Why We Need a Right to Bodily Autonomy

• In Event: Autonomy and Consent after ‘Roe’ and #MeToo

Abstract

Legal scholars (Goodwin 2022, Goodwin 2020, AAPF 2022) and ethics scholars (Watson 2018) often appeal to a concept of bodily autonomy to argue for expansive reproductive rights for women and, recently, to critique the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe. Yet there are fewer theoretical arguments in defense of a right to bodily autonomy in reproductive decisions which extend beyond the bounds of legal interpretation or ethical argument. This paper is the beginning of a new project to develop a full-throated political defense of a right to bodily autonomy over reproductive decisions. In this paper, I draw on critiques of the idea of the human (e.g. Wynter 1994, Mills 1999, Mignolo 2006) to explore the relationship between autonomy, life, and the human and to evaluate the relationship between a claim to bodily autonomy and the liberal concept of a right to life. I do this for both theoretical and political reasons. The theoretical reason is to explore the extent to which the right to life is a function of man’s rational capacities, to the exclusion of the not-white and the not-man. In the context of reproductive control, legacies of white supremacy and patriarchy persist in the devaluing of the life of a pregnant person, who is at significantly greater medical risk of mortality by undergoing pregnancy than legal, induced abortion (Raymond and Grimes 2012). The devaluing of certain human lives in order to preserve the potential life of an embryo or fetus facilitates the preservation of the political order. The legacies of white supremacy and patriarchy also persist in the medical establishment that ignores and even discriminates against not-white and not-male patients, and especially of women of color (see, for example, Washington and Randall 2023). The political reason to defend a right to bodily autonomy is that the right to life—asserted as an absolute right--is persistently deployed to preclude the claims to bodily autonomy of people who can become pregnant. In several U.S. states (TX, OK SD, AR, and ID), abortion is only permitted when it is necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant person, and no claim to health or autonomy can supersede the apparent absolute right to life of an embryo or fetus. These states ban abortion at “conception,” which means that they hold a right to life of an embryo or fetus as absolute, while a claim to bodily autonomy of a living person is not. For these reasons, I think that a political theory of bodily autonomy can be a vital resource in defending reproductive rights in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Author

• Alisa Kessel, University of Puget Sound