Even Libertarians Should Be Pro-Life
Many, like me, who oppose the imposition of oppressive regulations, seem to accept abortion as an inalienable right. After all, it's the only profitable private industry liberals don't relish regulating into oblivion.
Instead, the Left seeks to elevate abortion into a public entitlement.
Governments were ordained by God to administer justice upholding the law in defense of our persons and property. If men were just or if we could all defend ourselves, there would be no need of laws. If humanity were one big happy family government would be redundant.
Thus, if a person is maturing in the womb, legalized abortion violates the very foundation of legitimate government, its raison d'être: protecting those incapable of defending themselves. Everything rests on whether the fetus is alive, or not alive. And the unborn baby clearly lives.
Once women even confirm their pregnancies, the tiny child developing in her womb already has a budding personality, the beginnings of brain activity and a resonating heartbeat. It is an impossible conclusion that babies passing through this essential phase of maturation, something everyone ever born experienced, can be deemed anything but life.
Even on utilitarian terms, absent any modicum of morality, abortion cannot be considered socially beneficial. Eliminating unwanted babies before birth has wrought no wealth or happiness. Unless one ascribes to Malthusian madness, humanity is the ultimate economic resource.
Progressives in academia and the media have the world backwards.
Man is not a product of his surroundings. To the extent it infuses character, our environment derives primarily from human endeavors. God granted us dominion to cultivate and create that which sustains us.
Nor has terminating undesired pregnancies reduced indolence, crime or other social ills emanating from illegitimacy and its corollary cultural debris. It is clear family breakdown and poverty are inexorably linked, but abortion has not reduced the numbers of children sired by those incapable or unwilling to rear them.
Similar arguments have been advanced touting every other form of birth control. Since 1960 when the pill appeared, illegitimacy and the social evils it spawns have soared. This trend didn't reverse in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. It continued apace.
In 1960, 5.3 percent of babies were born out of wedlock. In 1970, this had risen to 10.7 percent. By 1975, after abortion had begun accelerating, 14.3 percent of babies were illegitimate. In 1980, it was 18.4 percent and this crisis has continued surging steadily to about forty percent today despite terminating fifty million babies.
The reason is readily discernible. As assorted birth control measures cheapened sex and coarsened our sensibilities, both the stigma of unwed pregnancy and social pressures on men to act honorably abated. Presto, we see huge numbers of unmarried mothers.
Like any safety-net, abortion as a backstop didn't inhibit risky sex practices, it encouraged them.
Believing abortion lessens children in undesirable circumstances appears similarly ludicrous as the "jobs saved" statistics espoused by apologists for Obama's failed stimulus programs. One is an economic poison focused only on what Bastiat coined, "That which is seen." The other is social venom guilty of similarly shallow analysis.
Nor is the much ballyhooed "abortion reduces crime" conjecture convincing. Many abortion advocates highlight decreasing crime in the Nineties and credit this to increased abortion in the Seventies. This argument was predicted even prior to legalization.
Considering nothing else it appears plausible. But why did Canadian crime peak and then subside in lockstep with America when Ottawa didn't legalize abortion nationally until 1988? A similar challenge arises from England which legalized abortion before us, but crime began ebbing later there.
Per John Lott's analysis in Freedomnomics, babies born in the four years after Roe v. Wade, accounting for states where abortion was already legal, perpetrated significantly more crime than those born in the four preceding years. Rather than bolstering the pro-abortion cause, this reflects the continuance of prior trends chronicling cultural depravity.
Abortion is obviously not singularly responsible for these dire developments, but neither did its legality arrest their advance. Eroding the sanctity of life and rending society's moral fabric doesn't alleviate lawlessness.
Lower crime rates stem from an aging population, concealed carry laws, heightened police enforcement and stiffer prison sentences. As a percentage of the overall population, crime has diminished. However, criminality per age group remains staggering. Teens and young adults still break laws at alarming rates. This undercuts the politically correct fairy tale that society makes men succumb to violence.
The nature versus nurture divide is very ancient, but if society were truly the cause of character defects, crime would increase as we age due to longer exposure to this nefarious element. Crime decreases because culture acts as a leavening agent tempering our baser instincts. This happens most effectively when the two primary character instilling institutions, family and church, remain vibrant.
As the traditional family gets sacrificed on the politically correct altars of feminism, multiculturalism and the welfare state, children growing up without fathers enter life devoid of any curbs checking their primal instincts. Fatherless teens roam like feral dogs unleashing terrible tolls on our communities.
Statistically, it is not tenable that abortion reduced the proportion of babies reared in adverse situations. The opposite occurred, but teenagers and men in their early twenties -- those most prone to crime -- now comprise lower percentages of the population than ever previously while we simultaneously incarcerate many more from these age groups.
Abortion has become a matter of personal convenience, a facilitator of hedonism.
Abortion is an affront to God. There is nothing moral, economic or socially beneficial about discarding unwanted babies as we would the weekly trash.
