In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, James Melville, a commenter in the UK, tweeted the following concerning possible stances towards abortion on the one hand and vaccine mandates on the other:

Such an argument is designed to draw attention to the apparent inconsistency of both the conservative right (which would normally oppose both abortion rights and vaccine mandates) and the liberal left (whom we would expect to favour both).

From a libertarian perspective, one could, in response, point out that the state has no right to impose any kind of mandate upon anybody. So one could easily oppose state imposed, vaccine mandates while believing that there is no, or a limited, right to abort a pregnancy.

That aside, however, your right to self-ownership (or to “bodily autonomy”) is sacrosanct only so long as you are not committing an act of aggression against the person or property of another. Melville’s argument therefore turns on whether someone who believes that abortion is an aggressive act must necessarily believe that the possibility of carrying a virus and potentially spreading it through ordinary, social contact is also an aggressive act. (For the sake of argument, let us assume that vaccines are an effective method of defence against the virus in question). And the converse must be true also: if a person regards one of the acts to be non-aggressive, that person must believe that the other isn’t aggressive either.

This seems to me to be far from proven. 

Any person holding the first view cited by Melville – anti-mandate and anti-abortion – could easily point out that the two situations are so spectacularly different in terms of a) the relationship between alleged perpetrator and alleged victim, and b) the certainty of the causal relationship between act and harm, that there is no problem in construing abortion as being aggressive while remaining unvaccinated is not. Thus, it would be consistent for this person to say that one’s right to resist vaccine mandates is absolute while suggesting that a carrying mother has no, or a limited right, to abort a pregnancy.

An individual holding the second view could plausibly maintain that people have a right to not be infected by viruses carried by others, thus favouring vaccine mandates. But this would not require that person to regard an unborn foetus as a legal person with (limited) rights to self-ownership that temper the rights of the carrying mother.

One may, of course, criticise each individual view on its own merits. But it seems to me that there is nothing inherently contradictory in coming to different conclusions in each situation.

Political Unionism after Roe v. Wade

[Originally Published on Free Life]

When asked to account for the inspiration behind his voluminous output, Murray N Rothbard is supposed to have replied “hatred is my muse”. In other words, he could not bear to let the scores of fallacies etched into some statist screed stand unanswered.

I myself receive few visits from this particular muse. In fact, to become riled by the predictably ignorant emissions of mainstream authors, journalists and pundits would probably be detrimental to one’s own sanity – more so today than in Rothbard’s lifetime. (Either way, it goes without saying that I am unlikely to come close to matching the great man’s extraordinary contributions). However, I do experience more than a passing encounter with some combination of wrath and despair in one, particular situation: when confronted by some piece of errant nonsense penned by a libertarian (or fellow traveller) who is in the position to know better.

Those following the political situation in the United States may have heard that the Supreme Court in Washington, DC has recently delivered several, broadly favourable judgments in US constitutional law, including: one striking down a New York gun control law, and, on June 24th, another reversing the landmark decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade.[1] While the effect of the latter is limited to declaring that abortion should be a matter regulated by the states – most blue states will inevitably continue to allow terminations – abortion, with Roe as its centrepiece, has become part and parcel of the US culture war. As such, rather than being regarded as a simple reversal of Federal overreach, it is arguable that the overruling of Roe has symbolised the struggle for the control of America.[2] Indeed, shortly after the decision, conservative commentator Matt Walsh tweeted:

Thus, amidst the jubilation of conservatives, traditionalists, states’ rights advocates and their allies, the US Libertarian Party – which has recently come under the control of the Rothbardian/Paulian “Mises Caucus” – was much less enthusiastic:

To counter what seems, to me, to be a reasonably sensible take, another user decided to tweet the following:

This comment fails to grasp in every way the reasons why libertarians should support the decentralisation of state power.

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