Roe v. Wade and Vaccine Mandates

Why overturning Roe v. Wade is bad news for bodily autonomy

So my first thought when I heard the news that the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade was leaked was…Greaaaat…now we’re going to have more strife and division just in time for the midterms.

This whole leak reeks of a theatrical production designed to whip people up into a frenzy in an environment in which we are already extremely divided and angry.

However, I think there’s an important point to be considered when we look at the potential fallout of the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And that is the issue of bodily autonomy.

After the decision was leaked, I went to read comments on various boards and blogs to see what people were saying. I also spoke to a few friends of mine in chat. One of them was truly excited because she is a very loving, kind woman who is very much against abortion. 

Another was a conservative friend of mine (pro-life, mind you) who thought that the whole thing was a manufactured diversion meant to instigate an angry summer of fire.

Other people online felt that the leak was designed to drum up Democratic turnout in the midterms, because they don’t have much else to offer right now other than war, woke, and an aging, senile president. I do think there’s something to this theory.

But the comment that really caught my eye was the following:

It’s not a distraction. It’s the end of the “my body/my choice” argument so that they can medically do anything they want to you. Roll up your sleeve.

Yep. I think this is what it’s really about, and they (the Powers That Be) are willing and more than happy to drop abortion protections on a federal level in order to justify mandating anything that they want to do to our bodies, whether it’s forcing a birth, forcing an abortion, forcing sterilization, or forcing vaccination.

For almost 50 years Roe v. Wade has prevailed…half a century…only to be overturned now when we have vaccine mandates as a major issue?

Sorry, not a coincidence.

We are more at risk of the government violating our bodies now than we ever were in the entire history of the planet.

Now to be clear, I’m not some protofeminist cheering on abortions. I personally think abortion is abhorrent, and at best, bad karma.

I used to be exceptionally pro-choice when I was younger and I regret it now. My biggest fear when I was in college was that I would get pregnant before I was ready and my life would be ruined. Little did I know that the thing that would ruin my life would be that I would never get pregnant or have the kids I always expected to have.

Far too often, young women are terrified into thinking that the worst possible thing to ever happen to them would be an unwanted pregnancy. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m here to tell you, dear younger reader, that you should not fear this so much as fear growing old and alone with terrible regrets.

For these reasons of bodily autonomy, I am technically pro-choice in terms of being against the criminalization of abortion. But I am definitely pro-life in that I believe abortion is an act of violence. If you’ve had an abortion yourself and you still have mixed feelings about it, you might want to skip my next paragraph. It’s harsh.

Put it this way. I believe when you abort your baby, particularly in the later terms, you have basically killed your own child, and your womb has now become a murder scene. Would you want to live in a house where murder had occurred? No. So why would you want to live with a haunted belly? 

I honestly believe that the toll of abortion on women psychologically and spiritually is one of the main reasons why so many Western women are today on antidepressants and suffering from obvious mental illnesses. 

No, abortion is not the only cause. (I’ve certainly dealt with my own mental health issues and I've never had an abortion, thank God.) But I think the entire free-for-all culture that has spawned from abortion, which includes cheap sex, pornography, and a devaluation of chastity, is not healthy for anybody, really.

(And by the way, no, I’m not going to say that men can get pregnant too. If you have decided to become a transman, good for you. But the minute you become pregnant and want to own that, then you should also own the sacred feminine that comes along with it and not just discard it out the window because the terminology is inconvenient to you.)

All that said, I still have to come out on the side of being against the criminalization of abortion. This is because I need to be consistent with my philosophy. My philosophy is the state has no right to tell me what to do with my own body.

And the overturning of Roe v. Wade might negatively impact our ability to fight vaccine mandates.

I’m not suggesting that if you are against vaccine mandates that you need to suddenly flip and become pro-choice, but you need to consider that there is a consistency of argument that will be used against you if the issue turns up.

Both vaccine mandates and abortion share the same arguments as to why they should be banned. On the abortion side, the argument is that the woman does not have a right to abort the pregnancy because the fetus is a human being who has a right to live.

On the vaccine side, we are told that “anti-vaxxers” don’t have a right to say no, because by denying the vaccine they might take away someone else’s life.

Of course, this argument might make more sense if the vaccine in question actually stopped people from getting and spreading the disease, but this isn’t the case with COVID-19 vaccines, is it? But what happens if a really fatal pandemic comes along and we actually had a vaccine that worked? What then? (Read my article, Vaccines: Whose Rights Are More Important?, originally written in 2019, for some ideas.)

Thus, the basic sentiment shared between pro-life and pro-vaccine-mandate arguments is that the government can impinge on somebody’s bodily autonomy if it might mean saving somebody else.

However, with abortion, there’s actually another party involved, and that is the person who is performing the abortion. So when we legalize abortion, we’re not just saying that the individual has a right to bodily autonomy, but that another person has a right to perform the abortions. 

Technically, these are two separate rights, and I could come up with and a law that would say that abortion is not a criminal act, therefore the woman can do whatever she wants with her own body, but that doctors are banned from providing abortions. 

Think about it. Does a person have a right to be certified in doing certain things that impact another person’s body? In order to conduct an abortion, a doctor needs to go through certain type of training, the clinic needs to have certain types of medical devices and procedures in place, and there needs to be some sort of safety surrounding all of this, ostensibly. All of this is regulated in some fashion.

Even under Roe v. Wade, abortion wasn’t a total Wild Wild West, where anybody with a coat hanger could go and help someone else get rid of a child they didn’t want.

However, the focus on protecting Roe v. Wade has led to absurd arguments that requiring abortion doctors to have hospital privileges is somehow removing the bodily autonomy of the woman wanting the abortion. No, it’s not the same thing at all.

And I think this is part of the problem with the left’s unconditional embracing of abortion. They’ve gotten so focused on making sure that the right to abortion is kept intact, that they allow abortion clinics to operate under egregious third world conditions….treating women like cattle and potentially causing death by not having the proper medical staff on site to deal with complications.

The middle ground here is that we can still uphold the right for a person to choose what to do with their own body while coming up with some reasonable regulations to determine how abortion is delivered as a “medical” procedure. 

In other words, I am saying that we should have an inherent right to bodily autonomy, including a right to abort our own baby or to say no to a vaccine.

However, the state is well within its bounds to dictate how and when abortions are performed.

This is a middle ground I’m talking about, but often strict pro-life Republicans don’t think on these terms. All they think is that they want abortion completely banned. They do, on some level, work to reduce the number of abortions by putting restrictions on abortion clinics in the name of health and safety. But these regulations are often perceived as cynical, and perhaps rightly so.

A more moderate position would be to try to reduce the number of abortions and make sure that abortions were very safe and performed under sanitary conditions that support the health of the mother.

Furthermore, we now have technologies that could make abortion completely obsolete. A lot of people scoffed at the idea of a synthetic womb, but really, this is the way to end abortion. If a woman really doesn’t want to have a child, then the child should be transferred to a synthetic womb. Then these pro-life people should put their money where their mouths are and make sure that that child is raised with love and all the things it needs to thrive.

So ultimately, I am not hopeful now that Roe v. Wade might be overturned. I think it’s going to just cause a lot more problems in this country then it will solve. It won’t reduce the number of abortions significantly in the long run, and it will just make people more at each others throats.

Finally, it will give more reason to the government to mandate vaccines if they can mandate carrying a baby, or worse, mandate abortions like they do in China.

For consistency’s sake, I have to stand for bodily autonomy so…as flawed as Roe v. Wade is, and as much as I am not a fan of abortion, I am still extremely concerned by this turn of events, particularly in when it comes to our fight against vaccine mandates.

The timing could not have been worse.

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