My Body My Choice is not a political song. It is a personal one about autonomy, the spinal injury that changed how I think about authority, and the right to make your own decisions.
The phrase my body my choice has been claimed by so many movements and arguments that it can be hard to hear it on its own terms anymore. I wrote this song to take it back to something more personal and more foundational than any particular political debate. The four words are powerful precisely because they apply to everything, your health, your identity, your choices, your relationship with authority, and your right to define your own path.
That is what the song is about. Not a debate. A declaration.
I am Tony Oso, a rock and alternative artist from Melbourne, Florida. Here is the actual story behind My Body My Choice and what I was trying to say.
Where It Came From
The song has two origin points that fed into each other.
The first was my spinal injury. I have multiple herniated and bulging discs from C1 to T2. When the injury was at its worst, spine surgeons told me my options were fusion surgery or learning to live with the limitations. What they did not offer was the third option: getting stronger. Building the muscle support around the spine to manage the condition without surgical intervention. I found that path on my own, partly through a conversation with a Marine who had been through combat injuries and told me that movement and strength were the answer rather than restriction. The doctors were not wrong from their clinical framework. But their framework was not the only one available to me and accepting it uncritically would have kept me sidelined from everything that matters in my life.
That experience changed how I relate to authority. Not cynically. I am not someone who dismisses expertise. But the lesson that expert consensus is not always the full picture, and that you have both the right and the responsibility to seek out the complete picture before making decisions about your own body, became part of how I think.
The second origin point was what happened during the pandemic. I am not anti-vaccine. I have had all the standard vaccinations. But when the COVID vaccines were rolled out with a timeline that was genuinely unprecedented, I had questions. I was young, healthy, and statistically at low risk. The mandates that followed created a situation where the people around me in Melbourne, a city full of defense contractors and engineers, were being asked to choose between their jobs and their own medical judgment. Some caved. I did not. The company I worked for pushed the mandate and I pushed back. I told them that if they wanted to enforce it they would have to fire me. The pressure eventually faded before it came to that, but the experience of being in that position clarified something I had already been working toward: that the right to make decisions about your own body is not negotiable and is not contingent on whether those decisions are popular or convenient for the people around you.
Those two experiences together are the foundation of My Body My Choice. The song is not about any single issue. It is about the principle underneath all of them.
What the Song Is Saying
The chorus is not a slogan. When I sing it, I am not repeating something I heard somewhere else. I am making a specific and personal statement about the right to self-determination that I had to actually fight for in my own life.
The lyrical content covers territory that most people have experienced in some form even if the specific circumstances differ. The feeling of being pushed into boxes that do not fit. The social pressure to make decisions based on what others expect rather than what you have actually determined is right for you. The accumulated cost of not standing up for yourself, which is one of the things I have watched happen to people around me and have had to guard against in myself.
The track has energy and edge because that is the right emotional register for what it is saying. Autonomy is not a passive thing. Taking ownership of your decisions, particularly when the pressure to defer is significant, requires a specific kind of active resistance. The music reflects that.
What the Song Is Not
My Body My Choice is not a partisan song. I am not making an argument for any political position. I am not aligning the song with any movement or party or policy position. The phrase belongs to everyone who has ever had to assert the right to make their own choices about their own body against external pressure, and that covers people across every political position, every health situation, every life circumstance.
The song is mine in the sense that it comes from my specific experiences. But the feeling it is describing is not mine alone and that is the point.
Who the Song Is For
If you have ever felt boxed in by what someone else decided was right for you. If you have ever been told to accept a limitation you were not ready to accept. If you have ever stood in the position of having to decide whether to capitulate to pressure or hold your ground on something that mattered to you, this song is for that moment.
The spinal injury taught me that the path forward is not always the one the authority in front of you recommends and that advocating for yourself is not the same as being difficult. The mandate situation taught me the same thing in a different context. The song is the synthesis of both lessons into a form that can be shared.
You can listen to My Body My Choice at tonyosomusic.com/music. I developed a visualizer for the song and can be viewed below. If you want to understand how I think about the difference between a visualizer and a full music video and why this song specifically warrants the full treatment, I wrote about that decision in my post on visualizer vs music video.
The broader themes of personal identity and resistance to external pressure that run through this song connect to Identity and Free in the catalog. If you want to understand the full picture of what I am working through across these songs, those are the ones I would listen to alongside this one.