I suspect that it’s the Alito confirmation hearings that have dredged up a pair of excellent posts on the subject of abortion. First, Megan McArdle at Asymmetrical Information has a good, succinct characterization of an intelligible position on the subject:
I want abortion to be legal, but I am in favour of stigmatising it. I am also in favour of more and better birth control, which I devoutly hope the pharmaceutical companies will provide as fast as they can. I would love to see the Pill be otc. I think that abortion is not a question of people who want to kill their babies versus people who don’t understand that I have a right to control my body; I think it is a complicated question of conflicting rights, and that as the cost of pregnancy, in terms of heatlh, money, and social stigma has gone down, we are rightly worrying less about the rights of the woman to control what happens in her body, and more about the also-compelling right of the fetus to get born.
amba of AmbivaBlog has another installment in her ongoing “AmbivAbortion Rant”. For amba, this subject is more than abstract philosophizing.
