Without Body Autonomy Freedom is Theoretical

What Do Abortion, Prostitution, Porn, and Human Rights Have in Common?

It always amazes me that the same people who will blush and sputter in modesty when confronted with a tampon, condom, or diarrhea commercial are surprisingly comfortable talking about other people’s sex lives. And genitals. And what they assume gets done with those genitals. My guess is that these people, who sexologist Dr. Carol Queen has referred to as “absexuals,” spend a lot of time thinking about sex. An unhealthy amount of time from an unhealthy perspective.

Abortion is on the mind of most everyone who watches the news right now, what with the Supreme Court of the United States set to declare it a non-Constitutionally guaranteed right in June because it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the document. You know, just like the filibuster wasn’t mentioned. Or women voting. Or renters voting, for that matter. Or POC and white people marrying one another. Or LGBTQ people being allowed to fucking live openly without being hounded by moral absolutists. Yet only one of the things I listed is being vigorously defended. Guess which one it is.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m a Constitutional scholar. We had one of those for President and one political party made fun of and insulted him. Our respect for intelligent or educated people is erratic at best. When you add dark skin or a uterus to the mix the reaction can get even less civilized. But I have an opinion and a weekly blog to share it on, so I’m going to do precisely that.

Without the right to control the major decisions of our lives we are not adults. We are not, if you will, free. Yes, there are limits to what we’re allowed to do legally. The morality of laws, particularly specific laws, can easily be debated. And the right of a born woman vs. the right of the most primitive elements of human life coalescing within her body to have a superior claim on decision making has been debated although only one of them is capable of making a decision or holding an opinion. My born woman opinion is that there was no decision more influential to my entire life’s path than whether I would have a child.

I got lucky. In spite of some sexual experiences that we’ll just call unfortunate during an era that had never heard of safer sex, I never became pregnant. But I have known women whose fortunes were different. A few did well. Most did not. I have also known women whose wanted pregnancies ended in abortion due to gross fetal abnormality, another thing that the anticipated SCOTUS overturning of Roe vs. Wade would deny. After all, by the time you realize your baby doesn’t have a major organ, you’re often in that dreaded “late-stage” that gets hyped by the political and religious right as a special kind of selfish bitch evil.

What’s especially ironic, aggravating, stupid, insulting is that the same people who hold these views tend to also be opposed to forms of sexuality that are not conducive to contraception. Lesbian? Not on their watch! Gay man? Unclean! Using contraceptives? Harlot! Hell, I know anti-abortion fanatics who don’t think that women who are incapable of conceiving should be sexual for the sole reason that there’s no risk of pregnancy. How is this logical? Why are we so afraid of pleasure?

This vilification of pleasure and insistence that it’s not protected under the Constitution is nothing new, so perhaps it is an American tradition. But, like a number of American traditions, it needs to stop. Life is too short and pleasure too fleeting to deny ourselves the opportunity to dip into that glorious mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well and drink deep.

It shouldn’t be a radical notion that we have the right to make decisions about our bodies and how they affect our lives, both present and future. I can’t legally be hooked up to a machine that saves my next-door neighbor’s life against my will. Why on earth would it be all right to tell me that a being growing inside of my body has the right to demand the right to risk my health, impact my ability to generate income, and essentially take control, making me a secondary concern in my own life and my own body.

It's hardly a surprise that the same forces that see a woman’s body as the property of moral forces greater than her own conscience don’t limit themselves to whether she carries a pregnancy to term. The fear and loathing that the anti-abortion movement has for pleasure include sex workers, whether they work the streets or have a camera in their home office. The cis men and transfolk who do such work are either ignored or held beneath contempt. It’s not as sexy to “save” a cis male or trans sex worker as it is to “save” a cis female one.

You’d almost think the anti-body autonomy movement didn’t value the concept of consent. Oh, wait! It doesn’t!

And there we have the core of the issue: consent. It is a basic human right, regardless of what some white guys who owned black people and didn’t think their wives should be allowed to vote put on a piece of paper more than 200 years ago.

The whole point of that document being written was that those who broke from Britain no longer consented to its rule. We wanted to be free to murder Native Americans, forcibly convert their children, and build railroads on the backs of freed slaves and underpaid Chinese.

It’s possible that abortion and contraception will ultimately be saved in the courts by a religious freedom defense. It seems to be the only thing that holds any meaning to the right, however fake I personally think its outrage is. After all, not all religions, not even all sects of Christianity, consider abortion to be murder or a fetus to be an ensouled human being.

Why should an outdated, unscientific, and minority religious view determine the fates of most of the world’s population? And why must “religious freedom” always be code for narrowing the number of people allowed to be free?