Guts!

It is always good to sharpen one’s dialectical foil every now and then. One pro-abortion argument you may come across in the abortion debate is this: “Just as you wouldn’t force someone to donate a kidney or part of a liver, so you should not force a woman to ‘donate’ the use of her body to a fetus.” I.e., if you’re not in favor of forced organ donation, you shouldn't be in favor of forced pregnancy, which is to say the criminalization of abortion.

There are serious flaws to this argument. The first is this: pregnancy is not, properly construed, analogous to donating an organ: it is getting pregnant that is the analogy.

Put another way: most people agree that nobody should be forced into either pregnancy or organ donation. The pertinent question thus becomes: once someone has voluntarily become pregnant or donated an organ, do they have the right to materially reverse their decision? Most people would agree that, once you have donated an organ, you do not have the right to ask for it back—your rights to your organ only extended insofar as you did not grant them to someone else. The same is true of pregnancy: one cannot morally “take back” the act of getting pregnant, any more than one could “take back” a length of large intestine one gave to a donee, without violating another’s rights—and in the case of abortion, killing someone.

(The common rejoinder for those who support abortion runs along these lines: “Just because you consent to sex doesn’t mean you consent to pregnancy.” But this too is flawed, for reasons we’ll address, though indirectly, next.)

More here