lifemattersjournal:
freeconservative:
You are not accounting for that a fetus does not belong to you—it is an organism with separate DNA and different organs and tissues. From conception, the embryo already has all the genetic traits it will ever have. Everything from the eye color to mouth shape to genetically-influenced personality traits are chosen at conception. You have all your genetic data at conception. That is biological fact.
To call abortion a matter of “property rights” is disregarding that a fetus is a separate being. It dehumanizes it so that we may justify its death.
You may be a libertarian, but you only stand for liberty for some people; not all of them.
The Libertarian Case Against Abortion
One popular misconception is that libertarianism as a political principle supports choice on abortion. And major elements within the libertarian movement (the Libertarian Party, for example) take abortion-choice stands. Nonetheless, libertarianism’s basic principle is that each of us has the obligation not to aggress against (violate the rights of) anyone else – for any reason (personal, social, or political), however worthy. That is a clearly pro-life principle. Recognizing that, and seeing the abortion-choice drift within the libertarian movement, Libertarians for Life was founded in 1976 to show why abortion is a wrong under justice, not a right.
We see our mission as presenting the pro-life case to libertarians and the libertarian case to pro-lifers. Among supporters of LFL, some of us are members of the Libertarian Party, some are not. Some are religious, some are not. (Doris Gordon, our Founder and Coordinator, is a Jewish atheist.) Our reasoning is expressly scientific and philosophical rather than either pragmatic or religious, or merely political or emotional.
To explain and defend our case, LFL argues that:
1. Human offspring are human beings, persons from conception, whether that takes place as natural or artificial fertilization, by cloning, or by any other means.
2. Abortion is homicide – the killing of one person by another.
3. One’s right to control one’s own body does not allow violating the obligation not to aggress. There is never a right to kill an innocent person. Prenatally, we are all innocent persons.
4. A prenatal child has the right to be in the mother’s body. Parents have no right to evict their children from the crib or from the womb and let them die. Instead both parents, the father as well as the mother, owe them support and protection from harm.
5. No government, nor any individual, has a just power to legally “de-person” any one of us, born or preborn.
6. The proper purpose of the law is to side with the innocent, not against them.
Treating children as property explains so much of what is wrong with the world.
I am a libertarian as well, but I must point out that it does not make sense to be pro-life. To be against abortion is to be against basic property rights, because the body is private property. What do you think about that?
