Murray Rothbard on abortion

Economics Political Theory
101

Thsi is just silly. You are equating participation in a act which may have an unintended consequence as an invitation to that consequence. If I leave my front door open, a homeless guy may wonder in. I certainly didn’t invite him. My engagement in an activity (leaving the door open) that increases the risk of having in intruder in no way constitutes an invitation to that intruder.

But even granting your invitation argument, are you claiming that if I invite you to my house, I cannot then ask you to leave at any time for any reason?

102

hashem, if a 5 year old tells you 2+2=4, it’s just as valid as if carl gauss told you 2+2=4. why the need for some superiority complex? debate the ideas.

103

jack cuyler, your analogy fails. just because a woman walks around in promiscuous clothes doesn’t leave her open to being raped. consensual sex necessarily involves both parties inviting that consequence, whether intended or not. if you excuse this “accident”, what other accidents do you excuse?

you obviously didn’t read my original post. abortion isn’t just kicking the baby out of the womb. it’s doing so violently. fatally. and when the baby is doing no harm to the mother.

104

Aderwent, that’s a very important question. I ask for only objections which cite sources and quotes because the vast majority of “libertarians” who argue about abortion have no clue about their own theory of rights.

So I ask you to provide a source and a quote, because you can’t. Nobody can, which is why nobody did when my previous thread was open, or the other 2 abortion threads open at that time. Anyone who sets about to cite a source on property rights and the role of ethics will necessarily debunk anti-abortion gibberish.

EDIT:

http://mises.org/daily/3660 Stephen Kinsella, What Libertarianism Is

105

Correct. There are limitations to how you may honorably eject me from your house.
For instance:
GOOD WAY: “Please pick up you stuff and leave in the next 15 minutes. Otherwise, I will remove you myself.”
BAD WAY: “If you are not out in 3 seconds, I am going to kill you!” and then after 3 seconds pass, you raise your shot-gun and shoot me in the back.

Abortion is the act of a pregnant woman exercising her property rights in a BAD way.

106

An invitation is a conscious act, and it necessarily requires the desire of the inviter. If the consequence is not desired, it cannot, by definition, be an invited consequence. Leaving a door open is risky, but not an invitation to homeless people to come over. Sex carries a risk of unwanted pregnancy, but it not an invitation.

Such violence is not necessary for abortions qua abortions. A woman has the right to remove the “guest” from her body in the gentlest manner possible. You will never see me praising the barbaric practice normally used today.

107

Would you like responses in that thread, or is this one ok?

108

Where was the baby at the time this invitation was extended?

109

oh, if a pregnant woman tells to a fetus “if you don’t leave my womb in 15 minutes I’m gonna remove you myself” is a good way. What must have been proved. Also you admited, that a fetus is an intruder.

110

this whole notion of “invitation” kinda reminds me “social contract” theory that some people believe in.

111

even if we assume, that woman can “invite the fetus”, she still has all the rights to remove it from her womb. Funny.

112

Your “BAD WAY” example is a violation of the guest’s rights. Too often it is forgotten that one never has the right to initiate agression, even in one’s house. The guest is a self-owner, and any agression against him would certainly be a violation of his property.

That being said, I’m glad we agree that a woman has the right to ask the fetus to leave, and if it does not, the right to remove it herself. It would then follow that she has the right to cotract someone to remove it for her. The only thing left, it seems, is to determine the method of removal which is not a “bad way”. Personally, I’ve always advocated for the gentlest method possible.

113

Same here. I advocate the gentlest method possible too: full-term natural birth.

What has been demonstrated is that the timing ( 15 minutes or 15 hours or 15 days or 15 weeks or 9 months etc. ) is purely arbitrary. The implication is the there is nothing libertarianism by itself can say is the one and only pro-life versus pro-abortion stance.

The market will demonstrate what abortion laws are right or wrong.

114

Partly agree, but still, under my principals, forcing a woman to have a baby (for example caging her in a hospital) is violent and unlibertarian, however, not performing an abortion for her is not.

115

I have often wondered why a woman would choose to pay hundreds of dollars to a physician in order to undergo a procedure that has a very real chance of damaging her reproductive organs or taking her life, when she could use herbs to induce miscarriage in the privacy of her own home with minimal risk, at a fraction of the cost. Is it because the abortion industry is publicly funded?

116

You guys are muddying the issue when you keep accidentally calling the fetus a baby. Anti-abortionists always do this, they are scared to death of anyone considering the fetus as a fetus and not a baby. The baby is the born, non-fetus, ex-fetus. Usually at this point the umbilical cord is cut and the baby becomes an individual.

117

You are muddying the issue when you create arbitrary categories for human beings. He or she is not a baby until the parents buy a “baby on board” sign for their car, until then s/he is an infant.

118

A Caesarean section is certainly gentler on the offspring, as it removes the need to go through the Play-Doh Fun Factory of Life, including all of the painful re-arranging of bones in the head. If abortions were performed in the same manner, I can’t see how anyone could claim aggression on the part of the doctor or would-be mother. It would simply be removing the unwanted guest from the woman’s property.

119

the most objective (in my opinion) way determining human and a fetus is the time when the fetus is born and becomes independent individual, not a “parasite of a host”. But keep on, try to prove that fetus is a human, then by such reasoning we can conclude that sperm is also a possible human so masturbating should be prohibited.

120

Natural rights people seem to believe that rights are physical possessions of individuals. You either have them or you don’t, and it does not have anything to do with what other people believe.

This is not completely bad as a frame of reverence in certain instances.

But it is necessary to understand that a right is a perception upon what is righteous in the context of an action. It is an abstraction, a rule. It manifests in the interpretations of intents and effects of a given situation.

So your right to property is only the understanding by other people that they should not seek to seize whatever you have, that action being considered wrong.

Your right to property depends upon such common understanding. Without it, it doesn’t even exist. You cannot say that a mob has violated your natural right to property if you’re the only person on the planet that thinks you own something.

You can argue that a society where people understand private property is more likely to achieve higher levels of affluence and an overall greater use of information and resources.

That doesn’t change the fact that rights rest upon the adherence and understanding of abstract rules that govern action, and are not physical things being carried around by “rights bearing entities”.

If you doubt it you can just do the empircal verification of moving to some place in Africa or Asia (or even in America) where they don’t like white people very much and where law enforcement is precarious and use your alleged natural right to free speech in an offensive way.

Rights derive from perceptions and understanding of those who are supposed to put those rights into use as a means of judging actions.

So it is inconsequential to try to define a right bearing entity.
What is relevant is to discuss what actions are understood as righteous, so them to judge the consequential actors by such.

We can spend the whole day discussing the metaphysical situation of a 16-month toddler, who can’t say “no” or “me” yet. Is she self-conscious, is she not? Is she a moral being?

But if we are to judge whether a pedophile who molested her should go to jail, such arguments are completely irrelevant.

We understand that the pedophile has violated standards of what is to be considered righteous action and we see him as liable to punishment for that.

The actual perception from the point of view of the toddler is something that will always remain subject to speculation, but in the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that we live in a civilization that has agreed upon certain standards for righteous action, and that pedophilia is a violation of those.

Clearly a toddler of 16-month “has” not yet any “right” to decide things for herself, but that does not make us see her as some piece of meat that can be subjected to any sort of desecration.

We sanctify her human life, whether she does understand it already or not. We do that even though we se her as a growing individual which is not yet entitled to take many important decisions by herself. We understand that until she reaches that point, it is the duty of those who brought her to life by their own volition to take good care of her. And if they don’t, we shall make them pay for their inequities.

We also do not know how a fetus perceive the world or her own situation. Maybe it is really nothing, or almost nothing, at least until she forms the brain structures that we assume do the job as to perform such processes.

But then again it doesn’t matter what she perceives. What we are discussing is whether the decision of destroying her can be justified by her mother desires or not.

Our individual perception of such issue will them orient the formation of a justice principle that will be used to guide normative decisions regarding this category of problem.

If we are to be consistent in our moral feelings, and sactify human life that grows, whether or not it has reached any arbitrary decision taking threshold, we are to agree that such destruction is a violation and we should be against it. That negligence by her parents is an unjust and wicked behavior that we should not tolerate as part of civilized society.