Contra Trent Horn On Bodily Autonomy And Abortion

We need to completely shut down conservative Catholic sexual ethics until we figure out what's going on

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Catholic apologist Trent Horn has written an article critiquing bodily-autonomy arguments in favor of abortion: that is, arguments based on the idea that people can do as they like with their own bodies.¹ His counterarguments are atrocious and present a disturbing attitude towards women and sex.

Sovereign Zone

The first argument he addresses is the sovereign zone argument: the idea that people have a right to do what they like with the inside of their bodies.

I can’t think of any other right that is absolute in the way that defenders of the sovereign zone argument claim the right to control one’s body is absolute. No one has an absolute right to free speech; we ban shouting “Fire!” in a crowded building when there is no fire. No one has the absolute right to engage in illegal religious activities under the guise of “freedom of religion.” Laws against illicit drug use, prostitution, selling organs, public urination, and indecent exposure show there is no absolute right to do anything we want with our bodies.

First, “shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded building when there is no fire” is an example which came from a Supreme Court decision criminalizing anti-draft advocacy. I’m really not sure this is the example I’d go for if I were trying to imply that I took rights seriously.

Second, Horn assumes that the people he’s arguing with don’t think that laws against illicit drug use, prostitution, selling organs, public urination, and indecent exposure are violations of your right to bodily autonomy. Many people do! In fact, I myself support the legalization of prostitution, selling organs, at least some indecent exposure, and at least some illegal drug use, in part because I believe in the importance of bodily autonomy. Further, the defenders of these laws often claim that they protect bodily autonomy by (for example) preventing coercion into prostitution or organ-selling. I think this is a dubious argument but they pretty clearly share the value in question.

But, point taken, there is no absolute right. Your bodily-autonomy right to swing your fist ends at my nose and so on. But a right having specific, clear exceptions in particular extreme cases doesn’t mean that any case you happen to name is an exception. You have to present some argument that this case is an exception to the usual rule, or we’re back to criminalizing anti-draft advocacy and calling it free speech.

If it is possible to remove a late-term fetus and keep him alive in an incubator, then, theoretically, if the technology existed, one could take a premature infant from an incubator and transfer him into a woman’s uterus. Nearly everyone agrees that it would be wrong to kill the child in the incubator. But according to the sovereign zone argument, it would not be wrong to kill that child after he was transferred back into the sovereign zone of the womb. It is ridiculous that an infant could be treated like a human being in one location (the incubator) and like disposable property in another (the uterus).

I think abortions past the point of viability are a hard case for the sovereign zone argument. If your sole reason for believing in abortion is the sovereign zone argument, then people have a right to induce labor after 21 weeks and put the newborn in the NICU, but do not have a right to kill the fetus. In practice, abortion after viability is rare and usually caused by health risks to the mother or severe congenital disabilities. So I think people wind up supporting late-term abortion so we can let individuals make these very difficult decisions without the government’s input, even though it doesn’t fall rigorously out of the sovereign zone argument.

On the other hand, if I donate my kidney, and then I got a rogue surgeon to take my kidney out of my recipient and put it back in me like some kind of demented kidney Hokey Pokey, then I would once again get to make the decisions about my kidney, because it is my body. That would be a bizarre thing to do, but so is putting a baby inside the uterus of a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant. No wonder it gets weird results.

Right To Refuse

Now, Horn does accept the common pro-choice intuition that you shouldn’t be legally required to use bits of your body as life support for others. His argument for this is, uh, wild:

In the case of a stranger who will die unless I donate blood or bone marrow, I am not obligated to help him, because I was not involved in how he became ill. But if I caused another person to become dependent on me, then I would owe him assistance.

Here’s an analogy that might help illustrate what I mean. Imagine a replicator machine that can create any kind of object. If I activate the replicator, there is a high chance that the machine will dispense $10,000. There is also a chance that along with the money the machine will dispense a healthy newborn infant. If you could find no one else to care for this child, you would become the guardian or “parent.”

Why? Because you engaged in an act that you knew could create a helpless human being, and now that human being stands in need of your assistance. Abandoning this infant to die would simply never be tolerated…

While the replicator is a science fiction example, we can also use the rare though real example of women who do not know they are pregnant until they give birth. If the autonomist believes that we have no obligation to the children we create, then there is no reason a mother who unexpectedly gives birth to a child in a field could not simply leave the child there.

Horn’s argument implies that, if you find a baby crying in the middle of a field somewhere, and you can’t find anyone besides you to take care of her, you are perfectly justified in abandoning her to die.

Ideally, we want a social system in which all children are raised by people who want to take care of them. Our current system is in many ways horrifically unjust, but contraception, abortion, adoption, and the foster care system mean that we almost always have better alternatives than the “finders keepers” method of caregiver selection. But if the nukes fall, and you find a kid by the side of the road, it’s your job to take care of her! It’s not that if you have sex you have to put up with the consequences of a baby. It’s that all people have a responsibility to take care of the weak and vulnerable.

It also doesn’t work the other way. Let’s say that I assaulted someone so badly that they had kidney damage and needed a new kidney. Should the state force me to donate my kidney against my will? What if I tackled someone very badly while playing football? How negiligent must I be before others have a legal right to my kidney? Is this any way to run a justice system?²

I’ve heard arguments in response to this objection that say engaging in sex doesn’t “cause” pregnancy because not everyone who has sex becomes pregnant. The critic also says that there are many factors outside of a woman’s control that influence whether she becomes pregnant so we can’t say she “caused” a child to come into existence that needs her help when she chose to have sex.

But that is like saying that drinking large quantities of alcohol and driving doesn’t cause pedestrians to be hit by drunk drivers because some people drink and drive and no one gets hurt. Furthermore, there are also factors outside of the driver’s control that affect whether a person gets hit (like whether other people are on the road or not). Therefore, we can’t say drunk drivers cause drunk driving fatalities.

Hogwash.

So, first of all, this argument implies that it’s perfectly fine to have an abortion if you were raped, you got pregnant while a minor, or you otherwise were not informedly consenting to have a child. I’m not sure that Trent Horn means this implication but it sure is there. If he does, I’m glad we share this one point of agreement!

Second, there’s a question of risk. If you drink and drive, you are clearly responsible if you hit a pedestrian. But what if you are a very responsible driver who follows all the rules of the road, but through no fault of your own winds up accidentally hitting a toddler who ran directly into your blind spot and whom you could never have known was there? Are you responsible for hitting the toddler, because you decided to drive a car? I don’t think so. Most actions have a chance—in some extreme circumstance—of causing a tragedy. But if we take appropriate precautions, the risk is low enough, and something goes wrong anyway, it’s fair to say “I’m not responsible for this.”

Contraception has gotten very, very good these days. If you use a Mirena IUD alongside perfectly used condoms³, then you would expect to have one unplanned pregnancy per 250,000 years of use. (Not a typo.) If you use the birth control pill as your only form of contraception and take it every day at the same time, you would expect to have one unplanned pregnancy per one hundred years of use—which doesn’t seem that dissimilar from the risk of a responsible driver accidentally hitting someone.

Perhaps this solves the rape victim problem. After all, a celibate woman who doesn’t use contraception is more likely to get pregnant from rape than a woman who uses a Mirena IUD is to get pregnant from consensual sex. Perhaps everyone who has a uterus is in a perpetual state of being responsible for having a child, since they are so careless as to continue to have one.

Or perhaps when Trent Horn says “sex causes pregnancy,” he doesn’t mean “sex is an act which has thus-and-such probability of having a child.” Perhaps what he means is that sex ought to result in the natural and inevitable outcome of babies, regardless of the medical facts. After all, that’s what sex was originally for! Sure. Just like how, if my son were murdered at a six-year-olds’ karate class, I would shrug and go, “well, fair’s fair, fighting was originally for killing people.”

Organ Use

“But,” says the critic, “What if the traffic victim needs your blood, or your own child needs a bone marrow transplant that you knew would be required before they were conceived? Are you obligated to donate your body in those cases?”

Here is where another important difference arises between pregnancy and these cases. In organ donation cases, I use a part of my body that was not made for the sick person in order to keep him alive. I am resorting to extraordinary means to save him, since the purpose of my kidneys, for example, is to filter my own blood and not anyone else’s. By my withholding the use of my kidneys, the sick person dies. But I am not the cause of his death; I have merely chosen not to save him. Is abortion a similar act of withholding an extraordinary use of an organ?

Even in a nonreligious framework it makes sense to say things like, “The purpose of the heart is to pump blood” or “The purpose of the lungs is to absorb oxygen.” Some people may deny that our organs have any “purpose” or are “for” anything, but I don’t think they would hold that attitude should their own organs become damaged or infected. In order to say an organ isn’t working properly would seem to imply that the organ has a proper way of functioning, or a “purpose” or “end” in its operations that is not being achieved. The uterus’s purpose seems clear: to support the life of an unborn child. Otherwise, why is it even inside the body at all? If the uterus is designed to sustain an unborn child’s life, don’t unborn children have a right to receive nutrition and shelter through the one organ designed to provide them with that ordinary care?

Here is the part where I get suspicious about Trent Horn.

As a practical matter, pregnancy is the only situation where one person’s life depends on the ordinary use of another person’s organs. No one has a horrific pacemaker accident and winds up fused at the chest with someone else with a heart beating for two. We don’t have to accommodate any strongly-held intuitions that in this situation you’re allowed to murder your sudden conjoined twin.

The only things Trent Horn accomplished through bringing up the responsibility argument are:

• Implying that rape survivors and minors can have abortions.

• Implying that it’s fine to leave babies to starve to death in fields if you didn’t give birth to them.

• Showing off his ignorance of modern medical technology.

Why did Trent Horn bring up the responsibility argument?

I know many, many pro-life people who are genuinely concerned with the well-being of fetuses, and I don’t mean this as a smear against pro-life people in general. But the only reason I can figure for why Trent Horn brought the responsibility argument up is that he really, really, really wants to say that women who have sex and don’t want children should be punished with children they don’t want. He wants to say this so bad that he’ll sabotage his own argument to do it. And I think this is… revealing… about how much he cares about children.

To address his actual argument: there are two common viewpoints about how medicine works. One is that medicine is intended to get the human body to a common-sense “healthy,” “functioning” state. The other is that medicine is intended to make a person’s body work the way that that person wants it to, the way that is most conducive to their flourishing.

Most of the time, these two viewpoints recommend the same actions, such as preventing death, pain, and unwanted impairment. But they often come apart. Should doctors try to preserve a person’s life, even if she’d rather die? Is it all right to prescribe contraception, even though it makes your uterus function ‘less well’ in some sense? Can a sports medicine practitioner counsel a young man about how to become the best quarterback he can be, knowing the health risks of football? Is a woman infertile if her reproductive system functions perfectly, but she doesn’t want to have sex with people who can produce sperm? Should trans people be prescribed cross-gender hormones? Is it all right to take amphetamines if you don’t “really” “have” “ADHD” but just have a job as a Senior Regional Manipulator of Tiny Numbers? What kinds of cosmetic surgery should be covered by the taxpayer or insurance company, what kinds paid for privately, and what kinds forbidden outright?

I’m personally a strong proponent of the second idea, but I can respect the first, especially as a way of rationing scarce medical resources. Most people, I think, have sympathies for both positions in different circumstances.

Under both of the popular viewpoints, abortion is a kind of medicine. Abortion is conducive to human flourishing, if a person doesn’t want a child. And pregnancy does interfere with the common-sense health and functioning of the body. Complications of pregnancy can make women very sick or even kill them. The mental-health consequences of an unwanted pregnancy can be severe. And even in the best of cases pregnancy makes you tired and sick and in pain.

Horn, however, doesn’t have either of the popular viewpoints. He’s smuggling in his Catholicism by focusing, not on the desires or health of the pregnant person, but on the functioning of individual organs. This same argument—that what matters, most of all, is whether individual organs are doing what they’re supposed to—is key for the Catholic belief that it is only permissible for men to orgasm inside of an uncontracepted vagina.

But Horn has given those of us who aren’t Catholic no reason to care about the evolutionary purpose of the uterus. The evolutionary purpose of my brain is to think. Does that mean that if someone points a gun to my head and says “three of these four mushrooms are poison, one is edible, and if you don’t eat one of them I’ll shoot you”, I have no valid complaint, since after all edible plant identification is what my brain was designed for?

Perhaps Horn only means to apply his argument in a medical context. But doctors suppress the proper functioning of particular organs for the benefit of the patient all the time. Is it wrong to use a feeding tube because the esophagus was designed to move food to your stomach? Is it wrong to use anesthesia because your nervous system was designed to sense data in the outside world?

Horn’s argument is perilously close to suggesting, not only do we have not have an obligation to donate kidneys, but we have an obligation not to donate kidneys. It all comes down to whether the organ in question is “the kidneys” or “a kidney”—the overall kidney system functions less well, but the individual kidney functions better, because it’s compensating for the loss of its pair. A very reasonable criterion with which to make medical choices!

But Horn isn’t going to say that kidney donation is morally wrong. No, women’s bodies are special. What underlies Horn’s argument is the idea that the purpose of a woman’s body is to get pregnant. Fulfilling her biological destiny is far more important than such trivial matters as her health or wellbeing. Sex ought to result in pregnancy, and if you have sex but don’t want kids you should be punished with babies for being a slut or a bad mom, and if your uterus thinks this is all a reasonable thing to ask of you who gives a shit about your mind.

I have no quarrel with pro-lifers who understand that unwanted pregnancy is awful but don’t want fetuses to die; the world is not obligated to give us easy moral dilemmas. But it’s a very different matter when pro-life people start trying to argue that unwanted pregnancy isn’t that bad and women deserve it anyway for having sex. That is unkind, unempathetic, and disrespectful to women. It’s one thing if it’s some random blogger. But people with these attitudes sometimes wind up in public office with power over women’s reproductive rights—and that’s not okay.

1. He also has one arguing that fetuses have a right to life. I’m not arguing with that one because it would be a retread of this post.

2. Spoiler: Trent Horn addresses this counterargument and it is unsatisfying.

3. Which sounds hard but actually isn’t—the most common cause of condom failure is not wearing one.