I Have More Rights as a Corpse than as a Pregnant Woman

Please explain why can I refuse to donate my organs but cannot stop an unwanted pregancy?

Jessica Lim
4 min readJul 19, 2022
Pexels | Karolina Grabowska

Welcome to the world we live in. The gavel has banged, the dust has settled and now in America, I have more rights over my body as a corpse than I do as a pregnant woman.

I wish I could be shocked, but I’m not. I’m appalled, upset, terrified and furious. But I cannot say it comes as a surprise that once again, the legal system has decided that pregnant women don’t need reproductive rights.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned a few weeks ago, the American constitutional right to abortion ceased to be a national right, and abortion rights and restrictions became a state-by-state decision.

In other words, if you live in a red state with a conservative government and you accidentally get pregnant, well honey, I hope you’re rich enough to get out-of-state medical care, because otherwise, you’re straight out of luck.

Does “My body, my choice” only apply to conservative white men?

It baffles me that the same people who said “my body my choice” when it came to vaccines turned back around and stuck out a massive middle finger when women needing an abortion wanted to say the same.

You’re really out here saying that removing a connected egg-and-tadpole from a female body is so murderous that she should have to carry a baby for nine months, and then deal with the financial, personal, and career repercussions for the next 18+ years.

However, when thousands were hospitalized, sick and dying from COVID-19, you could not deal with the inconvenience of a five-second needle and mask.

Please check your privilege.

Look at it this way — in America, guns, rapists and dead bodies have more rights than pregnant women.

We might have removed rights the pregnant women have over their bodies. But you know what hasn’t changed? The rights of corpses. Yes, that’s right — I might have no rights over my uterus in America, but the dead skeletons have rights over their organs.

In both the United States and Canada, organ donation is based on an opt-in basis. That means that doctors have no jurisdiction over using your deceased organs for a transplant unless you give explicit permission.

There could be a person dying next door to a dead corpse with a perfect organ match. The deceased could be dead as a doorknob with no need for any of their organs. The patient could be struggling for every breath due to a collapsed lung.

Yet it doesn’t matter.

Unless there is clear-as-day consent that the deceased wanted to be an organ donor, those organs cannot be touched. And organ donation is not even something to opt out — you literally have to sign up in order for your organs to be used to save lives.

Wow, imagine that. A medical process in which body autonomy is prioritized without millions of people marching in front of hospitals with signs of dead carcasses.

Now I’m not saying that deceased corpses should be an organ free-for-all (although I do think it should be an opt-out rather than opt-in process). However, if we are so pressed and stressed over every “life” then maybe we should focus our efforts elsewhere.

Maybe instead of turning a teenage girl into an unwilling mother with an unwanted burden, because we are clinging on to the clump-of-cells-that-might-one-day-become-a-human in her uterus, we could try to save the life of the actual real person in a hospital room by giving them an organ from the dead corpse who doesn’t need it but forgot to opt-in as an organ donor.

Just some food for thought. Because I feel like there are better ways to save lives than to force an unwanted pregnancy.

When you remove abortion rights, you’re not saving lives.

You’re putting people at risk, you’re making children and teens homeless, and you’re adding to an already rampant problem of poverty, under-education, crime and food scarcity. And above all, you’re just removing the rights of women.

You’re allowed to be pro-life. You’re allowed to think that it would be morally wrong to remove a clump of cells when it is YOUR body. The whole idea of “your body your choice”, the whole idea of pro-choice, is that YOU get to decide what you want to do to YOUR body.

But let other people decide for themselves. Don’t stand on your high horse with your signs of dead babies in front of children hospitals and abortion clinics. Don’t think you’re doing any good in the world by telling every pregnant girl that “Abortion is Murder,” especially when she is already considering suicide at the helplessness of the situation.

Afterall, when you’re talking about a country where guns, rapists, corpses and clumps of cells have more rights than pregnant women, you really don’t have a leg to stand on when you say “Abortion is Murder”.

--

--

Jessica Lim

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing … or both | Reach out 👋 jessicalim813@gmail.com