Hey you! Yeah you!

What?

Gimme your kidney.

What? No! I don’t want to give you my kidney.

Doesn’t matter. Gimme your kidney. I need it or I will die.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to give you my kidney. I don’t want to risk my life to give you my kidney.

But I’ll die without it.

But I could die giving it to you. And even if I didn’t die, I’d miss a lot of work. I might even lose my job. I can’t afford that.

You might die if you give me a kidney, but I will die if you don’t give me a kidney.

So how is that my problem.

You made the choice to sit next to me knowing full well that there are people in the world who need kidneys. If you didn’t want to give up a kidney, you shouldn’t have taken the bus.

I’m just trying to get to work. I didn’t plan on giving up a kidney.

Then you should have made better choices.

There’s like 40 people on this bus. How was I supposed to know who needs a kidney? I just sat down in the only open seat.

If you didn’t want to give me your kidney, you should have stood up in the aisle. But it’s too late now. The next stop is the hospital.

There’s a dustup over at Shakesville because Melissa had the ovaries to call out Ron Paul and his supporters on their hypocrisy. See they’re all for libertarian ideas, until it comes to women having the most basic of property rights – the right to control their own bodies.

See, it doesn’t matter if you think a fetus is a person with full rights or a potential person with no rights. One of our basic principles is the idea that a person has the right to control what happens to their own body. We do not force people into organ donation. We do not force people into medical experimentation (ok- sometimes we do but it’s generally done secretly and people get pretty pissed when it happens) and for the moment we do not force people into military service. We no longer forcibly sterilize people either. We have made mistakes in not allowing liberties to certain people in the past with slavery, but our goal as a nation is to move towards greater liberty- not less.

Your body is the only thing you can be sure of owning for your entire life. But for half of us, there is a high risk that control over our own bodies will be taken from us if we get pregnant. That is not a little threat. It is a deal breaker in a political candidate, even if that candidate is the most anti-war.

If a political candidate is not willing to allow half the population liberty over their own bodies, that same candidate cannot be trusted to protect any liberties.