Written by One of the biggest problems plaguing libertarian philosophy is the issue of abortion. There are several divides on the issue, including the classic “is it a person?” question, but most people with a modicum of intellectual integrity abandon this at some early point in the pregnancy.
One solution to this for libertarian abortion advocates is to say that the parents incur no positive obligation to the child by creating it. Murray Rothbard talked about this in Ethics of Liberty, and Walter Block furthered the position, coining the term evictionism. The idea being that the child is in fact a person, and killing it would be an act of initiatory force thus forbidden under the non-aggression principle – the core axiom of libertarianism. Simultaneously though, since the parents incur no positive obligation by their act of creating the child, the mother cannot be compelled to carry the child to term, or to care for it after birth. The mother can “evict” the infant from her womb at any time during the pregnancy, and the infant is responsible for itself. Predictably, this leads to the death of the child, but per the advocates of evictionism, that is not the parents’ problem.
I have refuted this theory quite thoroughly in a piece on my blog titled “On Evictionism, and Abortion” as well as during a segment of Free Talk Live. Unfortunately for liberty, this hasn’t stopped abortion advocates from conflating the wholesale slaughter of innocent life with libertarianism.
Whether you still think “it’s just a clump of cells” or you think it’s just fine to let children starve and suffocate for the sake of “reproductive rights,” you owe it to yourself to watch the video below. The Center for Bioethical Reform, in partnership with the Grantham collection, has released the full version of a video which became a source of political controversy after the 2nd Republican debate.