A Moderate Proposal

Tired: a woman’s right to choose. Wired: a man’s right to choose.

With five decades of an infanticidal free-for-all having had a cap put in it, the left is hopping mad about the whole situation. Feminists everywhere, fresh from having enthusiastically demanded that a needle go in every arm, have abruptly rediscovered bodily autonomy as an eternal, sacred principle defining the Who We Are Values of Our Democracy.

Far be it from me to argue against bodily autonomy. I had a great time over the last couple years throwing “my body, my choice” into the faces of the sanctimonious injectoids.

Now, the vaccinators insist that bodily autonomy doesn’t apply to vaccines, because, you see, if you’re not jabbed, you’re not protected, and you’re endangering the jabbed you interact with by potentially spreading the coof of doom to their defenseless immune systems. You see, the mRNA product protects against infection and transmission, which is why it’s so important that everyone be made to take it, because even though you’ve taken it you aren’t protected. Or something. I don’t pretend to fully follow the argument; I’m skeptical they do, either.

But I’m not here today to argue with our leftist compatriots. To the contrary! My purpose is to agree with them. I just want to take their basic argument, consistently and fairly, to its logical conclusion, and to do so in the spirit of inclusion and equity that we all publicly agree is the foundation of our moral order.

A fetus does not have the right to the resources of the mother’s body: so far as I can tell, that’s the foundation of the argument in favour of legalized infanticide. By imposing its unwanted existence on the mother’s body, the parasitic clump of cells is stealing from her, and this isn’t at all fair. Unless the mother is allowed to excise her little ovarian tumour, it will get in the way of all of the good things in life. She might have to scale back her ambitions at her very important career in human resources. Worse, if she’s forced by the state to carry the child to term, she won’t be able to enjoy consequence-free sex. Rather than a garden of delectable male delights, Tinder turns into a minefield of potentially life-altering catastrophe.

This is obviously inhumane and nightmarish, as I’m sure all right-thinking people agree.

The thing is, though, the present state of affairs still consigns women to intolerable slavery.

Let’s face it: children are pretty useless. In addition to having gigantic carbon footprints putting all other lifestyle choices to shame, they’re useless eaters throughout their life cycle. Ask any new parent, and they’ll tell you that pregnancy was the easy part. While they’re babies, they need constant changing, they wake up at all hours of the night, they puke all over the place ... essentially little machines for turning your hard-earned dollars into shit. If the mother breastfeeds, there’s the enormous caloric toll taken by milk production. It doesn’t get any better when they’re toddlers, at which point they’re generating even more poo, while making even more noise, and to make matters worse the monsters have become mobile, a threat to themselves and others. As they get older, they admittedly become toilet trained¹, but the mischief they can get up to only grows in scale and horror.

Throughout all of this, they’re entirely parasitic. You don’t get any useful work out of them. They’re not an investment that ever pays for itself. We don’t have an agrarian economy anymore where you can put them out in the field to milk the cows when they’re old enough to say their own names. Hell, these days you can’t even rely on them to look after you in their old age: the ungrateful wretches are much more liable to abandon your broken form in a retirement home, then proceed to happily ignore you as you rot away in a concentration camp for the aged.

If a fetus is a parasite in the natal environment and therefore has no right to the biological support of the mother’s body, how is the situation any different after birth?

Hence my first point: to be consistent, we must allow mothers to relieve their children of their lives at any point up to that at which they become fully self-supporting. Should the mother change her mind about the desirability of a dependant, it is the grossest imposition upon her bodily autonomy to prevent her from burying an ice-pick in its ear. Frankly, if a middle-aged woman is still receiving generous birthday gifts from her elderly mother, even that should be considered something of a legal grey area.

My second point follows directly from the first, and is made in the spirit of sexual egalitarianism. Since we have agreed that a dependant child has no more right to life than a fetus, for both are parasites living off of the life-energy of the mother, well, what of the father? Even should the father decline to marry the woman in whose womb he so carelessly spilled his seed, our enlightened society imposes upon him the costs of child support. Should he fail to make his payments timely and regular, the money will be extracted directly from his bank account. For every story of a woman’s promising career cut short by the unfortunate initiation of a life in her loins, there is a story of a man financially ruined by the costs of feeding and housing his useless offspring.

It follows quite directly, then, that a man should have the right to demand a fetus be aborted, at any stage in the pregnancy. There can be no question of this being an imposition on the mother’s bodily autonomy, for by agreeing to maternal homicide we have agreed that the fetus is not her body, but a parasite upon it, having no rights of its own. Since the child is also a parasite upon the father’s body, due to the time and energy he must expend to care for it, the father’s bodily autonomy is also being jeopardized should we prevent him from ending the child’s life for any reason he chooses. And of course, following the argument given above, the father should be allowed to do this for so long as the child remains an economic dependant.

Thus, the logic of abortion as justified by bodily autonomy leads us back to the family structure of the Roman era, in which the paterfamilias – and the materfamilias, we are not so sexist as the Romans! – have absolute right of life and death over every member of their household.

This might strike you as monstrous. Even if you’re a leftist, perhaps, it may seem a bit extreme to argue that a man should be able to order a woman into the baby abattoir because her growing womb cyst will cramp his style, or that a mother should be allowed to put strychnine in her teenage daughter’s vegan chili after the wilful child refused to clean her room for the hundredth time.

If so, perhaps we can agree that bodily autonomy is not the right frame with which to discuss the murder of children.

1. Although that’s apparently gotten less certain in the era of the socially deprived lockdown baby.