True North

My friend Ryan had a very interesting and thought-provoking post the other day. He was comparing the right of a woman to choose to end the life of her unborn child legally, and the taking away of rights from private property owners via smoking bans.

I, too, have thought about this before. A woman has a right to do what she will with her own body and end the life of her child legally, yet a business owner has no right to allow the use of a legal substance in his or her establishment.

Personally, I feel a bit irresponsible comparing the life of a baby to private property rights, but for the sake of argument, let’s consider it.

Metaphorically speaking, the woman’s body is the business-owner’s business. The woman owns her body, and the private-property owner owns his or her business. With current legislation reaching to ban smoking on private property - it is still legal to smoke, just as it is to end the life of an unborn child - isn’t it a little backwards to take away one entity’s rights to allow the use of a legal substance inside of their business, yet allow another entity to end a life inside of her body?

The argument is that secondhand smoke kills people, and this is the reason why business-owners and smokers are being forced to stop contributing to a deathly cause. And abortion isn’t contributing to death? It certainly isn’t contributing to life.

The argument against secondhand smoke is flawed to the core, simply because the data doesn’t support the so-called deathly hazard. Yet, when a woman aborts her child, there surely isn’t life being offered. There is only death.

So to argue for smoking bans for a supposed life-giving cause, in a society that refuses to ban a life-taking procedure, based upon the logic of private property rights to a body or to a piece of property, we find ourselves in one heck of a paradox