Among the most popular arguments for the morality of abortion is an appeal to what ethicists call self-ownership: women own their bodies, and are allowed to use them as they want, provided they don’t violate the rights of others. Since women own their bodies, they have a right to decide how their bodies are used. The philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson, made the point with a famous thought experiment:
You wake up to find yourself back to back in bed with a famous violinist. The people who have abducted you—members of the Society of Music Lovers—inform you the famous violinist is sick and needs the use of your kidneys to filter his blood for months to survive, and that you’re the only one with kidney’s compatible with his blood type. Are you morally obligated to stay, and let the violinist use your kidneys? The answer seems to be clearly no: you own your body, and thus you’re allowed to use it as you like. It may make you a jerk to unplug, but you’ve done nothing morally wrong: you have the right, in virtue of owning your own body, to refrain from helping the violinist.
The self-ownership argument underlies catchphrases we often hear in the abortion debate: ‘my body, my choice’ is the most famous of them. Women have the right to choose what to do with a pregnancy because they own their bodies. The thought experiment above is meant to block a basic objection to the morality of abortion, namely that a fetus is a human being, and thus it has the right to life, just like anyone else. (We are presuming, of course, that humans have things like rights; we’ll bracket that off for the sake of argument). The violinist thought experiment is meant to show that even if the fetus is a human being with the right to life, it still doesn’t follow it would be wrong to abort it, on this argument: after all, the violinist is a human being with a right to life too, yet we don’t think the violinist has a right to use our kidneys without consent.
Few defenders of the abortion, who appeal to self-ownership to justify their stance, realize that bodily self-ownership justifies freedom of speech too: everyone should be free to express their opinions and ideas without retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction—unless, of course, the speech incites violence—since this is just another use of the bodies they own. If women have the right to terminate their pregnancy since fetuses use their bodies to survive, they thus have a right to use their speech as they see fit too: we lack the right to control women’s speech, just as we lack the right to control their bodies. One’s self-ownership rights, in other words, logically extends beyond what someone does with their reproductive abilities, to their capacities in general.
Unfortunately, some folks believe that we should curtail freedom of speech to protect members of minority and marginalized groups: words can hurt and hurt badly; verbal abuse can produce long-lasting psychological scars. As some critics argue about the logic of free speech (as happen on campus, but the point here generalizes):
This logic expects members of marginalized groups to debate their very humanity. As a queer faculty member, it means I am expected to engage in a discussion about the validity of my identity: whether it is real, whether it might be symptomatic of demonic possession or perhaps a mental illness. Students and faculty of color, similarly, are expected to debate the reality of their experiences and their right to equitable systems.
While there is a point here, we must acknowledge the same logic applies to aborting a fetus and unplugging from the violinist: both actions may harm someone, yet this fact doesn’t justify trying to control women or their reproductive capacities on the pro-choice perspective. The broader point is that we should really think of our moral beliefs as forming a kind of web: what we believe on one issue like, say, the morality of abortion, has logical implications for what we can (consistently) believe on other issues like, say, freedom of expression. If one has a right to unplug from the violinist or terminate a pregnancy, regardless of consequences to the violinist and fetus respectively, the same holds of speech: the mere fact that one’s speech may harm someone isn’t enough to justify the claim that morally we should refrain from offensive speech. The overall point here—that self-ownership applies to more than abortion rights—highlights the web-like nature of beliefs. As the philosopher, W. V. Quine observed, about the nature of belief:
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.
The same point applies to moral beliefs: if we think limiting abortion rights would be wrong as it would violate a woman’s right to use her body as she chooses, provided it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others, since she morally isn’t required to allow the violinist or a fetus to use her body without her consent, it looks like we are thus committed to freedom of expression as a right that also derives from bodily self-ownership—at least to the extent that our speech isn’t used to trample on others’ rights. And if critics argue that we should curtail free expression to prevent harm to others, it is hard to see how they can consistently preserve their views on reproductive freedom by appeal to bodily self-ownership. And finally: even if one holds abortion is morally impermissible, the point here is just to highlight that the self-ownership argument for abortion applies to speech too.
It reminds me of some uncommon wisdom from Miley Cyrus:
It's our party we can do what we want to
It's our house we can love who we want to
It's our song we can sing if we want to
/It's my mouth I can say what I want to/
Say yeah, yeah, yeah, ehh
(emphasis added).