Disturbing.  Discouraging.  Depressing.  Evil.  Pick your adjective, but in its succinctness and utter refusal to acknowledge contrary points of view, an argument that I’ve seen with some mild variation around the Internet recently feels as if, finally, we’ve gotten to the rotten core of a worldview:

Here’s the thing, guys.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter when life begins.

It doesn’t matter whether a fetus is a human being or not.

That entire argument is a red herring, a distraction, a subjective and unwinnable argument that could not matter less.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a fertilized egg, or a fetus, or a baby, or a five year old, or a Nobel Prize winning paediatric oncologist.

NOBODY has the right to use your body, against your will, even to save their life, or the life of another person.

That’s it.

That’s the argument.

You cannot be forced to donate blood, or marrow, or organs, even though thousands die every year, on waiting lists.

They cannot even harvest your organs after your death without your explicit, written, pre-mortem permission.

Denying women the right to abortion means we have less bodily autonomy than a corpose.

Of course, this isn’t really a new argument, as the replies to the above-linked tweet assert, but something about the social media tone makes it feel as if it’s been brought to a fresh level of clarity.  So much can be seen to be wrong in that sharp, peremptory phrasing that one is tempted to throw up one’s hands in despair at finding an entry point that might reach anybody who is so far gone that she or he is unable to see it without guidance.

Perhaps the key point at which distortion enters the logic is with that three-word phrase, “against your will.”  To accept the relevance of this phrase to the abortion argument is to ignore biology that human beings have understood since the dawn of understanding.  In all cases that sexual intercourse is consensual, that act is the expression of will.  It is the invitation.  Even if there is only a one-in-a-thousand chance that somebody will respond to the invitation, it is still being offered.

If you bring life into being, you have a responsibility to the child.  You are her or his mother or father.  Under the logic above, a woman could deliberately bring countless children into the world for the thrill of killing them before they’re born.  Yet only a week or two ago, our nation was contemplating whether Kyle Rittenhouse would have lost his right to self-defense if he could be shown to have provoked others to attack him.

If you don’t have responsibility for lives that you create, then who does?  Here’s where dishonesty appears in the bodily-autonomy argument.  Those who express it in these terms are very unlikely actually to believe it in other cases.  Even among the replies to the link above some spot the problem that it creates for those who support vaccine mandates.  The response: “We do not force-vax, but we fine them or exclude them from society. Which is not the same at all; they are all free to go live in a cave somewhere else.”  Fine, but just so, we could, per this person’s logic, fine women who have abortions and exclude them from society.  More mildly, we could point out that it is not forcing birth for a community to decline to support the practice of abortion with licensure, subsidies, and the approval of the law.  (Please note that I’m not offering a suggested regime, merely addressing the illogic of the opposing proposition.)

If we, as a community, have a right to protect children if we so choose, then the refusal to acknowledge women’s responsibility toward their own children opens the door to regulation of the activity that creates them.

Thus we come to the wide field of conflicts that the abortion argument has with other positions typically asserted by those who support it.  Do fathers have an obligation to provide child support?  Do doctors have an obligation to “use their bodies” to provide all legal forms of care to all people?  Do people who work have an obligation to devote a portion of the earnings of their bodies to supply food and housing for others?

We can take up difficult cases separately, but categorically denying a mother’s responsibility to her children means the utter destruction of human society at its very core.  Everything that is good about the human condition crumbles under this logic, which is why I think I’ll settle on “evil” as the most appropriate adjective.