The standard appeal of libertarians is to the idea of the ownership of one’s self. I own myself, therefore, I am the only person authorized to make decisions on how my body and by extension property are used. This makes issues of coercion very clear: if you’re threatening or using violence to modify someone’s otherwise peaceful behavior, then you are claiming authority over his body, which makes the coercion wrong. Or it at least makes for an undesirable arrangement if your goal is a well-functioning society.
Should people be allowed to take harmful drugs? Does a person own his body? Since the answer is yes, then he should be allowed to take those drugs without violent interference even if they cause personal harm. Should someone be allowed to eat nothing but fast food and other junk? The answer again is of course yes because of the idea of self-ownership.
Should a woman be allowed to get an abortion? She owns her body, so shouldn’t she be able to have the authority over what’s in it? But wait, “what’s in it” is a human fetus. Now the waters are muddied.
There are a number of libertarians (and non-libertarians) who say that they are personally pro-life but pro-choice for everyone else. It’s “her body, her choice,” and their choice is to never have an abortion, but they don’t want to interfere with the autonomy of other women. That might sound consistent on the surface, but it ignores what it actually means to be “pro-life.”
Being pro-life means that you believe that abortion is wrong because it kills a peaceful human. And since that human had no say in whether he was conceived and has no ability to just get up and leave the womb when commanded to, he would also have to be considered innocent. Libertarians obviously do not support murder, so to say that you are pro-life for yourself and pro-choice for others means that you completely miss the point of what being pro-life means. To hold these two views must mean that you believe that the fetus is a human life but that it is objectively subordinate to the choice of a woman to carry the child to full term or not.
Yet that doesn’t seem to make any sense. It can’t be what these libertarians mean. Remember, no one says, “I’m against theft myself, but I don’t want to interfere with anyone else’s choice to commit theft.”
The question of abortion comes down to two fundamental questions:
- When does human life begin?
- When is it permissible to kill another human?
These questions require addressing what the act of abortion truly entails instead of skirting around it with a quick libertarian cliché. But pro-choice libertarians will use phrases like “her body, her choice” because it absolves them from the need to square up the incongruency of simultaneously supporting self-ownership and supporting the killing of a peaceful human life.
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