The Right to Bodily Integrity: Nobody Wins and We All Lose in the COVID-19 Showdown
The Right to Bodily Integrity: Nobody Wins and We All Lose in the COVID-19 Showdown By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead August 18, 2021 “We’ve reached the point where state actors can penetrate rectums and vaginas, where judges can order forced catheterizations, and where police and medical personnel can perform scans, enemas and colonoscopies without the suspect’s consent. And these procedures aren’t to nab kingpins or cartels, but people who at worst are hiding an amount of drugs that can fit into a body cavity. In most of these cases, they were suspected only of possession or ingestion. Many of them were innocent... But these tactics aren’t about getting drugs off the street... These tactics are instead about degrading and humiliating a class of people that politicians and law enforcement have deemed the enemy. ”—Radley Balko, The Washington Post Freedom is never free. There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.