Do you think that if you decide to tire of a dinner guest, and he does not leave immediately, upon request, you have the right to shoot him? If you believe this, please reconsider.

The fact of the matter is that a person invited into your home is no longer covered under the Castle doctrine — no matter how disgusted you get with him, unless he threatens you bodily, you have no right to execute him for his presence. Even if he does not “guarantee” a peaceful exit, you do not have the right to execute him unless he presents a clear and present danger to you. Inviting him in makes all the difference. The most you can make with your argument is a rape/incest exception, not an unlimited right to abortion.

Let me clarify my position on the issue of legal penalties for abortion should it be criminalized. The only rationale I object to for having in antiabortion laws no penalty whatsoever for women who procure abortion is that, although abortion is the murder of an unborn child, such a significant number of women who procure abortions are not responsible for their actions that including a punishment in the law is unwarranted. I think it is a fine thing for pro-lifers to have sympathy for women who procure abortions and understand that many do so under various pressures. But to declare women who procure abortions victims of the abortion industry who don’t understand the gravity of what they are doing or are under too much pressure to be held responsible for it is a position that continues to bewilder me. The religion I was raised in (Catholicism) excommunicates women who procure abortions, yet a great many Catholic pro-lifers insist that women are victims, not perpetrators. Certainly many women who procure abortions do so to get out of a difficult situation, and certainly this renders them less culpable than if they had an abortion because a pregnancy would, say, conflict with future vacation plans. But many people who commit crimes (including murder) are under intense pressure and do things they would not ordinarily do.

I have known only one woman who had an abortion, decades ago, but she did it because she and her husband didn’t feel emotionally mature enough or financially well enough off to have a baby. She knew what she was doing, and she did it of her own free will, although she did it with some misgivings. True, it’s only one case, but I don’t think it was extremely different from tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of others. I would have to say that if I believed abortion was murder, her actions would have constituted willful cooperation with the murder of her own child for reasons far from serious enough to take a human life. Her family was well off and could have provided assistance. She was in perfectly good health and could have carried the baby to term and given it up for adoption. The circumstances were simply not serious enough to relieve her of responsibility for the choice she made. Of course, she did not believe abortion was murder, and so I am not accusing her of being culpable of murdering her own child. But if laws against abortion are passed that severely penalize abortion doctors, they will not be absolved of legal responsibility no matter how seriously they (like Peter Singer) believe abortion is not the killing of a human person.

In short, the position I find bewildering is that abortion is murder, but women who procure abortions, for various reasons, are not responsible for their own actions and are therefore innocent of any punishable offense.

The problem with your (and Rothbard’s argument) is that as soon as you concede that the body is property and subject to ownership, you cannot prevent the transfer of ownership of that body without appeal to some other non-property principle. To go back to my original illustration, you cannot argue against the bank possessing my body for a failure to pay my mortgage without arguing that my body is something more than property. So, I ask you again, is it morally acceptable for someone to forcibly possess the body of another person in the same way as they would any other possession of that person, assuming due process of the law?

Perhaps I am misreading your intent. I do not object to the facts nor to the accuracy with which you relate them. What I object to–and I may be misunderstanding your point–is that you continue to act surprised and bewildered that anyone could hold such views, as if those who hold them were deeply morally confused or else simply opportunistic political crusaders.

This strikes me as even more peculiar given that the position you seem to find reasonable (“abortion to be murder and a woman who procured an abortion to be complicit in murder. [Whether I would advocate for laws to punish abortion as murder is another matter. It seem to me it would be politically foolish.])” is not very different than the position that many pro-lifers hold. We do believe that abortion is murder and that the mother is complicit to some degree in the murder. It seems, then, that the only disagreement is that you believe every case involves full complicity, whereas I believe that the complicity varies according to the knowledge, comprehension, and degree of freedom of the mother (all assuming, of course, your hypothetical acceptance of the embryo as person.)

I concede that Peter Singer did not advance his position in the concise form that I used. Instead, he says that “we may kill both fetuses and non-human animals at a similar level of awareness … [R]ats are indisputably more aware of their surroundings, and more able to respond in purposeful and complex ways to things they like or dislike, than a fetus at ten or even thirty-two weeks gestation.” As I have known babies born earlier than 32 weeks gestation, I do not think it is a stretch to suggest that Peter Singer is placing babies and rats on equivalent moral footing in the context of ending their lives.

Do you really think the fetus will leave immediately if the mother asks nicely? Can the fetus guarantee not to harm the mother during the stay and exit?

I think the exchange of comments has helped me to clarify why I support Ron Paul’s position of leaving abortion to state rather than federal legislation:

1) There is debate as to what constitutes a reasonable infringement on the mother’s life and liberty in order to protect an unborn baby’s life. Hopefully, some states would prohibit abortion and some would not, allowing people to locate themselves according to their beliefs without having to emigrate.

2) The battle for country-wide abortion prohibition has been waged at the federal level and lost. State governments may be more responsive than a federal government with a dismal record of protecting life and liberty.