Sunday, July 06, 2008

Sovereignity over one's own body is non-negotiable

Period.

It is not like a budget or a farming bill. It is a human right. And from that right comes a lot of things that progressives believe in. When you start messing around and qualifying the right to control one's own body, you start a slide down the slippery slope- into slavery.

So ask yourself if you believe that you have the absolute right to control what happens to your own body? Did you say yes? Good for you. Welcome to the rational world. Did you say that there is a higher power who gets to choose that for you? Okay, do you want God to choose or do you want some dude in Washington to choose? You said God, didn't you? Then why would you allow some dudes in tacky blue suits to interfere with your right to believe in God's divine plan for your physical person?

Bodily autonomy doesn't just affect the obvious things like abortion. If someone can tell you that you can be forced to be a life support system for another person against your will, then they can also tell you that you can be forced to donate an organ to another person against your will. They can also say that you have to take certain drugs or medical treatments against your will. If you're a Jehovas Witness, how would you feel about being forced to give blood? It's the same principle.

And once we give up a tiny bit of autonomy, we give it all up. When we allow laws to be made that govern what we can or cannot do to our own selves, then things like torture become permissible. After all, the basic premise of torture is taking away someone's ability to control their own body.

And when taking away the right to control your own body becomes commonplace and acceptable, you get slavery. You get a class of people who does not have the right to control what happens to their own body.

So when a politician claims that a certain class of people should only have "some control" over their own bodies, that is the top of the slippery slope of slavery for billions of women who would be forced to become brood mares. When that same politician needs to slice and dice up the human right to control your own body, he is trying to make slavery palatable for the masses.

Remember that. You may personally find abortion wrong. But once you take away the right of someone else to control what happens to their own body, you better be willing to offer yourself up as the first new slave. You better be okay with the right to use methods like waterboarding, caning, electrocution, beating, and rape as tools for information gathering. You better teach your daughter that they must submit to the first brute who puts his hands down her panties, she doesn't get bodily autonomy either. You better be okay with having medical treatments forced on you, even if they go against your religion. Think stems cells are unethical? Well you won't get to choose NOT to have them used on you. Are you just anti-pills? Won't that be funny when a strong-arm doctor forces you to take hormone therapy or anti-depressants.

Control of your own body is a non-negotiable human right. You cannot chop it to bits with exceptions for this and qualifications for that.

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