printThat the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) finally delivered a decision returning and restoring power to the states on this one issue, abortion, is as it should be. If her state outlaws abortion; a woman can still board a Greyhound bus to get the procedure elsewhere.
The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument has been reiterated before in this space:
“Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.”
Trojans, Trivora or a termination: An Americans woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals. Some of these individuals do not approve of the products and procedures mentioned. Americans who oppose contraception, abortifacients and abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership.
Taxpayers who oppose these products and procedures ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. America’s adult women may terminate their pregnancies (to the exclusion of late-term infanticide).
What America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope other, presumably free Americans into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience apply to all Americans.
Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed (I realize I owe you argument, yet have provided only assertion. My apologies; you’ll have to wait). One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks:
The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional.
A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.
Call it real federalism—on this one vexing issue—although, any reluctant state taxpayers will still be on the hook for such services. And , federalism has hardly been revived. Powers have never been more concentrated in the Federal Frankenstein, which has never been more intractable and tyrannical.
Have we not just lived through three years in which the Pharma State has consolidated power as never before? On pain of taking the Covid jab, the state has de facto established license to shutter a subject’s business, deny him freedom of movement, quarantine, fire, and separate him from loved ones. Sorry: Abortion does not rate a mention on a serious country’s scale of priorities.
Law is force. Outlawing abortion, in the midst of a true crime wave, and a systemic breakdown in ordered liberty, implies the creation of a new category of criminal, consisting of the abortion seeking “spiteful mutants” and their healthcare aids, to be jailed for the commission of an abortion.
Another pesky detail: However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from self-ownership. You have no right to take custody of another’s body. A woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything in her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself in conjunction with other busybodies.
The piss-poor quality of the now-overturned Roe V. Wade jurisprudence has never been in question. Wrote a perspicacious reader: “There were 50 state laws on abortion until the Republican-appointed Harry Blackmun decided to merge the musings of his Mayo Clinic physician buddies and the vaguely written 14th Amendment into a stream-of-consciousness halachic decision known as Roe v. Wade. Since then, 55% of black pregnancies get aborted compared to a third of Hispanics and 11% of white.”
These statistics are significant in the context of crime. John J. Donohue and Steven D. Levitt (2001) had established that “the legalization of abortion, in the early 1970s, played an important role in the crime drop of the 1990s.” Ceteris paribus, “legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.”
Reversal of the trend is inevitable.
Myself, I don’t have sticky fingers and have no desire to control another’s uterus. Let progressive women—especially the fulminating fiends rioting across the country—suction their wombs for all I care. As evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton has suggested, “Some people voluntarily resigning from the gene pool is a good thing.”
The consequences of similar efforts against family planning in the undeveloped world have been described less daintily by Kevin Myers, an Irish columnist who was banished from the ossified, idiotic media:
The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him, and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. … Somalia [is] another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts, and housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed [in Africa], we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world …
American Woman: A reminder to conservatives who want these medusas to be mamas: Babies begotten by such hos will likely be a lot like their feral mothers, who are NOT in God’s image. These gorgons are howling at the gods for being so in-and-out ugly. A medal to the man who gets on top of such putrid flesh for his jollies. Women who behave worse than primates in estrus are not mother material.
Dallas women TWERKING for abortions. WTF
“Shakin dat a** so we can kill our babies, proud to be a hoe and not to be a ladies” pic.twitter.com/tyTCEbDXhr
— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) June 25, 2022
This is pure garbage. Abortion is murder, doesn’t matter what trimester it happens.
Ilana is quite brilliant and rational almost all of the time, it’s sad to hear her so confused on this issue.
As a follow up, Steve Sailer thoroughly put to bed the theory that legal abortion contributed to low crime years ago.
I think that Justice Roberts had the right approach – the law in question was about a 15 week limit (and as Roberts pointed out, nearly all nations that allow abortion limit it in 12-16 weeks) and the court should have stuck to what was argued. Now we have a new Pandora’s Box where some will try to ban IUD’s, emergency contraceptives, condoms, who knows… because there is no “right to privacy” – the “Right” (like the “Left”) when unchecked, will gravitate to “my way or the highway” thinking. If there truly is no “right to privacy”, can the state mandate cameras in women’s vaginas? Just like Roe v Wade opened up its own 50 year jihad, Dobbs will do the same in the opposite direction. Ironically, median American public opinion is roughly at the abortion of golf-ball size developing babies legal, formed 1 lb babies not – not per se moral but perhaps a practical compromise. Nevertheless, thanks to anti-social “social media” and 24-hour rant networks, this country is diverging rather than converging – so more hysterics to follow.
Her argument isn’t “pure garbage”. She is attempting to argue from “first principles” of self ownership. Of course it would then follow that late term abortions woukd be just as moral as first trimester abortions which is an argument she does not make. Itt could even be argued from such “first principles” that terminating the child after birth would be just as moral as the child is still dependent on the mother. For that matter, those “…people who only survive because of help from the outside world …” are likewise dependent on the labor and sacrifices of others. What moral reason based on “first principles” would make terminating their existance immoral? It could be argued that a speedy extermination was the more compassionate approach than allowing them to perish from famine brought on by lack of the “help from the outside world.”
First principles are useful philosophical tools but they are still merely tools and should not be elevated to the point that they are in conflict with humanity. People such as myself believe intuitively that a human is more than the sum of his parts. Libertarians tend to believe otherwise.