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.
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.