Bodily Autonomy Arguments are Clearly Successful, Part II: Arm Shredding Doctors

I respond to another objection to bodily autonomy argument.

In the movie Alien, a sentient alien burrowed into its victim’s body to hibernate. Would it be wrong to kill or maim the alien to get it out? I argue that it’s not; Bentham’s reasoning suggests it is.

Bentham’s Bulldog has written an attempt to critique bodily autonomy arguments for abortion rights. I don’t think his objection succeeds, largely because it relies on intuitions that are clearly implausible.

Bentham’s argument relies on a comparison between killing a fetus-person and merely injuring one by amputating an arm. He writes:

…Let’s say that we accept this broad line of reasoning and think that a parent can expel persons from their body, to avoid great personal cost, even if doing so kills the persons in their bodies. If that’s true, then surely if doing so would harm but not kill the persons in their body, then that would be permissible. But problematically, this doesn’t seem permissible. Suppose that there was a procedure by which a woman could expel a fetus from her body by chopping off the fetus’s arm. That seems clearly impermissible! If abortions left fetuses alive but permanently, harmfully crippled, they would seem to be impermissible.

But surely if it’s permissible to kill the fetus in order to end a pregnancy, then it’s permissible to chop off it’s arm to end the pregnancy. After all, chopping off its arm harms it strictly less than killing it. Remember that the defender of the bodily autonomy argument grants that the fetus is a person (often just for the sake of argument)—they just deny that it’s wrong to kill a person who is dependent on your body. And so if you can kill a person who is dependent on your body to end their dependence, then surely you can slice off their arm, just as you can cut off someone’s arm in self-defense if you can kill them in self-defense (assuming both prevent the attack).

The bodily autonomy argument is about legality, not just morality. Even if unplugging from the violinist is immoral, surely it shouldn’t be illegal! But it seems like chopping off the arms of a fetus to end a pregnancy, in ways that leave the child alive but permanently crippled, should be illegal. And so similarly, if the fetus is a person, killing it should be illegal.

Essentially, Bentham doesn’t think it’s moral for a woman to remove an unwanted fetus-person that is inside her body, causing her severe distress, pain, and possibly life-threatening or life-ending complications, because doing so would kill the fetus-person. He doesn’t even think it should be legal for her to seriously harm the fetus-person in the process of removing it from her body, and so, he reasons, removing it by killing it should be illegal too (because killing a person is worse than injuring them). He thinks it’s so self-evident that she shouldn’t be allowed to seriously harm the fetus-person as a means of removing it from her body that he feels he has no need to further justify the point; it’s simply self-evident to him.

I disagree that this is self-evident. In fact, I think you can easily make a simple thought experiment that shows how not-self-evident this is.

Consider a scenario in which a zombie-like illness spreads throughout the population. This illness causes people to go into zombie-like states, but instead of attempting to bite and eat other people, the zombies latch onto their victims’ abdomens and begin a painful, months-long process of burrowing into their victims’ bodies. After 9 months, the zombie will rip open the victim’s genitals in an excruciating, life-threatening, and often permanently damaging process. After this point, the zombie may recover sanity.

In this thought experiment, the victim can remove the zombie at any point. But doing so requires amputating the part of the zombie that has latched onto their body — maybe an arm, maybe a leg, etc. It seems obvious to me that while such a situation might be tragic, it certainly shouldn’t be illegal for the victim to remove the zombie in any way possible. It seems eminently reasonable that the victim should be allowed to kill the zombie, if such an act was necessary to remove it from their body and prevent serious injury at the end of the 9 months. However, if they could remove the zombie merely by ripping off a body part, that would clearly be permissible as well. It doesn’t even seem to me that the zombie would have grounds for any anger or resentment about this decision once they came back to consciousness.

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Why do our intuitions here differ so much? I will offer a simple feminist analysis. In my experience, pro-life advocates (typically but not always men) routinely justify violations of women’s autonomy with regards to abortion by thinking of other situations in which they believe women should also not have bodily autonomy. For example, a recent paper by a male pro-life advocate suggested that women should not be allowed abortions because, he thinks, there are certain situations in which women should be charged with a crime if they fail to breastfeed. And in this particular case, the author justifies restricting autonomy for abortion by imagining of another scenario in which, he thinks, women are not guaranteed autonomy.

Rarely do those who make these comparisons justify the external standard they are applying to abortion. But of course, if such individuals generally believe that women should be forced to sacrifice their bodies to sustain others, it’s not surprising that they immediately conclude that it’s self-evident that women should be forced to sacrifice their bodies in one particular case, regardless of how much suffering those women might endure.

As a comparison, you can imagine someone who says that a gay man should not be allowed to share a locker room with other men on the grounds that he shouldn’t be allowed to share a bathroom with other men either, and sharing a locker room is even more intimate than sharing a bathroom. In this case, it’s the assumption that a gay man shouldn’t share a bathroom with other men that does all the work. If someone doesn’t believe that, then the argument isn’t going to go anywhere.

Of course, feminists appeal to the belief that women should have the same general bodily autonomy rights that men are (usually uncontroversially) assumed to have. We believe the patriarchal assumption that women are uniquely obligated to sacrifice their bodies is wrong. Since these patriarchal assumptions are deeply embedded in our culture, and therefore difficult to consciously parse out, it’s essential to construct thought experiments and analogies that consider equivalent violations of bodily autonomy applied to men, or men and women. The intuitions we derive from those thought experiments are therefore less likely to be biased by cultural attitudes that downplay the seriousness of forcing women to endure violations of their bodily autonomy, alongside severe physical and psychological pain and suffering. That’s why I consider the zombie scenarios to be far more trustworthy as a guide than Bentham’s intuitions about women and fetal amputations.