Philippa Kaur

The overturning of Roe v Wade harms all women and all who can get pregnant around the world by making their body-ownership merely conditional. This undermines their equality with others.

Many people are reeling from the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, so that states may now make it illegal to obtain or perform an abortion. For many of us, even if we do not live in the US, this feels like a personal blow. I use my work in moral philosophy to explain this feeling. If we feel personally affected it is because we are personally affected. The ruling diminishes the self-ownership of all women (even if they cannot get pregnant) and all those who can get pregnant, wherever they live.

The decision is likely to leave 33 million people in the US without access to abortion. These are the people most directly affected by the ruling. Evidence shows that being denied an abortion harms a person’s health, finances and family life. Those in the US who are forced to continue pregnancy may lose their dreams, or even their lives.

But the effects of the US ruling are global. Anyone who can get pregnant now knows that they cannot travel or move to the US and be recognised as an equal with equal rights. The same is not true for our male compatriots.

Of course, the US is not the only place where access to abortion is restricted so the development in the US amounts to an additional blow to equality, rather than a loss of what had been perfect equality. But the size and influence of the US make this additional blow very significant.

What is body ownership and why does it matter?

You own your body when you have the authority to make decisions about what is done to it and how it is used on the basis of your own interests and desires.

Body ownership is a fundamental part of moral standing for humans. It is through my body that I act on the world: when I bake a cake, write a book or build a house, I use my body. It is through my body that the world acts on me. When I am struck by the beauty of a sunrise, enjoy a cool breeze, find myself convinced by an argument, these effects on me need to go through my body. How my body is, makes up a major part of how I am: if my body is hurt, I am hurt. Body ownership is needed to respect the unique relationship between me and my body.

Body ownership is needed for a valuable kind of agency that I call full-fledged agency – the freedom to select one’s own ends and adopt a settled course of action in line with those ends. Maybe I value helping the sick and want to become a doctor. This requires me to commit to study for many years. I can only do this if I have at least some authority to decide what happens to my body.

None of this means that you are never required to use your body for others: it’s pretty uncontroversial that I am required to call an ambulance if the person next to me has a heart attack and this does not undermine self-ownership. However, for me to genuinely own my body, there must be limits on these requirements. I must have a say in how my body is used for the benefit of others.

Protestors in the US have been calling for their choice to be reinstated.
EPA/Etienne Laurent

Lack of access to abortion can undermine your body ownership even if you never actually need an abortion. If you can get pregnant but access to abortion is limited, then you only get to decide what happens to your body so long as you are not pregnant. You are not entirely free to decide on the actions needed to achieve your goals.

Indeed, I believe legal restrictions on abortion undermine body ownership for any woman, even if she cannot get pregnant and even if she never plans to travel to the US. Her control over her body still depends on the ability or inability to get pregnant and on where she is in the world. A woman’s right to control her body should not rest on such accidents.

Philosopher T.M. Scanlon discusses a “friend” who would steal a kidney for you if you needed one. Scanlon argues that this person is not a true friend to you, because of what his view must be of your right to your own body parts: “He wouldn’t steal them [from you], but that is only because he happens to like you.”

We need our friends to recognise that we have rights to our body parts because we are people, not just because they happen to like us. As a woman, I need recognition that my body belongs to me because I am a person, not merely because I happen not to be able to get pregnant or happen not to need to go to the US.

So all women and all those who can get pregnant are personally affected by the overturning of Roe v Wade – and all threats to abortion access. Recognition of why this is might help us understand otherwise puzzling feelings, both in ourselves and others. It might also help us to work together to defend reproductive rights. More

A woman sitting next to President Calvin Coolidge at a dinner party once told him she had made a bet that she could get him to say more than two words.

“You lose,” replied Coolidge, who served as president from 1923 until 1929.

During a White House recital, a nervous opera singer foundered through a performance before Coolidge. Someone asked him what he thought of the singer’s execution. “I’m all for it,” he said.

Coolidge was so taciturn that he was known as “Silent Cal.”

Three U.S. presidents – all of them Founding Fathers, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe – died on July 4.

Only one was born on July 4.

Calvin Coolidge was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, 150 years ago, on July 4, 1872. He died in January 1933.

Calvin Coolidge inspects a campaign truck painted with images of himself and his running mate, Charles G. Dawes.
FPG/Getty Images

Getting to know Coolidge

Fireworks rarely followed Coolidge during his political career.

Coolidge was balding, 5-foot-9 with a slight build, and he could walk into an empty room and blend in. He rarely smiled or changed expression. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, described Coolidge’s dour expression by saying he looked as if “he had been weaned on a pickle.”

Such a description would not have offended Coolidge. “I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a president,” he said, “and I think I’ll go along with them.”

Best known for a laugh or two

The 30th president remains a footnote in the history of U.S. presidents. Coolidge was preceded in the White House by Warren Harding, whose administration was one of the most corrupt in U.S. history. Coolidge was succeeded by Herbert Hoover, who was in office when the country fell into the throes of the Great Depression, which began with the crash of the stock market in October 1929, several months after Hoover took office.

Coolidge is probably best known for his contributions to books of political humor. I included him in a 2020 book I edited, “The Art of the Political Putdown: The Greatest Comebacks, Ripostes, and Retorts in History.”

Coolidge, a Republican who believed in small government, low taxes, morality, thrift and tradition, rose quickly – but quietly – in Massachusetts politics, where he became president of the state Senate in 1914. While serving in this capacity, two senators got into a bitter exchange of words in which one told the other to go to hell. The recipient of the remark demanded that Coolidge take his side. “I’ve looked up the law, Senator,” Coolidge told him, “and you don’t have to go.”

Coolidge was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1919. He soon earned a national reputation for being decisive by firing striking police officers in Boston and ordering the state militia to bring calm to the city after the strike had left its inhabitants vulnerable to violent mobs in September 1919.

Warren Harding, the Republican presidential nominee in 1920, chose Coolidge as his running mate. Harding and Coolidge won the election. Coolidge then became president when Harding died in 1923.

Early in his term, in December 1923, Coolidge spoke to Congress and pressed for isolation in U.S. foreign policy and tax cuts. He believed in small government and also benefited from the country’s strong economic position in the early 1920s. This helped his popularity rise, and he got more than 54% of the popular vote in the 1924 election.

Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, eat ice cream at a garden party for veterans at the White House in an undated photo.
Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

A genius for inactivity

If it was Coolidge’s decisive action that brought him to national attention, it was his inaction as president that defined his presidency and won him the admiration of political conservatives.

Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann wrote this about Coolidge in 1926: “Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity, which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly.”

Historians, however, praise Coolidge for presiding over low inflation, low unemployment and budget surpluses during every year of his presidency. He kept the country at peace and restored confidence in the government after the scandal-plagued Harding years.

But being president and taking daily naps still apparently left Coolidge with a lot of free time.

Coolidge reportedly liked to press the alarm buttons in the Oval Office, and when the Secret Service agents ran into the office to see what was wrong, he would be hiding.

Coolidge decided not to run for reelection in 1928. When reporters asked him why, he answered with characteristic succinctness. “Because there’s no chance for advancement,” he said.

If Coolidge had been reelected, he would have suffered Hoover’s fate of being president during the Depression. His political timing was as good as his comic timing.

Social critic H.L. Mencken once speculated on how Coolidge would have responded to the collapse of the stock market and the collapse of the nation’s economy.

“He would have responded to bad times precisely as he responded to good ones – that is, by pulling down the blinds, stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing away the lazy afternoons,” Mencken wrote. And yet the iconoclastic Mencken had this begrudging praise for Coolidge. “There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”

When American writer Dorothy Parker, who, like Coolidge, could say much with few words, learned that the former president had died in 1933, she replied, “How could they tell?” More