Regardless of how old, how young, how healthy, or how sick our bodies are, a Christian view is that these bodies are not our own.” “You were bought with a price,” Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “therefore glorify God in your body.”

In a rather stunning op-ed at CNN a couple of weeks ago, a medical doctor offered an answer to one of the great worldview questions: “What is the highest good?” Bodily autonomy, wrote Dr. Alexis Drutchas, is the highest human right, and should trump all other considerations in medical decision making: “Adults with capacity should hold the ultimate authority over their own bodies and the medical decisions for their minor children.”

The obvious context of this op-ed, which should be especially obvious to anyone who’s ever attempted to actually disagree with their doctors, is gender transition. Smartly, this doctor offered a philosophical take on the matter, since medical justifications for cross-sex hormones and body-mutilating surgeries are lacking.

In his most recent book, What it Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, bioethicist Dr. Carter Snead addresses the growing influence of expressive individualism over medicine. This vision of the human being “as an atomized and solitary will” which “equates human flourishing solely with the capacity to formulate and pursue future plans of one’s own invention” is, according to Snead, causing “mission creep” in the medical community. Instead of treating sick bodies with a view to heal, bodies are seen as arbitrary physical matter that should bend like clay to our wills, and medical ethics and science should follow suit.

If expressing our own wills is the first duty of expressive individualism, accepting everyone else’s expression is the second. Doctors should comply, even if a patients’ desired “expression” requires killing a healthy baby, cutting off a healthy body part, or causing death upon request. This philosophical shift is leading to dramatic practical changes in how medicine is practiced, in many cases leading to literal opposite ideas of concepts like “treatment,” “illness,” and “healing.”

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