Teachable Moment

Via Kevin, I see that Andrew Sullivan's question has been answered as to what the Republican party has in mind when it comes to personal freedom. He quotes Eric Cohen's piece in the Weekly Standard in which he claims that "people cannot be allowed to revoke life simply because it is theirs' to revoke."

We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are ... [T]he autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate.


Sullivan adds:

So let us be plain: the theoconservative vision would remove the right of individuals to decide their own fate in such cases, and would exclude the family from such a decision as well. Indeed, the law might even compel the family to provide care as long as they were capable of doing so. My "what if?" is a real one. And the theocon right has answered it. They want an end to the "autonomy regime." They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom - autonomy over one's own physical body - is now under attack. And if a theocon government won't allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?


I would imagine that there are more than a few women who are slapping their foreheads at that and saying ..."duh!" And there are probably some distressed "pregnant mothers" who would argue that it is quite strange to suggest their six week old fetus has more autonomy over the body it lives in than she does. Certainly the principle has never stuck me as particularly compelling.

The "autonomy regime" is not absolute, but it's pretty damned clear that the government, with its grandstanding morons running for the microphones, is hardly equipped to make the delicate decisions at the margins. It's been very convenient for politicians and self-righteous moralists to take pot shots at those who found themselves in the unenviable position of having to make such decisions as abortion. Perhaps now that the Schiavo case has filled in some of the blanks about what the "culture of life" really means, maybe a few people will understand why it is such a tremendous insult to women to tell them that Trent Lott and Pat Robertson are the ones who will decide what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.



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