Vice President Kamala Harris, a possible Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden, is known for her advocacy of abortion rights. I think she’s basically right on this issue. But she and many others ignore the reality that the bodily autonomy rationale for abortion rights also justifies repealing a wide range of other restrictions on people’s rights to control their own bodies. If you truly believe in the principle of “my body, my choice,” then the influence goes far beyond this issue. Washington post Columnist Monica Hesse recently highlighted an episode in Harris’ career that illustrates the problem:
Look, almost everything you need to know about Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy can be found in her 2018 campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh ) summed up in 19 words spoken during the confirmation hearing.
Harris, then a California senator serving on the Judiciary Committee, spent several minutes trying to determine Kavanaugh’s perspective on the matter. Roe v. Wade. Like nearly every senator who has taken up the topic, she has been mostly unsuccessful…
“Can you think of any law,” she asked the nominees, “that gives the government the power to make decisions about men’s bodies?”
“Yeah,” Cavanaugh replied, frowning. “I’d be happy to answer a more specific question, but—”
“Male and female,” Harris offered with a smile, and when Kavanaugh still expressed confusion, she repeated her 19-word question: “Can you think of any law that gives the government the power to make decisions about men’s bodies?”
Kavanaugh responded: “I’m not thinking about anything right now.”
Kavanaugh was caught off guard here, giving Harris a chance to rebut. But it’s not hard to think of a wide range of laws “giving the government the power to make decisions about men’s bodies.” Some of the restrictions imposed have even more serious consequences than abortion restrictions. I list some of them here and point out the implications of My Body, My Choice for these policies:
1. The organ market should be legalized. For example, people should be free to sell kidneys (perhaps subject to informed consent requirements). If someone wanted to sell a kidney, the response to a prohibitionist should be: “You can never tell her what to do with her damn body.” Your kidney is part of your body, and the decision to sell should be yours. As an added bonus, legalizing such sales would save thousands of lives.
2. Laws prohibiting prostitution should be repealed. They absolutely restrict people’s freedom to control their own bodies (including prostitutes and their clients). A prostitute’s body belongs to her, and using it for prostitution is her choice. Prostitution bans also limit clients’ bodily autonomy. Therefore, we should reject laws that punish them while freeing the prostitutes themselves. “Clients” have as much ownership over their own bodies as prostitutes do. The consensual sex you have with your body should be your choice.
3. The war on drugs should be abolished. all. It’s not just about banning marijuana. The whole purpose is to limit the kinds of substances you can put into your body. What you put into your body should be your choice. And, like the organ sales ban, the war on drugs has harmed large numbers of people both inside the United States and abroad (such as the Philippines and Mexico).
4. The government should not try to control people’s diet through “sin taxes,” limits on soda consumption, and other similar regulations. The goal here is also to limit what we put into our bodies. If this leads to increased government spending on health care, the right solution is to limit subsidies, not limit bodily autonomy.
5. Draft registration, compulsory jury service, and all other forms of compulsory service should be abolished (if already in effect) or removed from the political agenda (if merely proposed). All these policies actually take away people’s bodies. What you do with your body should be your choice.
6. We should legalize and use challenge trials to test new vaccines against deadly diseases. The resulting early authorization of a Covid-19 vaccine may have saved thousands of lives. If we allow the use of challenge trials in the future, it could save even more….
8. People should be allowed to receive experimental medical treatments that are not approved by government regulatory agencies. This is especially true if the treatment has a good chance of saving people from death or serious illness.
With the exception of mandatory draft registration, which remains limited to men, these policies restrict both women and men. But they still severely limit bodily autonomy, including that of men. Some of these measures—notably the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved organ market and medical bans—actually resulted in large numbers of deaths.
Furthermore, most other issues are easier to deal with than abortion, and anti-abortionists at least have a legitimate argument that restrictions are needed to protect the lives of innocent people who don’t consent to abortion. I generally agree with the pro-life side of this issue. But the moral status of the fetus makes abortion a relatively difficult issue. By comparison, most other restrictions on bodily autonomy—including the war on drugs and bans on organ markets—are paternalistic in nature. They violate the bodily autonomy of adults, allegedly for their own benefit.
Elsewhere, I have explained why efforts to distinguish these other situations are either misguided or could justify abortion bans, or both. For example, the argument that bodily autonomy may be limited when payments are involved, or when people trade in part out of poverty, could also be used to justify broad abortion restrictions.
However, with rare exceptions, such as her laudable advocacy for marijuana legalization, Harris supports most other policies that limit bodily autonomy. She doesn’t seem concerned that they “give the government the power to make decisions about…the body.” In this respect, she is not unusual. Most other mainstream politicians take a similar stance.
I’m not politically naive. The obvious reason Harris and many other political leaders take conflicting positions on the issue of bodily autonomy is that abortion rights are widely popular, while most other bodily autonomy issues are either less salient, less popular, or both It’s both. Supporting abortion on the abortion issue is likely to help Harris win over key swing voters. Supporting abortion on organ markets or drugs other than marijuana probably won’t. It’s likely to hurt.
Right-wing politicians are also often inconsistent on the issue of bodily autonomy. They also prioritize political expediency.
I don’t expect Harris and most other politicians to take a more consistent stance anytime soon. But I hope that drawing attention to these contradictions might lead more people to think about the broader implications of the bodily autonomy argument. The government should really stop controlling people’s bodies. On this, Kamala Harris is more right than she cares to admit.
