A Couple of Inconsistencies

In the public controversy and debate over abortion, many on both sides have had difficulty with consistency. For example, many religious  opponents of abortion believe that aborting a fetus at any stage is an  act of  forestalling  a soul's  chance to develop as God intended all souls to do. However since millions of spontaneous abortions of fetuses occur each year though natural miscarriages, this belief cannot be reconciled with their other belief in  intelligent design by a benevolent deity, one who could have designed things so as to preclude miscarriages but did not.  

On the other side, leftists proponents of abortion face a fundamental difficulty in the fact that they favor a nearly libertarian freedom of choice in regard to abortion and a regime of paternalistic control and regimentation in almost everything else, making  the impossible claim that  this one area of human action is special and deserving of liberty while most others are not. A recent example illustrates this inconsistency well. Conservatives in some states have passed bills requiring those performing abortions to have admission privileges at  a nearby hospital, claiming to do so in the interest of safety. Libertarians who believe people should be free to select any sort of  treatment they want from anyone willing  to provide it  have no difficulty opposing these laws, but leftists who support almost every other sort of so-called safety rule and regulation - no matter how authoritarian, intrusive, foolish, or inconvenient – cannot do so consistently. It is just hard to argue that a woman should be completely free to decide  from whom to have an abortion but not to decide how large a Coca Cola she wants to drink.

These are only a couple of obvious examples. There are others as well. Of course few in either group seem to notice or worry about such inconsistencies or to attempt to develop more cogent arguments, but they are interesting  to an outside observer and perhaps a challenge to do a better job of thinking things through regardless of what opinions one holds on the question.