ADAMS: The Right to Life Is Not the Right to Someone Else's Body
For years, the so-called “abortion debate” has been trapped in the same narrow frame: is a fetus a person, or not? Activists on both sides have staked everything on that single question. One camp insists that only once personhood is granted can rights attach. The other insists just as loudly that personhood is not yet present and therefore nothing has been violated.
I was reminded of this whole fight again as the Calgary Conservative Convention looms, where delegates are gearing up to vote on a motion that would scrap Policy 86: the clause stating that “a Conservative Government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion.” The same motion would drag the party into opposing so-called “sex-selective abortions,” with backers insisting that refusing to go anti-abortion is costing them votes they figure they're owed.
This got me thinking; even if we granted, for the sake of argument, that fetuses are persons with rights, would that automatically give them an unlimited claim to someone else's body? Does a right to life, however it is defined, magically become a right to commandeer another human being's organs, time, health, and liberty? Or are we again watching conservative activists turn complicated moral questions into slogans, while ignoring basic principles about individual autonomy when those principles become inconvenient?
Canadians have every right to ask these questions. And we have every right to demand that the state not quietly grant one group sweeping powers over the bodies of others under the language of compassion.
The truth is simple, even if it is uncomfortable for some: the right to life is not the right to someone else's body. No government, and no movement, should be able to pretend otherwise.
Explaining Rights And Responsibilities
Our political conversation is filled with discussions about “rights.” But too often, activists use the word as if it has magic properties, as if asserting something to be a “right” ends the conversation instead of beginning one.
In ethics, rights take various forms. Some are claim rights: meaning they impose duties on other people. My right to freedom of expression requires people not to silence me by force. My right not to be assaulted requires others not to attack me.
Some of these claim rights are negative, meaning they demand restraint. Others are positive, meaning they require the provision of systems, services, funding, and infrastructure.
Then there are liberty rights: these are freedoms to do something without anyone else being forced to act. I have the liberty to walk in the park. That does not obligate my neighbour to carry me if I injure my leg.
Every functioning society balances these categories. But we should be honest: positive claim rights are limited by reality. They do not entitle anyone to take whatever they want from someone else to make their life easier.
I may have a right to education. As a society, we respond by building schools, hiring teachers, and even running buses. We pool taxes to do so. But my right to an education does not entitle me to walk into my neighbour's driveway, take his car without consent, and speed to class because the bus is late.
Society may collectively provide tools—schools, buses, teachers—but I do not gain unrestricted access to someone else's body, labour, or property just to make my right more convenient. That is common sense to ordinary Canadians, even if it's foreign to a political faction that thinks every problem can be solved by ordering someone else around.
The State Cannot Draft Your Body Into Service
Pro-life activists often say, “Intentionally killing an innocent person is always wrong.” They then conclude that abortion must always be wrong if a fetus is a person. But this skips an essential step: whether anyone's right to life automatically includes a right to involuntarily use someone else's body.
It doesn't, and it never has.
Here's an example: Imagine if I, Will Adams, was a patient who would die without a kidney transplant. You may agree my life has value. You may feel enormous compassion. But compassion does not give the government authority to walk into your home, drag you to a hospital bed, and forcibly remove your kidney just because it is compatible.
We do not seize organs from the dead without consent. We do not strap citizens together for medical purposes against their will. We do not attach strangers for nine months because one person's body can sustain another. Our society treats bodily autonomy as a line that governments, employers, and activists do not get to cross simply because they have declared a noble cause.
And yet some would have us believe that pregnancy is the lone exception; that here, and only here, one individual's right to life becomes a license to occupy another's body for months without consent, with physical risk, economic cost, and psychological burden assumed by only one party.
That is not a defence of life. It is a blank cheque to override bodily sovereignty whenever the radical right decides it suits their values.
If Bodily Autonomy Matters, It Matters Consistently
We have just come through years in which many Canadians rediscovered the meaning of bodily autonomy. Some people demanded vaccination for work. Others resisted. Some insisted the state can order anything if it says “public good.” Others reminded them that freedom is not a fair-weather principle.
But notice the pattern: the same people who call bodily autonomy sacred in the context of vaccines are willing to erase it entirely in another, so long as they feel morally justified.
If bodily autonomy means anything, it means this: no person, institution, or government has the right to conscript the body of another without their ongoing consent, even for noble goals. Recognizing that one person cannot be drafted into biological service does not require denying anyone's humanity. It simply refuses the idea that personhood entitles one human to occupy and use another human like property without their consent.
The Self-Defence Parallel
Canadian law already recognizes that there are moments where taking a life is tragic but justified, when someone's rights are being violated and the only available means of preserving them is force.
Pregnancy without consent is not simply an “inconvenience.” It is a prolonged, physical occupation of a person's body, involving deep medical risk, and compelled biological labour. Where terminating a pregnancy is the only way to end the violation of bodily autonomy, the moral logic resembles self-defence: not punishment, not cruelty, but the refusal to be forced into involuntary service.
This is not about treating life lightly. It is about refusing to pretend one person's claim right creates an unlimited entitlement to someone else's organs, blood supply, and health.
No other class of persons in Canada enjoys such a sweeping right, and no government has the legitimate authority to grant it.
The Double Standard Canadians Are Expected To Swallow
We are told organs cannot be harvested without consent, that no adult can be forced into medical risk, and that no one may be compelled to surrender their body to another; unless pregnancy is involved.
The same fringe activist that bristles at the idea of even modest individual freedoms suddenly claims government should be able to dictate nine months of bodily use, labour, risk, and obligation, and that questioning this makes you extreme.
No: what is extreme is the idea that one person's right to life automatically grants an open-ended right to commandeer another's body.
Canadians do not live in a country where rights mean whatever the loudest activist says they mean this week. We live in a country where free citizens are not raw material for state-approved causes.
A Principled Conclusion
There will always be sincere disagreement about when life begins. Canadians of good faith hold deep convictions on the nature and value of prenatal life. That debate will continue. It should.
But even if we granted every premise of the most hard-line pro-life argument about personhood, it would still not follow that one person gains ownership over another's body.
Your right to life does not give you the right to someone else's kidney.
Your right to life does not let the state strap others together.
Your right to life does not erase my right to say no.
The same principle applies in pregnancy.
A society that respects freedom does not require 50% of the population to surrender bodily autonomy to satisfy anyone's moral framework, no matter how passionately held. The moment rights become an excuse to draft people's bodies into unwilling service, they cease to be rights at all and become tools of control.
If the government can order you to give your body to another person today, it can order it for any reason tomorrow.
And that is a power no free people should ever hand over.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.
