My Body, My Choice—Her Body, Her Choice. Same Principle

Principles are universal and provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

Examples from an earlier post, with appropriate qualifications, included water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, and never lying in human relationships. The former is a causal explanation with implicit guidance to adjust cooking temperatures at higher altitudes and the latter is moral guidance with a fundamental explanation of benevolent cooperation. Both principles are universal and apply to all instances of water boiling and cooperation.

Two disputed issues in today’s world are coerced vaccinations and coerced birthing of unwanted children. Both violate individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The premise underlying both types of coercion, which itself is presented as a universal principle, is the altruistic doctrine of self-sacrifice. As a universal, it justifies extending initiated coercion to other areas of our lives, such as coerced sterilization and coerced prevention of the use of birth control. The premise treats each of us as lambs to be sacrificed to the state. However, there is no right or duty to sacrifice ourselves to others, including the state, and certainly no right to sacrifice others to ourselves or the state.

Rights are freedoms of action, freedoms from any kind of initiated coercion, whether by another citizen or by the government, to choose the values we want to pursue and to take the actions necessary to acquire those values. Rights are moral guidance in a political context and causal explanation of peaceful social cooperation in a capitalist society.

Our only general obligation to others is to avoid initiating coercion against them.

Freedom of action in today’s world includes the freedom to refuse to get vaccinated or to have an unwanted baby. If anyone is afraid to get near the unvaccinated, it is that person’s prerogative to avoid them, not the responsibility of the government to punish or quarantine the unvaccinated. Private businesses can ask you to get vaccinated or stay home. The government cannot.

And the government is nearly everywhere in our lives in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, which means “follow and find the government intervention” before drawing conclusions about what should and should not be done in specific cases. Solution: get the government out of our lives, personal and professional.

Freedom of action also presupposes an actual, not potential, independent living human being who does the acting. Cells in a woman’s body is not an independent life and the woman has the right to decide what to do with her body and those cells. If a fetus develops, though not yet into an independent entity, and the woman’s life becomes threatened, terminating the pregnancy is her decision, no one else’s.*

Freedom of action is the legal issue. You can talk about ethical issues of recklessly refusing to take care of one’s health or of recklessly getting pregnant. But the government in a free society has no right to interfere in such a person’s life.

If I sneeze on you and you can prove my awareness of illness and my negligence or intent to harm, you might have a legal case against me. But if a woman gets pregnant to increase her welfare payments—the only thing morally or legally guilty here is the government welfare system, which should be cancelled.

In April 2020, I cited John Goodman of the Goodman Institute who projected what a truly free market in medicine might be like in a pandemic—meaning absent licensing monopolies and health or medical czars telling us what we can and cannot do. Such as, inexpensive testing kits rapidly produced and made available. Doctors or nurses (an abundance of both because there would be no artificial restriction of supply caused by the licensing) would be available immediately to talk to you via telephone or, more likely, the internet, or actually to make a house call. And if you had serious symptoms, you would be welcomed to the hospital emergency rooms (many more than today because of their built-in excess capacity) and treated promptly.

Quarantining (including “lockdowns”) of asymptomatic people is preventive law and, as Ayn Rand has said, preventive law “is the legal hallmark of dictatorship . . . the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent.”**

Emergency powers and martial law of any kind are violations of individual rights and should be banned in free societies.

Also in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, both left and right, that is, the pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates have much to clean up before they can talk about the issue of abortion. The welfare state and poverty programs that have given us welfare recipients, including pregnant teenagers, who refuse to get a job or a husband to father their children need to be opposed and repealed. And the adoption system, hopelessly mired in bureaucratic rules that prolong and extend the process, should not have any government involvement at all.

Needless to say, the government and its money should also not be involved in birth control or the actual medical procedure of abortion. Let the market decide and operate. It will do a far better job than any federal, state, or local government.

My body, my choice—her body, her choice. Both follow from the US Bill of Rights.


* The right to life, in other words, begins at birth and the abortion issue is nearly entirely about the first trimester, though the woman’s life, health, or future must never be sacrificed, whether to a rapist or to a healthy fetus, or to a severely disabled one.

** Typhoid Mary? Mary Mallon was the only one of over 400 carriers of salmonella typhi forcibly confined by the health czars of New York City. For a total of twenty-six years! The common cold is asymptomatic for one to four days. If we develop a test and find someone positive after two days, do we put that person in jail (quarantine)? Protect the vulnerable is the advice of rational scientists today. See Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 monograph Pandemics (Kindle, location 380), where she suggests that our “current patterns of international travel” have exposed us to all kinds of pathogens and likely given us a “global wall of immunity.” Lockdowns and other forms of confinement prevent our acquisition of such an immunity. And, as Gupta also points out, older people during the 1918 Spanish Flu seem not to have been affected because they likely had developed immunity during previous influenza outbreaks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pandemics, Kindle, location 20).

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 Meaning of Sacrifice and the Staying Power of Statism

Why does statism and its collectivist progeny, communism, socialism, fascism, and, especially, democratic socialism, still attract followers?

The answer is still Ayn Rand’s. You can argue the impracticality of statism until you are blue in the face, but unless you reject the moral ideal on which statism rests—altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice—your listener will respond by saying the failures of the USSR or Mao’s China or today’s Venezuela were caused by the selfish dictators who usurped power and destroyed the ideal.

In our present cultural, historical, and epistemological ignorance and chaos, discussion of ideas is rare and discussion in terms of fundamental principles even rarer. Let’s see if we can find some fundamentals.

Altruism, as I have written before, does not mean kindness or gentleness or helping little old ladies across the street (Applying Principles, pp. 39-41, 88-90). Immanuel Kant, though he did not know the word “altruism,” clarified its essence when he said moral behavior means always acting from duty, never from inclination.

And coiner of the term, Auguste Comte, as cited by George Smith, makes it clear that altruism has nothing to do with individual rights or individualism, but with living for the collective of “humanity.”

Which is to say that morality is not supposed to be fun. It means obedience to authority . . . of God, society, or some group. Pleasure and fun lead to selfishness and that is bad.

Self-sacrifice, then, is meant to be painful. The word, in fact, means to kill, destroy, or abnegate, which means sacrifice is supposed to hurt and you especially should not get anything in return for your pain.*

Sacrifice means giving up something that you value highly to something or someone you value less highly or not at all.

For example, a sacrifice from pre-historic times meant throwing your child into the fire to pay homage to the gods. Now that may be rationalized as giving up a lesser value for the sake of a higher one, and some usage and dictionary definitions of the word “sacrifice” tend to support this notion, but the correct meaning of self-sacrifice in religion and ethics remains the act of giving up a higher value to a lower- or non-value.

Sacrifice, in other words, is not a commercial trade in which a buyer gives up money (the lesser value) for a product (the higher value), and vice versa for the seller. Religious and ethical sacrifices are painful and are meant to be painful.

To further illustrate, it is not a sacrifice to spend extra years of your life, perhaps working at multiple part-time jobs, to acquire an advanced college degree in order to pursue a more personally rewarding career.

Nor is it a sacrifice to have children and raise a family. The parents, after all, have made a choice—they signed a twenty-plus year contract—to start a family and presumably they value the children more than the childless life they used to enjoy. (I have to admit that this last is not always obvious when observing the behavior of some young couples.)

Self-sacrifice means the pursuit of a career to please your parents instead of the career you truly love and want. It means marrying a person you do not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity.

Sacrifice means doing your job because it’s your duty—not because you enjoy it.

“Moral purification through suffering” is how the ascetic life is sometimes described. It is the motto of altruism. This is why young women who get pregnant are punished—for a lifetime, as it often turns out—by preventing them from aborting the pregnancy.** This is why small business owners are coerced, in flagrant violation of property rights, to provide services to customers they do not willingly choose to serve.

Your duty is to suffer and, if necessary, die for your country. This is why involuntary servitude in the form of a military draft or “national service” is justified.

You are immoral if you think you have a right to pursue your own self-interest.

Why does statism continue to thrive? Continued support of the doctrine of self-sacrifice and hesitancy or outright refusal to defend a morality of self-interest.

Capitalism and the free society rest on and require a foundation of rational egoism. Altruism and its statist political manifestations are acts of enslavement and destruction.

Thus, if we continue to allow the state to claim authority to coerce us in any way other than self-defensive, retaliatory force against those who initiate its use, we compromise our principles and yield the high ground to the statists.

These compromises include the acceptance or tolerance of coerced prohibition of abortion, coerced business service to unwanted customers, coerced military service, coerced removal of money from our wallets (through taxation and the depreciation of the value of money) . . . and on and on, including the thousands of coerced rules, regulations, and laws passed by the deep state and legislatures to control our business and personal lives.

Democratic socialism? The vote, somehow, since at least Marx’s time, and on all sides of the political spectrum, has become the panacea for all kinds of decisions, including the initiated coercion of socialism.

If it has been voted on, so goes the thought and argument, then it must be okay.

Democracy unrestrained by individual rights is a form of dictatorship. Anyone who advocates the vote without the rights qualification—or without making it clear that there is a rights qualification—is supporting and endorsing statism.

This worshipful blather over democracy, of course, in just another indication of our cultural, historical, and epistemological ignorance and chaos.


* From the Oxford English Dictionary (OED online), self-sacrifice means “the giving up of one’s own interests, happiness, and desires, for the sake of duty or the welfare of others.”

** “An embryo,” as Ayn Rand vigorously argued, “has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). . . . One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual . . . is to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former.” (Emphasis in original.) If both pro- and anti-abortionists were sincere about women’s liberty and rights, they would promote above all else the removal of bureaucratic obstacles to child adoption and the governmental encouragements (entitlements, welfare, incompetent government schools, etc.) of unwed teenage pregnancies. Instead, both sides would rather punish, that is, coerce sacrifice of, those who violate their arbitrary rules.