Comments Elsewhere

Holmes:

I think that your central argument — that consent to sex entails accepting responsibility for bearing any child that results — is dead wrong, but I’d rather give my explanation why a post to itself. For now, a couple questions about the view expressed later in your post:

1. If you believe this, then why did you bother to argue in the first place that consenting to sex entails accepting responsibility for bearing any children that result? Since you go on to argue that abortion is still illegitimate even for pregnancies that resulted from rape, you apparently think that consent is irrelevant, and that women bear responsibility for bearing children whether they accepted that responsibility or not. If the lack of consent to sex is irrelevant to a woman’s duties toward a fetus resulting from rape, then I don’t see how the presence of consent to sex becomes relevant to a woman’s duties towards a fetus resulting from consensual sex.

2. Since you apparently do think that consent to sex is irrelevant, and that the needs for a fetus’s life outweigh the unwilling mother’s claims to her own bodily organs, in what sense is Thomson’s Famous Violist case a bad analogy for you? Doesn’t the position you defend in the second part of your post commit you to saying that the cases are analogous, and simply drawing the opposite conclusion from Thomson?

After all, you can’t point to the fact that you didn’t volunteer your bodily organs for the use of the Famous Violinist as a point of disanalogy. You’ve explicitly denied that a fetus’s claim on its mother’s internal organs depends on her having consented. So it looks like the conclusion you ought to draw is that the cases are analogous in all the morally relevant respects, the Famous Violinist has a right to keep on using your body against your will, and if you disconnect her, that’s a form of criminal homicide.

If you’re willing to draw that conclusion, then your position is at least internally consistent. God only knows how you intend to reconcile it with anything recognizable as a libertarian theory of rights to person and property, though.