Originally Posted by PepsiFree
That isn't really an honest reflection of these two issues though.
For one, vaccine mandates don't "force" anything. You can continue to live a life unvaccinated, should you choose. You have continued access to shelter, food, all of things necessary to live. You can continue to find employment. It does limit those options, of course. You can't go to a restaurant. You can't work as a nurse. But you don't have the right to do those things in the first place. A hospital is not required to employ you just because you have the required education. A restaurant is not required to serve you just because you show up.
So, with the premise that this violates bodily autonomy thrown out the window, as it is completely ridiculous, here is how these two beliefs actually align:
"Pro-life" people, which are actually anti-abortion people, value the existence of life over the quality of life or societal good. They are against a medical procedure, but do not actually care about the life of the mother or child involved. If a mother was forced to carry a child of rape to term, give up the child to foster care due to inability to care, and have that child become the responsibility of an already overwhelmed foster care system, that would be seen as a win, as the actual medical procedure was prevented. They are not "pro-life" because they don't actually value life in qualitative terms. If that child lived a terrible life, one full of horrific abuse and neglect, and ended up taking their own life in their teens, they would still count 15 years of hardship and abusive as objectively better than an abortion. They do not care about quality of life.
Anti-vaxxers are similar. They are strictly against a medical procedure. They do not care if people get sick, hospitals become overwhelmed, or rising death tolls, so long as the procedure itself is prevented. The actual impact on other people doesn't matter, even if people die, so long as the procedure itself is prevented.
There is a clear through-line between those positions. Pretending that either life or bodily autonomy are values at the core of those positions is false.
On the other side, pro-mandate and pro-choice people share a higher value placed on quality of life and societal health. "Forcing" people to undergo a medical procedure is not a belief held in either position; the choice to do so is respected and upheld in either case. What mandates accomplish is limiting the areas where those who choose to remain unvaccinated can spread the virus. Choices have consequences. You have the right to choose to be vaccinated or not and deal with the consequences of those actions, just as you have the right to an abortion or carry a baby to term and deal with the consequences of those actions. Bodily autonomy is fully intact.
It's the same sort of mental gymnastics that occurs in free speech debates. It's a very loosely applied term. Mike Fisher has every right to say what he wants, nobody is debating that, nobody is seriously suggesting that the government intervene and arrest him for saying it. But still self proclaimed "libertarians" come in waxing poetic about his right to say it, as if it's a counter-point to the equally respected right of everyone else to call it ridiculous bull#### and call his position idiotic. Think of how silly it looks when someone says controversial, people say "that's bull####," and a pseudo-intellectual comes by trotting out "actually, it's free speech," describing what's happening on both sides of the conversation, but using it as justification for only one side and as a counter-point to the other. It's the same with bodily autonomy in that the way it's being applied here is political, libertarian nonsense, and not based on upholding the actual right itself.
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