At the risk of triggering an Anti-Labeling Police response, I'd say it sounds like they're a bunch of liberal hypocrites...which is about as surprising as sunrise being in the East each day.

In many ways this is a direct result of government's expanded role in running healthcare.

If the government has to pay the bill when you get sick then they have an interest in keeping you healthy. After all how can the government keep its laws off your body when they have to pay the bill when you damage it?

Unfortunately expect to see a lot more government interference in what we put into our bodies and how we live our lives. The more the government expands its role in paying our health care bills the more they will expand their role into what we put into our bodies and how we maintain them.

Welcome to the slippery slope.

Jonah, I love the thought and I think it could be fleshed out even more in a column.

One of the more striking inconsistencies, to me, is that mothers have the discretion to abort their babies, but once born, the government does not trust the same mothers to ensure their children eat healthy.

This is especially true in San Francisco, where, even if you're lucky enough not to be aborted, you'll never get to enjoy a Happy Meal.

No. Not more highfalutin, more obscure.

It was used with the same haste the left frequently uses in discarding the substance of words as, here, the life of a fetus.

In order to obfuscate their designs, the femini-leftists tried to convert us into the belief that in this matter it concerns one life only, not two.

Relatedly, I hear progressives talk about a "right to health care", but they only mean it in the sense of a "positive right" - an entitlement, really - to have somebody else pay an unlimited amount for something they want.

I have more respect for the libertarian version, which is more like rights as they have always been understood in the Anglo-American tradition: a "right to health care" means that if I want to hire a doctor, the state can't prohibit it on the grounds that they haven't certified him/her, and that if I want to buy a drug to treat a condition I have, the state can't prevent me just because the FDA hasn't signed off on the drug.

But those consequences of a true "right to health care" don't often come up.

In addition to the health care mandate, we have the bureacrats telling us what we can eat, how much to exercise and that we can't drink alcohol, soda or tap water. Oh, we also can't introduce smoke (tobacco variety) into our bodies, but we should legalize pot (marijuana) smoking.

There is no consistency here, no logic at all.

Please. Enough with the "Liberals". They aren't liberal. Never were. They are statists. Those who demand a bigger state are anti-freedom. The state is the enemy of liberty and those who embrace it are proponents of collectivism and group think.

I wish people would stop using the L word to describe these people. The Republicans are more liberal than so called "liberals".

"One irony, of course, is that abortion is actually the one area of public policy where there are at least two bodies — and two lives — in question and in conflict."

And abortion restrictions typically regulate abortion providers, so there is an actual commerce element to the regulated activity as well.

To James Hundhall.
I agree with you that the term liberal, formerly meaning less government and more freedom, has been completely corrupted by modern left wing liberals. But instead of using the term Statist, which is obscure to many non-libertarians, I use Leftist, or Leftie, or if I want to be more polite to the lefties I use Progressive. The meaning is just as clear, and cannot be confused with a classical liberal, and also allows a distinction with conservative statists.

I also agree that the leftie rhetoric about being able to control their own bodies, has now been exposed as a hipocritical sham argument, designed to enlist true libertarians in their own pro abortion fight. The lefties never gave a hoot about individual freedom, except on issues where they want it. If it is an issue where individual freedom conflicts with their leftist position, individual freedom clearly goes out the window.

Of course conservatives can also be hipocritical on this front, for example on gays and euthenasia, while objecting to economic regulation on things like obesity. On abortion their argument is somewhat more principled, once you accept their argument that a featus is a full human life, because you have 2 freedoms in conflict, the right to live, and the right to control your body.

Only libertirians apply the principle of controlling our own bodies and having individual freedom in a consistent and non-contradictory and non-hipocritical fashion.