Eight Pounds Lighter

From the transcript of Ron Paul’s interview with Piers Morgan last night:

On abortion, I just recognition [sic] as a physician and scientist that life does exist prior to birth. There is a legal right to it and there is a biological definition of it. And most people don’t think about it, that if you say the woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and what is in her body, that means that an eight-pound baby a month before birth can be destroyed and the doctor be paid for it.*

There is something awfully bizarre about a society that says oh, that’s OK because it’s a woman’s body. And every argument for all abortion endorses the principle that you can take that life and abort it and kill it. And I had to witness this. It’s very, very disturbing.

So I think that somebody has to speak for the meek and the small. And they do have legal rights. If you’re in a car accident and a woman’s pregnant and her baby dies, you’re — this is homicide. You’ve committed a very serious crime. You killed a life.

So, this whole thing that is simple to woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body — no, you have to deal with the fact. You have to decide is there a real life there? And there is a real life there.

I’m liable as a physician. If a woman comes in and if she’s a week pregnant or 10 months, pregnant, or was eight, nine months pregnant — if I do something wrong, rightfully, so I can be liable for injuring the fetus. So, if I give her the wrong medication, I’m liable for this.

To pretend that life doesn’t exist, that’s like putting blinders on.

And I don’t talk a whole lot about it. But I’ve made the emphasis the other day that if you truly care about liberty, you have to understand life because how can I defend a woman’s or any individual’s right to lead their own life as they choose and even do dumb things and drink raw milk or whatever they want to do, at the same time say that life is not precious?

And we can throw away a life even if it weighs eight pounds because it’s within the woman’s body.

I believe in property rights. I believe that a baby in a crib deserves protection, even though I honor property. And a house is our castle.

But nobody, nobody would say oh, a woman after the baby’s born, we can kill it. And today, we have this — all these abortions. But if a young girl is in a desperate situation and she happens to deliver her baby and kills it, she is arrested immediately. But if she had done it a day before, there was no crime and the doctor gets paid money.

That — even if you divorce this all from the law and enforcement of law, but morality. Our society has to decide whether that’s morally right or wrong in dealing with this.

I have high respect for life. Therefore I have high respect for liberty. And it’s hard to separate the two.

I’m going to defer to Paul’s experience “as a physician and scientist that life does exist prior to birth” and then I’m going to explain why that doesn’t matter at all when it comes to whether or not women have the right to abort a pregnancy on demand and without apology. In fact, I’ll even raise the stakes and say that we know for a fact that the baby (yes, ‘baby’, since we’re accepting Paul’s premise for now) will grow up to cure cancer and bring about total world peace.

[TRIGGER WARNING for descriptions of hypothetical rape.]

And we can throw away a life even if it weighs eight pounds because it’s within the woman’s body.

Now, let’s imagine that, instead of an eight-pound baby, a one hundred ninety pound man is within the woman’s body. In particular, his penis is in her vagina.

At this point, I haven’t said who this man is. I’d like to offer two possibilities:

1. The man is her lover and they are engaged in enthusiastically consensual intercourse, or
2. The man is a raping her.

Let’s start with the latter. Would Paul likely respond as follows:

On self-defense and stopping a rape, I just recognize as a physician and scientist that life does exist after birth. There is a legal right to it and there is a biological definition of it. And most people don’t think about it, that if you say the woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and what is in her body, that means that a one hundred ninety pound man in the prime of his life can be destroyed and the police be paid for it.

There is something awfully bizarre about a society that says oh, that’s OK because it’s a woman’s body. And every argument for all self-defense endorses the principle that you can take that life and abort it and kill it. And I had to witness this. It’s very, very disturbing.

I imagine it would be disturbing to kill someone or to have them killed in front of you, even if they were violating your body. Most of us aren’t rapists or murderers. In our legal order, “somebody has to speak” even for rapists and “they do have legal rights,” but it wouldn’t mean that it was wrong or even a moral dilemma to kill ’em dead right then and there. Why? Roderick Long explains:

What gives a woman the right to kill as rapist in self-defense, then, is…that he uses her body in the most deeply intimate and personal way, without her consent (even if she originally consented, then changed her mind). And it is precisely this same fact that gives [her] the right to kill her unwanted fetus…Hence abortion is not a disproportionate response to the seriousness of the boundary-violation it counteracts. My argument for abortion rights may be expressed, then, by the following syllogism:

(a) One has the right to kill in self-defense if the threat is sufficiently serious.

(b) The threat posed by an unwanted fetus is sufficiently serious.

(c) Therefore, one has the right to kill an unwanted fetus in self-defense.

If Paul is half the libertarian he claims to be, I can’t imagine he would disagree with the right to self-defense against rapists, and for the same reasons. But I also imagine that he would object to the move over to abortion by bringing up the idea of “innocence” since what is more innocent that a little baby, right? Long again:

My analogy between fetuses and rapists will strike many opponents of abortion rights as absurd. Doesn’t this analogy ignore a vitally important difference – namely, that the fetus is innocent? The fetus did not choose to violate its mother’s boundaries; the violation occurred as a result of natural processes over which the fetus, in the nature of the case, could have no control (since these are the same natural processes that produced it).

Yes, this is of course an important difference; but it is not important in the relevant way. An unwanted fetus is an innocent threat, but is a threat nonetheless. A boundary-violation does not cease to be a boundary-violation just because the boundary-violator was acting involuntarily; nor does such involuntariness transform a profoundly personal intrusion into a minor inconvenience. Proposition 20 [“Every person has the right not to have her boundaries violated, and also not to have her boundaries invaded unless such invasion is necessary to end some wrongful boundary-invasion of hers, and such invasion is also not disproportionate to the seriousness of her boundary-invasion”] therefore licenses the killing of innocent threats in self-defense. To be sure, considerations of the threat’s innocence or guilt may legitimately affect judgments of the moral proportionality of the response. But when the threat is as personal and intrusive as an unwanted pregnancy, it is difficult to see how the innocence of the fetus could make enough of a difference to justify forcing the mother to quietly endure nine months of what is tantamount to rape. Analogously , even if someone has been involuntarily hypnotized into becoming a literal rapist, his victim still has the right to kill him in self-defense.

So, Ron?

So, this whole thing that is simple to woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body — no, you have to deal with the fact. You have to decide is there a real life there? And there is a real life there.

We’ve done that, I think. We’ve decided that if there is a life there, it doesn’t matter. “Every person has the right not to have her boundaries violated, and also not to have her boundaries invaded unless such invasion is necessary to end some wrongful boundary-invasion of hers, and such invasion is also not disproportionate to the seriousness of her boundary-invasion.” I could pretty much leave it there. Case closed. But Paul’s not done making confused arguments:

I’m liable as a physician. If a woman comes in and if she’s a week pregnant or 10 months, pregnant, or was eight, nine months pregnant — if I do something wrong, rightfully, so I can be liable for injuring the fetus. So, if I give her the wrong medication, I’m liable for this.

Also:

But nobody, nobody would say oh, a woman after the baby’s born, we can kill it. And today, we have this — all these abortions. But if a young girl is in a desperate situation and she happens to deliver her baby and kills it, she is arrested immediately. But if she had done it a day before, there was no crime and the doctor gets paid money.

Remember our first possible man above? The lover? If the police came in and shot him, they’d be liable, right? That’s because he is crossing her boundaries, but he isn’t violating them. The police are violating the male lover’s boundaries, however, because the police action “is not necessary to end any boundary-invasion” on the lover’s part. Surely, Paul gets this. Yet when it comes to abortion, he just can’t seem to figure out why we would be liable in one set of circumstances (no boundary violation) and not another (boundary violation), or why a woman can’t kill a baby that is no longer violating her boundaries. Here is a politician who supposedly founds his entire platform on the idea that we have a right to do what we want unless we are violating another’s rights, yet he can’t tell the difference between killing someone who is violating rights and someone who isn’t.

Here’s the key, Ron: we know the difference by checking for consent or the necessity to end another invasion, and when we don’t find either, we have a rights violation. Since I don’t see how a pregnancy can possibly count as necessary to end an invasion of the baby on the mother’s part, that leaves consent AKA choice, a woman’s choice. Not qualified consent. Just consent, on demand and without apology.

There is one apology needed, however. Paul should apologize to all women everywhere for his desire to deny them the same libertarian rights he would fight for in any other situation. You might be glad to get that off of your conscience, Ron. You might feel eight pounds lighter.

* I’m not going to focus on this but just stop with this tired, underhanded, misogynist example already.