The above tweet is from Scott Adams, the famed creator of the Dilbert comic strip. In the tweet, Mr. Adams appeals to a rationale to morally justify abortion that can be stated as: my body, my choice. The underlying idea is that because women own their bodies — e.g., I own my hand in the sense that it is distinct from me, and mine to use — they alone get to decide whether a fetus occupies it for several trimesters.
‘My Body, My Choice’ and the Famous Violinist
The highlighted part of the tweet — the primary focus of this post — has a number of interesting, and mostly unacknowledged, philosophical implications. To put the point simply: the ‘my body, my choice’ (bodily self-ownership) rationale for abortion has implications that those who champion abortion rights may not like. Before exploring those implications, though, we should explore this moral rationale. The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson applied this rationale to the morality of abortion,
You wake up … and find yourself back-to-back in bed with…a famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you – we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’ Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. […] All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body …’. I imagine you would regard this as outrageous.
Thomson’s basic argument is that because one owns their own body, in a deep and important sense, then as a moral default, they get to decide what happens to it, barring special conditions (e.g., using one’s hands to wantonly strangle others). In the case of pregnancy—so the argument holds—one has a right to abort a fetus since that fetus requires the mother’s permission to occupy her body. This moral rationale, widely used by abortion defenders, has several largely ignored, and perhaps unpalatable, implications.
1. ‘My Body, My Choice’ and Funding the Welfare State
It appears that requiring people to fund the welfare state (e.g. food stamps; housing subsidies) through their tax dollars violates the ‘my body, my choice’ moral rationale. Consider that many people must pay taxes if they want to earn a living or consume anything. And those tax dollars must be paid using labor from the body of the taxpayer. Whether someone works in construction, childcare, or writing computer code, they are using their body to earn the money required of them to pay tax dollars to support those who, for whatever reason, cannot take care of themselves.
Readers may wonder here why I am focused on taxes that pay for the welfare state, and not taxes more generally. There are two basic reasons. The first is that one could argue that generic taxes sometimes fund stuff that benefits the taxpayer like bridges, roads, and a working justice system. The second is that forcing some people to help others for their own sake (where those paying the taxes do not benefit) against their will potentially violates the ‘my body, my choice’ rationale for abortion—just as requiring you to stay plugged into the violinist merely for the sake of the violinist would violate your right to bodily self-ownership.
2. ‘My Body, My Choice’ and (Would Be) Father’s Rights
If women have the right to decide what happens to their bodies, or how their bodies are used, then that would apply to men too. So if women have the right to terminate their pregnancy, thereby canceling their maternal duties, then it would appear that men have the a similar right to cancel their rights and duties as fathers. Of course there are some differences here — one involves abortion, the other formal forfeiture of rights—but they use a similar rationale: just as one cannot morally force women to use their bodies against their will to become mothers, one cannot morally force men to work, using their bodies, to support a child they do not want. As Steven Hales argues,
However, the father, having participated in conception, cannot escape the future duties he will have toward the child. The father can decide that he cannot afford another child, that he is not psychologically prepared to be a parent, that a child would hinder the lifestyle he wishes to pursue, and so on, to no avail. He is completely subject to the decisions of the mother. If she decides to have the child, she thereby ensures that the father has certain duties; duties that it is impossible for him to avoid. Even more, the mother is solely in charge: If she wants to have an abortion and the father does not want her to, she may anyway. If she does not want to have an abortion and the father does want her to, it is permissible for her to refuse to have one. If there is any conflict between the mother and the father here, the mother's wishes win out.
And Hales concludes,
[the] intentions and desires of the father before the birth of his child are in fact relevant to his duty to provide for the welfare of his children. If the mother can escape future duties to her progeny via the mechanism of abortion, the father also can escape future duties to his progeny via the mechanism of refusal.
The difficulty for those who use the ‘my body, my choice’ (self-ownership) rationale is to consistently explain why women have the right to abortion, but men lack the right of refusal with regard to parental rights. There may be a relevant difference here, but it is not immediately clear what that difference is.
3. ‘My Body, My Choice’ and Freedom of Speech
If women have the right to terminate a pregnancy on the basis of ‘my body, my choice’ (bodily self-ownership), then this rationale extends to freedom of speech too. After all, freedom of speech is just another case of someone using their body how they choose. Freedom to speak one’s mind is simply a natural extension of using one’s body as one chooses. To put the point negatively: if one can abort a fetus from their body on the basis of ‘my body, my choice,’ then there is no reason to think that one cannot speak their mind for similar reason too. As I argue in a popular philosophy piece,
[Everyone] should be free to express their views and ideas without retaliation, censorship or legal sanction, except perhaps if the speech incites impending violence – producing speech that conveys one’s idea is, after all, just another instance of someone exercising their right to bodily self-ownership. If women have the right to terminate their pregnancy because foetuses must use their bodies to survive, they have a right to speak as they see fit too: we lack the right to control women’s speech, just as we cannot control their reproduction, since both activities are simply an exercise of bodily self-ownership.
And then I conclude that,
[If] one has the right to an abortion, on the basis of bodily self-ownership, then one has the right to flutter one’s vocal cords to express ideas. Or, to express the point in the form of a catchphrase: my body, my speech.
The ‘my body, my choice’ rationale has implications for the morality of funding the welfare state, father’s rights, and freedom of speech. It is also morally risky.
4. ‘My Body, My Choice’ and Moral Risk
Whatever position one holds in the ethics of abortion debate—pro, con, somewhere in the middle—the point remains that having an abortion is morally risky. That is to say: to have an abortion risks doing something immoral. The claim is not that abortion is wrong, but that it might be. Even if one finds a number of arguments for their position to be highly compelling, ethical thinking is hard to get right. As Dan Moller explains,
[The] main reason for supposing there is a non-negligible possibility of error isn’t the sheer existence of anti-abortion arguments. It is rather that the subject matter involved is the sort of thing it is all too easy for people like us to be mistaken about; abstruse moral reasoning involving far-out cases and complex principles is something we find very difficult and are disposed to get wrong reasonably often.
Many issues in philosophy, and moral philosophy specifically, are hard to adjudicate. This is perhaps why so many people think of ethics as subjective or relative—figuring out the right answers to complex ethical problems is incredibly hard, and it is too easy to make mistakes. This factor could explain why there are so many deep-seated disagreements in moral philosophy. The fact that so few people appear to even consider moral risk on the issue of abortion is as discouraging as it is strange.
The overall point here is that our moral beliefs form a kind of web: what we believe on one issue, like the morality of abortion, constrain what we can (consistently) believe on other issues, like freedom of expression or father’s rights. The point is to highlight the web-like nature of moral beliefs. As W. V. Quine observed,
Implication is what makes our system of beliefs cohere. If we see that a sentence is implied by sentences that we believe true, we are obliged to believe it true as well, or else change our minds about one or another of the sentences that jointly implied it. If we see that the negation of some sentence is implied by sentences that we believe true, we are obliged to disbelieve that sentence or else change our minds about one of the others. Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
Mr. Adams and others who comment on the morality of abortion should keep the web like nature of our moral beliefs in mind. If they did, they would see that their views on abortion and bodily self-ownership have far-reaching moral implications that they may dislike or outright (and inconsistently) reject.
This post raised a whole bundle of questions for me. Sometimes I feel like expecting myself to maintain coherent beliefs is akin to a WWI fighter pilot expecting chivalry in air combat. Similarly to the pilot, I find it difficult to reconcile this expectation with the chaotic reality on the ground. Are there circumstances in which we can, should, or must accept incoherence? How do we navigate a discursive environment where participants routinely disregard the obligation to maintain coherence? In addition to those questions, if we grant that coherence is a necessary good, how much cognitive bandwidth should a person be prepared to expend for its maintenance? Are there diminishing returns?