No One Has the Right to Use Your Body Against Your Will, Even to Save Their Life or the Life of Another

You could save lives right now if you wanted to. You could donate blood, bone marrow, a kidney, a lung, or part of your liver, and you would be fine. People will die because you are not doing those things. On average, 22 people in the U.S. die each day – nearly one an hour – for want of a donated organ. Up to eighty percent of those patients – about 17 people a day – die because they need a kidney transplant. Now, you only need one kidney to survive. Donating that kidney would be painful, expensive, and could alter your life and health prospects dramatically. It could even kill you eventually, say if you develop kidney failure or cancer in your remaining kidney later. But you would have saved a life.

What about blood? Americans need blood transfusions at a rate of about 4.5 million people each year, with the largest group being cancer patients, followed by transplant patients. One blood donation can save up to three lives, but only about 25% of Americans eligible to donate blood actually do it. Blood donation is pretty painless, your body will just make more blood, and if everyone that was eligible donated every two months (the most frequently you can donate) there would be no shortage and there would be no risk of people dying for want of a blood transfusion. But 75% of eligible donors don’t donate.

Or bone marrow? Forty-four thousand Americans are diagnosed with leukemia each year, including 3,500 children. Roughly half the adults and 700 of the children - well over twenty-thousand people - will die, denied the major chance for survival for want of a bone marrow donor. Registering as a donor to see if you’re a match requires only a cheek swab in the privacy of your own home. If you’re a match, 80% of donations are done by way of a blood draw – the same process as blood donation, because all they need are stem cells already present in your blood. For the 20% that require invasive collection, it only takes about three weeks to fully recover from bone marrow donation, and the side effects are minimal: mild pain, fatigue, headache, bruising at the incision site. Only about 2% of the American population register as potential bone marrow donors.

Or lungs? You can live with one lung. How about livers? A couple thousand people die each year waiting for liver transplants. The liver regenerates itself. You can donate a portion of your liver and save a life.

So, knowing that thousands upon thousands of people die every year because their fellow Americans refuse to undergo mostly simple, low risk procedures, why doesn’t the government force healthy people to donate kidneys, or livers, or even blood and bone marrow? Because it would be ridiculous, right? To make someone risk their health, in some instances their very life, to save someone else? To forcibly prioritize someone else’s life above theirs? People donate blood, bone marrow, and organs voluntarily all the time. But they shouldn’t be forced to do that, to give up their bodily autonomy to save someone else’s life, should they?

In the United States, you cannot be forced to donate any portion of your body, even after death. Even though thousands of people – including infants and children - suffer and die for want of those donations every year.

Unless you are a woman capable of producing a child.

The maternal death rate in the U.S. is the highest in the developed world. Severe maternal morbidity, defined as “unexpected outcomes of labor or delivery that have serious short- or long-term health impacts” affects 60,000 women in the U.S. annually. Both maternal deaths and severe morbidity are on the rise.

The question of when life begins is a red herring, a distraction. What matters is that nobody has the right to use your body against your will, even to save their life or the life of another person. So even if an embryo is a person at conception, that doesn’t justify forcing a woman to incubate it against her will. Whether to bring a baby into the world is a life altering decision, and it can literally be a life-and-death decision. I can’t help but think that if American men were at risk of being forced to sacrifice their health, their opportunities, their careers, their freedom, and their lives in order to bring babies into the world, this wouldn’t even be an issue. There would simply be no question that abortion would be legal, because men’s lives are valued in American society. Women’s lives, however, are, by and large, disposable. If that weren’t true, there wouldn’t be a ten year old girl in Ohio right now being denied an abortion. But somehow the State of Ohio decrees that it is necessary and just that a child be forced to produce the child of her rapist.

Abortion is healthcare. A woman’s body is her own, and no on else’s.