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:
Anyone who says:
I’m against vaccine mandates, but I’m anti abortion.
OR I’m for vaccine mandates, but I’m pro abortion.
Both are hypocritical.
You either support medical choice or you don’t. You can’t just pick and choose bodily autonomy from an à la carte menu.
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.
Duncan Whitmore 