Prostitution should be legal. Someone once commented that using attractive women in advertising--magazines, billboards, etc. (what to speak of women working in topless bars, stripping, or posing nude!) is a subtle form of prostitution--women using their bodies for income.

Tracy Clark-Flory writes:

<< At $25-$30 per hour, prostitutes make approximately four times what they likely would outside of the sex industry. Of course, that doesn't take into consideration on-the-job risks like contracting an STD (condoms were used in only a quarter of dealings) or being assaulted; researchers estimate that sex workers are assaulted an average of once a month. There's also the threat of being arrested, but according to the Economist, "Prostitutes are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one." >>

Problems such as contracting STDs, being assaulted, pimp violence, being arrested, etc. would cease if prostitution were made safe and legal.

Prostitution was legal in ancient India for the same reason the Prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States. Commenting on Srimad Bhagavatam 1.11.19, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami writes:

"By tricks of chance, one may be obliged to adopt a profession which is not very adorable in society...even in those days, about five thousand years ago, there were prostitutes in a city like Dwarka...This means that prostitutes are necessary citizens for the proper upkeep of society.

"The government opens wine shops, but this does not mean that the government encourages the drinking of wine. The idea is that there is a class of men who will drink at any cost, and it has been experienced that prohibition in great cities encouraged illicit smuggling of wine.

"Similarly, men who are not satisfied at home require such concessions...It is better that prostitutes be available in the marketplace so that the sanctity of society can be maintained."

Even some conservatives concede that prostitution can be victimless. In a 1995 column entitled "Prostitution as a Privacy Right," Robert Craig Paul, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times, wrote:

"If a woman's right to control the use of her reproductive organs permits her to enter into a cash transaction with an abortionist, then how can this fundamental right of privacy not apply to other transactions involving her use of her body?

"...abortion has been against the law and restricted with greater intensity for more of our history than prostitution, reflecting social norms that abortion, viewed as infanticide, is more immoral than prostitution...

"In contrast (to abortion), prostitution is entirely an act between consenting parties that does not affect the bodily integrity, identity and destiny of a third party (the unborn)...

"It is legal nonsense that privacy conveys the right to abort, but not the right to ingest drugs or engage in sodomy...

"It will be interesting to watch the court sort out on the basis of Roe v. Wade why it is legal for a woman to contract for abortion but not prostitution."

Again, prostitution should be legal.