So we’re both in agreement that the whole quest for assault weapons bans is a smoke screen to take away people’s civil liberties. Good.

Back to abortion: We already have six states and DC without any restrictions whatsoever on abortion. All of the existing permissions, besides health of the mother, are utterly arbitrary. It’s a human being at every stage of development from the moment of conception and should be respected as such. And yes, human lives have precedent over the comfort of people who invited them to enter through consensual sex. We obviously should take strong measures to protect their lives, but that doesn’t mean the baby can be killed at any moment for the sake of convenience. In cases where they didn’t consent to sex, it still doesn’t make sense to kill them. That’s giving the wrong person the death penalty.

“Independent survival” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Extremely uncharitably, it could mean anyone living in their parents’ house, disabled people, children, and anyone who generally depends on the structure of society to survive. If that’s the argument, we need to define the threshold of dependence and justify it. Even pretty narrowly, it could excuse infanticide.

We already legally require parents to provide for their children, or give them to people who can. Requiring women to not kill their babies in the womb is a logical extension of this. Once the baby is born, it can be given to someone more capable of caring for it.

If the baby has no chance of survival, as was the case of a woman who died of sepsis, that’s a much more reasonable time to permit abortion. Better, though, are measures taken to try and save the baby’s and the woman’s lives. A premature delivery, for example, wouldn’t be outright killing it, but it would have saved the life of the mother.