Ben Pike tipped me off to this blog post, “Abortion Rights are Logically Required by Libertarianism“. Below is the email I wrote back to him. It was a rough email, not intended as post material, so it’s kind of jumpy. But the thoughts are there.
Basically, reading this and the original post over a few times, I think the questions are these: how does exiting the womb and being detached from the mother make it a self-property rights owner? Why does the fetus not own itself before birth? I don’t think concepts like “viability” really address it but I’m open to correction.
She rightly addresses the question of whether a fetus is an individual, which, if it is, then the rights of self-ownership (and the NAP) apply to it. But she calls the fetus a “potential” human without explaining why it’s just a potential and not an actual human. She just declares it, which is a pretty darn important presupposition since the fetus/baby’s status as rights-retainer rests on this. Maybe she has worked the fetus’ not-actual, potential humanity out somewhere else but this is an extremely important girder in her framework.
In the same paragraph she states “[a]t birth, the fetus is biologically autonomous and becomes a self-owner with full individual rights.” But there is no explanation as how it is fundamentally different other than being outside and not physically attached to the mother…and I can’t see how that difference transforms the fetus into a human. In a sense she is justifying the mother’s abandonment of the baby, because most of us would think she has moral imperative to provide care (or to seek care) once the baby is born. The mother still has to provide her own property to care for it, her resources: time, money, and sometimes her own body (arguably more resources than during pregnancy, but I don’t think amount is the issue). The only real difference is that the fetus is beyond the borders of her body-property.
In this case she has to establish that being inside that body makes it her property, which seems an extremely difficult situation to steer toward your side. That would mean any thing that lands in my yard is my property, even people. Though, a fetus doesn’t “land” inside a woman. It grows there. Could it be considered like a plant that spontaneously grows in my garden without my consent (it’s implicit that when I bought my house and land that things like that can happen). If a human sprouted up on my lawn ex nihilo, and that kind of generation was implicit when I bought the property, would I be morally responsible for its survival?
I’m just thinking through this here. Sorry for the disjoint. The conception/birth of a human doesn’t have a proper ethical analogy, it doesn’t seem. It’s its own special case and I don’t know the philo-ethical scholarship that has been applied to it. So, really, I don’t have an answer, except that I am pro-life (categorically) by logical means: if it’s indeterminate whether it’s just a clump of tissue or an actual human, it would be too morally risky to aggress upon it by default, “just in case” it’s a human…but sometimes I’m not so sure of the strength of that argument.
About the Ron Paul quote: did you have a link to that? I’d probably agree with it but I want to check the context.
Hey, speaking of tablets, which one would you recommend? I’m on Verizon and I know next to nothing.