Abortion

We must promote respect for individual liberty while insuring that none are unjustly deprived of life. Reducing the role the government plays in healthcare, can make issues like abortion obsolete by providing more and better choices.

As a fundamental right we all should be able to enjoy life and liberty. The right to life, is the most basic and fundamental of all liberties. The purpose of government is to protect our liberty to provide for the common defense, and defend the defenseless. These rights extend to the born and the unborn alike. The 5th Amendment to the Constitution for the United States enumerates that no “…person… [shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….” Abortion deprives the unborn child of life and liberty without due process of law. Government at all levels should work to ensure all equal protection under the law.

The center of the abortion debate revolves around when a child becomes alive. If a fetus is alive, then clearly it should receive equal protection under the law from being deprived of its life. If the fetus is not alive then it has no life of which to be deprived. Currently a women choice is limited to bringing a child to full term or aborting it. In a Libertarian society, with its prosperity and competing alternative healthcare, abortion could be made obsolete by developing the technology to transfer an unwanted fetus to a natural or artificial womb. This technology would be particularly helpful when the life of the mother might become threatened if the child was brought to full term or if the child was conceived due to rape. It might well be possible that if the pro-life and pro-choice groups had put their time, money, and effort into this research instead of lobbying, that abortion might already be a thing of the past. It is time to give women a real choice.

Under our laws (and the Fifth Amendment), murder like any other crime, should be tried by a jury according to the rules of the Common Law. Under the rules of the common law, a presentment or indictment for any crime must arise from a grand jury composed of the people. This means that the people, sitting as a grand jury, in each community and upon considering the facts of each specific case may determine if they consider a particular abortion murder, or not. Then a jury would have to decide if a mother is guilty of murder or not.

The tenth amendment to the Constitution for the United States says, “The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or the people.” Since the United States has no power establish rules on abortion, this duty clearly falls upon the people through our justice system.

In January of 2008 the Guttmacher Institute reported that U.S. Abortion rates are the lowest they have been in three decades. The report did not speculate upon the specific reasons for the decline. Certainly preventative measures and education may be considered as possible factors. Perhaps persuasion is once again working better than force.