Abortion is a serious ethical issue. I have been pro-life most of my life. I am anti-state, so I don’t favor jailing women and doctors as a solution, but I am not generally pro-abortion in any meaningful sense.

I oppose Roe v. Wade. But when the rightwing thinks of opposing Roe v. Wade, they usually think of replacing it with an equally unConstitutional, and even more tyrannical, federal regime. They want a federal war on abortion. They want lots of people to be sent to jail.

Let’s back up a second. Though personally I do ultimately take Rothbard’s position on what the law should be, I believe it’s one thing to say that abortion, arguably being a crime, shouldn’t be completely legal everywhere in all circumstances. But it’s another thing to take the fascist right position, to see the issue as another excuse for yet another illegal, unrestrained, national socialist crusade. Not all rightwingers simply oppose abortion because killing is simply wrong. No, they support the death penalty and endless, massively murderous war — it is not killing they oppose. They support laws against abortion for similar reasons that they support laws against drugs, prostitution, pornography, dissent and all other crimes against their moral code. For at least some of them, it is not that abortion is a crime against the fetus. No, it’s a crime against society, the state, and national life. (The fact that very few of them would even want to punish women who have had abortions as severely as, say, crack cocaine dealers, shows that their views on how rigorously the state should attack crime are not so proportional to the actual extent to which such illegal acts supposedly violate people’s rights.) Thank goodness there are still prolifers like Ron Paul, who recognize the limitations of power and the problems with the coercive state, even when there’s a ture social problem. He is anti-Roe v. Wade, and anti-abortion, but he is no typical rightwinger on this issue. He’s actually pro-life, and pro-liberty, and pro-Constitution, thus does his position on it confuse the statist conservatives. He doesn’t want to see millions of women jailed. He doesn’t want a national police state.

Ron Paul thinks the first step the president should take in his official capacity on abortion is to admit he has no say on it, no jurisdiction — it should not be up to the emperor of the “free world” to eradicate sins even as egregious as Ron views abortion. And yet he does speak out against it — which is an appropriate and completely non-invasive way for politicians to try to influence popular opinion and, thus, change society. And he’s indeed the only candidate proposing a way to actually circumvent Roe v. Wade — through simple Constitutional congressional action — rather than holding it out as carrot to keep the religious right supporting his campaign. If conservatives were really pro-life, and pro-Constitution, his would be the only candidacy they could back. Of course, they aren’t.

As for the Civil War reference, despite the Constitutional issues involved (and the moral implications of the way in which slavery was actually eradicated in the wake of the devastating war of 1861-65) of course all champions of liberty, including Ron Paul, hail the abolitionist principle, the abolition of slavery, and abhor slavery everywhere. But the fact is, the federal government propped slavery up. Centralism and statism were both on the side of slavery, for its entire history.

There would be much less killing, and much less slavery, without the leviathan state. When will all pro-lifers and partisans of freedom see this?