Alabama just passed a forced labor law.
According to this law, the state has the right to determine that one person is entitled to the labor of another: a pregnant woman MUST house and feed a fetus – without pay and against her will – under threat of state violence.
If that’s the case, how long until the state can redistribute your kidneys? How long until a senator’s right to a kidney overrides your right to keep yours simply because she’s more important than you? What happens when they can knock down your door because you’re Nancy Pelosi’s blood type?
If the law stands, then the state has the right force you to allow someone else to use your body parts for their own gain, regardless of your wishes.
Plenty of people have made excellent arguments from a left leaning perspective about why this law is a travesty, but conservatives themselves should oppose this law as well. Any conservative who believes in individual property rights, freedom, and small government should be vehemently speaking out against it since it: 1) backs up forced labor with the state’s monopoly on violence, and 2) sets a dangerous precedent of state overreach into the area of bodily autonomy.
For any conservative who has been concerned by eminent domain, wherein the state can take land from one person and give it to another, a law giving someone the right use to another person’s body should be a five alarm fire. If you don’t own your body, what do you own? What are property rights in such a country? If a woman doesn’t have a right to evict a fetus from her body, that she owns, then a landlord doesn’t have the right to evict a non-paying tenant from a building they own. If property rights are in question, that fundamentally undermines the economy.
This new law is unconstitutional, it is dangerous, and it is immoral. From every perspective.
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