The Bodily Integrity Argument is NO LONGER VALID!

I have recently gotten many choicers to agree that being a parent allows your children to infringe on some of your rights. Your child infringes on privacy, financial matters, even your ability to move around. All of this they say is fine because these rights somehow aren't as important as that magical right to Bodily Integrity.

Before I go further I would like to say that the right to bodily integrity is very important. Offenses against BI seem especially heinous(remember Sudam Hussein rolling in Kuwaiti citizens on gurneys, draining their blood, and injecting it into his troops?)However, like all rights, there are certain situations that require your rights to be temporarily held at stasis.

The pro-choicers seem to think that by giving birth you consent to parenting(funny, they don't think that having sex consents to pregnancy but we don't expect them to be consistent). They say that unless you sign away your parental rights, you are in charge of the upbringing of your children. With this consent, you also consent to lose certain rights-such as privacy and autonomy-which is acceptable to the choicers because well it just is!

They claim however, that it is different from pregnancy because you are not required to use your body for your children, only your resources. They argue "why should unborn children be given more rights than born children?" Ignoring the fact that young born children are given more rights than older children and adults are given less rights still, let's look at their claim that raising a child CAN NOT infringe on bodily integrity.

They like to claim that bodily integrity is only he physical strain on your body. This conveniently makes it so that things such as quarantine are not an affront to BI because you are not having something actually done to your body, but rather do not have free movement.

However, I came up with a quite plausible scenario covering a situation where Bodily Integrity is infringed upon, and whether you consent or not to this infringement, you have the obligation to the infringer to deliver it to safety.

I will start with the clearest argument and work from there-going in descending order of consent.

Say you are Michel Jackson. You decide that you wish to pick up your child and hang him over a balcony. At this moment you have made it so that your child is completely reliant on your body for his life. You must use your strength, your muscles, your nerve endings, your heart, your lungs-all of your body- to support this child. If you decide to remove your body from his, he will fall to his death and you will be guilty of murder. I suppose this would be akin to purposefully becoming pregnant, and then a few months later deciding to have an abortion.

Next, let's say that you are sitting with your child on your balcony. You are enjoying a lovely, but winding afternoon together. Suddenly, a gust of wind comes knocking you both to the side of the balcony. You catch your child as he dangles off the side of the building. You are again using all of your muscles and strength to keep the child from falling. You are again using all of your organs excessively to keep the child from falling. If you simply decide to withdraw your body from your child, he will fall to his death and you will be responsible for purposefully letting go. This would be akin to having protected sex, becoming pregnant, and aborting. You would be at the least negligent and at the most again murderous to pointedly decide to allow the child to fall because of your wish to remove him from your body.

Now it would be a different situation if he accidentally fell to his death. Though it could be argued you were negligent, most likely it happened for no foreseeable reason and you would not be held liable-this would be akin to a miscarriage.

The final scenario involves you being alone on the balcony. Suddenly someone comes to you and puts a baby in your arms. The baby is then reliant on your body for its life. If you simply decide to withdraw your body, the baby will fall from the balcony to his death. Though you had no part in creating the situation that led to the child coming into your care, here you are and you can not simply drop the child. You must find a safe place to put the child down or find an alternative caregiver. This scenario represents a rape, where though the woman has not consented in any way to the act that will create the child, she has become the caregiver of the child by default and may not simply allow the child to be removed and die.


For those who argue Mcfall Vs Shimp- that we can not be required to give our bodies to save another- surely the jurisdiction of this law would not cover my scenario. If you hang someone dangling over a cliff, thus causing them to become dependent on your body, you can not simply withdraw your body and allow them to die- doing so would be murder.