What Liberals Believe about Personal Autonomy

Fourth in a series about the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals place a high value on personal autonomy, the principle that people should have the right to decide most things about their lives for themselves.   This pillar of freedom is the basis of a number of issues liberals have fought for and still fight for today.  Some of these include freedom of conscience about religion and from an imposed religion, women’s admission to college and to many career fields formerly restricted to men, the right to divorce, and reproductive rights such as to decide for one’s self about contraception and abortion.  It also applies to the liberal stance on consensual sexual relationships including the right to interracial and same-sex relationships and marriages. 

It may seem hard to imagine, but all of these practices were at various times forbidden by those who wished to impose their social and moral views on others through the force of law.  Freedom from state-sponsored religion was made unconstitutional in 1791 by the First Amendment’s clause against any “establishment of religion.”  Even so, “blue laws” were passed in most states that restricted commerce or various activities like playing baseball on Sundays under the premise that people ought to be in church instead.  Though most of these laws have been repealed, some still persist.  In thirteen states, for example, it is illegal to buy or trade a car on a Sunday! 

Women were completely excluded from higher education until 1837, when Mary Kellogg, Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford and Elizabeth Prall were the first women admitted in to Oberlin College in Ohio.   Sixty-three years later, in 1900, most colleges still accepted only men, and just 2.8% of women went to college.  As late as 1970 only 9% of college graduates were women.  Today they constitute the majority of college graduates.  This progress over time is not only a testament to the triumph of liberal egalitarian ideals over those who fought to keep women in their traditional subservient roles but also an example of what can happen when obstacles to personal autonomy are removed.  Just think how much more vibrant every field of endeavor is today, with America making use of 100% of its brain power instead of only half! 

The slow but inexorable movement of women into professions once limited to men is still going on.  It began with secretaries and teachers, continued with police officers and firefighters and finally spread to doctors and corporate executives.  The military is now about to open the combat arms to women volunteers.  It’s about time.  Will some women wash out because they will prove unable to carry an 80-pound pack on a 25-mile hike?  Doubtlessly so.  Then weed them out on their inability to perform the physical demands of the job, not because they are women.  There are some women who relish the challenge and will be able to do it, and our experience with law enforcement and firefighting tell us it will be more than many expect.  Leave it up to equality and personal autonomy, the values America was founded on, and marvel at the results. 

Bans on divorce or the requirement of an adversarial judicial process to determine “fault” were another vestige of the attitude that the state had an obligation to impose conditions on people’s personal lives.  It eventually became apparent to all but the most stubborn that trying to force people to stay in a marriage against their will was not working.  Common sense and the principle of personal autonomy won out.  Divorce laws were liberalized in the 1970s beginning with California, with the concept of no-fault divorce.  An interesting statistic is the higher incidence of divorce in conservative-voting states and lower incidence in liberal-voting states.  The Wall Street Journal conducted an analysis of census data and came to the conclusion that, “Overall, the report shows that people living in northeastern states have lower marriage and divorce rates. And while those in the southern states are more likely to get married, they also have higher divorce rates.”  It’s ironic that the very same socially conservative states that trumpet their commitment to “family values” and tried to prevent easily obtained divorce are the very states whose citizens have been the ones to most utilize it. 

Reproductive rights are another facet of personal autonomy.  The Supreme Court, in the case Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 struck down the state’s authority to outlaw birth control, basing their ruling on the right to privacy. The Court extended that ruling in 1972, deciding in Eisenstadt v. Baird that Massachusetts could not deny access to birth control pills to single people.  There was another big dust-up over the provision of birth control pills under President Obama’s health care law.  Conservatives and some religious organizations tried to make a case that people’s employers and churches should get to decide whether they get access to contraception.  The liberal view prevailed, as it should.  Anybody is free to give advice, but the decision is up to the person involved, not their boss or church.  That is what freedom is.  If my boss is a Jehovah’s Witness I should not be denied a blood transfusion I need because he doesn’t believe in it.  It’s my life.  I get to decide, not him.  The famous case Roe v. Wade in 1973 held that a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester of a pregnancy, until the fetus is viable, is also protected.  The basic principle underlying all these, whether it is called privacy, personal autonomy or some other name, is that people are entitled to make their own decisions regarding these personal matters.  They are nobody else’s business.

The same idea holds true with liberals when the subject is personal relationships.  Conservatives imposed and then fought to maintain controls on interracial and same-sex relationships for many years.  Though most states had repealed or had never enacted anti-miscegenation (against racial mixing) laws, all the former slave states except Maryland still had them on their books when the Supreme Court ruled them invalid in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia.  At that time only 20% of Americans approved of interracial marriages according to the Gallup Poll.  By 2011 the liberal view had largely swept the country, with 86% supportive of marriage between people of different races. 

The same is momentously underway with regards to same-sex marriage equality, support for which has surged from 27% in the late 1970s to near 60% today.  Acceptance of the principle of personal autonomy is largely behind this change, along with a better understanding that sexual orientation is biologically determined.  The American Psychological Association, for instance, stopped categorizing homosexuality as a disorder back in 1975 and unanimously endorsed same sex marriage equity in 2011.  With “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the military repealed, marriage equality the law at the time of this writing in nine states and the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court currently in 2013 weighing the federal Defense of (straight only) Marriage Act,  it now seems we are on the threshold of seeing the liberal position on this great human rights movement become widely enshrined across the land.  This is a struggle in which liberals, as allies of the LGBT community, can take special pride. Once again, personal freedom is triumphing over age-old prejudice thanks to those who have stood up for human rights and fought the good fight.   

The principle of personal autonomy has also played a part in other issues.  One is the right to conscientiously object to military service during those periods when America has had a military draft.  Another is the ongoing liberalization of marijuana laws in fifteen states, where possession is treated like a minor traffic infraction, or even full legalization, voted in by the electorate in Washington state and Colorado.  The failure of the Eighteenth Amendment in trying to enforce the Prohibition of alcohol from 1918 to 1933 is probably the strongest example of the futility of unduly trying to restrict personal autonomy.  The basic liberal perspective on human rights is therefore to favor personal autonomy, limiting it primarily when an action harms or interferes with the rights of others.