It's not a right defined in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It's not even mentioned in the Magna Carta. Of the books I have read on natural law, there is no mention of the subject.
All of the reasons that the government tells us that we must be permitted before we can do anything is that we are all a part of our society and that we must protect that society at all cost.
I think that the greatest menace to society is bad people doing bad things, so clearly, conception of a human person should be controlled through a permitting process before any and all other considerations.
Conception requires that a man and a woman must be involved. If we are to conceive and raise children to the benefit of society, the child must be born into a safe family environment where the woman agrees to carry the child to term and the male agrees to the provide a support system for the child.
Violation of the permitting process should carry a substantial financial penalty or even jail or prison time for repeat offenders.
Obviously, there will be women who will claim that they became pregnant as the result of rape and therefore should not be subject to fines or penalties. With our current technology, there are many ways to avoid the rape scenarios but one I will throw out there is this, when a young girl reaches the age of puberty, all of her eggs are harvested and placed in a cryogenic environment until she elects to have one or more of them fertilized with the male sperm of both parents approval. I support taxpayers dollars to pay for this.
By having her eggs harvested and saved, a woman can live her life as she wishes without ever being punished by having a baby she never wanted. And, she will never have to pay for contraceptives ever again.
“Conception requires that a man and a woman must be involved. If we are to conceive and raise children to the benefit of society, the child must be born into a safe family environment where the woman agrees to carry the child to term and the male agrees to the provide a support system for the child.”
Agreed. Although both conservative, my wife believes that noone should be able to dictate what a woman does with her body (speaking abortion here). My take is that if only the woman gets to decide the life or death of the baby, then the man should not be obligated to financially support the baby, if decided to let live. This is even more correct where the child was born out of wedlock.
The woman cannot have it both ways-the woman is the sole decider, and she can then take support if she decides to keep. It takes two to create the baby, thus, it takes two to decide. The father may want the baby, yet the mother can trump and abort. Wrong. In such cases, there should be a huge penalty applied to the mother.
Male and female are specially designed to compliment each other; thus, both are equally valuable in propagating the species, and each should have a say in life or death of the baby.