by David Balashinsky
There is no right more important than the right of bodily self-ownership. I cannot conceive of a right that is even a close second. Without a territorial boundary that demarcates one's entire body as belonging exclusively to oneself and prohibiting all others from trespassing on it or restricting one's control over it in any way, liberty means nothing. Without the right to exercise sole authority over one's body, full personhood is impossible. (It should go without saying that when I refer to "personhood," I am speaking about persons who actually have been born - not zygotes, embryos or fetuses.) Bodily self-ownership is the starting point of personal liberty. Or, as William O. Douglas put it, "The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
Because I have always had a healthy contempt for authority, I am biased toward personal liberty. At the same time, I recognize that ours is a quintessentially social species. Just as individuals have rights, groups of individuals, acting together, also have rights. That is particularly true when the group in question is a society or a nation. In that case, group rights are especially compelling when they are legitimately exercised in pursuit of the public good. I believe that the guiding principle of any rational and just political system, therefore, should be maximizing personal liberty while simultaneously maximizing the public good.
These two ideals - personal liberty and the public good - exist in equilibrium. An increase of one often entails a decrease in the other and, yet, both are necessary. We routinely sacrifice some of our personal liberties for the public good. The entire concept of laws - which mostly limit what individuals are allowed to do but also sometimes compel us to do things we otherwise might not - is based on this principle. A law that prevents an individual from driving drunk is one example of laws that limit our personal liberties. A law against smoking in a restaurant is another. Likewise, laws against public spitting or urination. Some laws compel us to do things; military conscription is an example of this. Other laws are conditional, imposing obligations on us as a condition of being permitted to engage in certain activities. Obtaining a valid license before practicing medicine or nursing or physical therapy is an example of a conditional regulation. No one is obliged to work in healthcare but, if one chooses to work in healthcare, one must accept the conditions under which she or he may be permitted to do so. Completing the required degree program and getting that license is one of these conditions. Abiding by a code of ethics is another. Another is getting vaccinated so that one doesn't spread a highly contagious and deadly disease to one's patients and colleagues.
While both concepts - personal liberty and the public good - represent goods in and of themselves, both also have the potential to be misused, or weaponized. For example, claims on behalf of the public good - typically made by governments - can be and are used to justify abridging individual liberties. This is often what occurs when repressive governments prohibit public demonstrations or other forms of expression that are critical of the government. The rationale typically provided is that it is for the public good - usually to maintain "public order" - despite the fact that curtailments of individual rights almost never have anything to do with the public good but, rather, are imposed in order to preserve the power of the ruling party in government. Lately, there has been a discouraging and frightening increase in this sort of authoritarianism and repression around the world, from Hong Kong to Belarus and beyond. This is even happening in our own country as more and more Republican-controlled state legislatures enact statutes criminalizing public protests.
But just as the claim of the public good can be used to curtail individuals' civil liberties and justify harm to individuals, the claim of personal liberty can be used to justify or excuse harm to society and harm to other individuals. Until recently, the gun-rights lobby demonstrated probably the most extreme example of this phenomenon. Believers in an individual's absolute right to own any and all kinds of weapons are not concerned in the least by the harm to others and to others' rights that necessarily ensues from an unlimited, "personal-liberty" right to own military-grade weapons with high-capacity magazines.
A more recent example of the misuse of the claim of personal liberty is the refusal by many Americans (mostly Republicans, it turns out) to get any of the Covid-19 vaccines that have been proven safe, effective, are widely available and absolutely free. As a result, the Covid pandemic rages on in the United States, with deaths now surpassing 700,000. Had every American, who could have done so, done his civic duty by getting vaccinated, the pandemic likely would be behind us now and life and the economy would have returned to normal.
It may not be surprising to see antisocial behavior on the part of those who condemn virtually anything that benefits society as "Socialism!" (they use the word as a pejorative because, apparently, they regard anything that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people as an assault on their individual liberties). What is surprising, however, and disconcerting - and I speak as someone who has worked directly with patients in hospitals for more than 20 years - is the refusal even by some healthcare workers to get vaccinated. As a result of their intransigence, New York and several others states have recently had to institute a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. In response to this mandate, some of these opponents (and others) have appropriated the phrase, My Body - My Choice. To me, this represents a new low in the history of those whose rights aren't being violated appropriating the discourse of those whose are. This is either a shrewd if transparent tactic or just plain persecution envy. We see this in the Men's Rights Movement which, although there certainly are kernels of truth in what it has to say about sex discrimination, is based on the manifestly false premise that it is boys and men, not girls and women, who are, in fact, more often victimized and systematically oppressed. Claiming persecution also has become a favorite tactic of Christian Conservatives and Evangelicals.
Invoking My Body - My Choice in support of anti-science, antisocial, anti-vaccine obstinacy is a misappropriation of the phrase in several important ways but what is particularly objectionable is the insensitivity that it shows toward those for whom the phrase has real meaning. As is widely recognized, My Body - My Choice has been the battle-cry of the abortion-rights movement for at least the past half century. There is a reason for this. It encapsulates the fundamental issues raised by abortion: bodily self-ownership and the exclusive right of the individual, as the owner of that body, to exercise her own choices about it. Every human being must be free to chart her or his own course in life and to control her or his own destiny. Above all, every human being has a fundamental right to exercise absolute ownership of her or his body. For girls and women, that necessarily and unquestionably entails the right to terminate a pregnancy.1
It also necessarily entails the right to bodily integrity which is why, although its use in this context is not as widely familiar, My Body - My Choice also has been taken up by the genital-autonomy movement. It is frequently phrased as His Body - His Choice in recognition of the fact that, whereas genital cutting of girls is illegal and rare in the United States, genital cutting of boys is still legal and widespread.2 For this reason, the genital-autonomy movement here necessarily advocates on behalf of the right of boys not to be subjected to non-therapeutic circumcision. Despite the unequal legal status of girls and boys insofar as the right to genital integrity is concerned (one of those truths about which men's-rights activists happen to be right), or rather, because of it, I prefer the universality of My Body - My Choice. Taking sex out of the equation emphasizes that growing up with one's genitals intact and unharmed is a human right.3
The sex-neutral My Body - My Choice also emphasizes that the right to abortion and the right to genital integrity stand on the same ethical and philosophical foundation: the principle that every individual is born with an innate right of bodily self-ownership. It is the denial of this right, and specifically in these contexts - the profoundly significant and life-altering human-rights violations that are forced childbirth and involuntary circumcision - to which the phrase My Body - My Choice is an appropriate response. It is not a catchall for every law and regulation to which those who are irrationally jealous of their personal liberty might object. There simply is no comparison between either compulsory childbirth or forced genital cutting and being expected, as a condition of employment in healthcare, to get vaccinated against a deadly disease in the middle of a pandemic.
Invoking My Body - My Choice in opposition to something as benign (not to mention positively beneficial) as the Covid vaccine is a misappropriation of this phrase, then, in part because it trivializes it. In sharp contrast to the Covid-vaccine mandate, whether we are speaking of preventing girls and women from obtaining timely and safe abortions or whether we are speaking of genital cutting, when an individual is deprived of her or his right of bodily self-ownership in either of these two ways, real harm ensues.
A girl or woman who, against her will, is forced by the state (or, under a provision of SB8 in Texas, by any private citizen in the United States who wants to score ten grand) to undergo the ordeal of a pregnancy and childbirth has no remedy available that can undo the harm that will have been done to her. Her life will be irrevocably changed. If she keeps the child, doing so will have major ramifications for her education, her employability, her financial stability and economic independence and her ability to choose to have a family when she is ready to. It will affect every almost aspect of her personal life, her social life and her professional life. Even if her child is adopted, the girl or woman who bore her will have gone through not just the trauma of forced pregnancy but the additional trauma of giving up a now, fully formed human being who is her offspring. Conversely, if she is forced to obtain an illegal abortion, she runs a considerable risk of medical complications and serious injury including sepsis, hemorrhage, sterility and death, to say nothing of the potential legal sanctions. Pregnancy and childbirth, themselves, pose much greater risks to woman's health and life than abortion does, and those risks increase significantly for younger women and girls. Beyond all this is the affront to personal dignity and autonomy - the negation of one's full personhood - that is an inevitable part of being denied the right to make one's own reproductive decisions and the right to exercise exclusive control over one's own body.
What is getting vaccinated
against Covid-19 in comparison to any of this? The most common effects of the available vaccines are not dying or getting seriously ill. More importantly, a vaccinated healthcare worker is much less likely to spread Covid-19 to others. Needlessly infecting one's fellow healthcare workers (to say nothing of one's patients), besides causing them harm and being, therefore, unethical on its face, also results in a further depletion of already critically understaffed hospitals.
As with forced childbirth, in the case of forced circumcision there is no remedy. Amputation of the prepuce is irreversible - it can never be undone and its harms are life-altering and life-lasting. Non-therapeutic male circumcision removes the primary sensory structure of the penis. As a result, those who are subjected to this surgery in infancy or childhood can never know what intercourse is supposed to feel like. They are permanently prevented from experiencing the degree of sexual intimacy and bonding - the shared, mutual sensuality - that is only possible when both partners have fully intact genitals. If this were not enough, as with any surgery, circumcision subjects the victim to a range of risks and complications, from meatal stenosis to excessive scarring to complete loss of the penis, to sepsis, hemorrhage and even death. Also, as with any invasive surgery, non-therapeutic circumcision necessarily subjects the victim to pain. Beyond all this is the affront to personal dignity and autonomy - the negation of one's full personhood - that is an inevitable part of being denied the right to make one's own decisions about one's sexuality and the right to decide for oneself which parts of one's body one is permitted to keep and which parts get cut off.
Again, what is a vaccine mandate, as a condition of employment, in comparison to any of this?
Another crucial distinction between the vaccine mandate and either
forced childbirth or involuntary circumcision is that the vaccine
mandate has a rational, reasonable and justifiable
public-health objective. In contrast, there is no justifiable public-health
objective in denying women the right to abortion or in subjecting male minors to involuntary circumcision. Not only are the public-health claims in support of neonatal circumcision - namely a reduction in risk for transmission of STIs - not supported by the evidence but what evidence there is now actually points in the opposite direction.
Of course, the most significant difference between forced childbirth or forced circumcision and the vaccine mandate (and this is a difference not of degree but of kind) is that - the label mandate notwithstanding - no healthcare worker is being forced against her or his will to get vaccinated. The mandate is being instituted simply as a condition of employment. Healthcare workers who do not want to get vaccinated remain free to choose not to do so. They simply are being required to forego, as a consequence of exercising that choice, the
privilege of working in healthcare. They may not like that choice, but it is still a choice. That is fundamentally different from denying someone access to abortion and it is fundamentally different from subjecting someone to genital cutting without consent - both of which deny the victim any choice in what happens to her or his body.
In addition, the choice for healthcare workers that the vaccine mandate actually allows them to make is not between bodily autonomy and a forfeiture of bodily autonomy. It is between retaining one's job at the cost of a relatively small degree of one's bodily autonomy and retaining one's absolute bodily autonomy at the cost of one's job. Even that is still a choice. Giving up one's job - even one's profession, if it comes to it - is no small thing, and I am not minimizing it in the least. But one's job doesn't even begin to compare in importance to one's body. We routinely accept conditions of employment, precisely because they are undertaken voluntarily, that we would never accept if they were imposed on our bodies without our consent. That is the difference between forced childbirth and genital cutting as opposed to the vaccine mandate as a condition of employment for healthcare workers. It is the difference between the fundamental right to own one's body and the everyday compromises we all make in order to hold down a job. And, while everyone may be entitled to a job, not everyone is entitled to a job in healthcare. That is because working in healthcare is a privilege - not a right. Bodily autonomy, on the other hand, including the right to abortion and the right to grow up with one's genitals intact, is a right - not a privilege.
1. It seems strange that the right to terminate a pregnancy is not explicitly and universally recognized as a fundamental human right and that that right has not been formally codified. And, yet, even here, in the U.S.A. - a nation that cherishes the ideal of personal liberty - women's and girls' right to own and control their own bodies is under relentless assault, is now widely and significantly curtailed throughout much of the nation and the constitutional right itself, as recognized a half century ago in Roe v. Wade, is hanging by a thread. (The Senate can remedy this by passing the Women's Health Protection Act. The House did so last month.)
2. It also seems strange that the right not to have part of one's genitals cut off without consent is not explicitly and universally recognized as a fundamental and universal human right. And yet, here we are in 2021 and 3,000 times every day in the United States an infant boy is subjected to a traumatic and totally unnecessary genital surgery for no other reason than that the practice has become a self-perpetuating cultural norm. Worldwide, at least 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting (FGC) and more than one billion boys and men have been subjected to male genital cutting (MGC). It is not known how many intersex individuals are subjected to genital cutting every year.
3. It is a paradox that abortion restrictions and involuntary
circumcision are both so alike and yet so different. Feminists cite the
unequal effects of abortion restrictions - because they apply to
(biological) girls and women only - as an example of systemic,
sex-based discrimination. MRAs, for their part, cite the practice of
male genital cutting (MGC) - hence the unequal effects of anti-FGM
statutes because they protect girls but not boys from genital cutting -
as an example of systemic, sex-based discrimination that affects only
boys and men. Both are right and it is perplexing that feminists and MRAs have not generally made common cause with one another on the principle of bodily
autonomy. They should, because, in theory, at least, their shared belief in bodily autonomy ought to make them natural allies.
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