The violinist has no right to privacy and so has no right over his own body.
If you think that the argument is based on the privacy rights (or lack thereof) of the violinist you have a very poor understanding of the story. The violinist is the person who is dependent in the story and his 'host' is the one who is asserting a right (privacy, bodily integrity, liberty, whatever you want to call it) to not be required to be connected to, and act in support of the violinist. The violinist has the same rights as the 'host' but the contention is that the violinist (and/or the people who attached him to the host) are in violation of the rights of the host.
We don't have, and have never had, a legal right to do whatever we want with our bodies. You can't legally have sex with someone for money in 49 out of the 50 states, you can't legally snort cocaine, you legally can't punch me in the face without proper justification or trespass on private property.
Even a libertarian ideal (and our constitution, while it does support liberty, is not a strongly libertarian document, certainly the current legal interpretation of it is not strongly libertarian), would place limits on what you can do with your body, most clearly that you could not use your body to attack someone else. If the fetus is considered a human with rights abortion would be an attack against the fetus. The violinist argument is an attempt to say, by analogy, that the attack is justified. Its a strong attempt in certain ways but the analogy has certain important weaknesses when dealing with the majority of abortions.
Tim |
