Recently I came across a post on a social media platform, and what initially caught my attention was an illustration of a skeleton sitting with its legs crossed, and boxed in around its ribcage was a tinier skeleton, upside down, waiting to be born, with the words “Is it really just your body?” written above and below the illustration. So I read the post that commented on the picture.
The one who had posted the picture added a comment to it saying, “’My body, my choice’ only makes sense when someone else’s life isn’t at stake.”
The rebuttal was long and very informative and quite impressive, so I’ll post it here.
“Fun fact: If my younger sister was in a car accident and desperately needed a blood transfusion to live, and I was the only person on Earth who could donate blood to save her, and though donating blood is a relatively easy, safe, and quick procedure no one can force me to give blood. Yes, even to save the life of a fully grown person, it would be ILLEGAL to FORCE me to donate blood if I didn’t want to.
See, we have this concept called ‘bodily autonomy.’ It’s this… cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon.
Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy.
To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy or 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died.
You’re asking people who can become pregnant to accept less bodily autonomy than we grant to dead bodies.”
There was no other reply that I could see on the post, but honestly, this was enough. So now I would like to dissect this piece by piece because it is absolutely absurd.
First, it is greatly alarming that we do, in fact, need consent from a dead body before we extract life-saving organs. But I understand that. Not everyone wants to save lives, and so they don’t choose to be an organ donor. I really do understand that, though it casts the dead in such a crude light.
It’s true that no one can force you to give up your bodily autonomy, but that’s just not how we are created. We are not designed to want to extinguish life, so we sin instead. That is when we want to do wrong, to pull the life of someone who never had the chance to use his or her own bodily autonomy and how it is to be used.
And on the chance that I do feel that all stages of a fetus are life, it is still, as you said, "desperately unethical" to want me to move my stance to defend the murder of someone who never even had the chance to speak for himself. And on the chance that I don’t, it’s wrong for someone else.
And what is even more incredible on top of this point is that its truth. It’s preached in the Bible from Paul to the church at Corinth in I Corinthians 8, and if you are going to compare pregnancy to donating blood in a life-threatening situation on the grounds of bodily autonomy, then I can absolutely tell you why it’s wrong as according to the Gentiles who ate the meat sacrificed to idols. Even those Gentiles who did not realize they were doing wrong stood corrected because it was a stumbling block for their brothers and sisters with differing views of the world. According to the ESV, Paul even reminded them, “We are no better off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” Paul understood what one could do with a body, but still just asked, Why would you?
In addition to that point, in a court of law, if a pregnant woman is murdered, the murderer is charged with double homicide. Because two lives were taken, especially for the 23 states in America that have determined that fetal homicide can occur from consummation to birth. Simple as that.
In addition to that point, abortion is not for you, and so you are not supposed to feel pain. The fetus, on the other hand, is ripped from its carrier, and while I cannot speak for the pain of an unborn child, I imagine that it’s unbearable. Unfortunately, until we start deciding that life is life is life is life is life, we will never realize.
I have never seen pregnancy cast in such a light as this one, and so I just wonder why you just don’t get pregnant in the first place. I understand that maybe my views on the matter of sex are different than yours, but I know how pregnancy occurs, and so I know that it is preventable. Like we learned in high school sex ed, the best way to prevent pregnancy and STDs are to abstain from sex. In any situation, if you do not want a consequence to occur, DO NOT DO THE THING THAT WILL CAUSE THE CONSEQUENCE.
But my main issue with this post is that it is such a slap in the face. For you to give up your unborn child in the harshest way possible is a hard slap in the face to the ones that cannot have children. And I cannot stop hearing their prayers, and I am moved by them. And now I hope you hear that and you give them the chance to care for the child you cannot keep.
I understand why abortion was created, and I even see how it has its purpose because pregnancy sometimes goes wrong, and in order to save the mother, the fetus has to be dissolved. It does. But the next time you defend the bodily autonomy of a pregnant women, remember that you are in favor of killing off the bodily autonomy of the human inside her.
