Derek and I share a common revulsion for abortion. My personal feeling is that anyone who would murder their own spawn has already received the ultimate sanction. The fact that they don't know it or that society doesn't sanction it has nothing to do with anything.
Mike
Dear Mike and Derek,
As always your are very welcome to express your personal beliefs whether religious based or otherwise. Yet I am certain you will be able to agree that the politicalization of what many consider to be a deeply held religious belief issue has caused more grief than you can shake a stick at.
Despite this it still is a matter for ones personal beliefs to decide for themselves based on their personal beliefs based on who they are and what they are.
And the STATE shouldn't be making a decision for a person and telling them what their personal beliefs should be in any personal matter and how to make their decisions based on what the STATE says you should do or not do. This should be something left up to the person who will have to accept the personal responsibility for their personal decisions.
I believe this is the Libertarian Way. You have your personal decisons to make based on your personal beliefs and the way in which you want to conduct your personal life and teach your children accordingly based on your underlying religious faith.
Others feel differently based on their religion or lack of religion and their lifes experiences and what their core beliefs are about and what those core beliefs mean to them in their daily lives and the decisons they make for themselves and their families for today and tommorow.......
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian
I agree the essential issue here is religious. A sense of life as of intrinsic value, as opposed to an instrumental value in the service of personal happiness, is a partisan religious intuition based upon a certain conception of a soul. Christians beleive life is a gift from God and is precious in some other sense besides the happiness life brings to an individual or indirectly by friendship to another person. It is an intution which I do not share as a Pagan and I did not share as a Randian atheist. I believe death is natural and our society’s abhorrence to it is an irrational denial of a fundamental force in nature. Death happens to every person and is no great loss; that human beings do not have happiness while they are alive is. To my mind forcing someone to go through a life as an unwanted child is a barbaric cruelty compared to the mercy of death in utero. We all die and should accept it; in my own life I fear death far less than facing a long life not truly lived.
This issue is one that has other applicationsL for instance, I consider our society’s aversion to the death penalty as some peculiar evil monstrously irrational- to me death is kind compared to 40 years in the Hell of a state prison. Similarly, I strongly believe euthanasia and suicide are perfectly moral things as no one should be forced to endure suffering. And given I beliueve in the right to self defense I would certainly advise anyone to kill in defense of their life, liberty, property, or self-posession of their own body.
Like Rand I believe life is to be lived for its joy and passion, and this joy and passion certainly does not involve regarding oneself as men’s or nature’s helpless breeding sow. A woman has no self-interest in respecting the right of someone whose existence threatens her body, her integrity, and the full course of her life. To force someone to bear an unwanted child is a repulsive rape of an individual by society. As someone whose particular calling in life involves the defense of female independence I would fight to the death to prevent it. I care nothing for potential human beings and everything for the possibility of (heterosexual, fertile) women to live without their sexuality forcing them into marriage or a state of constant fear.
The principle of respect for the rights of actual human beings can be deduced by the immense benefits of freindship, love, culture, and commerce which living in fellowship with other people provides. No such derivation of the rights of fetuses can be made if self-interest is one’s logical base. To assert that a woman should bear a child against her will is to demand that she treat herself as a means to others’ intrinsic value or view morally as an external moral law. These are both religious concepts that have no place in a secular polity. The derivation of rights from enlightened self interest is by contrast available to all by public reason and is not religious partial.
And if religious concepts of the value of life or the soul are allowed to influence public policy, then I demand an equal right to implement the concepts of my own Pagan religion. I worship the erotic in life, and the Erotic- like her mother Nature Herself, is both beautiful and deadly, violent and caring. To worship passion means facing the chaos and darkness of the human condition an emracing them- as the Hindu worships sexuality in the male or female aspects of Shiva the Destroyer. Just as human beings are ominivores and partially live by the shedding of blood, just as the reality of life in a world of enemies may mean girding oneself for war, so sex and passion are unsafe things involving more than a little bit of the blade. As Camille Paglia once put it (using questionable Pagan thealogy, but I digress), abortion is a sword of war places into the hands of women for self-defense. In my religion, abortion in nearly the equivalent of a guarded sacrament, and in fact priestesses and courtesans did preserve knowledge of herbal abortifacients long before the surgical abortion or RU-486 was invented. If you want religious ideas as the basis for public policy, then play dice: I want my temple right next to Christ’s cathedral. And one wing of that temple would be an abortion-performing sexual health clinic.
Otherwise, you have a religious war on your hands. You will have to kill me before I am willing to accept an anti-abortion law as having any authority- one of the first things I would do if I moved to a country which banned abortion would be to support a pro-choice underground (such things did of course exist in the pre-Roe era). And I should note almost all feminists I know, religious or secular, feel the same way. Be very sure of your stance on abortion because the practical result of your policies would be social civil war.
love and strife,
Lady Aster 
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email ms_shiris@… 
Dear Lady Aster;
Very nicley said.
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian