Bodily autonomy: A male perspective

It’s a shame that we live in a world where the notion of a woman being entitled the basic human right to bodily autonomy is still somehow a controversial take.

Texas recently passed a bill that bans abortions after 6 weeks and a pro-life organization called Texas Right To Life offered $10,000 cash to any citizen of the state for bringing lawsuits against doctors, abortion clinic staff, Uber drivers, and anyone even remotely complicit in any abortion performed after 6 weeks.

This ghoulish exercise in misogynistic authoritarianism serves as a bleak reminder that we haven’t created a safe world for women to live in if these kinds of headlines can still be a reality, just last year.

We need to talk about bodily autonomy. We have to.

The outrage against these kinds of audacious violations of human rights isn’t nearly as unanimous as it should be.

It’s baffling that we ever thought, for any number of moments, that bodily autonomy could ever be negotiable, debatable, or diminishable – it speaks to our complete misunderstanding of it, conceptually, and it speaks to our failure to empathize.

When it’s not our uterus up for debate, bodily autonomy can seem abstract, I’m sure, since we’re not arguing for ourselves, it’s easy to lose perspective on why it matters.

I don’t have a uterus myself but I can still recognize how terrible it is for factions of people, unrelated to you, prioritizing something inside of you over your own well-being and life. It’s not a reality that should happen to anyone and we need to stop debating bodily autonomy like there’s any validity on the other side of this.

Bodily autonomy is, simply put, the concept where your body, your organs, and all of your bodily resources exclusively belong to you and you alone. No one else is entitled to it in any capacity, for any reason or circumstance. This is a hard fact – immutable and non-negotiable and it extends far beyond just abortion and pregnancy.

Two people can consent to touching each other’s bodies, they can consent to intercourse, and still not be entitled to each other’s bodies.

This might seem confusing but you have to understand that consent and entitlement aren’t the same thing. I can consent to you touching my body. I can consent to you using my body. But I can also withdraw consent, refuse consent, whenever I want, at any point in time, for literally no provided reason or explanation. “I just don’t want to” is a valid reason. You aren’t entitled to my body, you never ever will be, and your access to my body is a function of my continued consent.

And no argument against this is valid.

Your body will never be owed to anyone. You could poison both my kidneys and be solely responsible for me being in critical condition and I still wouldn’t be owed one of your kidneys.

You could be a new parent and deny your new born access to your blood, your bone marrow, and even your organs and you wouldn’t be responsible for its death.

We could be hooked up to a tube facilitating a vein-to-vein blood transfusion and you can decide half way through that you no longer want to give me any more blood and end the transaction right then and there and walk right out of the room even if I don’t have enough blood to survive and you’ve left me hanging.

You can deny your body to anyone imaginable for any reason imaginable, even if they die without your body, even if they will guaranteed perish without the continual support of your bodily resources, and there isn’t an argument in the world that could change the fact that you’re entitled to do that because your body is yours and yours alone.

So why are we allowing exceptions?

How have we mustered the audacity to claim that a woman’s personhood, her status as a human being, can be erased and her bodily autonomy – a right so non-negotiable that it can’t even be compromised or overruled for a minutes-in newborn – can be negotiated against her will for the sake of an embryo that no one else is personally gestating?

We should be ashamed and outraged and angry at this level of audacity. No one has ever stopped being a human being just because they’re pregnant and there’s no excuse for invalidating bodily autonomy just this once and no other time, just for a uterus and no other organ, just for pregnant people and no one else.

We wouldn’t like it if we lost our right to decide what happens to our own bodies so why are we letting governments roll over women’s right to choose for their own bodies?

I have the privilege, as someone without a uterus, of not being directly affected by draconian abortion bans and I will be using that privilege to speak against these blatant human rights violations, these mandates exerting unwarranted control over pregnant people’s decisions for their own bodies.

If you have the same privilege as I do, use it, it costs you little to nothing and it makes all of the difference.

Remember…

Not your body? Not your choice.