The blindness of individualism.

Jury box.  The folks who sit here have to present their body to do so, pleasurable alternatives or not.

The Casper Star Tribune apparently ran an article on abortion recently by conservative columnist Laura Hollis.  I missed it, but the article predictably provoked a response by a letter writer who made the classic "it's my body" argument.  More particularly, the letter stated, in part:

But the entire piece leaves out the crucial detail: individual women who are the sole owners of their own bodies. No man, no would-be child, no judgmental, nosy neighbor and no intrusive government has the right to demand that we take a risk detrimental to our own well-being -- ever! Our bodies are our own, and we can use them to give and receive pleasure without risking or limiting our futures. We alone can choose when and with whom we will accept the risk of carrying a pregnancy full-term. That’s what freedom means.

The "sole owners of their own bodies".

Is that true, and if it is, even part, should it be?  Or do we belong to a larger collective of other humans in some fashion?

We do, and more than we might suspect.

Let's start of with something that should be pretty obvious.  This classic resort in this argument ignores, right from the onset, the ultimate limit on self interest, which is what this argument concerns.

You can't kill be people because you find them inconvenient.

That's obviously the case, but it's where this argument basically starts.  The concept that "individual women are the sole owners of their bodies" doesn't actually mean that they can do anything they want.  You can't, for example, kill people because you find them annoying to your person, no matter how annoying that may be, and even if that annoyance is at a high, and even generally threatening, level.

That may sound flippant, but it isn't, and it actually strikes at the core of this argument.  The argument basically normally is here that the pregnant subject finds being pregnant, which involves having a baby in some form inside of you, inconvenient.  But you might find a lot of things really inconvenient to your person.  This is about the only area where society has accepted that killing the subject is okay.

Otherwise, your own person has to be serious threatened.  You can kill people who are going to kill you, and various things really darn close to that.  That's pretty much it, on a self directed level.  And it isn't based on a general "might" type of argument.  You have to be able, basically, to convince a jury of twelve beyond a reasonable doubt that the person you killed was going to kill you or harm you.  You can't say that the person was a lousy driver and you feared that he might run over you some day, or that he was a bad violent drunk and he might kill you some day.  It doesn't work that way.

So if we're going to make that the argument here, we pretty much have to stop here and reject the rather obviously flawed argument as most pregnancies in the Western World today (and abortion is a Western World thing) do not threaten the physical well being of the pregnant woman in any fashion. They're, rather inconvenient.* **

But what about the larger argument, and what it means overall?

It turns out that we really aren't, even in our very individualistic society, the sole owners of our bodies.  Society does in fact assert demands over our bodies which supersede our own desires, and not terrible infrequently.

Perhaps the most dramatic of those is conscription, which admittedly we have not undertaken since 1973 but which we still insist on registering young men for.  The essence of conscription is that the subject is required to present himself to the military, but trained, go fight, and potentially get killed.  The whole argument that "it's my body" isn't recognized as one that a conscientious objector can assert, and indeed it's really only from 1917 on that the concept of conscientious objection has even been recognized by the United States.

In fact earlier in the country's history there was a universal militia obligation, a species of conscription, which required men over the age 16 or so, usually, and up to the age of 60 or so, usually, to report at least once a year for a militia muster, and to report further if called upon by their Governor or the United States.  We often hear that the Civil War conscription was the first in the country's history, but it wasn't.  Conscription of that type, including being mustered into Federal or Crown service for war, went back to Colonial times.  Indeed, the entire concept is ancient.

But calls by the government on a person's body aren't limited to just that.  Little realized, the Federal government has even in modern times mustered men to fight forest fires; another type of conscription.

And people are often called upon to present their bodies for service as jurors of all types in courts of all jurisdictions. The "it's my body and I don't want to" argument, particularly when limited to "giv[ing] and receiv[ing] pleasure" won't cut it as a reason to get off of jury duty.

Indeed, the whole argument that you can do what you want with your body sexually as you have an absolute right to "give and receive pleasure" is shockingly narcissistic.  Do you really have the right to do anything you want with your body if it gives you pleasure, particularly keeping in mind that pleasure is inherently temporary by its very nature.  Do you have a right to drive drunk, for example, if that thrills you?  Do you have a right to get stoned in a public park, or in a public place.  If you like, can you relieve yourself in a public place, or if you get thrills by it, can you expose yourself to school children waiting for a bus?  It's your body, after all.

What you certainly don't have the right to do is to kill those in the way of your "receiving pleasure".

And that argument here is brutally self centered. Sex exists in nature for one reason and one only, and that's to create offspring of the male and female participant.  This society seems particularly confused about that and has become confused on the very topic of there even being two genders and two only.  That confusion is undoubtedly the byproduct of pharmaceutical birth control which allowed a lot of people to completely separate out the natural byproduct of sex with the pleasurable aspects of it and to logically conclude it is; 1) all about pleasure and 2) all about me me me.  When you get to that point, its a short trip to the concept that you have a right to kill the natural byproduct, as that's interfering with you, you , you and your hindrance free obtaining of pleasure.  That is, frankly, a pretty warped view of reality.

And highly individualistic. But as we've seen, contrary to that point of view, society has never accepted, anywhere, that it has no call on you.

If society can call upon you to serve, and by that service serve in things as varied as armies and juries, and to inconvenience you for things as widely varied as deciding the fate of others to dying for your country, what does that tell us overall about the relationship between the individual and the larger society?  It would seem to tell us that at some point society actually asserts that it has more claim to your body than you do.

Indeed, looked upon that way, society really decrees that you have custody of your body so long as the society doesn't need it for some greater purpose.  If it does, be that for juries that may last weeks or months, or armies that may be mustered for years or for you until your death, it's pretty clear that society asserts that it has more claim to your body as part of the body corporate than you do as a body individual.

And frankly, that makes a great deal of sense.  We are, as a species if you will, a species that has always had a corporate existence. We've never existed in a societies which didn't, even from our earliest days as a species, depend on others and have others who had a call upon us.  We really can't exist, no matter how individualistic we think we are, without depending upon the larger society on some level.

And at the end of the day, perhaps that's one of the things about this argument, the pro abortion argument, that fails so badly.  It is so individualistic.  But sex isn't.  By its very nature, it takes two, if it is real sex and not something just called sex by a society that would seek to define it very broadly, and it exists at nature to create a third.  There are many things ancillary to it and that, but that's the reason it is.  It's not individualistic at all.

But then neither, really are we.  

And maybe we ought to rethink that individualism in general. There's nothing inherently bad about Independence, but radical individualism, and perhaps even individualism in general, is rather thin as a concept, and divorced from the realities of our nature.

*What tends to immediately come up after this is "well what about rape and incest".  The natural reply to that would be "how many instances of abortion involve rape and incest".  Not very many.  But beyond that, while it is enormously uncomfortable for people to discuss, the pregnancies that result in this fashion still fit the category above, they're inconvenient as in enormously psychologically inconvenient.

That's awful, but the argument still holds.  Society doesn't allow those who might commit rape or incest to be killed.  Indeed, killing a rapist actually is only legally justified as an act of self defense.  Incest is trickier as that likely isn't a legally sufficient reason for homicide, but the one single instance I'm aware of that occurring in, i.e.,. the killing of the committer of such an act, the legal system turned a blind eye to it, although that was over thirty years ago.

**The writer, it should be noted (who noted that she's had more than one abortion herself) seems to have been aware of the deficiency of her argument in that she's over emphasizing the danger involved in pregnancy in the modern world and suggesting that every baby is an assault that puts you in imminent danger of death.

The era in which a large number of women in the Western World (and again, abortion is an industrialized society thing, not a third world thing) in mortal danger is over.  Even before that was the case, and women died in child birth fairly frequently by modern standards, the overwhelming majority of births were without incident.

But if that logic is really to be seriously maintained, then what should occur is that the writer of the letter should have gotten out her .44 and shot the male subjects of her desire in self defense.  If her argument is to be given credence, she should kill as the bullet is about to be fired. The logic would be more credible.