Great quote, especially for Libertarians

HT: Hispanic Pundit

You cannot morally treat children, or fetuses, as if they have the same rights and obligations as human adults; they have fewer freedoms, but more entitlements. Children are not only uniquely vulnerable, but also uniquely innocent; that fetus did not ask to be in your body, and has no means at his disposal to get out and stop bothering you. Trying to reason his fate from principles designed for consenting adults is neither practical nor morally just. Moreover, any society that did try to treat children and fetuses as adults, in the way that my commenters are advocating, would not be long for this earth. Evolution does not take cognizance of how beautifully consistently you have reasoned from first principles when it decides what behaviours will survive.

–Jane Galt, In a post titled, “Why children are a special libertarian case.”

Here's another pithy quote:

here are a number of people arguing in my comments that abortion is fine even if the fetus is a person, because no one has a right to use another person's body for their support. Well, in the classic libertarian formulation, no one has a right to my income either. But it would take a pretty hard core libertarian indeed to say that the state should allow parents to kick their children out on the streets if they tire of them.

A pithy debate follows, but evidently is now closed because I could not post the following reply to a comment:

Rex, the fetus is right were it's supposed to be when it's in the uterus. To say that a mother had a right to have a fetus put to death because she's not willing to allow it to remain in her uterus assumes that a fetus has obligations to the mother -- that it should have obtained her consent before implanting.

We don't allow owners to burn down buildings with squatters living in them. We don't allow them to shoot the trespassers. Anybody who deliberately destroyed a building without first going to the trouble in ensure that the building was empty -- regardless of the number of "No Trespassing" signs posted -- would rightly be prosecuted for the death of anybody who was unlawfully in the building.

Why is it that we expect more of a 48-celled morula drifing down the fallopian tube than we expect of a 48-year-old vagrant drifting down the boulevard?