Let me start off by saying that I'm pro-choice, especially when it comes to choosing where your taxes go. But in terms of abortion I recognize that the pro-choice position is logically inconsistent.
The pro-choice argument is basically that people should have the right to decide what they do with their own bodies. I strongly agree with this. However,
a person can only ever have one body*. And it's really easy to differentiate between bodies thanks to DNA.
Admittedly, pregnancy is a weird case where one individual is entirely inside another individual. But should this weirdness somehow change individual rights?
Let's say that I'm in your home, thanks to your invitation. Does the fact that I'm on your property somehow give you the right to harm me? Nope.
Let's remove the invitation. I break into your home. Do you now have the right to harm me? Yup.**
But what if I end up in your home against my will? Someone kidnaps me, ties me up, and puts me on your property. Do you still have the right to harm me? Nope.
Consider this passage from
Murray Rothbard's Wikipedia page...
In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights".[110] Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation and should be free to engage in other forms of child neglect. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum".
A pro-choice person will say that a pregnant individual should not be responsible for supporting the new individual inside her. However, the same pro-choice person will also say that, once the new individual is no longer inside another individual, then somehow the mother should be responsible for supporting the baby. Because... a baby is more individual than a fetus? Eh? The more individual someone is the more rights they should have?
The majority of people who debate abortion seem to assign great significance to when life begins. So a pro-choice person who shouts "it's MY body" will very conveniently ignore when individuality begins in order to focus on when life begins.
The same pro-choice person would also probably abhor Rothbard's idea of people legally selling babies.
The abortion debate is a small picture issue. It's only a debate because most people miss the big picture. The big picture issue is that we aren't mind-readers. A pro-life person will say that a fetus is priceless. A pro-choice person will vehemently disagree. But if it was legal to sell babies, how much money would the average baby be sold for? We have absolutely no idea. We can't use everybody's words to correctly guess everybody's values. If selling babies was legal, and the average baby sold for $5, then nobody could reasonably argue that a fetus is priceless.
Of course, if the average baby sold for $800,000... then what would happen to the debate about abortion? Who in their right mind would flush a ton of cash down the toilet? Very quickly we'd see clinics paying big bucks to remove fetuses and keep them alive in test tubes. So much for the abortion debate.
Right now a small committee, in this case the supreme court, can decide whether abortion should be legal. As if this small committee, or any committee, can read our minds. They can't. The decision should be made by donations to the government. Whichever side donates the most money to the gov should win. Then, and only then, would the most beneficial decision be made. Plus we'd all get more public goods and/or less taxes.
In the big picture, we are more likely to make more valuable decisions when we aren't ignorant of each other's true valuations. This is why markets work.
* Perhaps you thought I'd point out a real exception to this rule? Naw. I just wanted to point out how absurd it is to have to state that an individual can only ever have one body.
** Anybody remember my thread where I argued that if you have the right to kill intruders, then you should also have the right to enslave them? Hmmmm does slavery count as an exception to the rule that an individual can only ever have one body?
Posted: Sat May 21, 2022 3:28 pm