Bodily Autonomy Arguments And Arm-Shredding Doctors

A counterexample to the bodily autonomy argument for abortion

I’m generally pro-choice about abortion. I think a fetus is probably not a person in the relevant sense, and that the utility calculus ends up favoring legalizing abortion (I might write a post about that at some point). Generally, when arguing for abortion there are three primary strategies:

1. Shouting slogans;

2. Arguing that the fetus isn’t a person;

3. Arguing that even if the fetus is a person, bodily autonomy considerations give women the right to kill the fetus inside of them.

I find 2 convincing (1 is not convincing, shockingly!). But I am relatively lukewarm on 3. Defenders of 3 will often say that, just as you don’t have to give a blood donation to someone to save their life, especially if doing it required nine months of inconvenience, so too does one have the right to not allow a fetus to use their body at great personal cost for nine months. There’s a whole, complicated dialectic here that I won’t wade into.

But 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.

I can think of maybe two basic responses. The first is biting the bullet that it should be legal to chop off a fetuses arms to end a pregnancy. Problem: that’s obviously false!

The second is to invoke the doing allowing distinction. Perhaps abortion is not killing, but instead just not allowing one to use your body. I’m a bit dubious about this distinction and think that abortion probably counts as a doing, but even if we grant that it’s just an allowing, the argument can go through perfectly well if we slightly modify the case.

The explanation of why abortion is failing to save rather than killing is that abortion just involves removing the fetus from one’s body, such that it will die subsequently rather than killing it. But imagine that there was something comparable for the chopping off the babies arm case. Imagine that there was a procedure that took the baby out of the mother, horribly maimed and mutilated. Suppose that the horrible maiming and mutilation was the consequence of the baby being no longer hooked up to the mother. This still seems like the kind of thing that should be illegal.

I think this case is more probative than other abortion cases because it’s the most similar. Unlike many abortion analogs, it doesn’t involve analogies with lots of cofounders, but instead a case where a person is ending a pregnancy in a way that ends up harming the fetus.

So for this reason, I conclude that abortion isn’t permissible on account of bodily autonomy arguments. It’s permissible for other reasons though!