Vice President Kamala Harris, President Biden’s doubtless alternative on the Democratic ticket, is understood for her advocacy of abortion rights. I feel she’s largely proper on that difficulty. However she—and plenty of others—overlook the fact that bodily autonomy rationales for abortion rights additionally justify abolishing a variety of different restrictions on folks’s rights to regulate their our bodies. If you happen to actually consider within the precept of “My Physique, My Selection,” the implications go far past this one difficulty. Washington Publish columnist Monica Hesse recently highlighted an episode from Harris’s profession that illustrates the issue:
Hear, almost all the pieces it’s essential to know concerning the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris might be summed up by 19 phrases she uttered at the 2018 confirmation hearings of Supreme Courtroom Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Harris, then a senator from California serving on the Judicial Committee, had used up a number of minutes making an attempt to pin down Kavanaugh’s opinion on Roe v. Wade. Like almost each senator on the subject, she was principally unsuccessful….
“Are you able to consider any legal guidelines,” she requested the nominee, “that give the federal government the facility to make choices concerning the male physique?”
“Um,” Kavanaugh replied, furrowing his forehead. “I’m comfortable to reply a extra particular query, however — “
“Male versus feminine,” Harris supplied, smiling, and when Kavanaugh nonetheless expressed confusion, she repeated her 19-word query: “Are you able to consider any legal guidelines that give the federal government the facility to make choices concerning the male physique?”
Kavanaugh responded, “I’m not considering of any proper now.”
Kavanaugh bought caught flat-footed right here, thereby enabling Harris to attain a rhetorical level. Nevertheless it’s not laborious to think about a variety of legal guidelines that “give the federal government the facility to make choices concerning the male physique.” A few of them impose constraints whose penalties are much more extreme than these of abortion restrictions. I listed a few of them right here, noting the implications of “my physique, my alternative” for these insurance policies:
1. Organ markets ought to be legalized. Individuals ought to be free to promote kidneys, for instance (topic, maybe, to knowledgeable consent necessities). If somebody desires to promote a kidney, the response to prohibitionists ought to be: “you possibly can’t inform her what to do together with her goddamn physique, ever.” Your kidney is a part of your physique, and the choice to promote ought to be your alternative. As an additional bonus, legalizing such gross sales would save many 1000’s of lives.
2. Legal guidelines in opposition to prostitution ought to be abolished. They most positively limit folks’s freedom to regulate their very own our bodies (each prostitutes and their clients). The prostitute’s physique belongs to her, and utilizing it for prostitution is her alternative. Prostitution bans additionally limit the bodily autonomy of shoppers. Thus, we should always reject laws that punish them, while letting the prostitutes themselves go free. The “johns” personal their very own our bodies a minimum of the prostitutes do. The form of consensual intercourse you interact in along with your physique ought to be your alternative.
3. The Conflict on Medicine ought to be abolished. All of it. Not simply the ban on marijuana. Its complete goal is to limit what kinds of drugs you possibly can put in your physique. What you place in your physique ought to be your alternative. And, just like the ban on organ gross sales, the Conflict on Medicine harms massive numbers of individuals, each in the US and overseas, in nations just like the Phillippines and Mexico.
4. The federal government shouldn’t attempt to management folks’s diets by way of “sin taxes,” or restrictions on the size of sodas, and different such laws. Right here too, the purpose is to limit what we put in our our bodies. If that results in elevated authorities spending on well being care, the right solution is to restrict the subsidies, not bodily autonomy.
5. Draft registration, mandatory jury service, and all different types of obligatory service ought to be abolished (if already in drive) or taken off the political agenda (if merely proposed). All such insurance policies actually expropriate folks’s our bodies. What work you do along with your physique ought to be your alternative.
6. We should always legalize and use problem trials for testing new vaccines in opposition to lethal illnesses. The ensuing earlier authorization of Covid-19 vaccines might have saved many thousands of lives. And it might save many extra if we allow the usage of problem trials sooner or later….
8. Individuals ought to be allowed to take experimental medical remedies not accredited by authorities regulators. That is very true if the remedies have a big probability of saving folks from demise or severe sickness.
With the notable exception of obligatory draft registration (which stays restricted to males), these insurance policies all constrain girls, in addition to males. However they’re nonetheless extreme restraints on bodily autonomy, together with that of males. A few of them—particularly the bans on organ markets and medical treatments approved by the FDA—actually kill massive numbers of individuals.
Furthermore, most of those different points pose simpler circumstances than abortion, the place pro-lifers at the very least have a believable argument that restrictions are wanted to protect the lives of innocents who didn’t consent to the process. I largely agree with the pro-choice aspect of the problem; however the ethical standing of the fetus makes abortion a relatively tough query. Against this, most different restrictions on bodily autonomy—together with the Conflict on Medicine and bans on organ markets—are paternalistic in nature. They invade the bodily autonomy of consenting adults, supposedly for their very own good.
Elsewhere, I’ve defined why efforts to tell apart these different circumstances are both improper, would justify abortion bans, as properly, or some mixture of each. For instance, the argument that bodily autonomy might be restricted when cost is concerned, or when folks enter into transactions partially due to poverty, can be used to justify a variety of abortion restrictions.
But, with uncommon exceptions, resembling her commendable advocacy of marijuana legalization, Harris helps most of those different insurance policies limiting bodily autonomy. It would not appear to hassle her that they “give the federal government the facility to make choices concerning the…. physique.” In that respect, she is hardly uncommon. Most different mainstream politicians take related stances.
I’m not politically naive. The apparent motive Harris and plenty of different political leaders take contradictory stances on bodily autonomy is that abortion rights take pleasure in broad recognition, whereas most different bodily autonomy points are both much less salient, much less common, or some mixture of each. Being pro-choice on abortion could properly assist Harris win over essential swing-voters. Being pro-choice on organ markets or medicine apart from marijuana most likely will not. It might properly harm.
Proper-wing politicians are additionally typically inconsistent on bodily autonomy points. They too prioritize political expediency.
I do not count on Harris and most different politicians to undertake a extra constant stance anytime quickly. However I hope that calling consideration to those contradictions would possibly lead extra folks to think about to the broader implications of arguments for bodily autonomy. The federal government ought to certainly get out of the enterprise of exercising management over folks’s our bodies. On that, Kamala Harris is extra proper than she herself is prepared to confess.
