It’s understandable why many liberals like Ron Paul. After all, there are a few issues where he actually makes some sense (at least initially), like when he lays into the drug war, or when he questions U.S. military entanglements overseas.
But one issue animates Ron Paul above all else. No, it’s not destroying the Fed, or returning to a1900-style hurricane response, or denying that he actually okayed those racist letters that went out in his name. No, there’s one issue that Paul says is simply the most important issue of any facing America.
It must be some grave threat to liberty! Let’s see what it is:
Stuck in Washington as Congress faces votes on continued funding of American military action in Libya, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, making his third bid for the White House, spoke via Skype to pro-life activists convening in Jacksonville.
“I talk a lot about right-to-life,” said Paul, who called it “the most important issue of our age.”
Yes, that’s right: ending abortion rights is the most important issue of our age. More important than unemployment, the stagnating economy, the wars overseas, or anything else. The most important thing, Ron Paul believes, is stripping women of their basic right to control their own bodies.
How libertarian of him.
No, really: how libertarian of him. Sure, any serious attempt abortion would require draconian government action that would seriously endanger liberty for women, and even then, it would probably fail. It would require a massive outlay of cash and capital, of police and state resources. It would require spot inspections of health care facilities, and investigation of miscarriages. It would be about as anti-freedom an act as one could reasonably expect. Clearly, if Ron Paul really believed in liberty for all, he’d oppose it.
But Ron Paul, like most American libertarians, doesn’t believe in liberty for all. He believes in liberty for some — the rich, white, male elites who have generally ruled this nation. If some of those rights also accidentally fall to the poor or the non-white or the non-male, Paul’s fine with that. But it’s not what animates him, and indeed, I doubt he’s spent more than a minute or two considering the loss of freedom a ban on abortion would entail.
Libertarianism in America is essentially about protecting the best off among us, which is why libertarians are so overwhelmingly white, and so overwhelmingly male, and so overwhelmingly middle-class or above in upbringing. And it’s why libertarians are so completely blind to the realities of being non-white, non-male, and non-well off. Banning abortion would be severely injurious to liberty. But I doubt Ron Paul realizes it. To him, “liberty” is something for people like him to enjoy. Rich people. White people. Male people.
Your post is so far off base that it would take a week to try and correct it. Sad that you are so ill informed.
FEMA. Is not very well liked in the south. They botched Katrina. Confiscated legal guns. Beat an elderly women pretty badly and much much more. Ron Paul believes in protecting the people not sending military to treat them like criminals in their own homes in an emergency situation.
Ron Paul believes in protecting all life. Yours, a baby and the soldiers.
The rest of your writing is nothing but smear campaign which should be obvious to anyone reading it. What a shame people stoop to dirty politics but I guess that is the only way some of you win.
Damn, I forgot to warn everyone: I mentioned Voldemort’s name. Now the Snatchers are going to descend on the site.
One note: Even given the rampant incompetence of FEMA during Katrina, it functioned better than the non-existent support during the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, which killed over 6,000 people and pretty much destroyed the city. FEMA and the rest of the government failed miserably during Katrina. They still saved many more people than the “none” that government saved in Galveston.
Protecting life is not the same as making sure that said life is born only to sit on the unemployment line (for the tiny percentage of the average human lifespan which unemployment will help someone who is unemployed) and eventually sit homeless on a street starving to death. Unless they’re lucky enough to become sick or injured enough to die young without medical care… possibly during a hurricane for which there is next to no response good bad or otherwise.
But hey, as long as some rich white dudes get to make even more money by shorting their workers on every possible health or safety measure they can while ensuring that ever more unregulated contaminants spew out of factories making contaminant laced consumer goods and foods. I mean, what’s not to love about that scenario, and one cannot deny how totally focused on a right to life (however short, brutal, diseased, and lacking in any semblance of dignity it may be) this ‘libertarian’ anarchy would be!
“Ron Paul believes in protecting the people”
No…… Ron Paul believes in protecting nobody. He believes in you protecting you and the government staying the fcuk out of it.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all enjoy the kind of deranged credit that Ron Paul enjoys from his supporters. Where we make a crazy proposal, get credit for it even though it never eventuates and also somehow get credit for fighting the downside…. of your own proposal.
Hey I’m for ending the fire dept. I’m for fighting fires…. specifically you fighting your fire…. with your handgun.
No it wouldn’t. There are plenty of places where abortion is banned – like Ireland and Poland – and they don’t spend huge amounts of money on it. All publicly and pretty much all privately run health care facilities will comply with the law, simply because it’s the law, with pretty much minimal enforcement. It’d probably be a net saving to the state given some abortions are paid for with public funds.
This article is a lie. Plain and simple. Readers, research Dr. Ron Paul’s position for yourself and judge for yourself. This writer is lying to you.
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Dev, make an argument. Provide a link. Jeff backed up his claims — you haven’t. That makes Jeff’s argument seem more credible, to me.
If Ron Paul has actually said that he doesn’t think the government should be making the abortion decision for women, I’d be interested to know that. Please provide a link and a quote.
james,
There are plenty of places where abortion is banned – like Ireland and Poland – and they don’t spend huge amounts of money on it. All publicly and pretty much all privately run health care facilities will comply with the law, simply because it’s the law, with pretty much minimal enforcement. It’d probably be a net saving to the state given some abortions are paid for with public funds.
I suspect most people will remember how things worked when abortion was banned in the US before Roe v Wade. Back then there were “underground railroads” of clinics and doctors who would secretly do abortions — sometimes just for those who could afford it, sometimes gratis. And of course, there were quite a few charlatans with no medical training who did abortions, too; all you need’s a coat hanger. Given the fervor with which the anti-abortion forces pursue the matter these days, I imagine they would want to prevent all those clandestine abortions too — which would, as Jeff speculates, require quite a lot of state oversight. If there’s no active effort to enforce the law, it becomes meaningless.
So the cost of trials for all the women and abortionists arrested for violating the law, and the cost of imprisoning them, would be pretty high. I suspect any savings gained from stopping state funding of abortions — what little there is — would be far, far outweighed by the criminal justice costs alone. Then there’s the necessary state funding of emergency services for women who get botched back-alley abortions, botched self-abortions, pregnancies that go horribly awry because there’s something wrong and they should have been aborted to save the mother’s life. Some of those women will be able to pay their medical bills; probably most won’t, which means the public foots that bill. There’s also the cost — though much of this might be borne by life insurance companies — of maternal death; in Romania under Ceaucescu the rate of women dying in childbirth was 20 times higher than it is without the abortion ban. And let’s not forget that the generation of children born thanks to that ban ended up with a miserable quality of life and turned to criminality in greater numbers. So there’s a cost in terms of law enforcement as well.
And if the anti-abortionists also succeed in banning contraception, as so many of them seem to want to, we’ll need to plan for the state to pay a few more costs that will dwarf any savings gained by banning abortion. Like the cost of feeding kids whose parents can’t support them, via welfare and foster care and state-run orphanages. The healthy white babies might be adopted, but everyone else — the kids of color and the older kids and the kids with birth defects and so forth — will languish in state care for years. That ain’t cheap. And the cost of educating those kids needs to be calculated — Unless the libertarians succeed in defunding education and child services too, in which case I suppose the little bastards could just be left to starve in the street. But then there’s a necessary cost in state corpse-disposal services, too…
He’s voted to strip the courts of their rights to weigh cases having to do with ‘privacy’ issues, which in English means ‘abortion and gay rights’. Civil liberties, my pale ass.
nojojojo:
My comment is not per se related to the OP, but I think it’s worth pointing out that there are an awful lot of people who don’t remember what it was like before Roe v Wade. I am nearly 50, and I was too young to know anything of what was going at that time. People ten, twenty and even thirty years younger than I am will only know if they have been taught about it or searched the information out for some other reason.
Which version of pro-life is he? Being pro-life doesn’t always mean that you want to ban first trimester abortions. Do you have links which show that he means something like that?
@Sebastian H —
Sorry. Ron Paul is the current chief sponsor of the Sanctity of Life Act, which would define legal personhood as beginning at conception. As noted above, it would also make it illegal to challenge the law in the courts.
Paul is an extreme anti-choicer. The evidence is overwhelming. Combined with his well-documented racism (which has led him to oppose the usual libertarian stand of free, unfettered immigration), and frankly bonkers economic views, Paul should be anathema to anyone who calls themself a liberal.
You don’t have to say you’re sorry. I was curious and didn’t know.
If he was saying “FEMA is so dysfunctional it needs to be disestablished and an entirely new emergency management system put in place” I would be entirely sympathetic. FEMA itself could go without abandoning the federal government’s duty to provide relief for major disasters.
If he was even saying “the federal government has no responsibility handling major disasters, the states can take care of that…” I’d be sceptical, but I wouldn’t entirely dismiss the argument out of hand, and even if it was wrong it’d still ultimately be an argument about how best to deliver disaster relief, not a belief that disaster relief should be left in the hands of private charities.
But this, yeah… no.
Again, it wouldn’t happen. There are loads of places where abortion is illegal (again Poland and Ireland are specific examples), or de facto illegal because of access problems (in many parts of the US currently), and there aren’t always loads of back street abortions and mass jailings. It’s interesting that there isn’t, I suppose social mores have changed since the 60s so that single motherhood doesn’t destroy people’s lives the way it used to – so women aren’t always placed in as desperate position.
nojojojo wrote:
and james replied
Wait…read the last part of nojojo’s comment again. Healthcare costs for women who needed abortions but couldn’t get them. What social mores are going to magically make those go away?
Also, there may well be less demand for abortion in areas where the population is more predominantly Catholic (such as Poland and Ireland) because more women who accidentally become pregnant may choose not to abort. That doesn’t prove that there would be similarly less demand in the US.
While you’re right that single motherhood isn’t as awful as it used to be (at least socially), that also ignores the fact that a lot of women getting abortions are neither single nor without children. And having your fourth or fifth kid because you’re legally obligated to isn’t any cheaper or easier than it used to be. It may be less dangerous because of medical advances, but it’s still hard on your body physically as well.
@james —
Abortion in Poland is a $95 million a year industry. Abortion rates within the Republic of Ireland are lower, primarily because wealthier Irish women can afford to travel to the UK for treatment. (Women who can’t afford it turn to riskier options.) Clearly, making abortion illegal in these nations hasn’t stopped abortion; it’s just driven it underground, and made it less accessible and more dangerous.
I’ll grant you this: it’s true that an outright ban on abortion wouldn’t stop abortion, any more than an outright ban on marijuana use has stopped that. But what an outright ban on abortion does is make it more difficult for the poor and unconnected to have an abortion, while the rich and well-connected have no trouble.
This is by design. Just as the lawyer’s kid who’s caught dealing pot isn’t going to jail, the trader’s kid who finds herself in a jam isn’t going to have any trouble getting it taken care of. But the poor kid caught with a dime bag goes up the river, and the poor girl whose mom and dad can’t ask for a favor or send her on a plane to New York is going to either be forced to have a child against her will, or she’s going to have to go to someone unsavory.
I’d agree with all that. What I’m arguing against is the claims that if abortion was made illegal in the US they’d have to be a (1) massive police state and (2) huge numbers of backstreet abortions and associated deaths.
It wouldn’t happen. There are specific examples of nations where abortion is illegal where this hasn’t happened. I’m not saying Poland and Ireland have sensible policies – I’m just saying I can’t see how you can reconcille the current state of these countries with the nightmare scenarios that are being predicted for the US.
@james —
Basically, two things would happen if abortion in the U.S. was outlawed. First would be a return to pre-Roe days — back-alley abortions, extreme maternal mortality, etc. The government would then have a choice whether to look the other way, or to launch a “War on Abortion.” The former is what happened most often pre-Roe. But if abortion foes really want it outlawed, the latter is what would have to happen. Essentially, the only way to outlaw abortion and make it stick is to commit to an overwhelming police and state effort to make it happen. Otherwise, all we’re doing is making life harder on poor women. Which is the idea.
So why hasn’t any of that happened in Poland or Ireland? I’m not supporting their policy or saying it’s pleasant for women there, but as far as I can see there isn’t extreme maternal mortality or a massive anti-abortion focused police state.
James:
Jeff offers a link that indicates that back alley abortions do indeed happen in places like Ireland. Click on his embedded link (“turn to riskier options”) for the story. The fact that they manifest in the form of pills ordered off the internet does not make them less “back alley” or less dangerous.
Further, as the article indicates, efforts are made in Ireland to curtail both the importing of such pills and the selling of them, as well as monitoring their use for further investigation. That certainly sounds like quite a bit of resources being dedicated to finding and prosecuting those engaged in such abortions. Is it a matter of “mass jailings”? Well, that’s your hyperbole, not Jeff’s original assertion. I think, though, that the link demonstrates that Jeff’s predictions are well founded.
james,
Where are you seeing that these things haven’t happened in Poland or Ireland? Because Jeff’s links, and everything I see when I google things like “maternal mortality Poland”, shows otherwise. An example, from an admittedly biased page:
Citation of sources at the bottom of the article.
So basically Poland and Ireland have chosen to look the other way, as Jeff states in #19. They haven’t really ended abortion. They’ve just disguised it with clever marketing and tourism. They’ve found a way to make a profit off it, at women’s expense.
Also, women in those countries are still facing life-threatening scenarios, and still sometimes dying as a result. Remember, low maternal mortality does not mean no maternal mortality. So, how many dead women do you consider acceptable?
Dunno. Ordering pills off the internet certainly isn’t safe, but it’s probably more safe than the 1960s alternative. That’s after all why doctors use them – they’re an improvement on other options, that’s a good example of how illegal abortion has changed from pre-roe vs wade, and why criminalisation now wouldn’t be a straight return to those days.
Maybe I was engaging in hyperbole, Jeff’s original comment was:
Sure, any serious attempt abortion would require draconian government action that would seriously endanger liberty for women, and even then, it would probably fail. It would require a massive outlay of cash and capital, of police and state resources. It would require spot inspections of health care facilities, and investigation of miscarriages. It would be about as anti-freedom an act as one could reasonably expect.
But I still don’t see any of that in Poland or Ireland. You can see the general point I’m trying to make: there wouldn’t neccesarily be a straight return to the 60s and countries where abortion is illegal don’t always have massive amounts of law enforcement activity devoted to it.
You don’t have to look abroad. There have been over forty prosecutions for miscarriages Alabama already (this article references some in Mississippi as well).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges
Laws criminalizing miscarriages have been passed in Utah (if a pregnant woman acts “recklessly”, with “recklessly” left undefined):
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/utah-women-may-face-murder-charges-after-miscarriages-1913019.html
and proposed in Georgia (if there is any “human involvment”, with “human involvment” left undefined):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/23/antiabortion-georgia-lawm_n_827340.html
American anti-choice activists want to criminalize both birth control and any miscarriage that can be attributed to bad behaviour on the pregnant woman’s part. The atmosphere is much more poisonous in America than it is in either Ireland or Poland.
James, what do you mean pills off the internet are an improvement over other options? The pills offered are black market, subject to no regulation or oversight. That means increased chance of impurity, use of dangerous and untested drugs, with side effects that range from addiction to internal bleeding to death. Then there’s the possibility that the supplier is scamming the buyer, meaning not only pills that don’t work (meaning no chemical miscarry) but even increased chances of birth defects in the fetus (meaning even moire hardship for the family).
It may not be as bloody or graphic as a wire hanger, but it certainly isn’t an improvement when you consider the actual risks.
Is Ron Paul worse than, say, Rick Perry?
Ron Paul is the current chief sponsor of the Sanctity of Life Act, which would define legal personhood as beginning at conception. As noted above, it would also make it illegal to challenge the law in the courts.
How can that possibly be even remotely constitutional?
Is Ron Paul worse than, say, Rick Perry?
Seems like a tough call. I’ll tentatively say no, but only because I think I recall Paul changing his view or taking a public stance on some economic issue that went against his “libertarianism”. In other words, I suspect he has some ability to change his beliefs based on evidence. But even if this fits reality, you’ll notice it depends on the denial of Paul’s supposed principled stance.
And I have to withdraw even that tentative compliment unless I’ve missed something about Kirchick’s piece. He quotes two of Paul’s newsletters saying:
So either Ron Paul wrote this himself, or he allowed someone in his organization to defame him with no visible consequences. Even the latter interpretation suggests he’d put dangerous lunatics in positions of power as President. All together he seems about as bad as Perry, perhaps worse.
Well, of course it can’t, what nonsense. You don’t have to take a stance on abortion either way to figure that out. May I refer inquirers to Marbury v. Madison? Yawn. Every first year law student knows what garbage this is.
Political posturing, that’s what I say.
“But Ron Paul, like most American libertarians, doesn’t believe in liberty for all.”
Either put up a source or shut up. Every libertarian site I’ve ever been to is either split on this issue or pro-choice.
I can’t believe I’m even legitimizing this nonsense by writing on here. Ron Paul believes in the constitution. In Ron Pauls eyes the baby’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which is ensured to every individual under US law, is an imperative part of our society. The abortion debate is one of those nebulous arguments because both sides could be looked at as constitutional. If you’re for them you’re protecting the woman’s right to choose and if your’e against them, like Ron Paul, it’s because you believe in the babies right to life. It all depends on if you see an unborn baby as a person. Yes, some radical christians have ulterior motives when it comes to this topic and they’re not afraid to tell people those motives. But, when discussing Ron Paul you have to look no further than he feels the baby has the right to his or her life. When reading the above “article” I felt like a 6th grader wrote it. Libertarianism is fairly simple. You do whatever you want minus hurting or stealing. That includes all genders, sexes, races. I cannot believe somebody is going to argue that is not for liberty. So, I’ll just come out and say it. The person who wrote this is an uneducated idiot. It’s unfortunate there is people like him or her in the world.
Tom, you poor naive fool! You’ve fallen into our trap! Now you’ve written a comment here, and as result the criticisms of Ron Paul have been COMPLETELY LEGITIMIZED!
If not for you, none of the criticisms would have been legitimate. I can’t believe you fell for it!
Lol Amp!
All I can say is thank god I live in Canada! I think half the problem America has is that abortion was put in the law books down there. There is no (federall mandated) abortion law in Canada. However, individual provinces regulate the clinics themselves for safety and efficacy. That’s not to say however, that a woman can get an abortion whenever in the pregnancy she pleases. Past the first trimester, its generally required that doctors are able to show its medically necessary to save a womans life or that the fetus is unviable or suffering defects that would seriously impair its quality of life.
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He wants to make it to where federally nothing can be done either way about abortion. He wants to leave it up to the states. How libertarian. :)
What’s not libertarian about that, Clyde?
Libertarianism is not a one-word philosophical description, where anything with more liberty in it is automatically libertarian, and vice-versa. Rather, it’s an extensive embroidery on the classical liberalism extolled by Locke back in the olden days, with many further refinements.
In the case of federal power, libertarianism strongly holds that decisions should be devolved downwards in the governmental hierarchy to the greatest extent practical. National defense, for example, has been shown by experience to be very poorly handled when parceled out among the states, so the libertarian position is to have a national military, not a bunch of state militias, even though state militias resonate with the emotional sensibilities of many libertarians.
Most elements of criminal law or social/family law, however, work perfectly well if pushed down to the state or even local level. If Utah wants to have a hugely restrictive abortion law and Massachusetts wants to have an enormously permissive law, that is totally 100% ok with libertarians. Indeed, it’s far more libertarian-compatible than a national one-size-fits-all law would be.
If Utah wants to have a hugely restrictive abortion law and Massachusetts wants to have an enormously permissive law, that is totally 100% ok with libertarians.
Really? Libertarians seem to be against coercive state power, not against coercive Federal power but OK with coercive State power. Or have I misunderstood all these years and the libertarian campaign against police brutality was only directed at brutality by federal law enforcement?
If Utah wants to have a hugely restrictive abortion law and Massachusetts wants to have an enormously permissive law, that is totally 100% ok with libertarians.
That’s mighty white of them.
sorry to come so late to the discussion. but I happened to catch Rand Paul, the son, on TV this morning. He didn’t want to talk about his dad’s position on the Civil Rights Act, but eventually admitted senior rejects it on the basis that it infringes on property rights. Property rights. Right. The disturbing thing is Ron Paul does not allow for the same property rights “supremacy” when it comes to a woman’s property right to her own body. Either property rights count or they don’t. He can’t — shouldn’t — have it both ways.