Milei’s Anti-abortion Stance Is Anti-freedom

Making a country “great” must include respecting women’s right to an abortion.

Written by Agustina Vergara Cid

Americans continue to praise Argentina’s president Javier Milei. In a recent interview, Elon Musk and Donald Trump praised his success in taming inflation and steering his country toward good economic policy, while later Musk took to X to state that Milei is “restoring greatness” to Argentina.

It‘s true that Milei has had success taming inflation, and has made efforts to bring the free market to Argentina. But true freedom is more than economic freedom. To be an admirable leader, Milei should embrace freedom fully – including by respecting abortion rights.

Earlier this year, Milei’s political party drafted a bill to re-criminalize abortion in Argentina (the current law allows abortion up to fourteen weeks of gestation). It would imprison those who perform the abortion for up to four years. And while most anti-abortion legislation in the U.S. punishes the provider only, this bill follows the sinister anti-abortion logic to its dead end: it would imprison women who have an abortion for up to three years, without any exception for rape.

While Milei claims he’s not involved with the bill, attributing it to his party, it’s notable that he has not come out against it – and it is fully consistent with his stated views.

Milei thinks he’s defending the “freedom” of the embryo by banning abortions. Earlier this year, he told a group of highschoolers that abortion is “murder,” and he’s stated that abortion “goes against the right to life.”

But human life isn’t mere physical existence. Human life means engaging in production, like work and a career; it means the pursuit of psychological values like friendship and romantic love. It involves the conscious pursuit of knowledge, exercising our rationality, and having agency over our actions. It means planning and long-range thinking – pondering our options for a career, for the friends we want to have, for our lives throughout the years. It involves deciding how to achieve the life we want. These are the facts about human life that demand human freedom.

A human being is not merely anything with a heartbeat or an entity with some human DNA. An embryo is not an actual human being that can be “murdered.” It doesn’t resemble an actual human in any meaningful way, looking more like a raspberry than a human. An embryo is not an independent, self-sufficient being that can engage in the pursuit of values like friendship or the activities that a distinctively human life involves. It depends on the woman to sustain its life, a woman who may not desire the pregnancy. While the embryo possesses genetic human material, it’s not an actual human like the woman, but a merely potential human being. It does not need freedom to act because it cannot act.

Outlawing abortion sacrifices the actual human life of a woman with rights, to a mere potential, without such rights. By stripping women of control over their lives, Argentina’s anti-abortion bill would take away their freedom to choose their values: to choose when to have a family, with whom, how big, on what terms or whether to have a family at all. This bill, if it becomes law, will truncate careers and aspirations and everything that makes a distinctively human life worth living. It will force many women to abandon their dreams and sacrifice their lives for an unwanted pregnancy. This alters a woman’s life forever, even if she gives up the child for adoption, and forces women to go through massive bodily and psychological changes, including forced labor or surgery. How is sacrificing the life, bodies, and values of women protecting “freedom”?

If the bill re-criminalizing abortion passes, the only choice women in Argentina will have is to seek out life-threatening “back-alley” abortions or to procure expensive secretive-but-safe abortions with a medical professional who’s willing to risk jail time. Even then, women themselves would face the risk of being incarcerated for wanting to have control over their lives, bodies, and future. While this may sound like a step too far to Americans, the threat to a woman’s physical freedom is consistent with the anti-abortion ideology: if abortion is “murder,” then the woman is a murderer and should be punished.

I know lives will be destroyed by this bill not only because that’s been the outcome of every abortion restriction applied anywhere in the world, but also because that’s what happened in Argentina until abortion was legalized. I witnessed women dealing with the excruciating consequences of a law that didn’t allow them to control their own bodies and life: back-alley abortions gone wrong, and having children they weren’t ready for.

Sacrificing the life, future, values, and bodily autonomy of an actual woman for an embryo is diametrically opposed to freedom, especially if it involves punishing her with jail time. Imagine the case of a young woman who’s raped and impregnated by her rapist, and who’s caught after an abortion. She will not only have had to survive the trauma of a rape, but also face a criminal trial, with the likely possibility of having her life further ruined by being sentenced to jail. It’s hard to think of a more egregious affront to freedom, and to Milei’s motto that “liberalism is the unrestricted respect for other people’s life project.”

Individuals need freedom because it allows each of us to pursue our values and live the life that we judge best. A woman’s right to an abortion is an integral part of that, as it allows her to retain control of her life if she becomes unintentionally pregnant. No one can claim to be a champion of freedom if he intends to crush a woman’s life by forcing her to go through an unwanted pregnancy, or by incarcerating her when she decides to rebel against this massive oppression. As Ayn Rand said of Ronald Reagan, a staunch opponent of abortion rights: “Anyone who . . . denies the right to abortion cannot be a defender of rights.” Making a country “great” means more than lowering inflation, it means a holistic respect for people’s freedom.