McFall v. Shimp Does Not Exclude Women

The 1978 ruling of Judge John P. Flaherty, Jr., in McFall v. Shimp established bodily autonomy as a legal precedent that does not exclude women, including those seeking abortions.

 

Here are some key points.

 

The plaintiff, Robert McFall, suffered from a rare bone marrow disease and sought the court to compel the defendant, McFall's cousin Shimp, to donate bone marrow to save McFall's life after Shimp refused.

The question posed by the plaintiff was that, in order to save the life of one of its members by the only means available, may society infringe upon one's absolute right to his "bodily security"?

The court found the decision to rest with the defendant, stating that "to compel him to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle" upon which American society is founded.

Justice Flaherty continued: "To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual, and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn.

 

"... For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forceable extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind. Such would raise the spectre of the swastika and the Inquisition, reminiscent of the horrors this portends."

So, whose property is a woman's body? Does it belong to the state, which may then decide who lives and dies? Does it belong to some stranger she never met and may never meet? Does it belong to her father or her husband, as the Bible says?

Or does a woman's body belong to the woman herself just as a man's body belongs to the man himself?