During an interview with the American Liberty Association uploaded to Youtube on Monday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) explained why he supports legislation that would declare that life begins at conception and thus ban all abortions.
PAUL: It’s a big issue for me and I tell people that really it’s all about when life begins. You know, I’m a physician. One of the things I would do in my job is to go into the pediatric nursery and I would examine babies that are one-pound babies, looking in their eyes to try to make sure that they didn’t suffer from blindness from being born prematurely.
And the interesting thing is when you’re in the neonatal nursery and you’ve got a one-pound baby, everybody acknowledges that that baby has right. The Bill of Rights applies to that baby and nobody can hurt that baby. It’s a one-pound baby. But a week before, even a full-term seven-pound baby has no rights according to the way people are looking at it, and I think that is a big mistake.
So I’ve introduced legislation called the Life at Conception Act to define when life begins at conception. I’ve also co-sponsored 20-some-odd pro-life bills. I have a 100 percent voting record for pro-life. [...]
I do think its important because, I often say in my speeches, I don’t think a civilization can endure if it doesn’t respect the rights of the unborn.
Rand Paul believes in small government. Small enough to fit inside your Uterus.
Amazingly, civilization in America has endured for decades post Roe v. Wade. Other countries around the world have also managed to endure without banning all abortion as Rand Paul believes we must do.
This pitch for extending the Bill of Rights to apply to Zygotes is a cynical and transparent way of hand-waving the fact that banning all abortion also means jettisoning the rights of women.
And this is why Libertarianism is fundamentally flawed and does not work. You can’t say that everyone and everything has inalienable rights without also taking away the rights of someone else.
Rand Paul has objected to the Civil Rights Act because he believes private businesses should have the right to refuse service to anyone. That inevitably means that minorities and other marginalized groups have fewer rights. And if you declare that Zygotes have rights, that inevitably means that women have fewer rights.
There’s no getting around it without picking and choosing who does and does not have specific rights. But that does not mean that you must be dispassionate or ambivalent. It means you must carefully consider what rights should be preserved over others.
It’s been said that a budget is a moral document and that inside a budget you can find what a society values. This also applies to civil liberties and civil rights. Banning abortion only says you value some rights over others. You’re picking and choosing.
The only way libertarianism works as an ideology is if you don’t pick and choose. But we know that’s not possible. You have to pick and choose or you end up marginalizing those who need the most protection.
It’s not a coincidence that women and minorities are often the losing parties when Libertarians actually enunciate their policy positions because Libertarianism is the province of selfish, privileged, and disillusioned white males. They do not value the rights of women and minorities as much as their own. They pick and choose themselves. Everyone else can just fend for themselves in the Free Market of ideas.
Rand Paul says a civilization that doesn’t respect the rights of the unborn can’t endure, but I’d say a civilization that rejects the idea of collective society can’t endure.