Bodily Autonomy: the right to make decisions about your body without coercion or violence. It’s a fundamental human right that allows people to make choices about their health, sexuality, and reproduction.
While no right is absolute, with few exceptions, each of us has the right to do what we want with our bodies. No government, religion, or individual has the right to force us to violate our bodily autonomy. There was a time when most Americans understood this principle. Even when another’s choice fundamentally runs against our personal beliefs or morals, we have no right to force people to act against their own self-interest. Of course, this principle has frequently been violated throughout our nation’s long history. In recent years, right-wing Republicans have used the power of the state to violate the bodily autonomy of both men and women. Republicans have even gotten between people and their doctors, forbidding medically necessary treatment, all because their moral or religious sensibilities are offended.
We see this most often in the culture war against reproductive rights. Republicans demand that women surrender their bodily autonomy to the dictates of an ancient religious text — the Bible, and their errant interpretations of the text. Abortion, in particular, is THE issue that drives the right’s immoral war against a woman’s right to choose. If Republicans had their way, there would be a federal abortion ban, without exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Further, many Republicans want to criminalize abortion. Sadly, there is little difference between the moral pronouncements of many Republicans and Muslim Sharia Law. If given an opportunity, Republicans will ban abortion, in vitro fertilization, and some forms of birth control. No matter how many state constitutional amendments are enacted protecting reproductive rights, Republicans intend to ignore the will of the people.
Women have a fundamental right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term. The choice is theirs alone. Not their husband’s; not the government’s; not God’s. Theirs alone, end of discussion. It is their body that is affected and changed by pregnancy. In what other scenario do we allow people to intervene in the medical care of others? As long as a person is mentally competent to make their own decisions, they have the right to do what they want with their body. My body, my choice, applies to all of us.
But what about the “baby,” Bruce? What about it? Eighty-eight percent of abortions take place during the first trimester, long before what’s growing in a woman’s womb is a baby. Even when it comes to third-trimester abortions, most terminations take place due to fetal abnormalities. At no point do women surrender their right to bodily autonomy.
Let’s suppose I need a kidney. Without a transplant, I will die. After testing, I find out that my brother is a match. I go to my brother and ask him to give me one of his kidneys so I can continue to live. My brother says “no.” Should my brother be forced to give me one of his kidneys? Even though I will die if he doesn’t do so, he has a fundamental right to say no. His body, his choice. The same goes for pregnant women. No woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. Her body, her choice.
But, Bruce, God says . . . the Bible says . . . I think abortion is murder. What God, the Bible, or you say doesn’t matter. The woman’s body is her’s alone, and no one has the right to force her to do anything against her will. I know this is hard for conservative Christians to hear, but what you “believe” plays NO part in what a woman does or doesn’t do with her body. Think abortion is morally wrong? Fine, don’t get one. You would be rightly offended if non-Christians stuck their noses in your medical decisions; so it is when you stick your nose in the medical decisions of women.
For Evangelicals planning to post Bible verses in the comment section, don’t bother. Your proof texts are anything but. The Bible has little, if anything, to say about abortion. The notion that life begins at conception is not found in Scripture. Oh, you can massage and twist a few verses to justify your attacks on bodily autonomy, but careful exegesis suggests that your interpretations are wrong.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
I’m fascinated by this article, because among all the differing views and opinions, one thing is never brought up- and that is the concept of free vasectomies to prevent unwanted pregnancies AND abortion. Cut right to the source, literally. It’s cheaper than other procedures like tubal ligation and hysterectomies. Vasectomies are reversible for couples who really want kids. This is a solution Republicans or conservatives can live with. It would be interesting to see the reaction to this idea. After all, in the current political climate, even miscarriages are being criminalized, and reported to the police now. Hospitals are often used for spying on patients who suffer a miscarriage. It depends on the state one lives in.
I continue to be mesmerised by the continuing obsession with abortion, especially in the US but, sadly, starting to creep back into the UK psyche (I think because of the US).
Look, the issue isn’t important. It’s trivial. By this I don’t mean for the individuals concerned (very much the opposite), but that everybody and their neighbour (and government) thinks it’s okay to be involved needs to be knocked on the head. Cancer isn’t trivial for the individual but if being treated for it required you to live in the right state, not go to a Catholic hospital, or have to fly thousands of miles for treatment, I think there’d be an outcry. Hence we regard the need to treat cancer as a trivial issue: there is no discussion.
Yes, but what about the little, wee, tiny, innocent baby? To this I say, firstly, don’t be so pathetically sentimental. Why ‘innocent’? What on earth is this supposed to mean, other than to introduce some sort of sentiment? At what point as human beings to we cease to be innocent? If we’re ‘born in sin’, then might it not be better to be aborted than be born, so sin doesn’t enter the equation? Secondly, it’s not a baby until it’s born. It’s a foetus (or embryo, or zygote), and calling it a baby is definitionally wrong. It can’t be ‘murdered’ in the womb as murder is a legal term, and doesn’t apply to a foetus (small exceptions for harming a woman and unborn child by a third party). Thirdly, we don’t regard the foetus as having any particular significance in any part of our culture, and certainly don’t see any expression of the claim that life begins at conception. We refer to birthdays, first born, birth rights, country of birth and so on. Imagine the chaos if your nationality depended on your country of conception!
It’s one of those few areas of life in which compromise has to be forced on people, and which is why the Supreme Court betrayed women in overturning Roe v Wade. No matter how much people oppose abortion they must be forced to accept its legal reality. By all means protest it as much as you like, but those protests must be resisted so as not to dilute the legal rights of women to choose. Of course, abortion laws aren’t, and never have been, about protecting the foetus, they exist solely as a form of misogynistic control. It’s sad that so many women allow themselves to be manipulated into supporting the false narrative.
This is an issue I struggle with myself, as a pro-choice Catholic. To me this is exactly 100% about what Bruce said- bodily autonomy and safe medical care for women. And of course now in states like Texas, women are falling under suspicion if they’ve had a miscarriage. So they compound a woman’s grief by also making her experience fear. Yep, it’s what “Jesus would do”, to quote the bumper sticker I’m sure these hardcore folks have on their cars. Like other issues, I find myself increasingly on the opposite side of my religious institution. Pope Francis, as liberal as he is on a lot of other issues, is still against abortion.
My late father was a politically conservative person, but on abortion and birth control, he was 100% pro choice, to the chagrin of his religious brothers and sisters (he was also at most a deist, which also caused heartburn with his Pentecostal Appalachian family). Even though he was raised in Cincinnati, he would periodically travel to the family homestead in East Kentucky, and would see the effect of the lack of birth control and abortion access on the populace- lots of rural isolated poverty..and lots of kids without adequate care. And women who were just exhausted between the kids and trying to survive in a harsh environment. Oh, and lots of churches, of various baptist and holiness varieties.
There is a tremendous disconnect within the religious nut community who believe god is sovereign and in control of everything and the reality that huge numbers of spontaneous abortions occur under his watchful eye an outside human involvement. So who is the biggest abortionist of all?
If the “pro-life” movement had any consistency, by the same logic that a fetal “person” could have a right to use another person’s organ like the uterus, should logically conclude that kidneys* and parts of liver* should be available for those who have a medical need for them by lottery of random citizens. Of course the same people who don’t believe in bodily autonomy for abortion were up in arms about getting a Covid vaccine (and in many cases all other vaccines as well) wouldn’t hear of that! I guess it helps with their hypocrisy that only lowly women who spread their legs (voluntarily or by force) need abortions.
(I suggest kidneys and parts of liver since a donation could be made because the donor has a reasonable chance of surviving and living a normal life. There is always a possibility of a lethal outcome for the donor, but the same, of course, is true for pregnancy.)
A very insightful essay Bruce. My take on the abortion controversy is that cynical politicians exploit it to inflame impressionable voters and rally support for themselves. Politicians tell people abortion offends their religion and that they will champion a fight against killing babies in violation of God’s laws. I dare say many fewer Christians would be anti-abortion absent politicians putting the issue front and center. The Supreme Court overturning Roe did more than dismantle protection for abortion. Roe depended on an implied right to privacy considered inherent in other rights. In overturning Roe, the court ruled the right to abortion was not protected by a Federal right to privacy because privacy is not specifically “enumerated” in The Constitution and is thus a matter left to state law. By extension, then, other rights based on a Federal right to privacy are now less secure since a Federal right to prvacy is diminished if not abolished. Without privacy, police can, and some would, intrude on any and every aspect of our lives to enforce whatever mandates and prohibitions are legislated, however intrusive and violative. Our right to privacy prevents the constable from legally entering our very bedrooms to enforce laws against sodomy. It’s not far fetched that leaving privacy rights to the states creates a slippery slope to losing any and all fundamental freedoms.
Hello, Bruce. As a parent with a child that has Down syndrome (we’ve talked about our girls in the past) I have a difficult time with the attitude pro-choice people have with the fetus. Some are dismissive and consider the fetus “just a blob”. At the time we found out our daughter was going to be born with T21, it was still legal to abort (We chose not to however though I know people who have made the opposite choice). If someone were to say to me at that time our baby was “just a blob” I think I may have gone for that person’s throat!
I consider myself “reluctantly pro-choice” because I cannot tolerate the weasel words employed by the pro-life camp (bodily autonomy, reproductive rights). Abortion rights advocates think that they are engaged in a moral struggle, but they are not. They are engaged in a religious one. The open secret about the pro-life movement is that they are more interested in punishing unmarried girls and women for having sex because it offends their god and they are his enforcers. If this this debate could be redefined as a bunch of scolds and hypocrites trying to impose morals on you but not themselves then I think there’d be many more pro-choice allies.
There is a point in fetal development when what is growing in the woman’s womb is a clump of cells. That’s why I focus on first trimester abortions when 88% of all abortions take place.
Down syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality, is a challenging issue. Often, a woman doesn’t find out until later in her pregnancy that her fetus has Down syndrome. Unfortunately, there’s no test that I know of that delineates the severity of the disability.
As you know, there’s a wide range of intellectual capability and severity of other physical problems for Down’s children. Polly and I didn’t know our daughter had Down syndrome until she was two. Multiple doctors missed the signs of Down’s due to her mild facial features when she was young. Her health problems have been limited to her heart, thyroid, and high cholesterol. We are grateful for this. However, I’ve also seen Down’s children with severe intellectual debility and a plethora of serious health problems requiring either around the clock nursing or institutionalization. That’s why I am a big advocate of first trimester testing for the T21 chromosomal defect. Sadly, this often not done or restricted to pregnant women who fit certain criteria.
If asked if we’d do it all over again; if we knew beforehand our daughter had Down syndrome would Polly carry her to term, our answer would likely be yes. The unconditional love and kindness Down syndrome children bring into the world benefit all of us.
That said, I don’t criticize or condemn parents who choose a different path.
Dr. David Tee rips off my content, intermixes my words with another author, as he writes a post that basically says “God right, Bruce wrong.”
Give it a read if you want a good laugh.
https://theologyarchaeology.wordpress.com/2024/12/07/some-people-never-learn/
I can never resist reading Tee’s scribings, nor commenting on them. Several issues arise from this latest rambling, and I’ll mention just a couple that stood out for me. I might say that he immediately alienates more informed readers by his persistent use of the word ‘unintelligent’ with regard to your writing. This is pure ad hominem, and insults readers by insisting they make a judgement to prefer one writing to another. Anyhow he says as follows
“ It has been proven over and over that it is not the woman’s body that is the sole body involved in this issue. It has also been proven that the unborn child does not belong solely to the woman. But unintelligent people continue to propose this same unrealistic and out in left field argument because it supposedly grants them permission to have power and control over others”.
It hasn’t been ‘proven’. To be proved it would have to be a matter of fact giving rise to evidential consideration, and the issue is one of philosophy. Tee does nothing more than lay out a basic fact of biology (of which I have little doubt he is largely ignorant), then try to overlay his personal philosophical conclusions. Ironically his final sentence is an articulation of exactly what he seeks to do to others.
“ Then, no one has a fundamental right to kill a human being. The death penalty is not included here as it is a punishment, not a wanton act to kill something one does not want. The death penalty was instituted by God and no one has the right or authority to get rid of it.”
Here he, for once, recognises that killing people might sometimes be justified, but oh my goodness, what a mess he makes! It’s as though finally he’s woken up to the realisation that morality isn’t as straightforward as he tries to pretend, but doesn’t quite know what to do with the thought. Note the death penalty was instituted by God according to him, which permits its egregious use in practice. The fact that most civilised countries have now largely banned the death penalty says much to Tee’s own inability to understand the source of morality.
He doesn’t seem to realise how ironic he is, in every single rambling, ill-conceived post he makes.
Good, thoughtful post and wonderful comments.
It seems like there are way too many people who have decided that every political election is a “one issue” election and that that issue is abortion. It’s ridiculous to the think that the complexity of politics can be boiled down to a single issue, and even more ridiculous that the issue they pick is abortion, which Bruce so cogently shows is not the state’s business to begin with.
I am fiercely glad that I have the opportunity to parent my special needs child and to witness her grow and change and develop, even though it is harder than anything else I’ve ever done and I get very little rest. At the same time, I recognize that I am not the boss of other people: they get to make their own choices. This is particularly true when a pregnancy endangers a woman’s life. Non-medical strangers shouldn’t get to weigh in on whether or not someone should have a kidney transplant or go on dialysis, nor should they be allowed to make other life-altering decisions for you (tubal ligation, tumor removal, open heart surgery, limb removal, etc.). If the government can rule that you have to carry a baby to term, how long will it be before they are ruling that you to have your stomach stapled because you’re X amount over ideal weight?
As to adoption, I have friends who were adopted as babies and suffered accordingly, and I’m sorry to say: this isn’t the answer. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry which is basically tricking mothers-to-be out of their children and then selling those kids to other people and making a huge profit while looking like the “good” guys. It’s also a scam: those kids often have worse lives than they would have had they remained with their birth moms (although it can go either way). The way in which birth certificates are altered is a giveaway that this isn’t legitimate. The state is colluding with businesses to make a profit, and Child Protective Services is often involved in the trafficking.
Under the present economic system, I agree with Yulya Sevelova, above, that free, reversible vasectomies for all men would be the least dangerous, most effective method of solving the abortion dilemma. If a free or inexpensive sperm-saving method could be offered at the same time, that would be good. If men were not fertile by default, people who were too young, too poor, too sick, too old, and/or too self-involved to raise kids, as well as those who were raped or were clueless (as who isn’t at age 10?) would no longer be (as) at risk for unwanted pregnancies. There would still be some life-endangering pregnancies that would necessitate medical intervention and of course there would still be miscarriages because pregnancy isn’t perfect, but perhaps people could see these for what they are–heartbreaking, personal events–instead of criminalizing the women who have to endure them.
I very much enjoyed reading the original post as well as each of the comments.
Bruce,
Your sentence “While no right is absolute, with few exceptions, each of us has the right to do what we want with our bodies”
I agree 100%.
One question for all readers here, and I am not going to comment regarding any stance I have on abortion because I think we all have our opinions that do not change on that, but…
Why did people who took this same exact stance on not getting a COVID vaccination get blasted and shamed by people who use this same argument to support abortion? My cardiologist recommended I did not get the vaccination and it was my choice. Where did that commonsense reasoning go during the pandemic? Seems like it’s either “my body, my choice” for everyone, or that argument is not valid anywhere. Just food for thought.
JT
JT, I think there is a difference, though in your own case which was determined by medical advice the answer is more nuanced. In short, abortion rights affect (physiologically) just one person. There is no conflated medical issue other than that relating to the individual woman.
Vaccination is entirely different, in that there is much more than risk to the individual. There are two aspects to encouraging as many people as possible to become vaccinated. One is to ensure a rapid reduction of the virus to manageable levels via herd immunity, and the other is to try and protect the vulnerable (in this case including yourself) by ensuring that everyone who is able to be vaccinated can be. As you demonstrate, there are many people who cannot, for medical reasons, be vaccinated, and these people will have been told to isolate as far as practically possible.To allow people simply to refuse to be vaccinated without imposing limitations on their ability to interact with others means that there is additional known risk being introduced to the community, and communities have the right to attempt to ostracise such people.
Hey , Geoff. Thanks for the reply, but I have a few comments in response. First, you say that “abortion rights affect (physiologically) just one person”, but that may not be accurate. If the male participant of the fertilization is aware of the pregnancy, that person is affected as well. Maybe not as much as the female, but affected nonetheless.
Second, you write “Vaccination is entirely different, in that there is much more than risk to the individual.” I would ask how is it different?
The first lines in Bruce’s post read:
Bodily Autonomy: the right to make decisions about your body without coercion or violence. It’s a fundamental human right that allows people to make choices about their health, sexuality, and reproduction.
Either people have a choice, or they don’t. Note that “choices about their health” is the first one in there. You wrote a little later, “To allow people simply to refuse to be vaccinated without imposing limitations on their ability to interact with others means that there is additional known risk being introduced to the community, and communities have the right to attempt to ostracise such people.”
That statement is totally against the idea of Bodily Autonomy. You cannot say that a woman is free to have an abortion because it’s her body without being in agreement that any other person can refuse a vaccination because it’s his/her body. That is a double standard, and I can’t stand that. I am fine with any position people want to take because they have a right to do so, but I really don’t like double standards. If you ever catch me in one, please point it out because I don’t want ever appear that way.
Double standards on abortion have been around a long time. Example being Lacy Peterson in California years ago… They charged the guy with double murder because she was pregnant. Under California law, she could have had an abortion because the fetus is not considered a life yet. How could Scott have been charged with double murder then? It’s a double standard.
My stance on vaccines is pretty simple, I am not anti-vaccine. I take the ones I want, while not taking the ones I do not want. That’s the way it should be. To punish any one in any way for not taking one goes against the same argument used for abortion. We are either free to choose what we want for our own bodies, or we are not. That’s the argument I want to make.
Also, if vaccines truly worked all of the time, the vaccinated individuals need not worry about who is not vaccinated because it wouldn’t affect them. However, as I witnessed with COVID, it didn’t seem to matter in the circle of people I know… Vaccinated or not, we all got it with about the same severity…
You are free to NOT get vaccinated. That said, not getting vaccinated has social costs. Since vaccinations protect us from getting and spreading communicable diseases, not getting vaccinated may result in negative social consequences. For example,parents are free to not have their children vaccinated, but IF their children are going to attend daycare/public school they must be vaccinated. If they don’t want to vaccinate their children their children can’t attend public schools and will have to be homeschooled. (This is not a perfect illustration because the parents’ choice affects the health of their children.)
The issue here is the “social contract” we have with one another. When people gather together in societies they establish, develop, and enforce rules. Without these rules we would have anarchy.
No freedom is absolute, and with every free choice there are consequences. I’m free to drive 100 mph in a 35 mph zone. However, I may receive ticket or end up in jail. Worse, if I hit and kill someone, I could be charged with negligent homicide and imprisoned. This scenario is played out countless times in our daily lives. Actions have consequences.
JT, Bruce summarises any response I might have via his term ‘social contract’. The only point I would like to respond to is as regards those affected by abortion. Yes of course it can impact others, but this is why I used in brackets the term ‘physiologically’.
I posed, online, a parallel argument that draws from real experience.
In our worship group, a young man was in decline, kept alive by dialysis. He desperately needed a kidney.
I was rejected for testing because of health and age. I am often thought to be elderly, possibly because of my advanced number of birthdays.
I asked my doctor to intervene, hoping he might be able to provoke an exception.
He refused until I made my own argument. The young man did not remind me of myself at that age, but he did remind me of the young man I often wished I had been. My physician agreed to at least try on my behalf.
It turned out to be unnecessary. The young man’s step-mother, by some miracle (sorry), turned out to be a match and quickly agreed to be a donor.
My question:
Had she not agreed, should she have been taken captive, restrained, and had a kidney taken involuntarily?
There were many participants in the angry debate, and my question went largely unnoticed except by those who agreed with me.
Thank you, Bruce, for more ably making the case.
Remember what Trump once said about “low-information voters.”
They are exactly the people grandstanding politicians rile up with claims that abortion is “against the Bible.” As Bruce points out, no verse in the Bible explicitly prohibits abortion, simply because it does not specify when life begins.
I am a transgender woman, so I will never become pregnant. However, I have always been concerned with bodily autonomy. If lawmakers can dictate the course of a woman’s pregnancy–even if it means her own death–it’s not a stretch that they can end my life by denying me access to hormones and other substances I need to continue my post-surgery life. It’s also not hard to imagine them forcing people to continue treatment for, say, terminal cancer when those victims would rather live out their lives in peace, free of pain.
Aren’t most sects of Christianity opposed to bodily autonomy/human agency? Isn’t the notion that we’re born under Original Sin, therefore automatically condemned by God to either annihilation or eternal conscious physical torment, unless we fully submit our full selves to God? Thus, in order to be fully our own we’re condemned to termination or torture?
Is it any wonder then that most Christian sects don’t recognize or revere things like consent, agency, bodily autonomy? Though if you’re a man you are grated a little more agency/bodily autonomy because you can’t get pregnant, so there’s definitely an imbalance there.
Just my observation.