One can apply that position to absolutely anything including murder. In fact, some ethicists do.

Soooo 70% of Libertarians are pro-choice. Funny how they tried to soft ball that question. What about the Libertarian Party's platform? I've always thought it was pro-choice.

You can be pro life in your private life and still think that people should have the right to an abortion if they need one and that the government shouldnt have the ability to dictate peoples private medical decisions

You can be pro life in your private life and still think that people should have the right to an abortion if they need one and that the government shouldnt have the ability to dictate peoples private medical decisions

My position is that even if a fertilized egg is a human being with full human rights, that does not include the right to live inside another person's body without her consent (which consent, even if previously given, may be withdrawn).

Once the fetus is developed to the point where it can be removed from the mother and kept alive outside her body, it would be reasonable for the law to require her to do that, and give it up for adoption if she doesn't want it, instead of having it killed. But she always should have the right to remove the unwelcome visitor, and if the only way to do so involves killing it, then so be it.

Of course, it's an abomination that people who oppose abortion are required to support it with their tax dollars.

Right, so why doesnt that logic applly to people who find it abomindable that the following people are also supported with tax dollars?

Seniors thru medicare
Seniors thru social security
Lazy baby factories on welfare
Abstenence only education
Foreign nations who use our money to plot our destruction
Corperations who should have been allowed to fail in a free market system
CEO's who bilk billion and are put in what aount to the federal prision systems idea of a country club

Technically federal tax dollars have never been avalible to fund abortions directlty, programs like planned parenthood and others have to keep detailed finacial records proving tax payer funds go to their other programs like pre natal exams and perscriptions

Luj, where did I say those weren't abominations? This thread isn't about any of those things.

First off, I thought that was a really wishy-washy interview; I couldn't see where either of them said anything definitive.

My personal position is twofold:

a.) Roe v. Wade is an abomination on purely Constitutional grounds. The whole issue should belong to the individual States because there is nothing in the Constitution authorizing any branch of the federal government to have any say about abortion -- either pro or con. Furthermore, there is no "right to privacy" in the Constitution as currently written; all that "penumbras & emanations" stuff is pure B.S. I'm all in favor of an Amendment that would establish a (very broad!) right to privacy(including private drug use, freedom from groping at airports, one's house being one's castle, etc., etc.) But currently it just ain't there and any ad-hoc "right to privacy" that covers killing babies and not much else is a travesty.

b.) As far as abortion itself: We can't even discuss the morality of it without first narrowing the terms. There are light-years of difference between aborting an early-term embryo for some valid reason versus aborting a healthy, late-term fetus for a frivolous reason. The former should be legal (and if it really is immoral, then God will punish the perpetrators in His own good time). The latter is indistinguishable from homicide, and should be treated accordingly.

Obviously, the question of where to draw the line could be very very controversial. Personally, I would go by the medieval concept of quickening, or maybe the idea that once the fetus is advanced enough to have a good chance of surviving outside of the womb, then it is to be regarded as a "real" human being with full legal protection.

Sorry if I rambled.

Quickening is useless and meaningless and totally impossible to accertain outside of simply asking a woman if she's felt her baby kick yet. Some severely obese women never feel their babies. Some women feel them super early, some very late. None of which has anything to do with when the baby actually starts to move, which is very early on.

That's the point I was getting, Amy. I believe Andrew Hall might be right that a plank of the Libertarian Party is pro-choice, but there is a difference between people who consider themselves libertarians and the LP.

I think the main thrust of libertarianism is a focus on personal freedom, limited government, and free market economic policies. I know people who have all those views but have widely conflicting ideas on abortion. I am willing to listen to lots of opinions, but not until we address the issue of why such a huge percentage of pregnancies are unplanned in the first place. The rest is just arguing about clean-up detail.

I don't think it can be said that there is a definitionally libertarian position on the subject.

One could do the calculus and get the result that abortion is fine, or that it's horrible and should be prohibited like murder - and the only difference is how you weight the rights involved, and what you decide is worth considering.

(Just like with foreign policy; nothing in the libertarian fundamentals requires isolationism or active foreign policy, and neither do they preclude either.)

Rex: So your position is that despite granting that the fetus is - arguendo - a person in every respect, the mother's right to not have biological trespass automatically warrants deadly force?

An interesting (and logically consistent) position, but not one that follows inevitably from the premises.

Especially since, of course, the fetus, unlike a normal actor, didn't get to choose to trespass or not.

This is why I typically think of it in terms of potential future personhood, especially in the early term.

Granting full personhood just as easily leads to the conclusion that abortion must be disallowed. Easier, in fact, for most people, if my intuition about them is correct.

(Imperfect but useful analogy, especially given your mention of revoked "consent":

Imagine you invite me onto your property, which is large. In the middle of it, you revoke that invitation, such that I am now trespassing.

Can you shoot me if I can't teleport off your property?

How about if I don't leave quite fast enough?

How about if I cannot leave... because you've tied me down?

The latter two seem to approach the reality of an un-viable fetus that you grant has "full personhood" and thus a right to not be killed for no wrongdoing, much more than the simple "I have a right to not have a trespasser in my body, which automatically wins in the contest of rights" calculus you seemed (unless I misunderstand) to be proposing.

Yeah, it makes the answers a lot less easy and clean - but that's how moral dilemmas work.)

Sigivald, your questions ignore a subtle but important distinction. The pregnant woman's fundamental right is to remove the fetus from her body if she so wishes. Her right to have it killed only exists if that's an inevitable consequence of the removal. In your trespass example, killing you doesn't get you off my property any faster than leaving you alive. I can use whatever force is necessary to remove you, but no more than that.

If it were somehow impossible to remove you except by killing you, reasonable people can disagree as to whether I have the right to do so. I'd argue that even if I don't, a woman's right to her own body is stronger than my right to a piece of land.

" ... The pregnant woman's fundamental right is to remove the fetus from her body if she so wishes. ..."

Yeah, but an anti-abortion Libertarian would simply argue that by becoming pregnant ( assuming it was voluntary ), the woman made an implicit contract with the fetus to provide it with free room & board for 9 months. And so she can't just go and unilaterally breach that contract without a darned good reason.

So the whole thing still comes down to the philosophical question of whether a fetus is a "person" or not.

an anti-abortion Libertarian would simply argue that by becoming pregnant ( assuming it was voluntary ), the woman made an implicit contract with the fetus to provide it with free room & board for 9 months.

Pretty tough case to make, considering that one party to the contract didn't exist at the time it was supposedly made. And what did the fetus give or promise in return? (OK, temporary breast enlargement. Anything else?)

Oh okay, jay-w, but what if she didn't become pregnant voluntarily? In this case the rapist gave consent, the woman didn't, and really in no case of any pregnancy did the fetus give consent.

This is one thing about the pro-life/choice debate that I continue to sit back and watch. Some pro-lifers say it's okay to have an abortion if the woman was raped. What if it was a 15-year-old girl, raped by her own father?

But if the basis of their argument is that a fetus is a person, and killing it is murder, it's certainly not the fault of that fetus that its conception took place under such disturbing circumstances. Aren't you still murdering a person?

But on the other hand, you're forcing a 16-year-old victim of incest to carry it.

It's so much more fun to punish a slutty woman in her 20's, who sleeps around, and you can't just let her have a bunch or abortions!

Well what is the issue, here? Is that fetus a person sometimes, and not a person at other times? If you really want to go there, you have to accept that it's murder for ANYONE to have an abortion. And never mind if you're talking about a very-much-wanted child who turns out to be braindead in the womb.

There are a lot of very unreasonable people who scream at the top of their lungs on this subject, on both sides, and it's enough of a goddam job just weeding them out, to get to anything intelligent or thought-provoking. I got my tubes tied when I was 34, so this doesn't even affect me. I find myself quickly wishing they'd just take the subject offline so we can talk about how to deal with the entitlement crisis/national debt instead.

I expect a lot of other libertarians are like me and see this as kind of a sideline issue, like gay marriage. Not that we don't recognize this is a big issue for a small number of people, but please. We're facing issues right now that impact everyone, because that's just the shitty time we're stuck living in right now, so why can't we focus on those. It's no wonder there's a big divide between social conservatives and Tea Partiers. I'm not sure whether I'm a Tea Partier or not, but these issues seem lower on the list to me. Why don't we talk about them when we aren't faced with national bankruptcy?

I expect a lot of other libertarians are like me and see this as kind of a sideline issue, like gay marriage.

To be fair, Jo, it's not at all unreasonable to see abortion as a crucial human-rights issue. If abortion really is murder, then what we've had over the last 30-some years makes the Holocaust look like a school shooting. I respect people who see it that way, even if I don't agree with them.

Point taken, Rex Little.

Yet the answer is still better use of contraceptives. At least that cuts the numbers of never-should-have-happened pregnancies to begin with.

Can we at least talk about how to keep more of the horses in the barn, before we discuss what to do after they are let out?

I suspect we will run into a bunch of anti-contraceptive, yet pro-life, people who will say all horses should be let out of the barn, with no regard to how these horses will be fed. To this I just shake my head and go back to studying stuff that can be explained by math. I leave the kooks to debate the abortion issue at their leisure. We sane folks will just continue to use birth control and ignore them.

My problem with the whole abortion debate is the tenth month and beyond.

The number of abused, injured, neglected, or otherwise damaged children that the system sees is unreal.

You'll have the protesters standing outside the abortion clinic harassing the ladies going in for routine ob/gyn appointments. These same protesters won't notice they had to drive through 25 blocks of the worst slums past the drug dealers, gang bangers and the like to get to the clinic. They also won't notice that the welfare office, five blocks up, has the same 17 year old girl going in that they protested against 8.5 months earlier approaching the clinic.

The three and four generations of dependency class is going to starve once the system crashes.

If you want an abortion have at it. If you want to have the child -- do it, but don't expect me to pay for it.

And those women who intentionally, immorally
have babies (to benefit themselves rather than to benefit the babies), in a polygamous relationships or out of wedlock, with other people husband should also be ashamed of themselves.
People who go on irresponsibly having babies in a system that is collapsing should be very sure about having one before going around immorally on a breeding spree that not only affect the survival of existing adults but also may cause more burden to an already overstretched system.
Whether those women wish to have babies or not or whether they can afford to have babies or not is a very personal issue and it should be a personal issue as long as long as they are not in any immoral get rich baby making scams and
don't seek any public funding that they are not entitle to.

All the horror stories aside, the VAST majority of abortions are performed so that the would-be mommy won't be inconvenienced.

I have grudging admiration for the feminist who recently acknowledged that abortion is not just removing "tissue," but is killing a human being. She argues, wrongly of course, that a woman's convenience justifies the taking of a human life. But at least she had the guts to frame the issue accurately.

Your body? Your responsibility!

I will admit that feminism has provided one invaluable service -- it has allowed women the freedom to reveal their true selves.

Not pretty. Horrifying, in fact. For men? Well, forewarned is forearmed.

For men? Well, forewarned is forearmed.

Not sure what you mean by this, but given the subject of the thread I'll assume you're complaining about women who have abortions without the consent of the men who fathered the fetuses (feti?). My guess is, for every one of those there's at least ten who are getting abortions only because their boyfriends threatened to kill them if they didn't.

I'd rather those 50 milion babies were dead before they were born rather then clogging up the court sytems being abused and neglected and on welfare most of their lives

"All the horror stories aside, the VAST majority of abortions are performed so that the would-be mommy won't be inconvenienced. I have grudging admiration for the feminist who recently acknowledged that abortion is not just removing "tissue," but is killing a human being. "

I agree with you here Jay R. Let's call a spade a spade. Abortion is nothing less than killing a child for your own convenience because you were too stupid, lazy, or irresponsible to use proper contraceptives (obviously this doesn't apply to cases of rape/genetic defects etc but I would imagine these are the minority.)

But I also agree with this:

"I'd rather those 50 milion babies were dead before they were born rather then clogging up the court sytems being abused and neglected and on welfare most of their lives"

As an added note, let's not pretend that abortion exists solely for the woman's convenience. How many of those 50 million baby daddies do you think really would have wanted to support and take care of a child for 18 years? Or married the mother so that the baby could grow up in a 2-parent home? The abortion gets the father off the hook just as much as the mother--and without the cost, pain, or risk of an expensive, traumatic, and potentially dangerous medical procedure.