When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of \u201cbodily autonomy\u201d? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.<\/p>\n
Only two years ago most people understood \u201cbodily autonomy\u201d to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the \u201cdeplorables\u201d have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism\u2019s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.<\/p>\n
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of \u201cbodily autonomy\u201d not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.<\/p>\n
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals \u2013 chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are \u201cinferior\u201d \u2013 Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays \u2013 so that \u201csuperior races\u201d could benefit from the \u201cresearch\u201d. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.<\/p>\n
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to \u201cserious\u201d debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband\u2019s right to rape his wife.<\/p>\n
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy \u2013 a woman\u2019s or the foetus she is carrying \u2013 are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the \u201cwar on terror\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bad faith<\/strong><\/p>\n There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries \u2013 sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these \u201cinferior\u201d peoples, such as in the \u201cwar on terror\u2019s\u201d promotion of neoliberal \u201cdemocracy\u201d as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.<\/p>\n The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.<\/p>\n Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.<\/p>\n But, of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.<\/p>\n The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years\u2019 hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates \u2013 and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers \u2013 in much the same light.<\/p>\n The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially \u201cunclean\u201d and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.<\/p>\n No solidarity<\/strong><\/p>\n The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:<\/p>\n It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states \u2013 the \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d alike \u2013 are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.<\/p>\n Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can\u2019t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again \u2013 and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.<\/p>\n Coerced vaccination<\/strong><\/p>\n It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.<\/p>\n There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.<\/p>\n Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a \u201cmedical\u201d inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.<\/p>\n But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs \u2013 and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates\u00a0masquerading as scientific ones.<\/p>\n Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.<\/p>\n — Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 14, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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