When I was writing my previous post on abortion I had forgotten about this old comment from the Mises blog, (I think) back when I still believed in God and objective morality (though I was still less bothered by abortion itself than the bad legal arguments for its Constitutionally protected nature). I still like my James Bond analogy.
I think Block makes a lot of good points on eviction (if such technology existed, my position would be the same as his). However, I still dissagree with him. If you wake up connected to a violinist, neither you nor he has the right to cause the death of the other by removing them from the kidney they are using. If Ernst Blofeld drops James Bond from a helicopter into my raft, which is in water infested by sharks in a blood frenzy, neither of us has the right to kick the other out. Were another raft available, I could kick Bond off of mine and into it. All those examples are analogies to pregnancies resulting from rape, which are a tiny minority of all aborted pregnancies (conception and illegitimacy both rose after Roe, as use of contraceptives declined). A pregnancy not resulting from rape would be like if I placed Bond on my raft while he was unconscious. He cannot consent to this action, so there can be no contract, but I did consent to placing him on it.I also think Block is too dismissive of the possibility of anti-abortionists from achieving their goals without changing strategy. Anti-abolitionists did not need to change their philosophical stance, but it did take them a long time to achieve their goals. In addition, the “Roe effect” means that groups that oppose abortion (and tend to be less keen on contraception) will grow in size and have more political power. It has been said the the recent generation of youths is the first to be more anti-abortion than its predecessors, and this process may well continue.
That’s probably the most I’ve written about the legality of abortion without ranting about “substantive due process”, “the right to privacy” or interpretations of the 10th and 14th amendments. Usually that’s what ticks me the most off, even though common sense would seem to dictate that I’d be most enraged by what I believe to be ongoing and legally sanctioned mass murder.
Entitled to an Opinion 
February 10, 2008 at 10:23 am
Despite the natural law backdrop, there’s real logical meat to be digested in the literature put out by Doris Gordon’s Libertarians for Life. Her “Unplugging a Bad Analogy” paper on Thomson’s Violinist is well reasoned, and I think John Walker’s stuff on parental obligation and rape is worth wrestling with on purely contractarian or legal-positivist terms.
While the relative lack of experiential harm that abortion entails surely deflates the strident pitch (and holocaust rhetoric) favored by most pro-life activists, the case for legal abortion is mighty tough to reconcile with accepted legal frameworks, whether posited in terms of a harm principle, on contractual grounds, or with reference to the usual Constitutional show-stoppers (e.g. due process for “trespassers”).
If you’re interested, the L4L literature is online at:
http://www.l4l.org/library/index.html
Most of their key papers have also been collected in a special edition of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, which is available from L4L for $25:
http://www.l4l.org/journal.html
February 10, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Isn’t the logical answer to the legalistic approach simply a matter of definition; to wit, the fetus is not a human according to statute? I’m not talking about the scientific questions here; but, isn’t the legal question one of legislated status? Maybe I’m missing something… are we talking theoretical resolutions here, or are we addressing the mass of conflicting and or ambiguous definitions and laws? I’m coming into the middle a conversation here; what’s the problem I’m not seeing?
February 10, 2008 at 8:10 pm
My original post was in reference to ethics rather than legality (it was normative rather than positive). Legally, the law is what the Texas legislature says it is unless the Supreme Court says otherwise, but that wasn’t what Walter Block was discussing in the link, though people can argue about what it ought to be until the cows come home.
February 11, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Statutes are what they are, but the broadly conceived “legal framework” in which a law is drafted and reviewed includes consideration of Constitutional and common law issues, which, in turn, beg consideration of underlying ethical/normative (and scientific) issues. If the Texas legislature passed a law decreeing that 37-year-olds (like me) are non-persons who can be killed with no legal repurcussion, there would remain a serious conflict of law to be resolved.
I hope I didn’t derail the discussion. The L4L stuff is framed in mostly normative terms and seems primarily relevant to Block’s “evictionist” position.
February 11, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I thought it was the job of the legislature to decide normative issues, both in their writing of laws and of Constitutions. I stated elsewhere that I don’t think any American denies the prerogative of people to rewrite their Constitutions in the most heinous form, though some deny Constitutions themselves any legitimacy.
I’ll check out that John Walker stuff later.