For a man, the safest thing to do when a debate abortion comes up is to run in the opposite direction in fear. However, life is not always about safety, so with the beginning of the next sentence, you will have a discourse on abortion from what many will consider the least legitimate of all sources: a virile, (half)-white male.
I want to comment on one specific part of the debate that troubles me the most. It is the argument that says that abortion is justified because a woman can do whatever she wants with her body. This is the kind of argument most often reflected in T-shirts, etc. saying "This is not government property," or "My body = my choice!", or even better, "Get your laws off my body!"
At first glance, it is a very appealing argument, as it is simple and the idea that we have the freedom to do whatever we want with our bodies seems pretty innate. However, in the end, it is very deficient, and while the grounds for abortion being legal may come of other strong arguments, it may never come from bodily autonomy.
Firstly, we need to establish that the government can tell us what to do in general, as it would be silly to argue about the government telling us what to do with our bodies if it cannot tell us what to do at all.
The government and its lawmakers are constantly telling us what to do, and we seem to have readily acceded this power to them. The government tells us we cannot steal, murder, rape, pillage, vandalize, commit fraud, etc. In fact, it seems that the government tells us what to do with respect to various "moral" transgressions.
Furthermore, in all of these cases, the government, in an indirect way, is telling us what to do with out bodies- we cannot use our bodies to take other's people stuff, we cannot use our bodies to heft implements that will end other people's lives and we cannot use our bodies to cause vandalism.
For, you see, law regulates actions alone -- practically everything that law seeks to control can be expressed as an action. (There are certain laws that proscribe the way things are organized, like our government, but that is irrelevant now.) Furthermore, all of these actions are done with our body, or caused by something we can do with our bodily, like driving a car too fast, or operating a crane under the influence.
On the other end, the government does not tell us what to think -- we can vividly visualize child molestation, but unless we put that visualization into effect with our hands, we will be free people.
What readily follows is that practically all laws tell us what we can and can't do with our bodies. Right away, if we were to make a general statement "it's my body so it's my right to do whatever I want with it," it would be struck down immediately.
Is it a stretch then, to say that something like abortion can see itself regulated by the government- that the government can pass a law saying that we cannot put a vacuum to our insides and take something out of it? Many readers would say yes, because it is a completely different case, as the action is completely internal, between the mother and her tissues.
However, so far at least we have seen that the government can tell us what to do with our bodies in many cases, and we will have to examine what makes abortion so purportedly special a case that it gets an exemption from this principle.
Most proponents of this argument would say that it is a special case because of the completely internal action idea above. This is like saying that one can smoke pot in a locked room because the smoker is the only one being affected and should have the right to do this as long as he or she keeps it to him or herself. Another argument is that that the fetus is not a human and just a mass of cells the woman can control, or that the fetus is the sole property of the woman and grows there by permission; she can hence kick it out if she wants.
I also will contend that these arguments are flawed, and that "my body = my right" cannot be used to justify abortion in general.
"So where's the rest of this non-legitimate, (half)-white male's column," one may ask. Well, I was lucky enough to get this topic serialized due to its length, so if you care you'll have to clip and save this one and tune in at this time next week to see the next exciting installment.
