The Abortion Question
Q & A reposted from Quora
I am a long-time voter interested in political ideas and ideals. I have both. 8/27/2023
My view is a radical, principled view based on the exact meaning of the concept of rights.
Individual rights are innate (present at birth) and inalienable (not separable from the person, not transferable to any other person). All individuals have exactly the same rights to life, liberty, and property.
The woman’s right is to her life and body up to the point at which the baby is born. That being said, the doctor’s right is to his life and to practice his chosen profession, obeying the oath of his profession, “First, do no harm.”
No legislator or bureaucrat is born with a right to assume any rights of anyone else or to make up rights that don’t exist in nature. Nor is the bureaucrat born with the right to take other people’s rights away because “they know better,” or the voters want them to take some rights away from some people for some reason. There is no right to violate anyone’s rights.
If the doctor and the patient cannot come to an agreement about the termination of the pregnancy, she is free to find another doctor, have the baby, or jump off a cliff. It is her life, and the right to life begins at birth, not before and not after. The woman is on a biological timetable that does not affect the males of the human race. That timetable is the only timetable that nature forces her to recognize.
Laws pretending to “speak for the unborn” are immoral, insulting, and a violation of the concept of rights. No one appointed the bureaucracy to be God. The woman’s actions are between her and the forces to which she subscribes, whether God or human. Counseling, aiding, guiding, or helping are all legitimate human voluntary functions as long as they are private and not financed by an overreaching government, neither on the side of promoting births and adoption nor providing abortion services on demand.
The government has a role in prosecuting crimes but does not have the right to create new crimes where its declaration of rights creates a conflict of rights between individuals. Natural rights do not conflict. If the defined rights of the individuals conflict, then the definition of their rights is wrong.
As soon as the rights of one individual are infringed, the concept of rights as a whole is undermined. Women must be allowed to maintain full an equal rights to their own bodies under the law, or else the concept of rights begins to lose its meaning. Under such conditions then no rights are safe.
The abortion debate is the canary in the coal mine for a much broader and more critical issue. Congress needs to formerly define the concept of rights under the law. A legislative definition of rights based on a moral assessment of objective reality, could effectively mitigate not only the abortion debate, but also many other issues pursuant to individual rights. This should have been done by the founders of this nation. The sooner it is done, the closer we will be to the promise of the America.