“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
—JOHN STUART MILL, On Liberty140
Consider this personal account that appeared in Slate magazine: “I just recall riding in my friend’s convertible VW Bug, and the top was down. Us in the car with our hair flying everywhere, which felt like a romantic young moment of freedom and abandon, but we’re going to go get one of us an abortion.” The woman, Anna Holmes, founder of the blog Jezebel, described her feelings after aborting her baby: “I just recall getting back in the VW Bug with the top down and driving back to my hometown about 15 miles away, with the hair flying everywhere, all of us.”141
This may seem like a scene out of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, with the image of freedom, the open road, and the wind in her hair, but it was about a trip to an abortion clinic. To Anna Holmes, abortion is the pure expression of freedom, and choice is expressed as a moral ideal. She says she has had three abortions so far (one at eighteen, one around twenty-two, one at twenty-seven), and she seems to relish the memories of her abortion experiences. She says of her abortions, “I did feel a certain amount of pride in the fact that I was living my principles. I’d grown up pro-choice, I had gone to pro-choice rallies with my mother when I was a kid in San Francisco. But being pro-choice in theory and being pro-choice in action… I just felt like I lived my stated principles, that my body was mine to control, that women’s bodies are theirs to control. I never felt guilty about it.”142
For the pro-choice movement, choice is the value upon which everything else resides. Choice is the word they use most often. The power of using the word “choice” is that it appeals to the idea of freedom. Freedom is one of the core values of the West, and it’s one of the core values that most of us uphold. We see the American Revolution as a struggle for freedom from the British, giving us the right to rule ourselves. Our individuality is the expression of our freedom of our choices; they are what make us who we are. And all of this, this appeal to freedom, and to choice, is being invoked to justify something as clinical, as harmful, and as terrible as the mass killing of unborn human beings. So how do we confront this most devious justification for abortion in the name of freedom itself? The choice they are referring to, after all, is not “the idea of choice” in general. They are referring to the choice to do something specific: the choice to kill.
If I had to pick a single mantra we hear most often from pro-choicers today, it is “my body, my choice.” Pro-choicers try to muddy the waters by making it out as though the woman is exercising power and exercising choice over her body alone. But is it only “her body” she is referring to? Is it her body she wants to abort? Of course not. How would one abort oneself? We all know that, actually, it is not “her body” she is referring to but the fetus’s body.
But in order for the Left to pull off the argument that the fetus is literally “her body,” as they claim, they must argue that the fetus is a body part that can be removed, just like her appendix or her tonsils. Imagine how ridiculous this is since we know the fetus is not a body part but a living being with its own heartbeat and body parts. As I have shown, no matter what developmental stage the fetus is in, it is at no point “an organ.” Organs are body parts that enable us to function. Her heart is pumping blood, her lungs are helping her to breathe, her brain is enabling her mind to function, and so on. The “my body, my choice” argument breaks down when we realize that during pregnancy, when the woman is “with child,” there are two sets of body parts—mother and child. The fetus is inside her body temporarily during the nine months of pregnancy, but it is not “her body.”
Let’s turn to the issue of choice. We have a whole movement that calls itself not the “pro-abortion movement” but “the pro-choice movement.” And pro-choice, on the face of it, is basically the notion that choices are good and choices should be wide open. People should be able to make their own choices, the argument goes, particularly on something as important as pregnancy. No one would disagree that we all want choices in life. We seek choices. We measure our level of responsibility by the choices we make.
The ultimate champion of choice, and champion of freedom, is the philosopher John Stuart Mill. He articulates these ideas in his work On Liberty. As one of the fathers of libertarianism, he lays out the doctrine of limited government and maximal individual freedom. There’s a wise libertarian suspicion of the government intervening in choices that are within our legitimate purview or domain. And I think this skepticism of government makes sense because most things are better resolved by the local community and individual. It seems, then, that Mill’s argument would fall on the pro-choice side. But not so.
He says, “No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.”143 To limit the mind is to limit individuality and uniqueness, so it should never be limited. However, he finds that there is a limit to freedom of action; it can never be absolute.
The central tenet of libertarianism states that my right to swing my arm only extends as far as your face. In other words, my rights stop when they begin to harm or affect others. So freedom is paramount, but to a point. Why to a point? Because harming someone or killing them is to take away that person’s freedom. You can’t in the very name of freedom take away another’s freedom.
So while the government should stay out of most things in order to allow for maximum individual freedom, a true libertarian would have to agree that if there’s one thing the government must stop, it is the killing of other innocent people and the robbing of their freedom. Rand Paul, one of the most outspoken libertarians today, says, “I am 100 percent pro-life.”144
Abortion comes to the forefront of our minds when we think of the fact that legally today in America, people can be killed at whim, their freedom and future, obliterated. It seems like we wouldn’t be able to think of a similar scenario, where the side that strangely advocates for a horror such as this calls themselves “pro-choice.” But when we think about American history, we find a parallel that is almost identical to the abortion debate today. And that is the debates that ensued over slavery leading up to the Civil War. If we look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the famous debates in the middle of the nineteenth century between two statesmen, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, we see that their debates are very similar in substance and, in fact, almost identical in form to the abortion debate.145
Both of them were running for the Senate in Illinois, a preview of their presidential campaigns against each other four years later. Lincoln was the Republican; Douglas was the Democrat. And they were debating, of course, not abortion but slavery.
Here’s Stephen Douglas arguing that he is for choice. In fact, he says he’s neither for slavery nor against it. He says that he doesn’t care if slavery is voted up or down. The point he wants to make is that we live in a big country. Some people, he says, are for slavery, some people are anti-slavery. Douglas says it seems unreasonable to take one of these positions, a single norm you might say, and impose that set of values on the whole country. He says, rather, why not adopt a democratic solution? Why don’t we agree to disagree? Why don’t we embrace the principle of choice? So, Douglas advocates what he calls “popular sovereignty.”
But what he means by popular sovereignty is really what we today call the pro-choice position. He says let every community, every territory, every state decide for itself if it wants slavery. And in this way, Douglas says, we’re able to have a society in which different sets of values can coexist. By affirming the pro-choice position, Douglas says, we have a framework that is very consistent with the core principle of America and of the Founders: the principle of freedom. This, you can see, is a very attractive argument, and it’s not immediately obvious how it can be rebutted. It sounds good!
Let’s now consider Lincoln’s refutation of Douglas because Lincoln makes, I think, one of the strongest arguments not just against slavery but, as it turns out, for the pro-life position as well. And Lincoln basically says choice is a good thing, but choice always depends on what it is that is being chosen. Lincoln says, if the black man is like a hog, then, sure, it makes sense to choose whether you want to buy or sell it. But on the other hand, if the Negro is a human being, that same argument now collapses. But why does it collapse? What is the difference between a human being and a hog? For Lincoln, the difference is this: we do not, as human beings, have the right to use choice to deny others their life choices. We don’t have the right to use our choice to cancel out the choices of other people.
And this argument applies with equal force to slavery and abortion. We don’t have the right to choose to enslave others, and neither do we have the right to choose to kill them. If we do claim this right, the right to enslave or the right to kill, Lincoln argues that what we’re embracing is the right of the powerful to exploit the vulnerable. And what is particularly sickening is that this exploitation is then masked in the language of freedom. Lincoln very poignantly says that the wolf and the sheep both use the language of freedom, but they mean two different things by it. For the wolf, the freedom is the freedom to eat the sheep. For the sheep, freedom is the freedom to be free of the wolf, the freedom to live as a sheep.
To quote Lincoln, “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his Liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.” “Plainly,” says Lincoln sarcastically, “the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.”146 The most noble interpretation of choice is a choice to affirm life, not to degrade it, not to enslave it, not to wantonly take it.
Betsey DeVos, secretary of education, talked about the similarities between slavery and abortion in a lecture she gave at Colorado Christian University. DeVos invoked Lincoln and said, “He too contended with the ‘pro-choice’ arguments of his day.” She continued, “Lincoln was right about the slavery ‘choice’ then, and he would be right about the life ‘choice’ today.”147
Most pro-choicers go into the mode of denial when discussing “the choice to kill,” claiming abortion isn’t killing and there’s no death involved. It’s refreshing to hear an honest response from a pro-choice feminist like Naomi Wolf, who admits that abortion involves a death and even requires mourning. In her essay “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” she warns that the pro-choice movement needs to stop its denial and acknowledge the deaths of babies, or it risks becoming “precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life.” She believes that the pro-choice Left is “in danger of losing something more important than votes; we stand in jeopardy of losing our souls.”
One might expect that this realization would lead her to back away from pro-choice ideology, but alas it only leads her to argue that the pro-choice movement’s problem isn’t its ideology but its marketing. She finds the pro-choice language of describing abortion as “between a woman and her doctor” too clinical and believes it has led to “political failure.” Instead she says it should be described as “between a woman and God.” That sounds better, and more heartfelt, potentially endearing more people to the pro-choice side. She says to pro-choicers, by “using amoral rhetoric, we weaken ourselves politically.”148 She credits the pro-life side for tapping into morality and thinks pro-choicers should use the language of God more, too.
Ultimately, “pro-choice” is a contradiction in terms because it is a choice to cancel out the choices of people who have not even had a chance to make any choices in the world at all. Pro-choice is ultimately a moral abomination and a moral degradation. Phrasing it as “a choice between you and God” is a cop-out that doesn’t really work because every decision we make in life is between the self and God, and the fact that one is accountable to God for this choice is no exception. Regardless of personal belief in God and God’s judgment, the taking of an innocent life is a case where the government should intervene. Why? Because it is the core function of government to protect our right to life, upon which all other rights flow. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, is powerful. But if you take my life, you also take my liberty and my chance at happiness.