Abortion Ban Advocates and Rape Exception.

The present paper argues that abortion ban advocates can justify an exception for rape. Recently, Blackshaw offered an interesting argument that if abortion ban advocates modified their position along the lines of Thomson's analysis of rights, they could make an exception for rape. However, doing so would require making concessions they would be unlikely to make, the crucial one being subscribing to an absurd view that abortion in the case of rape is permissible but only if it is performed in a certain way, that is, in a way that withdraws life support from the fetus.

Evictionism, Libertarianism, and Duties of the Fetus.

In "Evictionism and Libertarianism," published in this journal, Walter Block defends the view that, although the fetus is a human being with all the rights to its body, it may nonetheless be evicted from the woman's body as a trespasser, provided the pregnancy is unwanted. We argue that this view is untenable: the statement that the unwanted fetus is a trespasser does not follow from the premises that the fetus uninvitedly resides in the woman's body and that the woman is a full self-owner. For this statement to follow, one more statement would have to be true; namely, the woman would have to hold her self-ownership rights specifically against the fetus, and for this to be the case, the fetus would have to have a correlative duty to the woman to abstain from interfering with her body.

Decomposing growth in spending finds annual cost of treatment contributed most to spending growth, 1980-2006.

Researchers have disagreed about factors driving up health care spending since the 1980s. One camp, led by Kenneth Thorpe, identifies rising numbers of people being treated for chronic diseases as a major factor. Charles Roehrig and David Rousseau reach the opposite conclusion: that three-quarters of growth in average spending reflects the rising costs of treating given diseases.