The Logic Trap of “Choice”: But Whose Choice?

Some communities insist no one has the right to tell you what goes into your body. Vaccine mandates for children? Eliminated. Parents, they say, should decide. Yet the same lawmakers ban abortion, declaring the state must dictate what goes into—or comes out of—a woman’s body. One breath they champion autonomy—“your body, your choice.” The next, they revoke it. That is the hypocrisy of their own making: a logic trap.

This is hubris—elevating choice above consequence until the reckoning arrives. By enthroning autonomy in one case and crushing it in another, political positions collapse under their own contradictions.

The deeper problem is not hypocrisy alone, but the refusal to face consequences. If a sick, unvaccinated child infects another and death follows, is that so different from a parent choosing to end a pregnancy? Both are questions of prevention—or its absence. Both end in the loss of life. Stripped of rhetoric, the moral arithmetic is the same.

Plato’s Ship of State reminds us that freedom without shared responsibility is not freedom but chaos. To let each untrained helmsman steer as he pleases is to wreck the vessel and drown all aboard. Vaccine “freedom” follows the same course: individual choice unmoored from collective duty imperils the innocent.

Abortion bans claim to “protect life.” Yet removing vaccine safeguards erodes the very protections that preserve the living. Both paths, meant to uphold life, may instead hasten its loss. Vaccination is not solely a personal decision; it is an act of care for the vulnerable child who cannot choose. To shrug it off is to clearly echo and exclaim the denial: “I am not my brother’s keeper.” That is tragedy—outcome born of blindness to consequence.

If morality is to mean anything, it cannot be applied with one hand and denied with the other. If a child who is unable to be vaccinated dies from exposure, who bears responsibility? The parents of the unvaccinated infecting child? The government that stripped safeguards? The community that endorsed it? Those who hold women accountable for abortion, especially those who are rape victims, cannot escape this parallel dilemma. Freedom framed as virtue but practiced as refusal to protect another is no virtue at all. Either the body is inviolable, or it is not. Either life is sacred in all forms, or it is not. Pretending otherwise is meant to satisfy a political base, but it cannot withstand the test of reason—or history. #NeverFearTheDream