Who Owns Your Body?

In the Covid Wars, the answer is the government

The Rape of Europa, Titian, 1559/62

As a child, your mother owned your body. She was in charge of what went into it and also, what came out of it. It was a deep bond based on the fundamental question of survival. As you matured, this intimate relationship changed until, at puberty, you couldn’t stand your mother anywhere near your body. Because by now, you had taken ownership; you were no longer a child. Access to your body and its functions was your business, not hers. Of course, some mothers never relinquish that right. Mine believed until the end of her days that she ‘owned’ me.

The only other person who has intimate access to your body during adulthood is your doctor and your lover. And that access is always temporary. It’s only when you get very old and frail, dependent upon caregivers, that you return to the state of childhood and others are in charge of your body. That is the normal state of affairs, but it is now under attack. If the government of Austria gets its way, adult Austrians will be children in their own country, ruled by a despotic political ‘mother’.

Covid is being used as an excuse to abrogate the democratic rights of adults and install the government as the legal and rightful owner of your body. Austria is the first nation on the globe to declare forced vaccinations legal as of February 2022. It is a terrible precedent, and even China backed away from it. Already, there has been a huge protest in Graz, and there are likely more to come. Even if the vaccines worked as advertised, i.e., stopping the infection cycle which is what actual vaccines have always done, this would be an invasion of your most basic rights and therefore, out of bounds in a democracy. They will regret this. We have fought this battle before and won: the history of feminism is instructive here and should give us hope in a dark time.

Women’s bodies have always been the dramatic staging room in the struggle for basic rights. This struggle has still not been won in places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, which practice an extreme version of the Muslim faith. All women in countries like this are ‘owned’ by male relatives. Their bodies are under the control of fathers, husbands, brothers, or uncles. We rightly abhor such conditions, but we have forgotten that as recently as the Victorian age, we also believed that women needed to be ‘protected’ and therefore, under the control of fathers, husbands, or uncles. Women could not be trusted to vote. They were children, after all. The childish woman was considered normal, even desirable. Women were brought up to be innocent and childish, so many were naïve and unfit for life. This only changed after decades of bitter and courageous struggles, women chaining themselves to the fences before parliament to gain the vote, women campaigning for the right to have safe abortions. My body, my choice, became their rallying cry. Informed consent became the norm when interacting with the medical system. The introduction of the Pill sealed it: bit by bit, women came to own their bodies, grew up and became adults in an adult world. So, we cannot pretend that we don’t know what this is about. It’s about who gets to decide who is in charge. When a government decides that you are a child because you need to be ‘protected’ and cannot be trusted to make adult decisions about your body, then you have crossed an historic, red line.

The good burghers of Austria have a crucial role to play in this Covid drama. Everyone will be watching them. Are they going to meekly submit, follow the herd, betray their individual conscience as they did with Hitler, or are they going to fight back and tell the Austrian government to go to hell? Resistance is not always futile.

This fight is about having the courage to be free, and there is a wonderful German term that sums it up in a way no English word does: Freimut. Two words, Frei/free and Mut/courage, cobbled together. This wonderful word is exact yet carries the wider, implicit message that freedom requires courage. Without courage, freedom means nothing. It also connotes a way of thinking, a habit of free ranging, untrammelled thought. This extraordinary spectacle in Austria, where National Socialism was hatched, is of historic significance. We are all implicated in this drama, and it is not yet over. I fervently hope they find the necessary Freimut to win. If they win, we all do. If they lose, we all stand to lose control over our own bodies. That it is thinkable, even actionable, is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.