Bodily autonomy is a strong consideration in favor of both abortion and optional vaccination. Because it is not the only consideration, however, many of us are in favor of abortion for anyone who wants one while also seeing some cases in which we favor mandatory vaccination. I've recently seen posts from friends supporting the right to abortion, such as shares of screenshots of this tweet:
If you don't accept that bodily autonomy is an essential unconditional liberty, it's a waste of time talking to you at all. No other liberties survive without that one, more fundamental than property rights: if you don't own yourself absolutely, you own nothing.
In some ways this is similar to the use of the slogan 'my body, my choice', but I don't think people generally interpret short phrases as a complete argument; a slogan often draws attention to a major consideration without claiming it's decisive. In this case, however, people are sharing statements that do claim to be a full argument, and make the case for abortion in a way that also makes the case against vaccination requirements.
Q: A right to abortion isn't anything like a right to refuse vaccination! Their impact is very different, and there are lots of other considerations: vaccination prevents something contagious, pregnancy and childbirth can be deeply difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous, etc.
A: I agree. Which is why we should make the case for these policies in a way that depends on those considerations, instead of resting the entire case on autonomy.
Q: I do think bodily autonomy is an essential unconditional liberty, and I'm opposed to both abortion bans and vaccination requirements.
A: That's a consistent position, but you're not my audience here.
Q: A vaccine mandate doesn't mean you'll have one forced on you, it just means you can't go certain places. That's very different from threatening jail time for abortions.
A: If the court had ruled that states could exclude people who had ever had an abortion from restaurants, gyms, universities, and jobs in healthcare, government, or schooling, we would see this as very nearly as bad as a blanket prohibition an abortion. But I would also go farther: a future pandemic could be much worse than covid, and I could see one in which we would need to choose between literally mandatory vaccination and the lives of immunocompromised people.
It might be worth talking more about what we mean by bodily autonomy. Most of the current abortion debate is not about laws that prevent women from doing something with their bodies themselves but it's about whether or not doctors can help those women by inducing an abortion in them.
Criminalizing suicide is not the same thing as criminalizing euthanasia.
From a bodily autonomy perspective, it's not clear to me why a government shouldn't be able to say "you are not allowed to sell this abortion pill" when the same government is allowed to say "you are not allowed to sell heroin" and "you are not allowed to sell your homebrew vaccine". I personally do oppose FDA/EMA ability to restrict what I can do with my body.
Legalizing prostitution also feels to me about allowing bodily autonomy.
Involuntary psychiatric holds in their current form feel to me also like problematic cases of violating bodily autonomy.
In cases like abortion, euthanasia, and prostitution I do like the way German regulation goes where we try to make sensible rules that try to honor the involved tradeoffs.
I get the impression that most people who at the moment speak about bodily autonomy don't very strongly believe in it and therefore don't see it as a problem if that principle gets violated in other contexts than their pet political issue.