“Most discussion of the issue bogs down in minutiae about when human life begins, when or if the fetus can be considered to be alive, etc. All this is really irrelevant to the issue of the legality (again, not necessarily the morality) of abortion. The Catholic antiabortionist, for example, declares that all that he wants for the fetus is the rights of any human being—i.e., the right not to be murdered. But there is more involved here, and this is the crucial consideration. If we are to treat the fetus as having the same rights as humans, then let us ask: What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite within some other human being’s body? This is the nub of the issue: the absolute right of every person and hence every woman, to the ownership of her own body. What the mother is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body to be ejected from it: If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.
The common retort that the mother either originally wanted or at least was responsible for placing the fetus within her body is, again, beside the point. Even in the stronger case where the mother originally wanted the child, the mother, as the property owner in her own body, has the right to change her mind and to eject it.”
For a New Liberty, p.139
In this article
Shadeburst
Whackhead Murray Rothbard as a poster boy for libertarianism. Jesus. I would be trying to distance myself from him as far as I could.
In dissecting pure nonsense, it often helps to paraphrase the opponent’s claims, removing the emotionally loaded words and replacing them with clear English. Thus we could write, “Abortion is the removal of an unwanted developing human being from a woman’s body. This developing human being is entirely reliant for survival on the woman’s body. No human has the right to be entirely reliant for survival on anyone else’s body.” Then the bullshit stands out clearly.
There’s a reason why the rights of the mother are usually given precedence over those of the unborn child. She has proved herself to be a viable human being, while the foetus has still the hurdles of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death to overcome. Society has invested a lot more in the mother. Even planned children will be a burden on the parents, and unwanted children may be even more so (but not inevitably so: I’m extremely glad that my daughter did not abort the “mistake” who is now the grandson who I adore). Arguments for abortion, to be valid, can only be based on pragmatism.
I’m surprised too, to read that a libertarian, upholder of the doctrine that my rights end where your body starts, should contradict himself so blatantly with the bland assertion that the woman’s rights over her body are absolute, even when this entails the violent dismemberment of the foetus’s body.
Rothbard was an economist, not a very good one either. He was not a biologist, medical doctor, neurologist or jurist. Nobody can claim to be an expert outside their field of expertise. Rothbard had not, as Dale Carnegie put it, earned the right to talk on this topic. For this to be held up as an example of good thinking does not say good things about Rational Standard.
Trutherator
Rothbard had an area of cognitive dissonance on this one. On most so-called “political” issues, he was right.
And he was a good Austrian economist, and in other areas, his reasoning was very very good and certainly better than any Keynesian economist.
Trutherator
The baby absolutely cannot be considered a parasite or an invader of the mother’s body. Especially in the case of sex, to kill a human being that results from voluntary actions of its parents is murder, even if the murder involves leaving a post-natal baby helpless on the hillside. That is still properly called infanticide.
A Beginner’s Guide to Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Libertarian Arguments – Turning Point News
[…] libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard argued that “what the mother is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body […]
Christian Sanchez
This seems to be a contradiction on Rothbard thought. In his book “For a New Liberty,” Rothbard argues on behalf of The Nonaggression Axiom: “The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.” On a subsequent chapter, he defends private property through Natural Law argumentation: that all men are born owning themselves, and thus, are also owners of the extensions of themselves expressed in the fruit of their labor. And this is the fundamental problem with his stance on abortion: if all men are born with self-ownership, and we part with the nonaggression axiom, then clearly abortion harms the fetus’s body, thus violating the axiom by harming a body owned by that individual fetus.
There is only one way of escaping this contradiction, and that is to deny the humanity in the fetus. Somehow, the fetus is not alive, and if it is alive then it is not a human, and even if it is a human, then is not entitled to human rights, and even if he is entitled to human rights, the human rights of the mother supersede the rights of the fetus. It is no longer a human dependent on his mother, it is now a parasite “abusing” the mother’s body, as if there was ever an action involved on behalf of the fetus to use the mother.
With regards to abortion, Rothbard has thrown his work off the window. A human being in its most vulnerable stage of development is now, apparently, not human at all. And even if it is, it can be tossed out, as if the mother has magically gained ownership of the fetus’s body by virtue of ownership of her own body. Rothbard has inadvertently justified a sick form of slavery: the ownership of someone else’s body.
Sometimes, it is better to judge the soundness of a train of thought not by its logical composition, but by its ouput. Rothbard’s conclusion led him to justify the killing of an innocent human being, so he clearly made an error, even if it presented it in logical form.