Prenatal care for all, or a Roe v. Wade endrun?. The Health and Human Services department announced today that a new policy has been proposed which will establish a fetus as an unborn child. [kuro5hin.org]
This is pretty clever of the “pro-life” crowd. They can’t just attack Roe v. Wade directly, so instead they tie an indirect attack to another unconstitutional, bloated, and wasteful government program.
The most obvious way to attack this is to simply point out that the new policy (and indeed the entire Health and Human Services Department) has no Constitutional authority and is therefore illegal. However, the pro-choice movement is (regretably) dominated by liberals who think unconstitutional, bloated, and wasteful government programs are just great. They can’t challenge the policy on Constitutional grounds without making arguements that could be used against everything else they stand for.
This is an example of why it is dangerous to rely on liberals to defend women’s right to an abortion. That right is based on the principle of self-ownership–the idea that a woman owns her own body and can do what she likes with it. Unfortunately, self-ownership is at odds with the liberal belief that people belong to the all-powerful State, which may dispose of them (and the fruits of their labor) as it sees fit.
Liberals are then put in the position of arguing that a woman’s body belongs to the State, but as long as they control the State they will allow women to have abortions. This is not very reassuring, I think. By contrast, the libertarian position is that a woman’s body belongs to her, and it is immoral for anybody else to try to control it.