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.)

The Repressed Memory Craze and Hysteria as Mimicry of Physical and Psychological Disorders

The word “hysteria” does not mean “wildly or melodramatically emotional,” although it can be used that way to describe certain people in certain situations.

Hysteria is a psychological problem largely dependent on the attention patients receive from their significant others, whether family, physician, or psychiatrist.

For example, Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients in the late nineteenth century mimicked the symptoms of epilepsy because they were housed on the same ward as epileptics who received considerable attention from Charcot. When the hysterics (after Charcot’s death) were moved to another ward, their epileptic symptoms disappeared.

Hysteria is a form of self-deception, as psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh puts it in his 2008 book Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind, in which patients imitate physical or psychological disorders.

Competent physicians determine when hysteria is operating, not a more serious physical or psychological disorder, by observing how careful hysterics are, for example, not to experience urinary incontinence or to hit their heads when fainting.

McHugh discusses the psychology of the repressed memory craze of the 1980s and ‘90s, the place of hysteria in it, and his role in defending a number of the accused.

The repressed memory (also known as recovered memory) craze consisted usually of adult women who, under treatment by what McHugh calls “Manneristic Freudians,” recovered alleged repressed memories of sexual assault and rape, usually by their fathers or other members of their families.*

A significant impetus for the repressed memory craze was the 1973 book and subsequent television movie Sybil, about a woman with alleged multiple personality disorder. A consulting psychiatrist to the authors said Sybil was a hysteric who role-played multiple personalities at the suggestion of one of the authors.

The publisher, however, expressed a strong desire for a book on multiple personality disorder, insisting that hysteria would not sell. The authors went along.

The “Mannerist” therapists almost from the beginning suggested to vulnerable and suggestible, frequently depressed, people that they may have been sexually abused, but don’t remember it, by a member of their family and that they may be suffering from “multiple personality disorder.”

Hypnotic suggestion and leading questioning, supported by a huge literature asserting (not proving) that repression causes amnesia of trauma, were the treatments of choice. Patients often exaggerated and escalated their symptoms, supposedly recalling memories of sex abuse as an infant and as the result of Satanic rituals.

Therapists seldom, if ever, interviewed family members or others who might have had important, relevant information.

Many patients sued the family member they accused and, in some cases, brought criminal charges. Prison was not uncommon.

McHugh and others defended the accused, pointing out that trauma of any kind is not forgotten or repressed and that competent therapists have their hands full helping trauma patients cope with the omnipresent memories and emotions. Memory researchers pointed out how malleable our memories can be, especially if we are vulnerable and depressed.**

In one of the trials at which McHugh testified (pp. 76-85), he stated that the patient, Donna, who was suing her father, suffered from “induced hysterical disorder,” induced by the type of therapy she received leading Donna to imitate symptoms of mental illness.

The trial ended in a hung jury, with eleven jurors voting to acquit. After trial dismissal by the judge, the holdout juror subsequently called Donna for a date. The hospital sent Donna to foster care many miles away. She soon began having doubts about her “memories” and accusations. Donna eventually reconnected with her family and sued the hospital and doctor.

Memories of nearly all accusers in the repressed memory craze were false. Lawsuits against therapists and hospitals eventually led to a modest decline in repressed memory therapies and clinics. Repressed memory also became suspect in most courts of law.

McHugh relates the story of the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692-93 as a fascinating parallel to the hysteria of the repressed memory craze (pp. 157-60).

Eleven Salem girls complained of pains and other miseries. A doctor diagnosed them as possessed by Satan’s representatives, the witches, who were causing their afflictions.

The girls then escalated their behavior to writhing on the floor and screaming, and because they were supposedly licensed to accuse who was a witch, they proceeded to do just that. Twenty people were executed and over a hundred imprisoned.

A telling incident occurred when the girls were traveling to Gloucester to testify at a witch trial. On the way, they saw an old woman near the Ipswich bridge, assumed she was a witch, and began their performances. However, the people of Ipswich yawned and paid no attention to them. The girls stopped their contortionate display, got back on their horses, and continued on to Gloucester.

Witch trials ended when the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor, whose wife was accused of being a witch, consulted ministers in New York. The ministers declared spectral evidence (dreams, visions) invalid in a court of law, which was valid at the time in Massachusetts. The governor banned spectral evidence and the episode soon ended. Apologies by some girls and other promoters occurred a few years later.

Today’s repressed memory craze, unfortunately, is not over, according to science writer Mark Pendergrast in his 2017 book Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die. Pendergrast exhaustively presents the history and theory of the craze, and, most importantly, arguments against its theory.

Pendergrast cites Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy from the early 1970s to raise an interesting question. Janov encouraged his patients to “relive buried trauma memories” by screaming them out. “Of all of Janov’s cases related in his first book,” says Pendergrast, “only one involved incest memories.”

How is it, asks Pendergrast, that allegedly repressed sex abuse memories did not overwhelm Janov’s therapy sessions and were not discovered until, and grew exponentially in, the 1980s and ‘90s? (Pendergrast, Kindle version, location 2565-67, chapter 2)

The repressed memory craze is still alive and well today. “Many of the allegations against Jerry Sandusky, the ex-Penn State football defensive coach, were based on repressed memories” (Pendergrast, location 340, Introduction).
   
The craze now operates under different names and usually beneath the headlines, although gender politics and political correctness stand out front.


* “These therapists—copying the master Freud but lacking his genius—called to mind the 16th century Mannerist sculptors and painters who, imitating the earlier masters without their inspiration or skill, produced crude and grotesque works” (McHugh, p. 34).

** The concept of repression for many years has been discredited in the minds of most psychologists, and the repressed memory craze only increased distrust of it.

Repression, however, is about emotions and its aim is to mute them by blocking awareness of their underlying evaluations. Repression begins consciously, by giving a standing order “I don’t want to feel that,” which in terms of practical effectiveness means “don’t be aware of the underlying evaluation.” (Emotions are attached to the evaluation as automatic responses; emotions per se cannot be repressed. It is the blocked evaluation that diminishes or prevents our feeling of the emotion.) Eventually, a habit becomes established preventing us from experiencing an emotion, sometimes many emotions. Repression is neither amnesia, nor forgetting, and has little if anything to do with memory. See Edith Packer, Lectures on Psychology, pp. 188-92.   

In the absence of brain damage or other physiological causes, traumatic events are not forgotten, nor are they repressed.