There’s a simple test for whether a right is actually a right: can a politician take it away? If the answer is yes — if your freedom depends on the “right” president winning the next election, or the “right” judge sitting on the bench — then what you have isn’t a right. It’s a conditional privilege, handed out and clawed back at the whim of whoever currently holds the reins.
That’s not just a modern grievance. It’s the exact problem the founders of this country set out to solve. The Declaration of Independence didn’t argue that rights come from government — it argued the opposite: that people are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” and that governments are instituted by the people for the sole purpose of securing those rights, not issuing them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were framed as pre-existing truths, not privileges a legislature could dole out or revoke. When a government stops protecting those rights and starts overriding them instead, the founding logic says that government has broken its own contract.
Nowhere is this founding principle more relevant today than in the fight over what people are allowed to do with their own bodies. Somewhere along the way, we let politicians convince us that our own flesh, blood, and choices are government property — subject to review, regulation, and criminal penalty. That’s a betrayal of the very idea this country claims to be built on. It’s time to reverse it. Individual liberty means total control over your own body and your own life, full stop. If your choice doesn’t hurt anyone else, it is none of the government’s business.
Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
Drug use and possession. Ending jail time for using or possessing drugs isn’t a fringe position — it’s a recognition that addiction is a health issue, not a felony. Decades of criminalization have filled prisons, destroyed families, and done nothing to reduce demand. If you choose to put something into your own body, that’s your call to make, not a prosecutor’s.
Medical choices. No one should face forced treatment or a government mandate over what goes into their veins. Whether it’s a vaccine, an experimental therapy, or a procedure you’re declining, informed consent has to mean something. The moment the state can compel a medical intervention, “consent” becomes theater.
End-of-life care. Autonomy doesn’t stop mattering when someone is terminally ill — arguably it matters most. People facing unbearable suffering deserve the right to choose a peaceful, dignified death through medical aid in dying, rather than being forced to endure pain because a legislature decided for them.
Body modification. Tattoos, piercings, elective body art, and other physical changes to your own body require zero government permission slip. If it’s your skin, it’s your decision.
Abortion and contraception. Full, unrestricted access to birth control and pregnancy termination is a baseline requirement of bodily autonomy. A government that can force you to carry a pregnancy to term is a government that has already decided your body belongs to the state, not to you.
Sex work. Consensual transactions between adults shouldn’t be a crime just because sex is involved. Decriminalizing sex work treats it like any other private choice or occupation — and it also makes workers safer, since criminalization is what drives the trade into dangerous, unacctountable corners.
Gender-affirming care. Personal medical decisions about one’s own transition — made between a patient and their doctor — don’t belong in a legislative chamber. Banning this care doesn’t protect anyone; it just substitutes a politician’s judgment for a patient’s and a physician’s.
Seatbelt and helmet laws. Wearing a seatbelt or a motorcycle helmet is smart. Being fined or arrested for not wearing one is a different question entirely — it’s the government punishing you for a risk that affects only yourself. Adults are allowed to make bad decisions about their own safety; that’s what autonomy means.
Diet and lifestyle. Soda-size caps, raw milk bans, and other nanny-state restrictions on what you eat and drink treat citizens like children who can’t be trusted to feed themselves. Personal consumption choices , healthy or not, are exactly that: personal.
If bodily autonomy means anything, it has to include the right to protect that body from harm. This is arguably the oldest liberty on the list — older than any constitution. Long before governments existed to write laws, people understood that a person threatened with violence has the right to respond with force. The founders didn’t invent this principle; they recognized it, the same way they recognized speech and conscience as pre-existing rights rather than government grants.
The right to bear arms. Owning and carrying a firearm for self-protection isn’t a favor the state extends to law-abiding citizens — it’s the practical extension of owning your own body. A right to life that depends on waiting for police to arrive isn’t a right at all; response time isn’t a substitute for the ability to defend yourself in the moment threat occurs.
Stand-your-ground and the duty to retreat. Laws that force a person to flee their own home, business, or the street they’re standing on before defending themselves get the moral order backwards. The aggressor created the danger; the victim shouldn’t be legally required to absorb more risk in the name of appeasing that danger.
Self-defense against unlawful state force. The logic of self-defense doesn’t evaporate the moment the aggressor wears a badge. A government that can use force against its own citizens without meaningful accountability — unlawful searches, excessive force, warrantless entry — is a government infringing on the same body it claims to protect. A free people has to retain the ability, and the legal standing, to resist unlawful force from any source, public or private.
Non-lethal self-defense tools. Pepper spray, stun guns, and other less-lethal options shouldn’t require a permit, a waiting period, or a government-approved reason. If the goal is genuinely to let people protect themselves, the tools for doing so — lethal or not — shouldn’t be gatekept by the same institutions that can’t guarantee anyone’s safety in the first place.
Self-defense isn’t the exception to individual liberty — it’s the enforcement mechanism behind every other right on this list. A right you cannot defend is a right that exists only as long as no one decides to violate it.
Every example above traces back to the same idea the founders articulated over two centuries ago: rights that can be granted are rights that can be revoked. The whole point of calling something “inalienable” was to put it beyond the reach of kings, legislatures, and majorities — to say that some things about a person are not up for a vote. If we want liberty that survives election cycles, court appointments, and shifting political winds, we can’t rely on the right people being in charge. We have to build a system where the power to take these choices away doesn’t exist in the first place — which is precisely the system the founding generation claimed to be building, even if they didn’t always live up to it themselves.
Bodily autonomy isn’t a privilege on loan from the state. It’s the foundation everything else — free speech, free assembly, free conscience, and the right to defend it all — is built on. Reclaiming it isn’t a radical departure from America’s founding principles. It’s a return to them.