Abortion and Vaccine Mandates

In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, James Melville, a commenter in the UK, tweeted the following concerning possible stances towards abortion on the one hand and vaccine mandates on the other:

Such an argument is designed to draw attention to the apparent inconsistency of both the conservative right (which would normally oppose both abortion rights and vaccine mandates) and the liberal left (whom we would expect to favour both).

From a libertarian perspective, one could, in response, point out that the state has no right to impose any kind of mandate upon anybody. So one could easily oppose state imposed, vaccine mandates while believing that there is no, or a limited, right to abort a pregnancy.

That aside, however, your right to self-ownership (or to “bodily autonomy”) is sacrosanct only so long as you are not committing an act of aggression against the person or property of another. Melville’s argument therefore turns on whether someone who believes that abortion is an aggressive act must necessarily believe that the possibility of carrying a virus and potentially spreading it through ordinary, social contact is also an aggressive act. (For the sake of argument, let us assume that vaccines are an effective method of defence against the virus in question). And the converse must be true also: if a person regards one of the acts to be non-aggressive, that person must believe that the other isn’t aggressive either.

This seems to me to be far from proven. 

Any person holding the first view cited by Melville – anti-mandate and anti-abortion – could easily point out that the two situations are so spectacularly different in terms of a) the relationship between alleged perpetrator and alleged victim, and b) the certainty of the causal relationship between act and harm, that there is no problem in construing abortion as being aggressive while remaining unvaccinated is not. Thus, it would be consistent for this person to say that one’s right to resist vaccine mandates is absolute while suggesting that a carrying mother has no, or a limited right, to abort a pregnancy.

An individual holding the second view could plausibly maintain that people have a right to not be infected by viruses carried by others, thus favouring vaccine mandates. But this would not require that person to regard an unborn foetus as a legal person with (limited) rights to self-ownership that temper the rights of the carrying mother.

One may, of course, criticise each individual view on its own merits. But it seems to me that there is nothing inherently contradictory in coming to different conclusions in each situation.