On Abortion and Cake-Baking

What do you not get, dear conservatives and dear leftists, in the expression “Stay out of our bedrooms and board rooms?”

The expression, of course, is metaphor, but it’s not too far from the literal truth. Individual rights means everyone, but especially the government, should stay out of our personal lives and our business and professional lives. It means what we do in our personal and business and professional lives—between consenting adults, which means we don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights—is none of your business.

The result of this principle is, or would be, if implemented consistently, laissez-faire capitalism.

Dear conservatives and dear leftists, you both conflate legal and moral issues. You both agree that what you consider immoral should be illegal and therefore moral transgressors must be punished.

If abortion is murder, for example, why not execute the aborters? Something similar can be said about small business people who refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings. No, you conservatives and leftists have not gone so far as to recommend execution—yet—but both of you have no qualms about putting victims of your legal shenanigans in that modern version of the dungeon called solitary confinement, “for their own protection,” as you put it. (Think Jerry Sandusky and Paul Manafort.)

In an earlier post, I quoted Ludwig von Mises, who said, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. . . . He refuses to convince his fellow citizens. He prefers to ‘liquidate’ them. . . . [He] worships violence and bloodshed.”

Are we there yet? You both preach self-sacrifice, otherwise known as altruism. According to both of you, we should all be sacrificing ourselves to some “higher good,” whether God or “society” (which means the state) . . . or you.

Suffering is supposedly our natural fate and you intend to make us suffer. Individual rights? That’s selfish!

Let us now take these self-sacrificial issues one at a time.

Abortion is not murder, nor does our soul begin at conception, or even at birth. At twelve weeks, the fetus is a couple of inches of cells in the woman’s body. Let’s emphasize that: in the woman’s body, not in your body. Each woman owns her body and, as does every adult individual, has the right to do with her body whatever she wants. (Suicide laws in most states have been properly abolished.)

We are, after all, overwhelmingly talking about the first trimester (91.1% of abortions performed) and we are talking about ending a potential, not actual, human life. Beyond the first thirteen weeks, each woman still has a legal right to abort, especially if her life is at risk due to a difficult pregnancy. This is what the “right to life” means! It begins at birth. This is the legal issue.

The moral issue is narrower.

Is it really the moral duty of a young woman to become enslaved to a child she does not want?  I’m not just talking about malformed children. What about the psychology of physically healthy children who have been raised by a mother (and father) who did not want them?

As for the soul . . . the soul is our consciousness and fundamental motivating values, our core and mid-level evaluations, as psychologist Edith Packer (chap. 1) identifies them, that give us a personal identity. The soul-making process takes many years, with development beginning most likely in toddlerhood, though infants, through the treatment of their caregivers and their experiences of pleasureful satisfactions and painful frustrations, may begin to develop a potential soul.

Conception and the months of pregnancy give us genes that determine our skin and eye color, not our souls.

Suffering, I guess you conservatives would say, is the plight of both children and parents, but especially parents, because they are the ones who chose to have sex. And this is where we have arrived in the discussion. It is sex that must be controlled, by the government, and you are the ones who want to be in charge.*

Now dear leftists, there’s nothing subtle about you and your recycled Marxism and collectivist clichés. Your issues are blatant power grabs. Ultimately, you or your followers or descendants, if current trends continue, will soon start worshiping violence and bloodshed, if it hasn’t already begun. As did Robespierre, you are already dressing up violence as virtue.

Sacrificing a baker to an alleged “public good,” coercing him to make a cake for someone he does not want to serve, is only the beginning. As your policies dictate, the dungeon, or rather, solitary confinement (and, of course, eventually the guillotine), is where hinderers of your march to power, whom you propagandize as violators of morality, should go.

The issue is the primacy of property rights and you know it. Capitalism is a system of private property, private ownership of the means of production, which includes the baking of cakes. I can do whatever I want to on my property (and say anything, if we are talking about free speech), provided, again, that I’m not violating other peoples’ rights who are residents or guests. So you, dear leftists, get out!

But that is precisely what you cannot tolerate—being unable to control other people on their own property—so you brandish your government guns like any other petty or psychopathic criminal.

“Without property rights,” as Ayn Rand says, “no other rights are possible.” Property rights are sacrosanct and should be untouchable. They are the implementation of the rights to life and liberty.

The destruction of capitalism has always begun with the destruction of property rights. It continues to be a fundamental part of your campaign.

Dear leftists, I sympathize in today’s intellectual climate with conservatives and side with them in their war against you and your medievalist friends who want to reinstitute a modern version of serfdom with you in charge of the fiefdom. Most conservatives seem to understand your envy and hatred of the good, the capitalist good, that has brought us out of the abject poverty you want to send us back to.

Abortion is not an insignificant issue, but you leftists have no principles with which to argue your case—“pro-choice” or not. You so obviously want power.


*This is not an endorsement of every abortion. The moral decisions of getting pregnant and raising children, as well as aborting a fetus, are serious and must be carefully thought out ahead of time. It is decidedly immoral to get pregnant just to collect welfare or because one feels like it; it is also decidedly immoral to abort based on whim. Parents must provide information and support to their children about sex, birth control, and abortion, including information about abortion’s potential for physical and emotional pain,. But this means the government on both sides of the political aisle must get out of the abortion business. This means in particular no tax-payer funds or regulations to or for either side, and especially it means no tax-payer funds to “nonprofits” like Planned Parenthood and the various conservative counterparts! (Scare quotes intended, as many so-called nonprofits are highly profitable.) And, as I have written before, both sides have the moral obligation of removing legal and regulatory obstacles to adoption and the legal and regulatory encouragements of unwed teenage pregnancies. (On this last, see Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.)