Part 3

Libertarians Cannot Be Anti-Choice: A Rebuttal to Jakub Wisniewski

Sharon Presley

Jakub Wisniewski attempts to make a libertarian argument against legal abortion. Yet what he comes up with is neither libertarian nor moral. His case is full of errors, ignores realities, and offers solutions that would not work.

The Claim That a Fetus Is Not a Person

Wisniewski claims that abortion violates the libertarian non-aggression principle but admits that it hinges on whether the fetus is a person. If the fetus is not a person, his argument fails. He asserts that because it is a “developing” human, it is therefore a person. To say that there is no difference between a developing entity and the final product is already a conceptual problem. A “developing” structure without a roof or electricity is not in fact a house or an office building.

More importantly, his definition of “person” is at odds with the philosophical, psychological, and legal meanings of “person.” The requirements for “person” as defined by philosophy and psychology include sentience, agency, self-awareness, a notion of past and future, continuous consciousness over time, free will and volition, and/or cognitive abilities based on perceptions of the environment. None of these qualities characterizes the fetus. The fetus is not self-aware and has no agency, volition, or any of the other characteristics of personhood. Ergo, the fetus is not a person and the non-aggression principle is not applicable.

Wisniewski’s Argument ad Absurdum

Wisniewski’s criticism of my point that comatose persons and fetuses are not analogous misrepresents the phrase “normal state” and misses the point. Every entity is defined by its characteristics qua entity. The meaning of “human being” or “person” is defined by its natural functioning state. A particular mood-state has nothing to do with the definition of what it means to be a human being. The definition of the normal state of a person, as I have noted, is to have self-awareness, volition, etc. Comatose humans would have these qualities if they were not afflicted by abnormalities of disease or condition. Developmentally disabled people do have self-awareness, volition, and cognitions, even if not always at the same levels as others. Fetuses do not have these qualities even in their normal state; thus they are not in fact analogous to comatose persons.

Wisniewski’s attack on Walter Block is a straw man. I think Block’s argument is absurd and repudiate it entirely. Wisniewski’s critique is, therefore, irrelevant to this discussion.

Wisniewski claims that he takes the rights of the pregnant woman into account, but this is simply untrue. He completely ignores her right to control her own body and her life. He focuses only on the fetus’s alleged rights. But what are the actual consequences of the position that the woman has no right to control her pregnancy? The real-life consequence is that the woman is forced into motherhood. Forced motherhood by law means that her body and life belongs to the state, not to her. In this view, she becomes simply a slave and baby factory for the state, which cannot be trusted to control her own life. How libertarian is this? The answer is: not at all.

Furthermore, insisting that the fetus has a right to life has enormous implications for both the woman herself and for political policy. It implies that the woman who aborts is a murderer and should go to jail. Shall we send both the performer of the abortion and the woman to the death chamber? Is that chilling? It should be. Shall we monitor the pregnant woman to make sure she is not secretly aborting? Shall we inspect every miscarriage? To say that this would require an extensive bureaucracy is an understatement. It would require a Gestapo state capable of prying into the most intimate details of a woman’s life. And this is supposed to be libertarian? If Wisniewski does not want such an outcome, let him tell us why he can maintain that killing the fetus is murder and not accept this policy implication.

Dismissing Real Consequences

Wisniewski, typically for anti-choice people, simply dismisses the consequences of illegal abortion to the pregnant woman, claiming that the costs to her of abortion are less than the consequences to the fetus. He presents the argument as only involving the cost of the woman’s action to the fetus versus the harm the fetus can do to the woman, waving away the “severe psychological consequences” as if they don’t count. Apparently her suffering is unimportant, but a non-self-aware entity that cannot suffer in any meaningful sense is important.

But much more is at stake for women than the dangers of pregnancy or even the psychological consequences. A young woman who is forced to bear a child before she is ready for motherhood may forfeit her chance for an education and a career, which in turn has consequences for her (and the child’s) standard of living. A woman who already has a family but can’t afford more children is forced to reduce her family’s standard of living. This is especially true for poor women.

Throughout anti-choice rhetoric, including Wisniewski’s, is the implicit assumption that income is not an issue, that having too many children is not a problem. Tell that to the poor families of the world or the starving children in Brazil, Africa, and other places where abortion is illegal and women are forced to have more children than they can feed. But rights (and consequences) apply to all people, not just Americans.

Women and Children Are Suffering

Wisniewski’s assumption that “severe psychological discomfort associated with unwanted childbearing” is the only thing at stake for women and so can be brushed aside is totally at odds with reality. Many women are suffering and dying around the world because they do not have reproductive freedom. The implicit idea that all women can easily control their reproduction and “just say no” is also at odds with reality. Many women do not have access to contraception, nor are they in cultures where they can realistically say no to their husbands. Rape is also prevalent in many parts of the world. Since many women are also in cultures where abortions are illegal and unsafe, the consequences are much more serious than lost income or psychological distress. They are dying.

According to the World Health Organization, there about 20 million unsafe abortions per year, mostly in countries where abortion is illegal; about 68,000 of these women die every year. An additional estimated 2–7 million sustain long-term damage or disease. Of those damaged by unsafe abortions, 20–40 percent result in secondary infertility. Don’t their lives matter? Human beings, both woman and children, are suffering and/or dying in the millions every year in large part because abortions are illegal. Any so-called right that results in this much harm and death must be seriously questioned, if not declared outright monstrous.

Non-Solutions

Women never have and never will stop getting abortions no matter what the law says or what anti-choice people do or say. Denying this truth is wishful thinking at best and callous at worst. Most women do not choose abortions frivolously; they do so out of desperation to prevent the bad consequences to themselves and to the child of having an unwanted pregnancy. Women with families (the majority of those who seek abortions) are trying to protect their other children from the consequences of too many mouths to feed and not enough income.

Is it ethical to force the birth of a child who is unwanted or cannot be adequately cared for? Saying that the child could be given up for adoption is unrealistic at best. If a child is abnormal (either mentally or physically) or is nonwhite, the chances of adoption are slim. Nor does it solve the problem of starving children in the third world. A position that dismisses the dire consequences of illegal abortions or unwanted children is thus not only profoundly anti-woman but deeply harmful to children as well.

Not Libertarian

The point of most moral principles, including libertarian ones, is to make life better on earth for the living. Religious principles that suggest otherwise are immaterial to a libertarian view, because libertarians believe in separation of church and state and that no one has the right to force their religious views on others. So if a set of principles results in enormous harm, suffering, and death to living self-aware women and children in order to save entities that have no self-awareness, how can this be called libertarian, let alone moral? Sacrificing the living to the mere potential for life violates any sensible and realistic concept of liberty or morality.

Those who deny reproductive freedom to women are neither libertarian nor moral. They are aggressively anti-woman. To stop women from controlling their own bodies is, in fact, initiating coercion against women. Libertarians—even those who are personally opposed to abortion—have no right to stop women from making the choices that will result in the least harm to them and their children. The full consequences of insisting that abortion be illegal and women be prosecuted is not simply anti-woman; it will establish hell on earth for women. There is nothing libertarian about that at all.

NEXT: Jakub Wisniewski responds to Sharon Presley.