Reflections on the meaning of choice

Professor Reynolds at Instapundit has another quick post on the anomaly that the "right to choose" really means "the pregnant mother's right to choose to have an abortion, but not the father's right to choose anything whatsoever." The hypocritical position of the "pro-choice" camp seems to be a recurrent theme with him - see my post from June 17, 2002 - but I am not sure why inasmuch as I believe that his is not an opponent of abortion. Anyhow, he writes, and links, as edited by me, as follows:

DAHLIA LITHWICK writes about a man's right to choose in Slate. It's not a bad piece.... There's rather a lot of hypocrisy, which Lithwick doesn't really address, in the juncture between the way abortion is treated ("my body, my choice!") and the way child-support is treated ("he got her pregnant, he should pay!"). Perhaps Richard Bennett will have something to say on this topic.

Actually, I think I do have some idea of what the underlying issue is. Back when I was a callow youth, I was far more entranced with the intellectual thrill of libertarianism. I used to amuse myself with flanking the Left on the Left on the issue of abortion just to watch the amusing results that would follow. I would get some committed advocate of the "right to choose" to commit to that principle, then I'd turn the knife with a line of questions about the man's right to choose. Invariably I'd get answers to the effect that that was different - he was just having fun and had to pay. [What was she doing? Her tax returns?] Lampooning hypocrisy is always amusing. Back then I was ambivalent on the issue of abortion. I really didn't come around until law school when I read a law review article essentially arguing from Leibniz's theory of the Monad that since it would be immoral to kill a person "now," it is just as immoral to kill that person at any point before "now." [I am sure that seems weird, but it makes sense to me. I am not sure if a fetus is "alive," (particularly under the nihilistic rules of debate that have been engineered by the pro-choice side) but I'm pretty sure that it would be wrong to kill you - yes, you - and I am pretty sure that it would have been wrong to kill you anytime today, or yesterday, or ten years ago, or anytime anyone would care to name. Since it would have been immoral to kill you when you were a fetus, it is equally wrong to kill anyone else at the same age. That's what I'm pretty sure about, but if you get to the same result through a different line of thought, God bless you.] But even in my ambivalence, I knew that the "right to choose" is basically hypocritical in principle and in its smug assumption about which sentient living beings are not entitled to "choose."