30
Dec
2019
Soho Forum Debate on Abortion
This was the best presentation I’ve seen Walter Block give for his “evictionism” stance. I only watched the two opening statements. Is Block saying that if the fetus is non-viable then removal should be illegal? It wasn’t obvious to me what his view was on that (currently extremely important) point.
No, you can evict the baby at any point even if it’s not viable. You just wouldn’t be able to kill and evict a viable baby. He argues that as medical tech improves and babies become viable at earlier stages that eventually killing any baby would be illegal.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read him on this, but he has some conditionals before the woman can evict, but I don’t remember what they were or why, or if they only apply to viable or non-viable.
Here was his debate that fleshed out his views that I remember being pretty informative back in the day. http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2010/lp-2-32.pdf
And to make his position a little clearer, he makes a distinction between eviction and abortion. Eviction is removing the baby without killing, and abortion is removing and killing. Then he further posits that as long as you make every attempt to save the baby while evicting it, then it’s not abortion. If the baby dies because it’s unviable, so be it, but it’s not murder in that case. So, presumably, methods of evicting a baby would have to be much different than current methods of abortion. You certainly couldn’t intentionally kill the baby and then induce labor, for instance.
Dan, did you listen to the whole Soho forum debate? What you are describing is what I took to be Block’s position before, when I heard him live in Auburn. But in these opening remarks he was less clear. I thought maybe he was willing to say you couldn’t evict if it would kill the baby.
Yeah I listened to it all. His position is still that same as always. He explicitly addresses your question throughout.
OK thanks. I wasn’t doubting you, just wanted to be sure.