An old school friend queried me on facebook about why I think prostitution should be legal. Here’s my reply to her:
Prostitution will always exist no matter what. We’ve been trying to stamp it out for centuries and have failed. So, the question we have to ask is: since prostitution will never cease its existence, do we want prostitution to exist legally or illegally? The main argument for it being legal is that in a free country consenting adults ought to be able to do whatever they want with their own body, including using it for sexual intercourse in exchange for money. The second argument is that legalized prostitution probably would not be nearly as bad as illegalized prostitution. When it is legal, it can be regulated, and the industry has a kind of transparency that it cannot have when it is illegal and underground. For example, with a legalized brothel (that’s a name for a house of prostitution) the health inspectors, police officers, and other authorities are free to come in at any time and inspect it to make sure everything is as it should be. That is not the case with underground prostitution, obviously. Legalized brothels can have mandatory condom usage/ HIV testing which will drastically decrease the spread of disease, but you can’t really enforce that in the underground market.
You brought up the issue of whether legalizing it would lead to women being kidnapped/abused. That’s a serious concern, but I suspect that this problem is far more rampant when prostitution is not legal. The thing is that kidnapping/abuse already happens in countries like the United States and Britain, and I think it is a lot easier to get away with that when prostitution is done completely behind closed doors. In places like Nevada, where prostitution is legal, the women who do it have to go and apply for a business license themselves and that obviously makes it so much more difficult for illegal aliens to be doing this against their own will.
