One of the candidates now running for president said that even though he was personally opposed to abortion, he didn’t believe in making it illegal. Then I heard a pundit named David Lazarus attacking this position. He called it wishy washy . “Have the courage of your conviction,” said Lazarus. “If you think it’s wrong, how can you be against making it illegal? You can’t have it both ways.”

As it happens, I’ve been reading about the 1930s recently and thinking about the relationship between the state and the individual. Stalin and Hitler had many disagreements but on one issue they agreed: the state, whether embodied in a party or a personality, ought to determine all matters for all individuals.

This theory led both Nazism and Stalinism to commit catastrophic deeds. Hitler’s theories would have been evil, even if he had succeeded. Stalin’s vision would have been a boon to all mankind if it had succeeded. But the actual outcome of both madmen’s schemes was horror and heartache. Why? In part because they abrogated all power to the state.

Once you get a firm grip on this notion, you can see that the anti-abortion movement is really the same as a movement that would force women to have abortions. The fundamental point here is the assertion that the government—the law of the land, the state—has the right to decide whether a woman should have an abortion or a baby.

Today’s “pro-life” movement happens to believe the government should prevent abortions, but once the government has the power and authority to make this decision, the actual decision it makes will depend on who controls the levers of state power and what the circumstances of the moment happen to be. Those of us who are pro-choice are saying: “This decision is not the proper province of the government. It belongs to the individual woman.”

Well, if a decision like this doesn’t belong to the government, what does? I would say, on any matter that concerns “all of us,” we want to act with unity. We can find this unity more safely through an organic process than through charisma, submission to a personality, or reference to a manual. That’s what democracy is about.

We’re saying that on matters such as the roads we travel on, and whether to have a army, navy and air force to protect the whole nation, and what measures to take to allow or prevent a proliferation of homelessness, and whether to let all our wilderness be destroyed, and whether to build massive, universally needed facilities such as hospitals, we are all affected, so we must operate through a process, through a government, to solve these problems as a community. And if an issue only concerns a town, it should be the town government that decides; and if it only concerns a state, it should be the state government that decides, and if it concerns everyone within the national borders, it should be the national government that decides.

And if it only concerns an individual and his or her family and friends, then it should be the individual who makes the decision, in civilized conversation with his or her family and friends. Everyone else should butt out.