Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Our society assigns relative values to life, liberty & property, and it uses democracy & The Courts to do it, but there are folks who think their value system supersedes the liberty of others. Specifically I'm referring to the unquenchable hysteria surrounding abortion. Since 2% of women of child-bearing age have abortions every year, it's certainly of immense importance, but the wisdom of letting the people bearing the burden of pregnancy make the decision is lost on the zealots. Our judicial system has said that life begins with breath: this is a somewhat subjective call but it's the best we can do in a liberty society.

Unfortunately, indoctrination is almost impossible to break, especially religious dogma. Logic & rationality are easily defeated by faith, and no amount of argument or evidence can change a closed mind. If you can get people to die for an invisible man in the sky, then when there's actual evidence of life, like a fetus, the rhetoric gets very heated indeed. Emancipation used similar arguments & reasoning, and when viewed in that context, the anti-abortion folks have a point, which is what makes the conflict so vicious, because the sides are equally matched.

The line between where one person's liberty ends, and another's begins can be very fine, and simply looking at it from a different angle may make it shift a little, just enough to push it onto the other side. Abortion may be the closest example of an issue like that: add a wee bit of religion, and it seems wrong, but take away the sanctimony, and clearly it's no harder choice to make than letting a million poor children die in Africa when all you had to do was send them malaria medicine. The answer is always the same in a liberty society, when in doubt, give the choice to the responsible individual.