Are you thinking that, once a locality has a critical mass of Insurance X policyholders in a given area, Insurance X might want to sponsor a firehouse for that area as a policy perk?

That perhaps anyone within a given radius could call on Insurance X's firehouse, and that homeowners who either hold an Insurance X policy or who carry another insurance willing to negotiate with insurance X will get free or discounted firefighting services? Or perhaps Insurance X might actually find it cost-effective to provide some local fire houses as a civic service?

Something like that?

(Some life-insurance clubs built hospitals that anyone could use, with club members receiving special discounts.)

Hmm... a lot of arts organizations rely on volunteers to provide civic services (concerts at free or reduced fees), yet I don't usually think of the arts as a public utility (or at least, not a legitimate one).

On the other hand, people rarely find themselves in desperate need of an emergency opera singer.

Funny how the ideal private community envisioned by anarcho-capitalists often sounds more communitarian than ordinary municipal life. (This could be a feature, not a bug, of  the anarcho-capitalist mentality.)

Yeah, there's that.

That's one possible difference between ambulances and fire trucks.  A fire truck arriving in a timely manner might have the potential to prevent more loss than an ambulance that arrives in a timely manner.

Life is precious, and it's always sad when a person dies because the ambulance doesn't show up in time. But a late ambulance usually doesn't risk endangering perhaps hundreds of people, along with their property. A late fire truck could.

Is it possible that technological innovation can produce fire-fighting equipment that doesn't have to be driven at high speeds through congested traffic (on the roadways or in the air) in order to fight fires?

I think automated sprinkler systems already fall into this category.

Also, I'm still not exactly sure where volunteer fire departments fit into all of this. Are they really voluntary (hence not something libertarians should have a problem with)? Or do they inevitably degenerate into crony-capitalism or an arm of the municipal government?

That seems like the most reasonable distinction to me.

It is linguistically weird (as  contra-ception  means  against-conception), but consistent with our tradition of considering others innocent until proven guilty.

For whatever it's worth, vinegar eels, though unappetizing to most of us in the finished product, are totally harmless, often present during vinegar manufacture (then filtered out later), and may contribute to vinegar's flavor.

Not only that, but when olive oil is in a bowl or an open jug, your own nose tells you whether it's gone rancid  before  you pour it all over your food. If the olive oil's in

not so much.

It seems to me that the goal of pro-lifers should be efficient deterrence of as many abortions as possible.

The most bitterly contested legal battles are those where the evidence is uncertain and the punishment for guilt is very grave. Bitterly contested legal battles eat up resources like sumo wrestler with tapeworm: to encourage too many bitterly contested legal battles is simply inefficient.

All else being equal, if the punishment for guilt is less, there is less reason for the defendant to put up a huge fight, and less reason for the jury to cling to the last conceivable (and not necessarily reasonable) shred of doubt in order to avoid turning in a guilty verdict.

Something to keep in mind with criminalizing abortion: you might get better total deterrence from a milder punishment than from a very harsh punishment.

Exactly.

Regarding 2:

It seems consistent with the evolution of common law that the closer the evidence of abortion gets to the evidence of (traditional) homicide (killing of a live-born person), the more abortion should be treated like homicide. Just like with age-of-consent laws, there'll probably be some "arbitrary" lines drawn (and perhaps inevitably, exceptions to those lines). But I think I could live with that.

Recently, I read a touching pro-life article about mourning the unmet. Calling the aborted the unmet highlights the difficulty of prosecuting abortion as if it were the murder of a born person.

People usually suspect murder only if they've found a dead body or noticed that someone's gone missing. When abortion's done early enough, it's hard to notice there's a dead body in there. And you can't notice that someone's gone missing if you've never met them. Therefore, abortion is inevitably the easiest kind of human-life-taking to get away with.

Most people dislike viewing justice as a gamble, and get uneasy when the law punishes one person harshly for a crime that many other people get away with. It offends their sense of equity. I'm more accepting of the "gambling" aspects of the legal system than average -- I know removing risk from the law is subject to diminishing returns. But even I feel uneasy with the prospect of one person getting, say, capital punishment for a crime hundreds of others inevitably get away with.

So the old common laws regarding abortion strike me as rather sensible.

Depends.

Suppose person X believes that abortion is murder in God's eyes. Suppose X also believes that the legal system cannot afford to prosecute abortion as murder because it does not share God's omniscience. Are X's beliefs mutually incompatible? I think not.

X's beliefs will, however, be confusing and contentious if they are not articulated clearly.

Pro-lifers hurt themselves when they fail to articulate practical, historically-grounded guidelines for laws criminalizing abortion. That scares non-pro-lifers into fearing that pro-lifers want suspected abortions to be investigated as if they were first-degree murders, even though practical considerations of evidence and burden of proof obviously make that impossible.

Tommy, doesn't the law traditionally apply the term homicide to born persons?

(This isn't to say that tradition is never wrong.)

Charity and smoky slow cookin'.

A tasty, tasty combination.

I heart the Book of Common Prayer! Or the older editions, at least :-)

Mr Rattler and I were married using one of the rites in the Book of Common prayer.

Quicker,

I think the best place to start looking for an answer is in our legal history, first in Anglo-American common law, then in English canon law.

According to this source, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that abortion became a matter for legislation rather than common law. Before then, abortion before quickening generally went unpunished by common law, and was punished with penance by canon law, while abortion after quickening was treated as a very grave misdemeanor in common law, and as quasi-homicide in canon law.

Abortion can be a very hard crime to prove, particularly early-term abortion. Common sense tells us we can't allow every unfortunate woman who has miscarried, or whose weight simply fluctuates, to be under suspicion of murder. And under any law against abortion, many women will nonetheless get away with it. Just and humane laws must reflect these realities.