Would you mind elaborating on why the right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life? It’s an ethical debate I’ve struggled with, and it would be awesome to have someone else’s perspective. Thank you!!

prochoice-or-gtfo:

Because we have legal precedence of a right to bodily autonomy but not life. People are not forced to donate blood/organs/tissues to save the lives of others, regardless of relationship or reason of need. Parents do not have to donate to children, even though they are the reason those children exist. People needing organ donations are allowed to die on waitlists even though we put millions of perfectly good organs into the ground or crematoriums if the people who had those organs didn’t give consent for them to be taken after death. That’s how much we value bodily autonomy over people’s lives. Those organs literally do nothing but rot in the ground but corpses’ wishes are respected.

Now consider pregnant people who wish to have abortions, who are told that fetuses, a neutral party that doesn’t even know it exists, deserve to be able to gestate without enthusiastic consent. Doesn’t matter if the pregnant person goes into poverty over it. Doesn’t matter if their existing kids suffer. Doesn’t matter if they’re kicked out of school, abused by their families, experience dysphoria, nothing. That fetus deserves to control your body because you dared to have sex. That’s all it takes for people who can get pregnant to have fewer rights than a dead body. That’s how little we value people who can get pregnant and their rights as human beings.

The right to life does not exist. If it did, the world would revolve very differently than it currently does. The “right to life” is a convenient line trotted out to justify the misogynistic oppression and control of pregnant people.

-V