So I’ve seen that I’ve been e-called out.  No, I haven’t been standing naked on my front lawn.  I’ve been on a month-long Zumba bender, which has caused blankness in McFloogle’s mind.  You wouldn’t believe how good I’ve gotten at shoulder-shakes.

And if you’ve taken notice of our Twitter feed, there’s been some conversation with some readers (I haven’t been completely dead).  It’s kind of interesting and I’m going to be writing an article about one of the major flaws in arguing against liberty that my new statist Twitter friends have been using.

Over a month ago, I got a few comments on an article about abortion from someone named “A different perspective” (I’ll call him ADP for now on).  He wrote some points that I really wanted to spend time on and I promised him an article as a response within a few days.  Well, days turned into weeks.  And I now find myself about a month and a half removed from the promised article.

My absence demonstrates an important point that I wanted to make.  ADP (and essentially all other supporters of various government interventions) seems to believe that a government program designed to lower the number of abortions will do so based on its intention to.  I don’t doubt a person’s good intentions when lobbying for the state to perform some task.  I also don’t doubt that many of the bureaucrats involved are trying to reach the goal of the program.  But I also don’t doubt my own intention of getting article up in a day or so to answer ADP’s response.  Unfortunately, intentions aren’t necessarily a predictor of results.

I’m not trying to single out ADP by any means here.  This is the view that countless people take.  Just watch a presidential election—a candidate will claim he’s going to solve a problem by creating a program.  And then everyone cheers.  How is the issue going to be solved?  With a program!  And how will the program work?  It will solve the issue.

Now I’ll directly respond to some points…

If you polled women coming out of their abortion procedure, I doubt any would say that they went because it was a “good” thing to do on a Thursday afternoon. If anything, women who have abortions feel horrible about their situation, shame that they got pregnant, scared about their decisions…

If it’s not deemed to be good, why would anyone pursue it?  No one in the right mind would act in a way that they deem to be bad for themselves.  If I were attacked and ended up having to kill my assailant to protect myself, I would say that the outcome was good, or at least better than the alternative.  If a woman doesn’t believe that an abortion will leave her better than having the child, why would she have an abortion?

Don’t mix up the argument by saying legal and good are the same the thing. Declaring war is legal is it a “good” thing?

Well, considering the theft involved to acquire the funds for war, I don’t consider war to be either legal or good.  And I do think that a lot of people consider war to be good.  Otherwise, why would people be so quick to use it—and not even “legally” by our own Constitution?

Abortions are not a political issue, they are a class issue.

Abortion is a social issue.  Poorer people may have more abortion, but that doesn’t mean that it parallels favorability towards it across classes.

60% of all abortions are performed on poor people, 88% live in metropolitan cities. You cannot ignore that abortion is a “poo-man’s disease”.

It’s a “bad decision” decision.  Are these people getting pregnant because they’re poor?  Absolutely not.  Correlation does not mean causation.  I think that people who are poor and get abortions do so because they just make bad decisions—the poverty and higher rates of pregnancy are a result of that.

So when addressing lowering abortion rates, you have to frame it around how do you lower abortion rates for the poor. That is contraceptives, healthcare, maternal care, support for the baby once it’s born. And really saying that contraceptives would led to careless sex is actually the complete opposite of what contraceptives do which is safer sex.

Don’t you see, though?  You’re incentivizing more bad decisions!  You’re saying, “We don’t want you to get pregnant, but we’re going to take care of you if you do.”  You’re not making these people be accountable for their own decisions.

As for giving away contraceptives leading to carelessness, they create a false sense of security.  They don’t always work.  And access to essentially unlimited contraceptives will cause people to have more sex than they normally would, so there would be more pregnancies.  If I offered you access to unlimited Johnny Walker Blue, you’d have more than you normally would.  If contraceptives suddenly ceased to exist, people would change their sexual habits.

The “Being Liberal” sticker has merit in that if the government wants to (1) restrict contraceptives, (2) cut healthcare for the poor and (3) cut food stamp programs for families

First of all, I don’t think that anyone wants to restrict contraceptives.  I’m not trying to prevent any given person from using them, I just don’t want to pay for them.  If someone decides to get pregnant, why am I then responsible to take care of the child?

then poor women who get pregnant have no access to a maternity doctor, and no means of really paying for their child once its born and so they turn to abortion.

Instead of telling me that I need to pay for the pregnancy and the childcare, maybe you should tell these women (and the men also equally responsible) to not have so much sex, or at least be more responsible if they are unable to deal with the consequences.  It’s not the childcare that’s the root of the problem, it’s the fact that people who are completely unprepared to have a child are getting pregnant.  Don’t ask: “Why don’t you want your child?”  Ask: “Why are you getting pregnant?”

We need to stop them from turning to the decision by preventing the pregnancy in the first place or if that fails, telling them that they have other options…and yes that’s going to cost money. Even if they elect to have an adoption, poor women still need healthcare to see the baby through to a healthy delivery.

The only thing that “we” need to do is to stop incentivizing a situation where there’s no accountability for the parents.  And to be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have charity for the poor.  People are generally good and will help those who genuinely need it with voluntary actions.  But to claim that these people are entitled to a portion of my labor means that I am their slave.

If you want to take your own money to buy contraceptives for the poor and provide them healthcare services, by all means, pursue that.  I think it’s good that you want to help those people.  Would you, however, go door to door and demand that others give you money to achieve this goal?