Abortion is a Property Rights issue

A wonderful little piece by Humble
B Wonderful
has lead me to ponder the abortion
issue again. Essentially her position is that abortion is a property
rights issue and provides a wonderful thought exercise on her blog in
regards to that position. I agree with her points. Further more I
agree with the Objectivist
View that abortion is Pro-life and it is a property rights issue.
The right to property or ownership is the freedom to use and dispose
of one's property as you see fit. The first thing one owns as a
separate individual being is one's body. Therefore, the right to
property in this case is the right to use and/or dispose of ones body
as you see fit. A government that states or is given the power to
control what goes in or what goes out of your body, implies they have
a right to the use/ or dispose of your body. Government is only
a group of individuals. So lets follow this reasoning to its
conclusion. A group of individuals that controls the use of /or
dispose of your body implies that you are the property of this group
or government. This is just plain slavery. The rights of a fetus
would be the right to slavery. That's just not right at all.

Let us make another observation, that a fetus is not a human being. It
is a potential human being. For example, a peach seed can become a
peach tree. A peach seed is a potential peach tree or in other
words ungrown tree. However, a peach seed is not the same as a peach
tree. The peach tree can feed you now if it is the right season and a
peach seed by itself can not feed you any season until it becomes an
actual peach tree. Now, potentials have value and this explains the emotional attachment
to a fetus. If there is a chance or a potential to gain something in
life that you value and if that potential opportunity has ended, most of us would be
sad. The greater the value the more that we would be sad. Our
feelings however do not change that a women's body is her
property.
The fetus can live off of it biologically as long as it
has the
permission of the mother.
Some
may ask why we many times refer to the fetus as child or baby if it is not an actual being. If you think
about it, how many times have we talked about a potential as if it
were an actual already. You drive by the home that you are
going to buy and say "there is my home" instead of
saying "there is my future home and it is owned by the Jones
right now". We use present terms to show how much we value the potential future.

A final thought on property rights, is that all parts of the body
feel pain and have reactions. Body parts also can not survive with
out being attached to a person's body or some machine to keep it
alive. A fetus until born is a body part. It depends on the
mother's body to survive. Sure, there are means to keep fetuses of a
certain age alive outside the body and once they are removed from the
body they should have full rights because they are no longer part of
the mother's body. Yet, while they are a part of the mother's body,
if the mother decides she no longer gives the fetus permission to
stay in her body the fetus most be removed in the safest way for the
mother. This may be a C-section or could be an abortion. This is up
to the mother and her doctor's expert opinion.
Now, I know some
will say that fetuses can laugh, cry, avoid light sources and etc.
However, Studies into Fetal Brain & Cognitive Development show
that these are reactions caused by the brain stem not the cognitive
area which would be the fore brain. This brings us back to
a fetus being a potential being not an actual being. A fetus is more like a body part of the mother and abortion is an extension of the right of
property that the mother holds over her own body. The fetus does not gain
these rights until it is an actual being not a part of the mother. Abortion is pro-life. It is pro the mother's life the
only actual being in this situation and not the potential human
being.

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