A Kentucky woman Friday filed an emergency class-action lawsuit, asking a Jefferson County judge to allow her to terminate her pregnancy. It’s the first lawsuit of its kind in Kentucky since the state banned nearly all abortions in 2022 and one of the only times nationwide since before Roe v. Wade in 1973 that an adult woman has asked a court to intervene on her behalf and allow her to get an abortion.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but they would counter this argument by simply flipping it: “If you can get an abortion why should I have to get a vaccine?”
And, of course, the logic here is that the vaccine helps you and everyone else because the virus won’t spread as much, and the abortion affects — bodily — just the woman. But that won’t matter to their argument.
Didn’t we cover all this in 2021?
Nobody was ever punished for not getting a vaccine in a way that’s remotely comparable to the punishments women and doctors are threatened with for abortions.
Nobody was ever forced to get a vaccine against their will. Forcing women to give birth against their will is the whole point of abortion laws.
Abortion isn’t contagious. Having one doesn’t put people around you in any kind of risk. Being unvaccinated does greatly increase the likelihood that people around you will get sick.
Vaccine mandates were only a thing in the middle of a pandemic. They’ve all been rolled back since the crisis has gotten under control. Abortion restrictions, OTOH, are not temporary and were not created in response to some special circumstance.
But they didn’t get the vaccine and now these women still can’t get abortions. Maybe if they were forced to get the vaccine they could argue that but they weren’t. There was no law requiring normal citizens to get a vaccine but there is a law now stopping normal citizens from getting an abortion. So it seems the group has won both arguments with conflicting hypocritical information
Utilitarianism sucks. Violating sovereignty is wrong in either case. You can refuse to treat someone with Covid because they didn’t get the vaccine when they had the opportunity to. You can shun the person socially for getting an abortion and reject them from your groups. But you can’t reasonably interfere with their body.
The primary ethical punitive act any individual or group may apply to another is to remove one’s presence from their life. If they survive without you, then that’s fine.
Sovereignty resolves a fuckton of organizational and legal issues. Even with it being fairly implicit in the minds of most, it is a massive foundational issue that underpins any reasoning about rights. When the push for mandatory covid vaccines came along, I knew immediately we were at risk of losing abortion, because body sovereignty was on the line - and without sovereignty, there can be no valid moral community.
And if your community isn’t moral, I will simply make my choices, having an abortion if needed, and choosing to get covid rather than getting a vaccine. If you fight me on it, I’ll fight right back, up to the point that you cease to impose your will on me, or on those I recognize as my community.
If the social contract is compulsory, that is called slavery.
TBF It also affects the baby
Fetus*
So do school shootings, lack of healthcare, lack of parental leave, lack of affordable housing, lack of public funding for education or childcare or anti-vax tendencies.
Are you sure you didn’t misspell “fetus?”
What baby?