Few things are as jarring as a colossal Celestial head and hand emerging from the ocean. Even a world that has experienced alien invasions, sudden depopulation and repopulation, and Howard the Duck has to be rattled by such a literally earth shattering event. You’d think so, but the mysterious appearance of such a monolithic mega-structure is relegated to a mere curiosity on the news. In all likelihood, the multiversal rifts and rapidly rewinding night sky would eclipse even this huge event mere weeks and months later.

We certainly haven’t experienced the level of trauma that the world of the MCU has, but we’ve seen a thing or two these last few years. No doubt, the stunning late night reveal that a United States Supreme Court draft opinion had, for the first time in our nation’s history, been leaked to the press months ahead of its intended official release, will be old news before long. However fleeting the ruminations may be, though, the underlying issue remains.

Whether the leak hastens the apparent overturn of Roe v. Wade or derails it, the fundamental conflict between the bodily autonomy of mother and child that the 1973 ruling thrust into the national debate will continue to divide Americans. Like most wedge issues, the disconnect comes from both sides embracing only part of the solution while rejecting anything that resembles the opposition. The pro-life side doesn’t necessarily disregard women’s rights, but the concept has become so loaded that it isn’t often given the consideration that it’s due. The pro-choice side, for all its ostensible devotion to freedom, has rigorously trained a generation in Olympic level mental gymnastics to avoid the blatant truth of the matter. Each side has an arsenal of thought experiments to drive home their points, but analogies fail to do justice to the singularity of the issue.

Though it likely wasn’t intended as such, The Eternals, presents a very telling analogy for abortion. The titular team of otherworldly immortals spend millennia protecting mankind, from the dawn of civilization to modern day, only to find that the cosmic entity they’ve been serving cared for humanity only insofar as their sentience could fuel the birth of another of its kind. Celestials, we learn alongside their horrified servants, draw sustenance during their gestation from intelligent life and are born fully grown from within the planets that harbor them. Faced with an impossible decision, the Eternals choose to end the life of the Celestial, Tiamut, rather than be a party to the genocide her emergence would cause.

All the pivotal factors of the most difficult pregnancies are there: conflicting autonomy, dependence, obligation, and a lack of consent. Even the best real world analogies may isolate one aspect or another, but none of them present the whole picture. Any situation one conjures outside of literal gestation misses the unique, inherent relationship that undergirds the entire situation.

It’s not just any person upon whom the unborn is dependent, it’s his mother; his progenitor. It’s not just any person whose rights conflict with hers, it’s her child. No more intrinsic connection can exist between two people. The very concept of obligation, that one is compelled by propriety to fulfill the terms of an existing bond, could be expressed in no more absolute terms than these.

Even more imperative than a contract, pregnancy requires no active observance or enforcement, instead proceeding automatically from an literal, material bond. No compulsion by a nefarious religious patriarchy, an ambivalent police force, or even the unborn child is required. Indeed, the unborn are in no position to compel anyone. Requests are made and obliged chemically without so much as a thought.

Isn’t it the thought that counts, though? Contracts require explicit agreement in order to be binding. What is consensual sex, though, if not a conscious, explicit agreement between people? To say that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy is to say that signing a contract is only consent to writing your name. Even the most (how to put this decently?) truncated sex takes more consistently conscious choice than the few seconds it takes scribble a signature.

But contracts entail certain terms, and the signature makes it virtually incontrovertible that these terms were understood or at least assented to. Does pregnancy not have definitive terms known to those who engage in sex? Perhaps if it had been legal for almost half a century to escape contracts by killing the party to which one is obligated, then people would be as flippant about their John Hancock as they are with other extensions of themselves.

Contracts exist precisely because people cannot always be trusted to live up to their obligations. Sometimes they try to weasel out of them, so it helps to have a record of that agreement to reference. With pregnancy, no written record is necessary, as the existence of a brand new human being attests to the concurrence. If mere ink and paper, signifying consent to known and understood terms, is considered morally binding, how much more so is physically intertwined human tissue resulting from the same? Certainly no written assurances can be more indispensable to the beneficiary or more ethically confining than the immediate necessity of sustaining a human being who exists on your account.

This, of course, doesn’t reckon with the pro-choice ace in the hole: rape. No obligation, it seems, could possibly result from a decision made by someone else, especially one so heinous and antithetical to the victim’s will. Part of what makes the act of rape so repulsive, though, is that it occasionally forces just such a situation. It’s as though someone has pushed a baby in a stroller into the path of a moving car. Presuming it’s within the driver’s power to stop, she is obliged to do so, lest her refusal directly cause the death of the infant. There can be no doubt that the initial act is evil, but that doesn’t excuse the decision to barrel forward without a thought for the innocent life.

This conflict between the autonomy of the woman and that of the child, whatever the circumstances that lead there, is the heart of the concept of abortion. The unconscious provision of sustenance is no more a violation of a woman’s autonomy than is her heartbeat,  but sometimes pregnancy puts a woman at the risk of much more than discomfort. Sometimes it puts her very life at risk.

The MCU’s Celestials, with their disregard for the lives obliterated by their births, their implantation without consent of those very lives, and their sense of parasitical entitlement, are a perfect storm of excuses for their abortion. Yet the Eternals are still conflicted by the thought of doing so. They understand the gravity, not just of the lost potential, but of the obligation humanity has to the Celestials. While the people of Earth don’t owe anything to Tiamut herself, they do owe their existence (if Arishem, The Prime Celestial, can be believed, that is) to the sacrifice of a previous planet. The sacrifice entailed by Celestials’ gestation and birth is built into the natural rights of all people, as much a part of who we are as the necessity to eat or sleep.

The Eternals understand that, though the people of Earth had no choice in the matter, neither did Tiamut. It is no fault of hers that the cycle of life to which we all are beholden requires the sacrifice of some to sustain others. They understand that her life is a much worth saving as those with whom her autonomy conflicts. For them, ending her life is as horrific as letting her unwittingly end the lives of others. They conceive a plan to forestall her emergence until a more agreeable solution can be reached.

It is only when their plan is foiled, when their inaction would result in the imminent, inescapable deaths of billions, that they resort to ending her life.

It is telling that, though the stakes could scarcely be higher and the necessity of the choice could hardly be more unjust, they still felt the weight of decency weighing on them. They recognized that choosing the lesser of two evils is still evil and were committed to sacrificing themselves if need be to avoiding choosing either. The Eternals presents a unique analogy that accounts for the relevant dimensions of pregnancy and seems to offer a rationale for abortion. However, the lengths to which it needs to extrapolate illustrate the flimsiness of that supposed justification.

To infer from the last resort of lethal force against an imminent existential threat a blanket permission to preemptively eliminate potential threats is nothing short of madness. To draw from a unique parasitism that kills the host a standing policy allowing the killing of any symbiotic organism whose dependency might pose threat or inconvenience is utterly monstrous. To rationalize that the extenuating circumstances amounting to self defense in the most complicated pregnancies render abortion as essential medical care is to state that the existence of bad actors renders murder itself an essential right of all people.