Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
Other than the religious, the other question is "when is it ok to impose involuntary servitude and dispense with any claim to bodily autonomy?"
The answer to that is essentially never. If the state can discard an individual's bodily autonomy, no other rights will survive.
No person though is entitled to another person's organs without their consent. Most parents give their lives to save their child. The government can't mandate you do so though. I'm not entitled to my genetic match's kidney even though I'll die without it.
A fetus, even if it was a human life, has no inherent right to live off the flesh of its parent. A parent may allow a fetus to live off its flesh, but the fetus doesn't have an inherent right to do so.
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According to Blacks' Law Dictionary an inherent right is "An obvious guaranteed right just by the fact that one is a human being and not a right granted pursuant to another outside means or source."
So then, how do we apply a notion of autonomy to the human body? A human being inherently perpetuates its species by the union of male and female chromosomes through sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. This is an inherent "right" dictated, in the least, by the ingrained, biologically inherent capability to do so. Some will go beyond the mere biology and say that this is the inherent right and duty of human beings as created by a creator of life.
Without an expression of this inherent right, human beings would not continue to exist.
human bodily autonomy is only meaningful as such when it expresses itself as dictated by the potential of what a human body is not only capable of doing, but by the inherent bodily functions that drives its existence. Bodily autonomy is not merely a tabula rasa of infinite "rights," but an inherent "blueprint" of how a human body must function in order to exist and survive. There is no complete "autonomy" to do what a human being may desire. Human bodies are "trapped" by an internal biological design, a human engine that requires the body to develop through stages of existence in unelectable prescribed ways in which the body has no recourse to resist--if it wishes to continue to exist.
Strictly biological, scientific, human "bodily" autonomy is circumscribed by how the human body must function in order to exist--at least to exist as what we know is human. A pregnant woman's body functions inherently in basic ways that she does not have an ability to control. She has no "inherent right" of bodily autonomy" over what her biological blueprint dictates.
The "inherent right" to "bodily autonomy" that you speak of is not actually inherent. It is a constructed right. It is, as Black's Law Dictionary says, "a right granted pursuant to another outside means or source."
So the discussion, re abortion, is not really about an "inherent" right, but what right(s) a society wishes to create.