kidney donation is merely optional, a lifestyle choice which the parent may either accept or reject at will, and that if a parent refuses and allows their child to perish from kidney failure, it is justified because the parent has “bodily autonomy?” I think not. In this world we can easily imagine that the donation might be legally mandated for very good reasons, in exactly the same way that in the real world we mandate that parents must provide their children with an education.
Even if the kidney donation were not to be legally mandated in this hypothetical world, we can again imagine that a parent’s refusal to donate might be seen as an extreme moral transgression worthy of severe condemnation and social shunning. This possible outcome reminded me of the moment when I realized that abortion was wrong, many many years ago now. In a twist of irony, the article that first convinced me of abortion’s clear unacceptability was an article in some feminist rag arguing that women have a right to drink and use drugs during pregnancy and that they cannot be judged for doing so because they have “bodily autonomy.”
And of course, that is entirely consistent with the “bodily autonomy” anti-lifer view! This baby has no right to use my body or my organs, I am graciously lending myself to them in the same way that I might casually decide to give a few dollars to a begging hobo. What right does the baby therefore have to dictate what substances I can or can’t put into my body? If I can kill the child in the name of “bodily autonomy,” well then surely I can expose them to a few harmful chemicals. If they end up with fetal alcohol syndrome, that’s not my problem. They should be grateful that I allowed them to exist at all!
As soon as I read this article and understood its premise, I went from being agnostic on abortion to immediately understanding why it is wrong, and that it is not just wrong, it represents a grave and impermissible evil.