'My body, my choice' is a slogan, so let's take it seriously for once

A slogan is a very small argument wearing a very large hat. It fits on a sign, a T-shirt and the side of a bus, which is exactly why nobody ever checks what is underneath the hat. "My body, my choice" is among the most effective of the genre. It is four words, it rhymes in spirit, and it contains the whole case for one side of the abortion debate.

So let us do something unusual in modern politics. Let us take the slogan seriously. Not sneer at it, not shout over it, but lift the hat and look. I think you will find an argument worth respecting, and a gap in it large enough to drive a Supreme Court through.

Where the slogan came from

The phrase belongs to the women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, when activists argued that women had been denied control over their own bodies by laws written entirely by men. Books and pamphlets of the period, such as the women's health manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in the early 1970s, made the case that medicine and law had treated women's bodies as property of someone else. The phrase "my body, my choice" appeared on signs at abortion-rights marches and became a standard chant. I will not pretend to name its first speaker, because I do not know who it was, and slogans are like folk songs in that way.

The slogan did not start as a joke, and it did not start as an attempt to deceive. It started as a claim about consent and control. A woman had been told, for generations, that the law could compel her in matters of her own person. The slogan was an answer to that history.

I want to give the movement that credit up front. There was a real grievance, and a conservative who cannot see it is not seeing clearly.

The strongest argument behind it

Let me state the autonomy argument the way its best defenders would state it, because it is much stronger than the four words.

The American legal tradition protects bodily integrity with unusual force. In Union Pacific Railway Co. v. Botsford (1891), the Supreme Court wrote that no right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law. That sentence is not a progressive invention. It is the common law.

From that principle, defenders draw an argument in three steps.

1. The law does not generally compel anyone to use his body to keep another person alive. You cannot be forced to donate blood, a kidney or bone marrow, even if a life depends on it and even if you are the only match. A Pennsylvania court declined to order a man to donate bone marrow to his dying cousin in a well-known 1978 case, McFall v. Shimp. The judge called the refusal morally indefensible, yet reasoned that forcing the donation would defeat the sanctity of the individual.
2. Pregnancy, the argument continues, is an intimate and prolonged use of a woman's body. If the law will not compel a bone-marrow donation to save a life, it cannot compel a woman to sustain another for nine months.
3. Therefore, even if the unborn child is a person with a right to life, that right does not include a right to use the mother's body against her will.

This is the heart of the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous violinist essay, published in 1971, and it is the version that thoughtful pro-choice writers prefer to the slogan. It does not deny that the child is a human being. It argues that personhood is beside the point. the famous violinist argument for abortion, and why it never fit the case takes that argument apart in detail.

I want you to notice something about this argument. It is not what the slogan says. The slogan says "my body." The argument says "my body, even if another body is involved." Those are different claims, and the slogan quietly depends on the first.

The second body

Now the gap. The slogan says "my body," and the question the entire debate turns on is whether there is only one body.

Here is the problem in plain terms. Consider a different sign: "My body, my choice" at a protest against a vaccine mandate. During the pandemic, protesters used the same four words to oppose requirements to be vaccinated, and many of the people who cheered the slogan in one setting mocked it in the other. I am not telling you who was right on the vaccines, and I am not making any medical claim. I am pointing out that a slogan which can be carried by both sides in two different fights is not doing the work its fans think it does. What decides each case is a separate question: whose rights are at stake, and who else is affected by the choice?

In the abortion debate, that second question is the whole ball game. If the unborn child is not a distinct human being, then the choice affects only the woman, and "my body, my choice" is a complete argument. If the unborn child is a distinct human being, then the choice affects two, and the slogan skips the question it needs to answer.

I argue that the child is a distinct human being, for reasons that do not depend on religion. The embryo is a living organism of the human species. It is genetically distinct from its mother. It is not a part of her body in the sense that a kidney or an appendix is a part, because it has its own developmental trajectory, directed from within toward the mature form of the same organism. You can disagree about what moral status that organism has, and thoughtful people do. But you cannot get to "my body only" without first answering that question, and the slogan treats it as already answered.

That is why the phrase is a slogan rather than an argument: it assumes its conclusion. A sign that said "My body, my choice, and there is no one else involved" would be honest, and every passerby would immediately ask the right question.

A joke worth taking one step further

Let me do something I enjoy, which is to follow an idea to the next step and see what happens.

If "my body, my choice" is a complete principle, then it should settle every case where choices touch a body. Does a parent's choice about a newborn count as "my body"? No, of course not; once the child is born, nobody thinks the parent's choices about the child fall under the parent's body. Why not? Because the child is not the parent's body. The child is another person.

So the principle everyone accepts after birth is the same one the pro-life side asks us to apply before it: the question is not whose body the child occupies, it is whether the child is a person. A slogan that stops being useful the moment a baby is delivered was never about bodies at all. It was about when the baby begins to count.

And that, I would remind everyone, is exactly what the Court argued about in the first place. Dred Scott, Roe and the danger of a Court deciding who counts as a person looks at how the same question has been answered, and mis-answered, from the bench.

The argument in numbered form

Here is the rebuttal in order, with each step labeled so that you can say where you get off.

1. The slogan is a claim about bodily autonomy, and bodily autonomy is a serious principle in American law.
2. The principle protects a person from being compelled to use his body for another's benefit, but it does not authorize a person to destroy another human being.
3. Whether abortion falls under the second description depends on whether the unborn child is a human being with a right to life.
4. The slogan does not address that question, and so it cannot settle the dispute.
5. The best defenders of abortion rights know this, which is why they have turned to arguments such as the violinist, which grants the child's personhood for the sake of argument.
6. Those arguments depend on a distinction between killing and declining to sustain, and that distinction is contested, because abortion in many cases involves actively ending a life rather than withdrawing support.

I will say plainly that step six is where the real philosophical argument lives. It is a hard one, and I would not claim it ends the debate. The point is that the debate is there, not in the slogan.

How the words are chosen

Part of what gives the slogan its force is the vocabulary that surrounds it, and that includes the vocabulary of the press. Newsrooms publish style guides, and those guides make decisions about the words used for each side of this issue.

The Associated Press Stylebook, for example, as reported in coverage of its December 2022 update, tells reporters to use the terms "abortion rights" and "anti-abortion" and to avoid "pro-life" and "pro-choice" except in the formal names of organizations or direct quotations. Each side has its preferred terms, and the choice of words is not neutral. "Anti-abortion" defines a movement by what it opposes, while "abortion rights" defines the other movement by what it supports. I am not accusing any editor of bad faith. Every guide has to pick something, and every pick tilts a little.

What I would ask a reader to do is notice. When you see a story, ask which words are used for the participants and for the child, and which are used for the procedure. Notice what is called a "pregnancy" and what is called a "fetus" or a "baby," and when. The point is not that one set of words is wicked. It is that a reader who knows the words are chosen is harder to steer. The AP Stylebook Changed a Phrase in 2013 and the Coverage Changed With It describes how one stylebook decision changed the language of coverage on a different subject, and why newsrooms cover believers like a tribe they have never met looks at a related habit.

Those who defend the slogan are entitled to the same scrutiny of their own side's language. Conservatives have slogans too, and some of ours are as thin as the one we are examining.

The strongest objection, answered

The best objection, I think, is the one that comes from the woman herself rather than from the philosophy. It goes: "You can argue about the second body all day, but I am the one who carries the pregnancy. I am the one whose health, career, and life are affected. You are asking me to bear a burden that nobody can bear for me. Do not lecture me about personhood."

That objection deserves a serious answer, not a rebuttal in numbered points. So here is an answer in plain words.

The burden is real. A pregnancy is not a small thing, and a pregnancy that comes at a hard time, in a hard situation, with little support, is a heavy load. Any honest pro-life position has to begin by saying so, and it has to be willing to share the load. That means supporting pregnancy centers, adoption, maternity homes, paid leave debates, help with medical costs, and the many private and church charities that do this work every day. A pro-life argument that cares for the child and offers nothing to the mother is only half an argument.

But I would add this. The weight of a burden does not by itself determine whether another person's life can be ended to relieve it. We accept that principle in nearly every other area of the law. It is the reason a parent cannot abandon a toddler on the grounds that parenting is hard. It is the reason that great hardship is an argument for more help, not for a different answer to the question about who counts.

I would also say that a person making the objection should be treated with respect, not as an opponent to be defeated. She is in the debate because she is living the consequences. The courtesy owed to her is real.

The courtesy owed

That brings me to manners, which conservatives sometimes lose in the heat of the fight. Most people on the other side of this issue are not in favor of anything cruel. They hold their view because they care about women's freedom, about the dangers of coerced pregnancy, about people who have faced terrible circumstances. They have a moral vision, and it is not a stupid one. It is incomplete, as I have argued, because it does not deal with the second body, but incomplete is not the same as malicious.

If we want to persuade, we have to start by acknowledging what is true in what they say. The grievance behind the slogan was real. The principle of bodily integrity is real. The burden of pregnancy is real. A pro-life argument that begins by granting all three is far more likely to be heard than one that begins by sneering at the sign.

A republic's discussion of its hardest question should be conducted by people who can tell the difference between a slogan and an argument, and who are willing to keep the argument going after the slogan has been shown to be incomplete. For the broader constitutional question of who decides, see After Dobbs, should pro-lifers seek a national law or win state by state?.

The case in brief

1. "My body, my choice" grew out of the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s and responds to a real history of women being denied control over their own persons.
2. Its strongest form is a legal argument about bodily integrity, from Botsford (1891) to the refusal to compel organ or marrow donation, and it does not depend on denying that the child is a human being.
3. The slogan itself assumes the one thing in dispute, which is whether a second human body is involved, and a principle that stops working at the moment of birth was never only about bodies.
4. Style guides and word choices shape how the question is presented, and readers who notice them are harder to steer.
5. The burden of pregnancy is real, which is a reason to offer more help to mothers and a reason to treat people on the other side with courtesy.

What you can do: find a pregnancy resource center, adoption agency or maternity home in your own community, and ask what it needs, whether volunteers, supplies or money.