I like to think of myself as principled. I like to think that principles are not arbitrary, that they have some basic logic to them. Others may say a moral basis, but as an atheist, I prefer logic. My principles say that in a crowded world, where I lack the skills to look after myself from birth, to the gentle death, in a clean bed, that I am hoping for, I must rely on the help of others. I can attempt to take that help, pay for that help, or look for mutual cooperation. I live in a country where we attempt a mixture of pay and cooperation. It’s far from perfect, but malnutrition, homelessness and violent crime are now incredibly rare here. So rare that every murder still merits headlines. Not every country is that fortunate.
I’ve never encountered a set of principles, which I could consider to be a logical alternative to our present mishmash of capitalism and socialism. Even the magical thinking of nationalism and religiosity would be difficult to replace or wholly dispense with (at the moment at least). We couch this strange mixture of compromise and silliness in a system called democracy and hope that its inherent contradictions will work themselves out.
How does majority rule, stop itself from becoming a dictatorship of the majority? How far is it right to expect an individual to go, in compromising their principles, in order to retain their access to the community’s resources? Fortunately I am not a philosopher, a leader or a pregnant woman, so I do not have to plot a practicable path through that mire. The laws that offend me, but are imposed on me by the majority, are easily circumvented by me. Thus I am really just an armchair rebel. Worse comes to worse, I can always head off to Switzerland.
I am never going to be told, that what is inside my body is the business of strangers. The business of the majority. And as someone who has been irresponsible, has overindulged, has dared, I think myself more than fortunate that I am not a woman. A woman who might face being told that what is inside my body is someone else’s business. Oh the heady joy of being born a man. Oh the strangeness of having my insides protected by my gender.
In this jurisdiction, we are not even sure what the majority thinks about imposing their views on another person’s insides. We don’t even know for sure what the legal situation is concerning a woman’s insides. We’ve had referendums with ambiguous wording and we have a spineless, cowardly, male dominated legislature, which wishes to please everyone, because a legislature, is where principle goes to die, to be replaced by populism and very fine pensions.
What we do know for sure, is that many of us have decided that there are good reasons to impose another person’s principles on what happens to the insides of a woman, and then there are perhaps less good reasons to impose one’s views on a woman’s insides.
We see something similar in the US. Their Supreme Court ruled that woman’s insides are always her business and never anyone else’s business. But now there are ‘principled‘ men, powerful men, who think that there are good reasons to, in many cases, interfere with a woman’s body, in the interests of principle.
The irony of course, is that in this jurisdiction, some of us have conceded that sometimes it is ok to interfere with a woman’s body, in the hope that if the principle of sometimes not interfering with a woman’s body is conceded, then one day this will lead to a woman always being left alone by principled men. While in the US, the principle of sometimes being allowed interfere with a woman is being pushed, in the hope that one day, this will lead to a woman’s body never being left alone by men of principle.
