osan, my good man, did you read the article?
Actually yes. I was not responding to the article per se, but expressing the general sense of exasperation I experience when this molehill is made a mountain of, usually with grotesquely flawed logic on both sides of the argument. Now that you bring up the article in question, there was this:
Prohibition is the same no matter what you prohibit
Picking a semantic nit here just to make you aware - not making a big deal of it. The statement could be taken to include, say, murder - I am confident you did not mean that, but just pointing out that the expression was a little loosey-goosey semantically. I always try to make sure that which I put into writing is free of such open-endedness. I fail at it now and again, but not so very often. Just FYI.
Then there is this:
The problem is that it is a cultural issue - an issue of moral degradation, which *cannot* be solved by law.
Very good and right on the money. But the bit following gets into iffy-land and must be regarded with some caution:
The best answer we have for this problem are social pressures like social and commercial ostracism (shaming),
I see this as a very dicey sword of two edges because "social pressure" can so very readily get out of hand and become a form of tyranny. I would also note that abortion and such other "unacceptable" choices lay deeply within the boundaries of choice that are protected by privacy right. Unless a woman makes her choice public, how should others come to know of it? If they do not know, there is no basis for ostracism. If it has not been made public be HER yet people know, someone has breached her privacy right and I deem this a criminal act in a manner similar to a peeping tom filming your "deviant" sex acts with your partner and publishing them on youtube.
And hen there is this:
the hope that the culture will improve and that ostracism will become a strong enough cultural force to discourage this,
IMO the way the culture improves is by people minding their own damned business where the legitimately private matters of others are concerned. The tacit thesis of the paragraph from which all these snippets were taken is that the majority should be able to force the minority to bend to its wishes. This is Hitler-speak, Stalin-speak, Mao-speak, Obama-speak, and it is way dangerous stuff. Because there is NO SUCH THING as "government" all we have today is a subset of the population with lots of guns and the will to use force at the drop of a hat to enforce their will upon the rest. What you suggest in the paragraph in question is fundamentally no different. It is a very dangerous re-packaging of the same old same old. Be aware of it and if I may be so bold, suggest you do a little analysis work and reconsider this aspect of your position.
As for selling rights, we already have that. Women get abortions often because they DON'T WANT TO GO THROUGH PREGNANCY. I had a lovely Romanian gf who absolutely HATED children. This is no exaggeration. She cannot stand them. There is no power on this earth that could persuade her to carry a child to term. None. You would literally have to kill her before she would accede to such a thing. That's why we went our ways as I thoroughly love children. There is no moral basis anyone could possibly contrive that would justify forcing someone like her to carry a pregnancy to term. Such force is far and away the greater crime than what some claim abortion to be. There is no comparison.
What you suggest is done every day. People rent uteruses and have children or adopt prior to the birth and so forth. I agree with you that the so-called "state" should have nothing to do with any of it. It is a private affair.
The 'issue' of abortion is indeed a difficult one for libertarians who hold consistently to private property rights as well as concepts of self-ownership.
It's not at all difficult for me. The woman is an established human being in the world capable of asserting her rights. The fetus is not. Fetus loses, 1-0. I do not like it in many cases, but too bad for me. The status of the woman can be established with certainty. That of the fetus can be argued. That's enough for me to keep my nose out of things. I find late-term abortions to be a horror, and I mean that so very literally, but I am nonetheless morally obliged to keep my hands to myself. There is no argument I can spin that makes valid the placing of my unwelcome hands upon another in such situations unless I can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the person is acting without capacity. If someone drugged my wife such that she goes suddenly and wildly crazy - maybe those "bath salts" - and tried to abort her now-8-month pregnancy, I may have a basis for tying her down and getting her some medical attention. Short of that, I tread very thin ice.
Of course, any culture that values life and particularly the life *of their own children* so little as to openly and proudly proclaim the 'right' and willingness to end it so indifferently is of course going to be one that is naturally so casual and detached about statism and the corruption, waste, destruction and death that it imposes on complete strangers locally and abroad.
Nicely stated. That's a keeper.
