An unborn child is property. And not all libertarians are pro-life - me, Einzige and Mech for example.
SPC & myself are also pro-choice libertarians.
Once more, with feeling: the property rights of the mother far outweigh any imagined property rights of a semi-sentient fetus.
Well once you degrade the status of the fetus, then the debate gets back into more familiar territory.
"Degrade"? You ought instead accuse those who are pro-life of inflating the status of the fetus.
I am not accusing anyone of anything. First you form an opinion of how human fetus is, and when, and then you decide given the former assumption, what rights a fetus has vis a vis the mother, if any. The discussion here was about the provocative idea that even assuming a fetus is every bit as human as the mother, the mother has the right still to abort it because otherwise she is being made a slave by having to carry the fetus against her will, or something. And then it went from there.
I hardly see how the idea is "provocative". If we assume - as is only natural in a libertarian paradigm - that the mother is sole owner of her body, then even if we grant that a fetus is "fully human" (the vagaries of such a position aside), she is entirely within her rights in aborting it, insofar as the fetus provides nothing for its free ride inside of her body. It's no different from my right to rid myself of any hemorrhoids I might develop.
Well hemorrhoids don't have rights, so to do that is more comparable to aborting a fetus that one views to not be subject to natural rights.
