Laurence Vance, Ron Paul, Abortion

In response to recent criticisms of the Doctors Paul, Laurence Vance wrote this article that was published yesterday at LRC. Every pro-life conservative should read it. He says a lot of good things in it. He emphasizes that real change is social change, not political change, and that programs asserted from the top down end up like Prohibition. He mentions that there are all sorts of non-political routes that the pro-life movement could take besides the political route, which has progressed unremarkably at best. And, he suggests between the lines that a program for the rights of the preborn is pretty much meaningless outside of a program for total freedom.

I do have some criticisms of the article, though, and it just wouldn't be right for me to suggest his article without also offering my criticisms of it.

For one thing, Vance keeps talking about the Constitution. The Constitution has no inherent authority. It is just another piece of positive "law", and at best is just a useful legal tool to keep a positive law system relatively "libertarian".

Also, Vance rebukes American Right to Life for attacking national sovereignty. But frankly, there is no such thing as national sovereignty. If the people of another country start genociding Christians or Jews, we would have a right to violently intervene. That's half of what we mean when we say "right to live". To say that individuals don't have the right to intervene to stop a genocide abroad is to say that the rights of individuals depend on the dictates of the government they live under - and that smacks of anti-individual and pro-government sentiment. Our opposition to U.S. intervention abroad should be based not on some myth called "national sovereignty", but on the principle of individual sovereignty - that is, on the moral opposition to killing noncombatants and to forcing taxpayers to fund something they don't want to fund. If the proposal was for the U.S. military to intervene, sure I would oppose that. But if private individuals and groups wanted to intervene, and were subject to a procedure by which they are held accountable for any nondiscriminate or disproportionate violence, I'd have to say let them.