absurd. Subjugating women-living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, suffering human beings-to the needs of a tablespoon of insentient, unaware tissue is perverse. Equating a person with a hollow ball of cells trivializes everything we value about humanity. The time to worry about equal rights and human dignity is when a society singles out one group of people and strips them of rights that other people in that society take for granted. It's when a society decides that one group is going to bear burdens and provide services that are expected from no one else. It's the societies which ban abortion, now and in the past, where human rights are not respected, and lives are in danger, for people besides pregnant women. 4. Compulsory pregnancy laws are incompatible with a free society.. It is impossible to regulate the private consensual behavior of people, as the examples of Prohibition and the failed War on (Some) Drugs show. Outlawing abortion is discriminatory. Anti-abortion laws discriminate against low-income women, who are driven to dangerous self-induced or back-alley abortions. That is all they can afford. But the rich can travel wherever necessary to obtain a safe abortion. Like drinking, drug use, prostitution, and unorthodox sexual behavior, abortion is a "victimless" (no complainant) crime. In 1965, sociologist and lawyer Edwin Schur looked at existing ...
