In response to some recent comments on my popular libertarian essay about abortion, it's time for me to mention that my views have shifted. I would argue that for the purpose of discussing law and public policy, the critically relevant issue is not the nature of the fetus as I have argued before, but the nature of the state.
Let's come up with a libertarian consensus on abortion that even if a human fetus is a living human being entitled to self-ownership and non-aggression, and even if to abort a human fetus is to murder a human being, that we still don't want to pass a law against it in a monopoly legislature, appoint a standing army of career policethugs, and try to enforce that law with money we take from people against their will and under threat of violence-- because if all that isn't bad enough to begin with, even if protecting human fetuses was the only thing this government did, before long it would end up doing a hundred other unrelated things that make us less free and probably even get a lot of us killed... while doing a terrible job of protecting the fetuses. The state is a good solution to no problem.
Let's come up with a libertarian consensus on abortion that even if a human fetus is a living human being entitled to self-ownership and non-aggression, and even if to abort a human fetus is to murder a human being, that we still don't want to pass a law against it in a monopoly legislature, appoint a standing army of career policethugs, and try to enforce that law with money we take from people against their will and under threat of violence-- because if all that isn't bad enough to begin with, even if protecting human fetuses was the only thing this government did, before long it would end up doing a hundred other unrelated things that make us less free and probably even get a lot of us killed... while doing a terrible job of protecting the fetuses. The state is a good solution to no problem.
