Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent

This text attempts to reframe abortion rights by focusing not on a woman's right to choose abortion, but rather on a woman's right to consent to pregnancy. Drawing on legal, medical and philosophical definitions of pregnancy, it disaggregates the consent to sexual intercourse from the consent to pregnancy and argues that men and women have equal right to bodily integrity, which is defined as the freedom from nonconsensual bodily intrusion. The work provides the grounds for a woman's right to an abortion and state funding of abortions.