The idea of being “personally pro-life but politically pro-choice” rests on a particular understanding of freedom: that freedom means living without coercion by the law. Yet this understanding is incomplete. Nearly everyone agrees that some acts must be illegal, even if someone claims a personal belief in them, because those acts inflict violent harm on others. Rape, assault, and battery are prohibited precisely because they violate another person’s freedom through physical violence.
At a minimum, laws exist to prohibit physical violence against innocent human beings except in narrow cases such as self-defense or just-war scenarios. If this principle is consistently applied, abortion cannot be treated as a morally private choice while remaining politically permissible. Abortion involves the intentional killing of an innocent human being, which places it in the same moral and legal category as other forms of unjust violence the law already restricts.
Supporting freedom, therefore, does not require supporting a supposed freedom to kill an innocent human. If someone truly believes abortion is wrong because it ends an innocent human life, then consistency demands supporting legal protections for that life, just as consistency supports laws against rape and other violent harms. To oppose abortion morally while defending its legality is to carve out a unique exception for one form of violence that the law otherwise exists to prevent.
Key Takeaways
Laws already restrict personal choices when they involve violence against innocent humans; abortion fits this same category of unjust violence.
Freedom does not include a right to kill an innocent human being, just as it does not include a right to commit assault or rape.
If abortion is truly believed to be the killing of an innocent human, consistency requires opposing it legally, not only personally.
Being “personally pro-life but politically pro-choice” creates an incoherent exception to the basic legal principle that innocent human life deserves protection.