Our privacy and why it matters

I was sitting in the living room the other night watching a show on Amazon with my wife Tracy when it came to me how wonderful it was that we could be doing exactly that.  We were alone.  Our dog Ruby was asleep on a big pillow between us on the sofa.  No one could bother us, or tell us to turn off the TV, or turn down the volume, or get up from the sofa and move somewhere else.  We could sit there all night if we wanted to because we have this house and the sofa and the TV and the right to be left alone.  We have our privacy.

It made me think about the circumstances that could deprive you of the right we enjoyed that night to do whatever we wanted to do within the four walls of our domicile.  You could be homeless, and thus not have a house and a couch and a TV to be alone with.  Even if you were in a shelter, you’d be housed in a communal area surrounded by others who also needed a place to get off the streets.  If there were facilities like a kitchen or a recreation room with a TV, those would be communal too, and subject to rules set by the entity running the shelter, like a city or county government.

You could be in a prison and housed either in a cell or within a dormitory-like area with other inmates, and even if you had a TV, it would be shared by the group, and what you watched would be determined by a vote of your fellow inmates or controlled by the prison administration which might allow the viewing of only certain channels and programs.  Or you could be in a communal barracks in the Army – I inhabited a few back in the day – and the TV, in the rare instance there was one, would be tuned to what the group wanted to watch and your bedtime would be set by a commander, as well as what time you woke up and what you did after that. 

In communal situations not caused by distress such as traveling by airplane or train, those running the conveyances go to some length to ensure that you can control at least some of your experience, such as providing individual TV’s that allow you to select what you watch and listen to on headphones.  In luxury accommodations such as business class, some airlines have cocoon-like seating that have doors you can close for privacy when you’re watching your entertainment or sleeping, and in really high-end first class you can order your meal whenever you want to eat instead of at a pre-determined mealtime.  In other words, they try to reduce the communal aspect of your experience and allow you to control as much of it as possible, given your mode of transportation or class of service.

Note that the operative word in all those situations is control:  who gets to control what you can do.  Any loss of privacy necessarily means that you relinquish control to someone or something else, whether it’s the Army, or an airline, or a prison system.  Privacy is dependent on control, thus the right to privacy, if it means anything at all, is the right to control your own space and your own body and what you do with it.  To have that right taken away is such an absolute loss that it can only be caused by personal distress or ordered by the courts or by volunteering to relinquish some of your privacy as you do in the Army.

Without the right to privacy, other rights you are guaranteed by the Constitution cease to matter.  You can be forced to be quiet while being housed in a shelter or in a prison cell or in the Army, thus removing your right to free speech.  Your right to “bear arms” under the Second Amendment is not operative behind bars or in the other circumstances I’ve mentioned.  Your rights against unreasonable search and seizure go away in similar circumstances due to the need for security in communal situations or because a prison administration is in complete control of your living space.

You know where I’m going with this.  The right to abortion under Roe v Wade that was just abrogated by the Supreme Court in Alito’s Dobbs decision was only in part about whether women can continue to get abortions – they can in about half the states, and so far at least can travel from those states to other states to get one.  What that decision was about was control over women’s lives and their right to make decisions about their lives and their own bodies.  In Kansas, where a recent referendum upheld the right to abortion (under various limiting circumstances), the state constitution protects “a right to personal autonomy,” according to a state Supreme Court decision upholding the right to abortion. 

That puts it about as well as anything I’ve read anywhere.  Personal autonomy means that an individual controls what he or she does with his or her body.  What the Dobbs decision did was take away that autonomy in states where that right is not protected by state constitutions and give control over women’s bodies to the same entities that administer prisons and run shelters and maintain state-controlled National Guard military units.  The state in all those instances controls the autonomy of whoever is sentenced to prison or needs a shelter or volunteers for military service in the National Guard, and now the state controls women and what they are permitted to do with their own bodies, in some states even when a woman has been raped or is pregnant due to incest.  Some Republican-controlled states are now trying to pass laws that would control a woman’s right to travel to other states in an even further attempt to take away the right to abortion.

That is absolute control, a loss of the right of autonomy over your own physical self, an absolute loss of the right to privately, by yourself, decide your own fate and to pursue your own life and liberty and happiness.

So while the rest of us still enjoy a right to sit in our living rooms and decide what to watch on TV or when we’ll go to bed or what we’ll do with our bodies when we wake up in the morning, that right has been taken away from women.  If a woman sits in her own home, or even in a shelter or in a prison or in a military unit and decides by herself that she wants to end a pregnancy for any reason at all, including having been raped or subjected to incest, she does not have that private right in the states that have banned abortion services.

The state is now in control, and that control and loss of liberty applies to women and to women only, not to the men to whom they are married or who caused their pregnancy or to the men who voted in a state legislature to ban abortion. 

Just women.  On its face, it’s an unequal application of the law and the Constitution, but so long as Republicans control the Supreme Court and those state legislatures and governorships, there we are.