KOL443 | Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach (PFS 2024)

Kinsella On Liberty

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 443. “Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach,” 2024 Annual Meeting, Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 22, 2024). https://youtu.be/v9bDRDD2wWU Panel discussion: https://youtu.be/vFCZLT4tMY4 Notes below. Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach Stephan Kinsella Property and Freedom Society 2024 Annual Meeting Bodrum, Turkey September 19–24, 2024 Alright, let’s have as much fun as we can with a topic like this. Contentious issues among libertarians: Anarchy vs. Minarchy Forms of state: monarchy vs. democracy Open borders vs. mass immigration Intellectual Property (we are winning this one) Israel vs. Gaza Ukraine vs. Russia Abortion: Pro-choice and Pro-Life I’ve changed my own mind a bit on this issue, after becoming a parent: from pro-choice. to more sympathetic to pro-life arguments, and to my current decentralist view Traditionally libertarians have tended to be pro-choice, including virtually all Objectivists, though there were always some minority pro-life voices (e.g. Doris Gordon of L4L). In recent years many seem to be more conservative, and more friendly to religion, and many more opposed to abortion than in the past. The LP removed its pro-choice plank in Reno in 2022 as part of the Mises Caucus takeover, the “Reno Reset,” arguing that the issue is not settled and each candidate should be able to adopt their own position on this issue. On some issues it seems possible to make progress. Many libertarians come from conservatism, or sometimes leftism, moving at first towards libertarian minarchism and then eventually to libertarian anarchism. I changed my mind on the IP issue and have managed to persuade a large number of people to adopt the anti-IP position. Views change on the issue of open borders and immigration and on particular issues like Israel vs. Gaza and Russia v. Ukraine. But it seems almost impossible for anyone to change someone else’s mind on the abortion issue. The fact that this issue seems intractable, often rooted in deep lifestyle preferences or religious beliefs, is relevant, I think to how this issue is best solved in a political-legal sense. See Loren E. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 91: “The intractability of the dispute … may itself be philosophically significant.” There are the well-known arguments Pro-choice There is the modern, or feminist, argument: it’s my body. Of course the response is that there is a baby inside which complicates the matter For this reason even most pro-choice people do not not favor legality until birth Ayn Rand: “abortion is a moral right-which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved.” (“Of Living Death,” The Objectivist, Oct. 1968, 6) In Rand’s view, opposition to abortion arises from a failure to grasp both the context of rights and the imposition that child-bearing places on women. As she put it: “A piece of protoplasm has no rights-and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months.” So even Randians recognize difficulty in the later stages of pregnancy Pro-life Then there is the religious-based pro-life argument As this is religious, it is not exactly rational since people of different faiths can have different beliefs about souls, life, rights, and so on Libertarian abortion arguments Pro-Life Doris Gordon of Libertarians for Life: Pro-life she was a neo-Randian and had a secular argument against abortion. However it ultimately was a cheap semantic argument about what it means to be “human”. It’s a simplistic argument, as all semantic arguments tend to be Doesn’t account for rights of non-humans, e.g.