Episode 02: Do I ‘Own’ My Body?
Is my body my own?
Why is this even a question, you ask? My instinct tells me that my body may be one of the few things I truly own. To be sure, there are modern legal cases that would seem to support this conclusion. Take the Pennsylvania case of the cancer patient who needed a bone marrow transplant. His cousin was a match. The only match. The problem: the cousin didn’t want to go through the painful [and dangerous] procedure to donate his bone marrow. Push came to shove and the cancer patient sued for an injunction to force his cousin to give him the bone marrow. No deal, said the court. The judge held that the court didn’t have the authority to order the transplant.
By contrast, the courts of this country have long enforced military conscription in times of war. Although the draft has not been used for decades, the right to conscript men is still on the books. Given that warfare is deadly, the right of conscription is a right over a person’s body. Consider this fact as well: Western law has long refused to acknowledge that anyone owns their own body. The reasoning is pretty straightforward: For starters, if you own your body, you can sell it — including organ sale (illegal) prostitution (illegal) and slavery (need we say, illegal). While suicide is not illegal (owing to challenge of penalizing an already dead person) encouraging another person to commit suicide is, indeed, illegal. Moreover, the corporate world has its own stake in the issue: both in terms of the use of the body as an advertising space (completely legal) and in terms of the sale of discarded parts of the body, whether skin tissue (legal) blood (legal) plasma (legal) or semen (legal). And lest we assume that government and corporations make the only claims to our body, we are reminded of the spiritual claims that are made to our bodies as well. See 1 Corinthians 6:19-20; See also Genesis 9:5; Quran 17:33.
So, ownership of the body is, maybe, more complicated than we might think. In this episode of Misjudged, we discuss emerging trends in biotechnology and law that threaten to upend our instinctive view of the rights we have over our body. Just what do we really own, and what rights do we have when it comes to our own skin?
