Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

People who know me, or are familiar with my work, understand that, as a libertarian—rather than a conservative—I’m a lifelong advocate and supporter of a woman’s natural right to control her own body, by means of an abortion, if necessary. In the past, not everybody agreed with me about that (I never expected them to), but it was relatively simple and straightforward.

But now, the proto-communists who falsely call themselves liberals or progressives or democratic socialists or socialistic democrats or whatever, in their utter contempt for rational ethics, common decency, or the essence of what it means to be human, have made it necessary to add an asterisk, even to that relatively simple and straightforward idea.

You’re probably aware that the legislatures of several East American states, including those of New York and Virginia, have been considering a new abortion law that not only permits the gynecological procedure at the end of the ninth month of pregnancy (it used to be the sixth, before the fetus was truly human), but at the very moment of natural birth, when it’s more accurate to call it “infanticide” than abortion.

I have skinned and gutted deer and rabbits in my time and have been cleaning my own trout since I was five or six. I have a strong stomach that way. But I came closer to being physically ill when I learned about this law than I can remember. While the legislation failed in Virginia, it passed in that wretched hive of scum and villainy, Andrew Cuomo’s New York, to the roar of self-congratulatory applause and cheering from legislators unfit to scrape the human feces from the streets of San Francisco with their tongues, let alone make laws for what the world once considered the very heart of Western Civilization.

Understand that I am not a religious individual. However, read almost any of the three dozen books that I have written (so far) and you will see that the one thing in the universe I hold sacred is the individual human mind. To murder the mind of a living human child (because that’s what it is)—just like the minds that tamed fire, invented the wheel and the bow and arrow, traveled to the Moon, or discovered the overall architecture of the subatomic realm or the multi-galactic universe—or to simply let it die of neglect and exposure on a cold marble counter-top, is a criminal atrocity no matter what any cigar-smoking gaggle of cheap, small-time political hoods says it is. Or left-wing floozies for that matter.

I therefore propose that, if you agree with me about this barbarity, you take action. My favorite brand of coffee comes from New York. I have enjoyed it for more than thirty years. I will not buy, brew, or drink it again as long as this law is on the books. I will carefully examine everything I consider purchasing to make sure where it comes from. I will do my best to prevent any of my books from being printed in New York. If enough of us starve them, maybe the business movers and shakers of the state will do something about their insane legislature.

As a libertarian admirer of the Bill of Rights, I have many other reasons to despise New York’s rulers. All of New York City’s problems with crime and violence, for example, are entirely self-inflicted. With this new law, they have made it plain that individuals and individual rights mean absolutely nothing to them. We need to teach them now what a suicidal attitude that is, before we lose what it took our ancestors a thousand years to build.