Bodily autonomy and the right to be let alone are intertwined
A thread by British science fiction writer Charlie Stross attempts to simplify the (impending?) death of Roe to a single, universal idea:
Big idea here: The US right’s war on abortion is part of a bigger fight—their war on the Enlightenment era concept of rights. (Alito’s ruling puts a lot of other rights at risk, not just abortion.) The solution is a basic right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.
The right to bodily autonomy means that you, and nobody else, have the right to control your own body. Nobody should be allowed to torture you, harvest your organs, perform surgery on you without consent, force you to be pregnant against your will, or brainwash you.
I think [almost] all of us can agree that the right to bodily autonomy is desirable for ourselves? If it is a universal right then the right to abortion is a natural consequence of it. So is the right to contraception. Transgender rights too. It’s a wellspring of rights.
Slavery violates the right to bodily autonomy. Anti-miscegenation laws violate it. And so on. It explicitly refutes both the Divine Right of Kings and the Biblical religious doctrines that informed the legal reasoning of Matthew Hale, the witch-hunting judge Alito cites.
A right to bodily autonomy is completely incompatible with the intentions of the Christian Dominionists behind the campaign against abortion, miscegenation, LGBT+, contraception, divorce, and minority rights now running in the USA.
They want to turn the clock back to the 17th century, and are doing so incrementally. You can’t win by fighting on the opposition’s chosen battlefield. Instead, pick a single goal that is easy to argue for and blocks ALL their objectives. A right to bodily autonomy.
Back in the heyday of blogs, Markos drew flak (I cannot find the post now) for rejecting the notion that the right to an abortion was a fundamental principle for Democrats. Like hell it is, he wrote. What’s fundamental is the right to privacy. From that, an entire host of rights flow.
In a 1928 dissenting opinion in a wiretapping case, Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the Constitution protects Americans “in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations” and “conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
In writing about the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, Jefferson considered the inviolability of “the rights of conscience” in terms, I recall this morning, that also invoke bodily autonomy for support:
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Jefferson had more to say about Christians’ efforts to make the teachings of Jesus Christ the standard by which American freedoms were defined. Americans of the late 18th century were not yet prepared to include Black slaves’ legs under the protections of being let alone (and are not prepared to leave Black people alone even today). But Jefferson’s statement already leaned in that direction.
The right to be let alone includes both conscience and bodily autonomy, does it not?
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