NOW members during apro-abortion demonstration on March 1, 1986. One sign reads: Our bodies, our choice, our right.
A pro-abortion demonstration on March 1, 1986.Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images
  • People against vaccine and mask mandates argue that they impose on a person's bodily autonomy.

  • The cry of "my body, my choice" was derived from the abortion-rights battles of Wade.

  • The people against vaccine and mask mandates are encouraging the demise of abortion rights.

The leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would end abortion has been met with approval by many conservatives who supported the idea of personal choice.

The justices were urged to move ahead with the decision by Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona.

While railing against vaccine mandates last June, he said that they mean nothing. Your body is no longer your choice.

Anti-vaxxers, vaccine skeptics, and anti-maskers have all used bodily autonomy as an argument.

The cause ofbodily autonomy has been marshaled by leading anti-vaccine campaigners and conspiracy theorists over and over again. The Center for Countering Digital Hate dubbed them the "Disinformation Dozen". Tenpenny called abortion "slaughter".

The abortion-rights movement gained prominence due to the concept of personal control over what medical choices one takes. It was applied to the decision of whether or not to have a child.

When railing against vaccine mandates, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the issue was whether or not someone would want to have something put into their body.

One of the most restrictive abortion bills in the US was imposed by Abbott in May of that year.

The Houston Chronicle reported that he called on the Supreme Court to follow through with the draft opinion.

The issues are so important that the conceptual inconsistency would be laughable.

He said that the community was fine with limiting reproductive freedom, for example, asking someone to wear a mask during a pandemic. Huh?

A woman holds a placard a protest against vaccine mandates in August 2021 in Edmonton, Canada.Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

This view was mirrored and inverted by the vaccine skeptics.

You might be an evil asshole if you support a national vaccine mandate, but shout my body, my choice! On Tuesday, he said that he could not contain his excitement at the Supreme Court decision.

Elizabeth made the same point in a Telegram post on the day of the leak.

She said that the people who said "my body my choice" are the same people who said "we have to bevaccinated in order to go to our jobs or our children to go to school."

The irony is that the exact reverse is true, according to Prof. Tina Rulli, an ethicist at the University of California's philosophy department.

Competing claims

In a co-authored paper, Rulli and Campbell compared the claims of bodily rights brought about by the vaccine-skeptic and pro-life movements.

Even if one accepts the premise that a fetus has the same human rights as a legal person, the logic of my body, my choice, is weaker when marshaled against vaccine mandates rather than forced birth.

The paper argued that the death of a fetus is a serious, intentional, moral decision made towards an identifiable being. They wrote that an unvaccinated person who caused someone else's death may never learn of it, and most likely didn't intend it.

The professors wrote that getting jabbed is less inconvenient than carrying on and giving a lifetime of care to a child, and that the harms caused to others by refusing to be vaccinations can extend to many people.

Pro-life advocates who believe in thesanctity of life should have a very low tolerance for actions that pose a substantial risk of death to others when the costs of avoiding such risks are minimal.

If you have a vaccine mandate, you can lose your job or attend school.

She said that abortion restrictions are true physical imposements and that pregnant people are required to stay that way and give birth even if they are at risk.

Is that correct? Being an anti-vaxxer who cares about bodily autonomy while also being pro-life makes no sense.

The original article is on Business Insider.