Bodily Autonomy Quotes

Loving another person should never mean forfeiting bodily autonomy.

I don't often engage in debates over abortion rights, for the same reason I don't sit down to share a meal at any table where I am on the menu. My body is not a theory or a talking point, and neither is yours.

There is a concept called body autonomy. It’s generally considered a human right. Bodily autonomy means a person has control over who or what uses their body, for what, and for how long. It’s why you can’t be forced to donate blood, tissue, or organs. Even if you are dead. Even if you’d save or improve 20 lives. It’s why someone can’t touch you, have sex with you, or use your body in any way without your continuous consent. A fetus is using someone’s body parts. Therefore under bodily autonomy, it is there by permission, not by right. It needs a persons continuous consent. If they deny and withdraw their consent, the pregnant person has the right to remove them from that moment. A fetus is equal in this regard because if I need someone else’s body parts to live, they can also legally deny me their use. By saying a fetus has a right to someone’s body parts until it’s born, despite the pregnant person’s wishes, you are doing two things: 1. Granting a fetus more rights to other people’s bodies than any born person. 2. Awarding a pregnant person less rights to their body than a corpse.

Everyone should have the right to bodily autonomy -to literally be able to choose what body parts we have and choose to keep or modify. Taking that right away from intersex kids isn't okay, and intersex activists are working to end these practices.

Your vagina is not a democracy. No one else gets a vote on what you do with it.

Who knew psychopaths were so sensitive? He sighed, cupping August’s face and tilting it upward. “I want you to keep pursuing me, but I need to feel like it’s not already a done deal. I’m an adult and I have bodily autonomy. ‘I licked it so it’s mine’ isn’t a thing in dating.”  August’s hands came around to grip Lucas’s ass, his gaze heated as he said, “I did, though.

If a woman is asking for birth control, it's because she needs it. The request itself is enough.

To me, 'sexual freedom' means freedom from having to have sex.

I was too selfish to have a child before I was ready for one, and there's no shame in admitting that. Women should be selfish about our choices, for as long as we have the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness in women isn't the great crime that people like to pretend it is. We are as entitled as men to prioritise ourselves and our desires, and we are as capable as men of knowing what's best for us. Why is everyone so pathologically terrified of selfish women? The word is thrown around like an insult, as if the worst thing a woman could possibly do (aside from being fat, having sex with whomever she pleases and whenever, swearing, having an abortion, drinking alcohol, standing up for herself and being a working mother) is to decide that her life matters. But women are allowed to be selfish. It shouldn't be considered a 'privilege' to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It's a right that, by and large, has been stolen from us and used to keep us in thrall to a paternalistic body that pretends to know what's best for us but is really only interested in maintaining the order that has proved best for them.

There is nothing like a horror film to reveal the cultural anxieties of one’s time and place. And if horror has taught me anything, it is that nothing has been as enduringly terrifying across time and place as women’s bodies, as the bodies of all marginalized genders.

Most people are in the dark about what is being demanded by transactivists. They understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity. I, alongside every critic of gender-identity ideology I have spoken to for this book, am right behind this. Most, including me, also favour bodily autonomy for adults. A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.

In the days of slavery, the moral reasoning went something like this: Black slaves are not fully human but are the powerless, voiceless property of powerful slave owners to dispose of as they choose. Call it “property justice,” if you will. The moral reasoning for abortion is identical. In “reproductive justice,” the unborn are not fully human but rather are the powerless, voiceless property of mothers. According to the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, women have the right to exercise their “personal bodily autonomy” by disposing of their unborn as they see fit.

More than economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family [and its support of the authoritarian state]. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology. Conservative sexual reform has always made the mistake of merely making a slogan of "the right of woman to her own body," and not clearly and unmistakably regarding and defending woman as a sexual being, at least as much as it regards and defends her as a mother. Furthermore, conservative sexual reform based its sexual policies predominantly on the function of procreation, instead of undermining the reactionary view that equates sexuality and procreation.

Every possible decision modern women make or the role they occupy, outside of the most rigorous and regressive, can be tied back to the very symptoms of witchcraft: refusal of motherhood, rejection of marriage, ignoring traditional beauty standards, bodily and sexual autonomy, homosexuality, aging, anger, even a general sense of self-determination. (From Carmen Maria Machado's introduction, page 11)

It's not your business what I do with my body, or what Alim does with his. You have no 'right' to me, we weren't together, we weren't even exclusive. You're not entitled to fuck me just because you were a decent human being and went along when I wasn't ready to be intimate with you, or be mad because I ended up fucking someone else. You don't get points for waiting for me. I didn't use you, I didn't lead you on. I went as far as I felt comfortable, and I stopped there.

We've known for a long time that this day would come. Today, an illegitimate Supreme Court-- stacked with justices who have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault, installed by presidents who took power via undemocratic sleights of hand-- ratified their cause of eroding the 14th amendment and the right to bodily autonomy. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will be lethal to Americans - particularly, Black women and queer people - who now will lose their already limited access to abortions. If establishment Democrats sit back and allow this Court to continue to dismantle every right protecting marginalized people, this decision won't just cost lives - it also will cost us our democracy. Our leaders in Washington must recognize how the tyranny of the minority, white supremacy, misogyny and bigotry brought us to this dark day. And they must act now to protect voting rights and enshrine the right to an abortion into federal law -- before it's too late.

Consider carefully the term 'rape' and its implications. Would anybody ever say that rape is acceptable? From the most complacent patriarch to the angriest feminist, all would declare rape to be a terrible crime. But the apparent consensus is mythical, for the reasons behind arriving at this opinion are diametrically opposite. For patriarchal forces, rape is evil because it is a crime against the honour of the family, whereas feminists denounce rape because it is a crime against the autonomy and bodily integrity of a woman. This difference in understanding rape naturally leads to diametrically opposite proposals for fighting rape. In the patriarchal perspective, rape is a fate worse than death; there is no normal life possible for the raped woman; the way to avoid rape is to lock women up at home, within the family, under patriarchal controls. In this understanding, the raped woman is responsible for the crime against her because either she crossed the lakshman rekha of time (by going out after dark) or the lakshman rekha of respectability (by dressing in unconventional ways or by leaving the four walls of her home at all).

Loving another person should never mean forfeiting bodily autonomy

humans and augmented humans can’t sign away their rights to their labor or bodily autonomy in perpetuity; that’s like, straight-up illegal.)

It is wholly justified to label vaccine passports as draconian, coercive, and one of the most dangerous government interventions in human history; an intervention that undermined voluntary consent to medical procedures and threatened the core principles of what it means to be an autonomous human being.

Far from being an intruder in his mother’s womb, the unborn child is where he belongs. Furthermore, parents bear special obligations to their children, and a woman’s bodily autonomy does not justify lethal violence against the unborn.

The bodily autonomy arguments for abortion fail to acknowledge that all our liberties have limits.

Regardless of the medium, performance artists explicitly explore and enact their holistic autonomies and interiorities (gendered, spiritual, emotional, and political), not simply their bodily corporeality. If this process takes place within a recorded electronic or digital environment, it is the medium that is virtual, unreal or disembodied, not the human performer within it. In the performance arts, whether in a theater, on a street corner, or on a computer monitor, the medium is not the message (and never has been); the performer is. [. . .] The dislocation and fragmentation of the body in digital performance is an aesthetic praxis which deconstructive critics have hungrily grasped and mythologized, holding up the virtual body as the central icon (immaterial, disembodied), whereas in actuality, it operates as an index, as another trace and representation of the always already physical body.

It was as though a memo had been forwarded to every government body demanding all nations sing the same tune. The official narrative was to hibernate, with the threat of fines and imprisonment, and await a vaccine; a vaccine that would be wielded as a stick to an obedient dog

It was as though a memo had been forwarded to every government body demanding all nations sing the same tune. The official narrative was to hibernate, with the threat of fines and imprisonment, and await a vaccine; a vaccine that would be wielded as a stick to an obedient dog.

Flipping it another way; do gods give a damn about universal health care, access to stable, affordable housing, and the right to earn a living wage with benefits for everyone? What use are gods who don’t protect bodily autonomy and the right to self-determination for queer, nonbinary and gender nonconforming folks? What use are they if they don’t protect these rights for women or folks with disabilities? What do supernatural deities say about these specific socioeconomic, cultural, and social issues? Why do they remain abjectly silent if they are in fact omnipotent and omnipresent?

Free Abortion on Demand Without Apology: Reproductive Justice in a Post-Roe America paints a vivid picture of a country that is actively harming its citizens by taking away their reproductive rights, their bodily autonomy, and their right to choose parenthood.

The right to have an abortion has been popularly justified as a woman's right to control her own body. Such a right seems to be implied by a number of other rights, but only recently has it been stated in this way. So stated, it is somewhat confusing, for many of our laws, legal and moral, require one to control one's body—to restrain it, for instance, from killing the body of another person, except of course when ordered to do so by the government.

I accepted the edict I was in control of my body and didn't have to adhere to societal beauty standards. I happened to like the feeling of shaved legs under fresh sheets.

It is hard to be a pro-choice disabled person who understands that believing in bodily autonomy means you have to support the idea that other people—your friends, your peers, your siblings—may choose to abort a pregnancy because their child could be like you.

Today’s GOP wants to strip women of their bodily autonomy and empower rapists to force births on their victims. They want to end free and fair elections, ban books, and pass anti-freedom cultural and religious laws better suited for oppressive theocracies like Iran. If you consider yourself middle class, they believe you ought to pay higher taxes. If you rely on Social Security or Medicare, today’s Republican leaders want to leave you high and dry. That’s how we need to frame the stakes. And as draconian as all this sounds, it’s all true! And if you don’t believe it’s true, it’s because the GOP’s own messaging works so damn well.

The conversation would look very different if we truly believed gender freedom is the goal for everyone; changing your name, pronouns, body, and/or appearance to feel more authentic was just another part of self-growth celebrated in our culture; we applied “my body, my choice” and a belief in bodily autonomy to gender and not just reproductive health. Wait…

Transition is a fundamental right that all trans people, of all ages, should have access to. But I believe that transition, ideally, should be offered to us as one option of many for bodily autonomy and self-expression. It should not be something that we have to do to make ourselves more acceptable to others, or to hide our transness from the world.

We can be a lot of things, but we can’t be angry (or president, apparently. Or have bodily autonomy in, like, thirty states).

Holly implored him. "Juan, I had a miscarriage. Obviously, God doesn't want me to carry our baby. But now, you, you can. This is a miracle! This is our second chance. God is good, all the time! Can I get an Amen?" She punctuated her words with a little celebratory dance. “I have to call Pastor Pete with the exciting miracle. Oh wait, I wonder if he is pregnant, too?” She laughed. “Can you imagine all the men at church, pregnant? We have to go next Sunday, I have got to see this.” But Juan, determined to make his stance clear, was unyielding. "Holly! I get to have a choice here." "Choice.” She snickered. “Welcome to life as a woman!” Holly spun around to see him. “Our entire existence is doing things we don't want to do, starting with our first period to having the great portal between our legs that brings humans into this world…and then you men dictating what we can and can’t do. Choice. Please.

As Juan listened to his wife's impassioned reasoning, a new and unsettling sensation overcame him. It was a feeling he had never experienced before – a profound loss of control over his own body. For the first time in his life, someone was dictating what he should do with his own physical being, and it left him profoundly uncomfortable.

Every woman in the world is entitled to have bodily autonomy. One only has to look at history to see making abortions illegal or harder to obtain doesn’t work. All it does is endanger women’s lives. If women are unable to obtain safe abortions, they will use dodgy quacks, buy drugs off the internet or self-abort with a coathanger.

You are a woman; this is your body. You are beholden to no one, Ke-Han or Volstovic.

consider women in music who align themselves with charities and causes that don’t reflect their lived experience in order to seem like they’re doing great things for poor, suffering women—the Other. Look at female artists who use background dancers of other races as props, or appropriate other cultures. Look at women in music who publicly shame other women for exercising bodily autonomy, like Warpaint making offensive comments about Beyoncé and Rihanna’s wardrobe choices.

My body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public and complex as any man's. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision – the first time I asserted, unequivocally: ‘I KNOW THE LIFE I WANT AND THIS IS NOT IT"; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder... The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies... For that reason, we simply MUST talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, and always an impossible decision. Well we're not and it's not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine... My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.

We should remember that with each imperfect, and eventually stalled, stage of major societal change has come some real progress: expanded enfranchisement, increases in liberty for more kinds of people, greater bodily autonomy. And yes, after each step has come the siren song of not-anger - of complicity and satisfaction and fealty to the traditional structures that soothed the burns left by the revolt. But it's nowhere near time for that yet. We need to work to ensure that this moment will have spurred real change, to know that the changes we make will reverberate far into the future.