The Right’s Bad-Faith Argument About Bodily Autonomy - By David M. Perry

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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The total lack of awareness exhibited by the author regarding his own irony would be amusing if it wasn't so pitiable. He is libertine regarding absolute personal autonomy, and simultaneously pro mask mandate. He vociferously defends a woman's right to abortion, yet is happy to suggest that violators of mask mandates should have their rights rescinded.

It must take a gargantuan effort to suppress the cognitive dissonance.

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Justice Amy Coney Barrett wants to catch us in a trap where either we concede the state’s right to coerce reproduction or we abandon the state’s right to mandate vaccines.

Throughout the pandemic, American conservatives have appropriated the language of the reproductive rights movement as a way to protest disease mitigation measures like masks and vaccines. (Actually, conservatives are using the leftist leftist rhetoric ironically.)

As early as April 2020, people protesting mask mandates appeared around the country holding posters with the slogan “My body, my choice.” The conservative argument attempts to place the left in a bind: If you concede that the government can mandate vaccines, you must concede that the government can criminalize abortions, because bodily autonomy isn’t a core right. (We would agree. Bodily autonomy is not a "core right.")

On the other hand, that means if you demand bodily autonomy for reproduction, you must also grant it to anti-vaxxers. About halfway through the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case from Mississippi that threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the right to legalized abortion in the United States, Justice Amy Coney Barrett mentioned bodily autonomy. She acknowledged that criminalizing abortion is “without question, an infringement on bodily autonomy,” but then noted, “which you know, which we have in other contexts, like vaccines.” In other words, she claimed that if you accept that the state has the power to mandate vaccines, then you can’t fight the criminalization of abortion by invoking bodily autonomy.

But these claims willfully ignore crucial differences. A pregnant person, of course, has the right to the autonomy of their own body, ("Of course?" There is no legal principle of which we are aware that makes it self-evident that a person can do whatever she wants with her body. In fact, quite the opposite. Suicide is illegal. There are helmet laws. Seatbelt laws. Safety regulations. OSHA regulations. FDA regulations.

But of course the author ignores these obvious infringements into personal autonomy because they impede his agitprop.)

which includes the choice of whether to carry a pregnancy to term. (Well now. That's what the Supreme court decided with Roe v. Wade in 1973, isn't it? But the decision wasn't founded on some sort of "...right to the autonomy of their own body...," it was derived from the 14th Amendment, premised on an inferred right to privacy.)

And while the government should not send shock troops into homes to force needles into people’s arms, (Why not? The author makes a summary statement without explaining his reasoning.)

no one has the right to carry a deadly disease into public space and possibly infect the bodies of others, at least not when easy and affordable mitigation tools are at hand. (No one is claiming the right to being in a public space while infected. This is a typical leftist rhetorical technique, reframing or obscuring the opposition position so as to make it seem ridiculous.

The author glosses over the irony. No one has the right to imperil someone with COVID, but a woman possesses absolute bodily autonomy to imperil her unborn baby.)

The right of each individual to bodily autonomy, as I wrote for The Nation during the first year of the Trump administration, is one of my guiding principles. It links so many different kinds of issues, from decriminalizing drug use and sex work to disability rights to trans rights to the right to health care and housing to decarceration and of course most centrally to reproductive rights. (Hmm. The author is a nearly absolute libertine regarding bodily autonomy, with the exception of mask mandates and perhaps forced vaccination?)

Like all abstract principles, it has its limitations, but it’s a concept that can articulate the rights of the individual in an increasingly authoritarian society. (Waaait. What limitations? How are they decided? Is it based on the author's leftist sensibilities, or is there some sort of objective principle that can be invoked? 

The author just lets this crucial point dangle. Those limitations are the very issue he is writing about. Why are some things [like abortion] absolute, while other things [like not wearing masks] not? The author simply punts.

And why is society "increasingly authoritarian?" We have Democrat majorities in both houses and a Democrat in the Whitehouse. Hmm.)

Imani Gandy, (Who?)

the senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group, (A leftist blog formed in 2006. It's nothing more than a leftist website regurgitating agitprop.)

is a lawyer and has been a leading journalist (That means Mountain Man Trails is journalism, too.)

covering reproductive rights and attempts to curtail them for well over a decade. In the aftermath of the Dobbs hearing, she’s been writing about what the right will do after Roe is overturned. She predicts that the GOP will focus on granting a fetus, from conception, the legal rights of a person. (Hmm. If Roe is overturned, the premise will be because the "fetus" is a person. There will be no need for the GOP to pursue this because it will be the principle that negates Roe.)

This, she argues, will criminalize women, especially Black women, (Ah yes. Good, the author didn't overlook a little bit of race-baiting... And, here we have the tacit admission that black babies are disproportionately being aborted. Margaret Sanger would be proud.)

for taking any kind of action—usually taking drugs or medication—that endangers a fetus. (Not terribly likely. However, if the unborn baby is a person, then purposely endangering another person necessarily carries legal implications. Indeed, this is already the case. A mugger who attacks a pregnant woman who subsequently loses her baby will be charged with murder.)

In this context, she told me, the principle of bodily autonomy remains critical.

So if we can’t surrender the principle of bodily autonomy in defending the right to abortion, how do we respond to anti-vaxxers chanting, “My body, my choice,” or Barrett trolling pro-choice America by using the example of vaccine mandates? I am actually very uncomfortable with the civil liberties implications of digital vaccine passports (especially managed by private corporations via an app that tracks you) or mandatory vaccination for all Americans. Instead, a vaccine mandate proposes that you have a choice. Taking the safe mitigation step (obviously virulent anti-vaxxers argue safety, but that’s a different conversation than the one Barrett is invoking) of wearing a mask or getting vaccinated means that your presence in society is not threatening the bodies of others. (But threatening an unborn baby's body is acceptable. Notice how the author studiously avoids this issue.)

Choosing not to mitigate risk to others means you lose your right to participate in certain aspects of society. (No, it doesn't. The author is way too comfortable with the idea of rescinding peoples' rights.

The risk has always been small. The death rate is very low. 

So the author thinks that losing one's rights is a reasonable consequence of imperiling others. That is, he's comfortable with the idea of government taking away rights, unless the right being taken away is the right to kill one's unborn baby.

If we accept the author's argument, then the flu also qualifies. Serving fatty foods. Using fossil fuels. The list is endless if we let the author open this door to government control of our lives.)

There are always trade-offs, but masks and vaccines don’t present a particularly complicated case. In her recent work, Gandy cites five women whose decisions to take a variety of substances into their own bodies (meth, rat poison, abortion pills, cocaine) were treated by the state as crimes against their fetus, including Regina McNight, who “was sentenced to 20 years in prison after using cocaine while pregnant. After being incarcerated for eight years, she was released when the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned her conviction in 2008. The court said her attorney had ignored evidence that her pregnancy loss may not have been linked to cocaine.” During the Dobbs hearing last week, then, Justice Clarence Thomas invoked a similar case, Whitner vs State, while questioning to what extent courts were allowed to criminalize women for endangering fetuses. So the question is clearly on the anti-abortion movement’s mind. Gandy told me, “Personhood and increased criminalization of behaviors while pregnant will mean the government is going to be way more involved in the lives of pregnant people from ‘Were you wearing a seat belt?’ to the doctor says, ‘You need to have a C section.’ So you don’t get to have the natural birth that you want. It’s going to start infecting all areas of life.” (Apparently the slope is actually slippery. But we are at loss to explain why a woman can drink rat poison and not be held accountable to the damage it causes her unborn baby.)

In a famous passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and the Jew, the writer notes that you can’t argue with anti-Semites by pointing out their absurdity: “They know that their remarks are frivolous. They are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.… They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” Similarly, we will never persuade a member of the forced birth movement (Notice the inflamed agitprop.)

to respect the bodily autonomy of a pregnant person through words, logic, or nuance. Pointing out the hypocrisy or logical flaws of a Barrett, or an anti-vaxxer with a sign on the street, will not convince them of their folly. (More irony piling up. The author engages in similar rhetoric but is unaware of his own folly.)

But my arguments about bodily autonomy have never been about persuading the other side but rather about mobilizing the left and helping us locate points of connection. One of my introductions to left-wing politics was doing clinic defense as a college freshman. Now, as a 48-year-old father of an autistic boy with Down syndrome, I’m very focused on disability rights. (Why? Why didn't he just kill his defective baby in the womb? And why now does his post-born child now possess bodily autonomy, and how did that line get drawn?)

One point of connection between these two issues—issues that the American right wing wants to place into conflict—is preservation of bodily autonomy for everyone. (Except anti-vaxxers.)

We make nuanced arguments ("Nuanced arguments?" The author's arrogance is unseemly, considering the vapid commentary he has offered so far.)

about the limits and effects of principles like autonomy to help others to see how their issues connect to our own, drawing the left into overlapping networks of alliance and mutual interest. Ideally, this advances our various causes. When we fail to draw those connections, we leave ourselves open to being set against each other.