LEGAL ABORTION IS NOT A COST-BENEFIT ISSUE

    Since our last post on the downfall of the Roe v. Wade decision, quite a number on the Right have been receiving some criticism for their positions that the Supreme Court's ruling was only the beginning  and not the end of the fight for life; and also for calling out the hypocrisy of many so-called 'Conservative' sentiments on the issue. Since the decision was handed down, the Conservative leadership---which has ignored the issue since the 1970s---is doing its best to sweep the issue under the rug and to convince us all that we should continue doing what the Right usually does: look the other way and be thankful we don't live in a libtard state where Abortion is legal. It's rather telling that less than two weeks after the historic ruling, the subject has nearly disappeared from the opinion pages of the Controlled Opposition Conservative press.

  At my suggestion on another site that the SCOTUS Decision could end federally-funded abortions and open the door for a Constitutional ban, one such realistic Conservative commented:

  "J. Alito's well supported Dobbs opinion makes your idea, as well as federal abortion as a federal constitutional rights, absurd...The court didn't say abortion is illegal on federal level. It said that the Constitution is silent. States may authorize it, and most Americans live in states where most abortions are legal post Dobbs. Abortion's here to stay."

  And furthermore: ."First trimester abortions eventually will be upheld everywhere even by state constitutions. The 'potential' life is far different than the post viability person the law should protect. Roe was, as Alito stated, not backed by any amendment-Fifth, Fourteenth, Ninth - or vague liberty provision. But privacy is in some state constitutions, and where it's not it's an attractive alternative for allowing first trimester abortions since a 'person' doesn't exist in the womb at that stage."

  Aside from his utter ignorance of Biology, the one thing noteworthy in this type of argument is a complete disregard for the whole premise of Human Rights: specifically the Right to Life. One of the issues which clearly defines a real Conservative as a opposed to a fake one is that life begins at conception and that this position is not open to debate. Common Sense alone should tell anybody that Life either begins at certain point, or it doesn't. Just like the completely arbitrary 'six-foot social distancing' rule during the height of the COVID hysteria, Conservatives are buying into this whole Trimester nonsense when it's completely obvious that the time from the formation of an embryo to natural birth is a continuum in a single process. A 'trimester' is nothing but a general medical description of various stages in the process.

   But such reasoning is about what we'd expect from a culture that seriously believes gender is something assigned by doctors.

    Now that the Conservative punditocracy has found itself neatly painted in the proverbial corner---with too many constituents demanding that they take action, one of their number Prof. Walter Block wrote a piece on Independence Day justifying the virtue of compromising on the Abortion issue. This article was so bad that I actually thought it was satire at the first reading, but no: this guy really means it. 

   Block argues that: "it might be a good time to consider the philosophical case for and against abortion. Which is correct: The pro-choice view or the pro-life position? Neither. The only tenable stance is a compromise between the two of them, called evictionism...What, then, is evictionism? It is the view that the mother has a right to evict her baby at any stage of its development, but not, ever, to kill him (except in self-defense when her life or health is at stake). At the present level of medical technology, this means that when and if evictionism is adopted as the law of the land, the baby’s life will be protected during the last trimester, when it is viable outside the womb, but not during the first two trimesters, during the time that it is not capable of living on its own (even with help, of course). Hence, evictionism constitutes a compromise position between pro-life and pro-choice."

   No, it doesn't offer a "compromise position," it's a 'pro-choice' position if there ever was one. Stripped of it's pseudo-Libertarian catch-phrases, it's simply "my body, my choice" repackaged to sound appealing to the types of voters who reflexively pull the levers for anyone with an "R" after his name. And now we come  to the philosophical justification for this:

  "How, ever, do we arrive at any such position as this? We do so on the basis of private property rights. The mother is the complete and total owner of her own body. She has “mixed her labor” with this physique of hers, in the words of philosopher John Locke, hence she is the proper owner of it. What about the fetus? The unwanted pre-birth baby is a trespasser!"

  And many on the Right seriously wonder how Conservatives get the reputation of being selfish louts with no regard for the lives or welfare of others? Really? Getting pregnant is no different than signing a rental contract? A woman's body is no different than an undeveloped piece of land? As for John Locke, he'd probably vomit if he heard his name invoked with such ideals.

   As if this actually needed explaining, pregnancy is actually a 'co-ownership' to use Block's rather debased terminology. But as one can see, the whole premise of his argument is based on economics and not on actual biology. His whole concept of the family in general is a reductionist argument as a Cost-Benefit analysis based on the individual profitability of the principals involved. If anyone's inclined to doubt this, Block once elsewhere wrote that:

  "Suppose that there is a starvation situation, and the parent of the four year old child (who is not an adult) does not have enough money to keep him alive. A wealthy NAMBLA man offers his parents enough money to keep him and his family alive – if he will consent to his having sex with the child...Would it be criminal child abuse for the parent to accept this offer? Not on libertarian grounds. For surely it is better for the child to be a live victim of sexual abuse rather than unsullied and dead. Rather, it is the parent who consents to the death of his child, when he could have kept him alive by such extreme measures, who is the real abuser."

   Besides the obvious absurdity of imagining this situation occurring in real life (and we do have to wonder about Block's own inclinations in thinking it up in the first place), this same type of reasoning behind Evictionism is at play here. The child is not a human being, but a commodity; and actually by his logic, selling one's children to purchase narcotics is a perfectly rational decision. In an area near where I live, there's a missing 5-year old girl whose parents are widely suspected of having done exactly that. I strongly tend to believe that the reaction of most of Block's followers would be simply to shake their heads and say "Well that's what she gets for living in a Blue State." After all, Block argues, "Being born is merely a slight change of address."

   Bear in mind that this arrant nonsense isn't being spouted by some drugged-up Leftist at a 'woke' university: these are the sentiments of a full professor of Economics who holds a Chair at the supposedly Conservative Loyola University and another at the prestigious Von Mises Institute, at allegedly Conservative Auburn University. The only Evictionism I would favor is evicting people like this from our schools before they warp any other young minds. I'm all for the freedom of creatures like Block to express their opinions, but to take patently Leftist positions and disguise them as Conservative is a deceptive practice; and proves nothing other than that Conservative schools are just as much a dishonest racket as the 'Woke' neo-Liberal slimepits. 

   The argument that childbirth is nothing more than an economic factor is not a Conservative position, but a Neo-Marxist one. Recall that both Maoist China and the Khmer Rouge encouraged abortion and population control---as a purely economic calculation. Both Mao and Pol Pot believed that their populations were too large to be sustained so they advocated population control as a means of keeping the Collective economically viable. Block and the fake Conservatives are making the same argument except spinning it to the benefit of the individual instead of to the community. 

   This pretense isn't fooling anybody; and the Conservative Movement is not suffering politically because it is 'Pro-Life'; but because it is very much pro-abortion and trying to pose as though the lives of the unborn actually mattered to them. In reality, they embrace a variation of Social Darwinism and their only real disagreement with the Left is who should be declared 'unfit.' Our real problem, the real source of these social divisions we're experiencing is not because we're engaged in some great clash of principles, but instead we're led around by the nose by frauds who are only fighting over who gets a bigger share of the spoils. 

   Again, our problem is a spiritual one. As a society, we need to start thinking more about our accountability to God than to our earthly accountants figuring out the Bottom Line. We need to think helping our neighbors instead of helping ourselves to the Public Trough. Otherwise, nothing is going to change.