A 23-year-old man is receiving online praise for using a heavily debunked argument to promote legalized abortion. His video, which has amassed 1.5 million likes, is being called “excellent” and his argument one that was “never heard before.” But it’s actually a spin on a very common pro-abortion argument.
In his viral video shared on social media, John Jameson (@notjohnjay), claims that bodily autonomy is valued in every circumstance except abortion. But his argument falls short.
“Bodily autonomy means ‘jacks**t'” to pro-lifers
He begins by stating the truth — that if his mother were pregnant with him today in Tennessee, she would not be able to get an abortion in that state. Tennessee protects preborn children from abortion except in situations in which the mother is at risk of death or serious impairment of a major bodily function. Jameson wrongly concludes that this is because “her bodily autonomy means jack s**t” to Tennessee lawmakers “because they believe in the ‘life of the fetus’ and that life begins at conception, and that aborting that fetus would be committing murder, right?”
The Tennessee law has more to do with the right of the preborn human being to not be killed than it does the woman’s bodily autonomy — because bodily autonomy only takes a person so far. After all, no one’s bodily autonomy is without limitations. There are laws that prevent one individual from causing physical harm to another human being, and even laws that prohibit individuals from using/possessing illicit drugs. These laws prevent people from using their bodies to take actions that harm themselves or others. And as Monica Snyder of Secular Pro-life explained, bodily autonomy is not an all-or-nothing consideration.
“Do you mean bodily autonomy is either the most important consideration all of the time or it doesn’t mean jack s**t? Those are the only two options?” she asked. “I mean, if Tennessee is outlawing surgical interventions or medical interventions because they just really don’t care about women’s bodily autonomy, what are all the other surgeries they’re outlawing? You know, are they outlawing hysterectomies, tubal ligations, or liposuction? Facelifts? Boob jobs? Like, if this is just about not wanting women to have control of their bodies for X, Y, Z reasons, you would expect that kind of reaction, right?”
Of course, Tennessee has not outlawed elective surgeries like the above, nor has it outlawed true health care; it has outlawed intentionally killing innocent human beings through abortion. This does not deny a woman’s bodily autonomy, because a person’s bodily autonomy does not give them the right to actively kill another innocent human being.
The overused violinist pro-abortion argument
Jameson goes on to argue that abortion is the only instance in which bodily autonomy is denied to women. And he uses a common pro-abortion talking point to try to prove his point.
He stated, “So, let’s say she gives birth to me and then 20 years later, I go into kidney failure, and I require a kidney transplant to survive, and my mother is the only viable match on the planet. There is not a single law that would compel her to give one of her kidneys to me, right? Because in that circumstance, we recognize that her bodily autonomy is that important. My mother could die and we could still not harvest the kidney from her corpse to give to me. Her bodily autonomy is held in such high regard that they would rather let me die than infringe on that freedom. Bodily autonomy is widely respected in every other context except for this one.”
This is a take on the well-known pro-abortion “violinist” argument, which Live Action founder and president Lila Rose debunked in a 2023 video. In this scenario, a person awakens to find that he has been hooked up to a machine that is using his body to give life support to a world-famous violinist who is suffering from an illness that will take nine months to cure. This person is the only person in the world who has the correct blood type to keep the violinist alive. If the machine is unplugged before the nine months is up, the violinist will die.
“So the question is,” said Rose, “do you have the right to unplug yourself from the violinist? Obviously, no one has the right to kidnap you and force you into giving life support, even if the person you are giving life support to is highly valued by society. So the abortion advocates are arguing here by some analogy that a pregnant woman must have the right to unplug her body from her baby in an abortion because you have the right to unplug your body from a violinist.”
Rose offers two reasons why this argument fails, and those reasons apply to Jameson’s kidney donation argument as well.
“Abortion is killing, intentional killing, not just declining life support,” explained Rose. “Abortion is the direct and intentional killing of a child in the womb. … So while you or I would be allowed to unplug ourselves from some violinist, we are not allowed to tear a violinist apart with suction or forceps, give a lethal injection to the violinist, drain the violinist’s blood or starve the violinist to death with pills.”
She continued, “The cause of death in the case of the violinist is the illness. The cause of death in an abortion is killing and the baby would live if it wasn’t killed. It’s as simple as that.”
In addition, Rose noted that parents have the obligation to care for their children — even children they didn’t plan for. The law recognizes the natural relationship between parent and child, which is the reasoning behind child support laws and negligence laws that ensure children are cared for. If the parents fail to provide care to their children, they can face jail time and lose custody of their children.
Secular Pro-Life’s Snyder made similar arguments, stating that though bodily autonomy is important, it is not the dominating factor in every situation. She pointed out that in most countries, abortion is not legal after a certain point in pregnancy — commonly 12 to 14 weeks. “Which means in those places, the fetus has a right to not be killed once she’s 14 weeks or older. She has the right to use her mother’s body,” said Snyder. “… So if you’re looking for precedent where we don’t consider bodily rights absolute, look no further.”
She also noted that Jameson is wrong about post-death organ donation. A family can decide after a loved one’s death to take their organs for donation.
“‘Let you die’ – that’s an interesting choice of words [on Jameson’s part],” she said. “When you let someone die, it means they’re dying and you don’t take any action to stop them from dying. That isn’t abortion.”
Kidney failure does not happen at the same rate as abortion
Snyder went on to say that if 20-year-olds were dying from kidney failure a million times a year — just as preborn babies are dying from abortion nearly a million times a year in the U.S. — then society and the medical field would likely look at kidney failure in a different way.
“There are other ways too that the forced kidney donation analogy doesn’t really work because first of all if that was happening, if 20-year-olds were dying of kidney failure a million times a year, we would probably look at it quite differently than if it’s a relatively uncommon occurrence,” she said. “And more importantly if it was like a required life stage for any of us to exist at all — we first had to almost die of kidney failure and then have someone donate their kidney to us for us to survive — we’d probably look at it pretty differently. And if it was the case where the majority of the time you are dying of kidney failure because someone else made a decision you had no control over, that they knew might mean that you might die of kidney failure, and then they refused to help you with it, we’d probably look at it a little differently. There’s a whole bunch of ways in which the forced kidney donation thing is not analogous to conceiving someone and then killing them through abortion.”
Bodily autonomy only takes us so far. It can not be used to justify causing harm to another human being, whether that human being is born or preborn.
