Libertarians have often asked, who owns your body. Government wants to control what you eat and what medicine you can take. Indeed, many people are in jail at this very moment for “possession of a controlled substance”. Government SWAT teams descend upon farmers selling raw milk to willing customers in private transactions, not to mention raiding health food stores for selling vitamin pills it thinks should not be sold.
I can make up my own mind, thank you.
It is a shame that these issues comes to light due to demand for an abortifactant, a medicine that causes a fertilized egg to be be flushed out of a woman’s body instead of being able to finish gestation at term. If life begins at conception, the “Plan B” bill destroys a life.
Having said that, the issue returns to the fact that one human cannot own the life of another. This was how the Supreme Court decision Scott v Sanford insulted reason and human rights. In this decision, the Court ruled that Negro slaves were the property of their owners. The effect of Roe v Wade was that the unborn child was not a human with its own right to life, but instead was the property of its mother.
I reject the government’s claim to have power to regulate what I put in my body. My power over my body is a right that I reserve as unalienable and protected by the Tenth Amendment. My body is not a factor in “interstate commerce”. If there is any value to Roe v Wade that was to elaborate the unalienable right to privacy which I also claim as it pertains to what I put in my body, that is: it is my private business alone.
When a woman conceives a child, no matter what the circumstance, she has a fiduciary responsibility for the life and welfare of that separate human life until it can sustain itself. That is why conception is such a serious matter and must be protected by society.
Just because nobody else may know of the conception does not make the new life any less human and any less endowed by the Creator with the right to life. But if she kills that new life, she will have to answer to God, and not human law. We would not want to live in a society where women’s menstrual cycles are tracked (like in China at one time), in order to police unauthorized conceptions or to track the disposition of a pregnancy.
The legal protection of the pregnant mother and the conceived child does not require reproductive surveillance ---- no more than the legal protection of air quality requires respiratory surveillance.
One hundred years ago, every state in the U.S. had some level of protective legislation on the books, which restrained abortionists. Most of the enforcement resulted from investigations sparked by damage done to women. A woman in the hospital suffering from lacerated cervix, punctured uterus, sepsis, etc. might well be questioned as a suspected victim of criminal abortion.
Maternal trauma, infection, or mortality caused by procured abortion, occurs in equal or greater numbers now than it did 100 year ago. If every injuiry resulted in investigaion and conviction, we could shut down 100 abortionists a year. By 2020 they'd all be gone.