smalltime said:
Here is a question. If you use the same logic that all women have the right to control their own bodies, then doesn't it follow that people should be ablt to use any kind of drug or substance, do illegally dangerous things and the like?
yes, it does follow.
Legal drugs are as profitable as illegal drugs, and vice-versa.
I think the government can help people, but it cannot control people until they are doing "dangerous things" to others. In other words, what is a crime? That principal needs to be established first.
For many years slavery was legal, now slavery is a crime. The issue needs to be more than what is legal/illegal, but rather what is right. "Right" has two levels, personal and public. Slavery was not "right" even when it was legal. The same is true of abortion. However, abortion, at least in some stages of growth, is not infanticide. To say that an acorn is a tree is incorrect. An acorn has the potential to be a tree, and "potential" is the slippery slope, because potential can be applied to anything. It is an invented future, just as fear is an invented future: it is a prediction of events. The slippery slope being that people are being penalized for what "might" occur, rather than for what did occur in the present. (kinda like giving tickets for speeding or not stopping "completely" at a red light.)
At the point where the State has control of the woman's body, where does the line stop? Is she allowed to drive after three months? Is she guilty of child abuse if she drinks a beer? Is she torturing her child if she eats spicy foods? Most, but not all, cows care for their calves. Are humans so different? Whatever drives a woman to abortion is usually fear disguised as something else (love, commonsense, peer pressure, etc.) A law cannot address people's emotional state, it can only control what is criminal. The more the law tries to enforce a perfect state, the more emotional distress it causes.
The sad, and great, irony is that small-government believers in virtue are willing to recreate Prohibition all over again, which can only create big government and the end of virtue, since it teaches that everyone is someone elses master.