Solving the Abortion Conundrum

Abortion has been a contentious topic in libertarian thought for some time now. On the one hand, there are libertarians who hold any restrictions on a right to abortion as being "akin to slavery," since they force a woman to have her body used to "host" an intruder whom she wishes to be rid of. For instance, Steve Horwitz writes:

"I'm strongly pro-choice and I do believe that one can and should find constitutional protection for the right to choose…. I think that forcing pregnant women to carry to term is akin to slavery, and in the same way I would not tolerate a state that permitted slavery, I am unwilling to tolerate the banning of abortion at the state level."

On the other hand, for libertarians who understand a foetus to be a full-fledged human being, abortion represents a specific type of murder. Whatever legal apparatus exists to protect rights, whether that of a limited state or some non-state system, ought to protect the life of this helpless individual and forbid abortion. That is the position of, for instance, Ron Paul.

Is there no way out of this impasse? I suggest there is, and will begin my effort to indicate the direction to head with an analogy. Imagine you are sailing your boat along at sea, minding your own business, when you hear a noise behind you. You turn around and find a bedraggled looking man climbing from out of the waves onto your craft.

"Thank God you happened by!" he says. "My ship sank, and I’ve been clinging to the mast for a day now. I had almost given up hope."

You nod solemnly at him, walk across the deck, pick him up, and throw him back in the ocean. "You see," you explain to an imagined audience of shocked onlookers, "he was trespassing. I came out here for some solitude, and the idea that now I’m compelled to accommodate him makes me into kind of a slave, doesn’t it?"

In most people's view and in most legal regimes, this justification is pathetic and you are guilty of murder. And I think that verdict is correct. (I realize some libertarians may disagree, and my argument may be unconvincing to them.) But what of your complaint that you are being enslaved by being forced to take this unwelcome passenger?

The fact that you cannot toss the man off your ship does not compel you to go anywhere you were not going before. If the interloper says he would really prefer to be let off in Boston rather than your destination of New York, you can tell him to bugger off. Most importantly, you are not compelled to keep the man aboard one moment longer than is necessary to get him to safety. At the first moment you reach a populated land, your responsibility for the man’s fate ends. Yes, you are inconvenienced, but that is all – and in a decent society, when you are in a unique position for being able to save someone’s life at the cost of a minor inconvenience to yourself, you are obliged to do so.

I argue that the analogy to abortion is straightforward. A woman may not have meant to have "picked up" the passenger she is carrying and might find his presence annoying, inconvenient, etc. However, it is certainly not the passenger’s fault he finds himself there, and he has committed no tort against her. To deliberately kill him is just as much an act of murder as your tossing the shipwreck victim back into the sea – in fact, the position of the foetus is stronger than that of the shipwreck, because the shipwreck had to purposefully crawl aboard the ship, while the foetus found itself there willy-nilly.). On the other hand, once the woman can "put ashore" the foetus, she can ethically rid herself of the unwanted burden.

Therefore, as I see it, the ethical way to end an unwanted pregnancy is to deliver the baby at the first moment it is likely to be viable, and place it up for adoption. This may seem burdensome, but advances in medical technology are pushing that "first moment" back earlier and earlier, so that soon it will approach the initial detection of the pregnancy itself. It won’t be long before a foetus can quickly and easily be relocated in an artificial womb of some sort, or the womb of a willing mother. Once that happens, what excuse will there be for killing the child? The woman may complain that this still leaves her with the perhaps unsettling knowledge that she has a biological child somewhere, one whom she doesn’t know. Not to diminish the true unease that may cause, but I think it pales compared to the distress caused by being chopped up inside a womb.