One place where the right has a serious rift is the topic of abortion. There are many on the right who want to stake out some “libertarian position” on a woman’s “right to choose”. My objection has always been that abortion kills a human being. Period. No drawing artificial lines of time or development, it’s a human being, a baby, and you can’t kill it. But many of you are quick to throw those of us who say that under the bus, or out of the party or the movement or whatever. No. I’m not leaving, and I’m not shutting up.
THIS is why, from a post over at Hot Air.
Investigators say because the mother and baby were still connected by the umbilical cord and placenta, state law does not consider the baby to be a separate life. Therefore, the mother cannot be charged.
What kind of fuzzy-headed thinking made a law like that? And why don’t they change that law?
Why have Virginia legislators failed to act? They’re afraid of running afoul of the abortion industry
Draw all the phony moral lines you want (”ensoulment”? for crying out loud), make all the personal excuses you want (”above my pay grade”?), as far as I’m concerned you’re all guilty, at the very least of being cowards. Sex without consequences, kill the “mistake”… liberal or libertarian, it makes no difference. If this story doesn’t illustrate the absurdity of drawing an arbitrary time line on when it’s “OK” for a woman to kill a baby, then I don’t know what does.
If this story makes you angry, and you’re one of those who has staked out some sort of libertarian pro-choice/pro-abortion position, quick, go look in the mirror… I challenge you… are you ready to defend this? Because this is what you get when you start drawing lines and making your own rules.
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December 18th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Amen brother. Infanticide is one of the issues that prevents me from identifying as ‘Libertarian’ which seems to be focused on license and libertinism. They can call me a ’statist’ (I like ‘Federalist’ myself) all they want, but liberty implies duty, and duty is not slavery. Without freely giving that which owe ourselves and our brothers and sisters and our God ‘liberty’ becomes an excuse for any behavior however immoral. What is needed is someone to drive home relentlessly the idea that good morals are also good policy; the wages of sin really are death, both spiritually and physically, because that’s the way the world works. If the Lord hadn’t revealed himself his presence would be logically necessary to explain the human condition.
I should stop before I start ranting; good day sir, and God defend the right.
III
December 18th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
I’ve been conflicted about the abortion issue for a while, and I consider myself a Libertarian. It’s obvious to me that there is a human life involved from the very beginning. It is silly to try to draw an arbitrary legal line in the sand. As soon as you try, opinions fracture into various shades of grey, and nothing can really be decided because there are no clear-cut answers. What it boils down to for me is this:
It’s a very tough decision, and I am not prepared to make that decision for anyone else.
It is not my body, and it is not my decision.
I think that is the only civil response to the situation.
On the other hand… I’m not about to throw anyone under the bus for thinking otherwise. I just wish that the issue would be approached with less moral arrogance, and more understanding that complex moral decisions do not have to be made collectively.
Legally, the case for a right to abortion in the Constitution is poor, but neither does the Constitution grant the federal government any power to regulate it. It should be a state issue, and on that I suspect we would find common ground… except that politically, this issue is going to be a club for the left with women who resent the moral arrogance regardless of how they feel on the core issue.
JDShaw, that includes the moral arrogance inherent in assuming that your religion is justified in passing laws to govern people who do not follow your religion. You are free to exercise your powers of persuasion to encourage people to make moral choices without criticism from me, but when you want to enshrine your religious rules into law that binds everyone, then I must object. People can make their own choices, and sometimes, those choices will be the wrong ones. In order to have liberty, we must have the freedom to make those wrong choices.
December 19th, 2009 at 7:17 am
TriggerFinger, are you defending the woman in the story? ‘Her body, her decision’ is a bumpersticker slogan left over from the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, but it is (like so many bumperstickers) simplistic, and lousy logic. I chose this news item because it makes that point with blinding clarity. What choice did the baby have?
What, if anything, is it reasonable for a government to legislate? Fraud? Theft? Murder?
I would argue that the prohibition against taking another human life is a universal moral, not simply a religious issue, and it is held by most human beings throughout history. There is not a religion on earth that does not condemn murder, including Islam (despite having a convoluted “get around” for jihadis). All religions also condemn fraud and stealing, and no one would argue that it isn’t legitimate for the government to legislate against those.
If it is legitimate for government to legislate against a mugger killing a person in an alley for a wallet, then it is also legitimate for government to legislate killing an unborn human being for being in “the wrong womb at the wrong time”, which is essentially what abortion is. Defending Liberty doesn’t require us to quietly look away when a baby is killed, nor is Liberty diminished by making laws against it.
BTW, thanks for coming by, I appreciate it. You know you’re welcome anytime.
December 19th, 2009 at 9:43 am
No, I’m not. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a fair case to use when discussing the issue. Infanticide is a debate that is far clearer than abortion, because there are so many other, better solutions once the child is capable of surviving independently. The situation in the article is a rare one which happens to expose a flaw in Virginia law; it’s not a good case from which to derive broader policy. I’m not going to be drawn further into that part of the discussion, nor am I going to be arguing in favor of abortion here.
I feel that people have the right to control their own bodies. Yes, the baby is not exactly part of a woman’s body, but neither is it separate and independent. It’s a grey area about which reasonable people can, and inevitably *do*, disagree. Murder and fraud are not reasonable analogies (though you should know that I, and other libertarians, agree that laws against murder and fraud are reasonable). I could invoke cancer and parasitic organisms as analogies which would be equally poor.
I am simply not willing to use force to enforce my own moral sense upon someone else in this situation. I don’t have all the right answers, and the consequences for liberty of trying to enforce such a law are so profound that the cure is worse than the disease. Will you investigate women who have miscarriages in case they were actually abortions?
Women can make their own moral judgements, and I’m not willing to make that judgement and enforce it upon them.
December 21st, 2009 at 1:04 pm
You all are entitled to your opinions, but in my mind a true conservative would not want the government - or anyone else, for that matter - making such decisions for themselves or others. Call it simplistic, but I say keep the government out of my boardroom, my bedroom, my gun room, and most importantly, my body. And may God have mercy on the soul of anyone who tries to intrude into any of them.
December 21st, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Human life should be defended and protected, whether it is inside or outside a woman’s body. Being unplanned, unwanted, unloved, inconvenient, incompletely developed, or any other descriptive you can think of is not sufficient reason to allow a grown human being to kill an innocent ungrown human being.
The purpose of calling out this story is to illustrate the absurdity of picking an arbitrary time or an artificial condition and making THAT your determinant of whether it is alright to kill another human being. And using big government to guarantee you the exercise of that act, as if it is a right, well, that’s just a mockery of conservative, small government, libertarian belief. To me that is as absurd as that progressive congresswoman a week or two ago who proclaimed that abortion was a God given right.
Dan, do you realize that invoking God to have mercy on the soul of anyone who steps on *your* rights is one of the most ironic things I’ve heard anyone say in weeks? You’re going for the laugh there, right?
December 22nd, 2009 at 12:33 am
“Using big government to guarantee you the exercise of [abortion]” is a misnomer. BillH, you are the one seeking to use government to impose your moral values on others. Granted, you have justification in your own mind for doing so — you are protecting the rights of one human from another, as you see it. That’s a valid argument for government intervention. But to claim that people opposing your efforts are seeking to use big government to make that guarantee is frankly absurd. If there’s any government stick being wielded it is being wielded by those who seek to prohibit abortion, not those who encourage government to stay out of the question.
Yes, it’s difficult to draw lines here. This is a good argument for keeping government out of the issue. People draw their own lines and know their own circumstances infinitely better than government does. Government intervention only makes sense when there really is one rule that can fit for everyone. This is *clearly* not the case here. There is simply too much disagreement.
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:53 am
“Using big government to guarantee you the exercise of [abortion]” is NOT a misnomer at all. The pro-abortion position until recently requires the government to not simply stand aside so people can exercise that “right” if that is their “choice”, it uses big government in some circumstances to place restrictions on folks who hold the opposing view (med schools, hospitals, pharmacists, etc) . With the new healthcare bill it now will require the government (and therefore the taxpayers) to pay for it, but that is a discussion for another day.
Triggerfinger, I love you brother but you keep making my point. We ALL have “moral values”. Every action by government is an imposition of some moral value on the citizenry. We would all be miles ahead if we could ever get to the neutral place of government noninvolvement, but that is not what we have, nor have we ever had it in America. And knowing human beings, it will never happen either. (I’ll write the post about how much limited government broken human beings need another day
)
You’re correct, I view a baby as a human being, whose life is as worthy of government protection as yours. That isn’t something some religion told me, it is something I can see with my eyes and understand with my reason. Does it make sense to use government intervention to keep one human being from forcefully impacting the life of another human being in a very negative way? Slavery? Fraud? Theft? Rape? Of course it does, and no one would cry “foul! morals! religion!” over those things (well, that’s not totally true; they did over the slavery issue). If it makes sense to ask for government intervention in protecting your life from a mugger or your lady’s life from a rapist, then I contend it also makes sense to ask for government intervention to protect the life of a tiny human being whose only problem is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Barack Obama famously said, “I don’t want them punished with a baby.” His answer? Kill it. That is wrong. People who hold the pro-abortion position draw arbitrary lines that say it’s ok to kill it today, but not tomorrow. I contend that is wrong as well.
The main sticking point in the issue is that human beings love their sex and the majority will do anything it takes to have it as often and as free of consequences as possible. To that end human beings tend to play the oldest game on earth, “I can write the rules to my maximum benefit”. In the case of abortion, they make a bunch of silly rules and definitions (”conceptus”, “ensoulment”) to help get their minds around the obvious fact that even a five year old knows instinctively. Have you ever seen the look on a small child’s face when they touch that slight bulge of their mother’s tummy? Even a child can understand there is a baby in there. Why can’t we?
It’s only as adults that we think up ways to justify stopping that little heart, imposing “our morals” on that tiny human being. And frankly, having the government tell us it’s ok to kill a baby ought to frighten the heck out of ALL of us. It’s only slightly further down that road that that very same kind of dehumanization leads to all kinds of governmental abuse. Ask blacks. Ask Jews. Ask Cambodians and Viet Namese.