SPROUL: Is this right to your own body, and I might want to hasten to add that I believe
that women do have all kinds of ethical rights to their own body.
They have a moral and ethical right to be protected from an assault against their body.
They have a moral and ethical right to be protected against the violence and the humiliation
of rape.
No man, no man – I’ll give you a universal negative – no man ever has a right to rape
a woman.
That is a gross and heinous crime against another human being and every woman conversely
has the moral right to be defended and protected from that sort of thing.
We have other rights to our own body.
I mean sometimes when we check into hospitals to undergo the care there, we sort of feel
like we're in custody and that if we don’t like what's going on we have to suffer it
in silence and endure it.
I mean but actually you do have a right to get up out of the bed and say, “I’ve had
all of this care I want, I’m leaving.”
You know, we tend to forget that this is a business transaction that we’re involved
in here, that we’re not under arrest when we go to the hospital.
And a woman certainly has the right to determine to some degree how she's being treated in
medical facilities and so on.
There are no arguments about that, but my question is this.
Is a woman's right to her own body, and this is the crucial point, is it an absolute right?
Is it an unlimited right?
Or are there other principles and rights that impose limits and restraints upon whatever
right we have to our own bodies?
From a biblical theological society, we know for example that in Old Testament Israel in
the legislation that God gave to his people he prohibited self-mutilation of the human
body of both male and female.
Other nations and people go into certain cultic practices where they do violence to their
own flesh and deform their own bodies for various reasons.
That was prohibited in Old Testament Israel.
So, at least in that case, we know on occasion where restraints were placed upon what a person's
rights were with respect to their own bodies.
The moral issues surrounding the question of suicide touch on this position.
Do I have the moral right, for example, to destroy my own body?
There are many states, I believe, to this day and certainly nations that pass civil
laws disallowing suicide.
I don't know how they impose punishments upon those who succeed.
But it is against the law so that if you tried and you don't succeed, you can certainly be
called in and be paying penalties for it, because the state recognizes that we don't
have the right to destroy ourselves.
One of the most poignant things that we find in biblical history are to find those people
who are suffering severe persecution in heroic measure who are begging God for permission
to die.
Moses asked God to kill him.
Job asked God to kill him to put him out of his misery and so on.
But they were not given the right to suicide.
And obviously, my individual rights of my body are limited always by your rights of
your own body.
For example a professional boxer’s fists are part of his own body, and they are considered
by the law to be weapons, lethal weapons.
Now, my fists are not registered as lethal weapons.
OK?
But I do not have the right of my own body to use my body as a weapon to injure your
body.
That's one restraint on the rights of my body.
I can't use it to harm you.
But then there's one other question with this repeated position that I think is important
and that is one that goes on every day.
The debate is: “Is the unborn child, technically speaking, really a part of the mother's body?”
Now, it’s obvious, isn't it, that in a normal pregnancy the unborn child is in the mother's
body?
So, here we have a woman who has something going on inside of her.
Now, there’s no dispute that that embryo, fetus, whatever you want to call it, that
baby that is developing in there is the inside of that woman's body.
But is it part of her body simply because it's located within her?
We've already demonstrated that that fetus, baby or embryo, whatever you want to call
it, has its own distinct peculiar genetic structure and makeup.
For example, if you're following what has been going on in criminal law, that’s only
within the last ten years or so, that scientific investigation in the field of genetics had
been able to use the genetic code to solve crimes; that there is a method now to establish
individual identity that is as certain or more certain than fingerprinting.
It's called the genetic fingerprint; that in a piece of hair from your head, a drop
of blood from your arm, or from just the tiniest portion of your flesh, a scientist now can
isolate the distinctive genetic fingerprint of your identity.
Now, here’s the point I want to make.
If you take a tissue sample from an unborn child and examine its genetic structure, it’s
genetic fingerprint will not match the fingerprint of the mother because it carries the genetic
code both of the mother and of the father and what is growing in there, from a biomedical
perspective, is not part of the woman's body.
So I don’t want to labor this point any longer but to simply say that every woman
has a right to her own body therefore she has the right to destroy the developing baby
within her involves some very, very serious questions.
Again, the difference between a legal right and a moral right, again the principle that
my individual rights, even if they are moral rights, are limited and not absolute if they
conflict with other individual human rights.
And thirdly, there is the strong evidence that the unborn child may not medically and
biologically be considered actually a part of the woman's body other than the fact that
it is located for a time within the woman’s body.