Libertarians favor liberty, obviously. But what has liberty? We interfere with liberty when we intervene, contrary to the choice of the person intervened upon, to foreclose him or her from taking options of his choice, options which in their turn do not negatively effect anyone else. Liberty consists in the absence of such intervention against persons' wills.

This means that the only beings that can intelligibly be said to have the general right of liberty which is the essence of the libertarian position, are beings who can make, conscious, deliberate choices.

Fetuses can't do any such thing. Neither, to be sure, can newborns although very soon thereafter the concept of deliberate choice becomes applicable and remains so during the human organism's subsequent career, until death or some consciousness-destroying disease sets in.

If, therefore, anyone wants to insist that women, or perhaps more accurately parents-to-be, do *not* have the right to abortion, on whatever terms they see fit to adopt, he is going to have to do so on some other ground than the intrinsic, supreme right of liberty which we attribute to all normal humans from late infancy on up.

Of course this means there is a problem about infanticide, which I have discussed often enough. Infanticide is rather an odd problem, though, since anyone who voluntarily has a baby certainly doesn't want to destroy it. Ideally, all infants are wanted infants, and there should not be a problem of infanticide; it is puzzling, and the sign of something wrong somewhere, if there is such a "problem". Things can happen, of course: parents-to-be can go insane, and of course many births are due to accident, though in those cases, if the parents in question has been able freely to choose abortion early on, there again would be no problem.

Moreover, as I have pointed out, born babies, unlike fetuses, are readily portable, and indeed are very often transferred to others, for various reasons - given up for adoption by mothers who didn't want to have abortions but felt they could not care for a child on their own, and so on. So long as there are willing parental-role-assuming persons ready to take on any unwanted infant, there again should in principle be no problem about infanticide.

So what most otherwise-liberal theorists regard as this very dreadful problem should not be regarded as any such thing. Infants in particular and children generally are loved by someone, and that someone should certainly have the right to exercise that love over a child that others don't want.

But, to return to abortion, there is no fundamental problem here at all. If an abortion is had, then the human organism which would have developed into a human person with libertarian rights does not in fact do so. There is no person harmed, as such, by abortion. And since harm to persons is precisely what liberty consists in the absence of, that is the end of the matter. There is, absolutely, no intelligible case for restricting abortions on libertarian grounds.

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