Libertarians Can, Rather Should, Be Abolitionists.
How should libertarians seek justice when state action is an unavoidable means?
This article is written from the perspective of, and to the Libertarian Christian Anarchist. Therefore, conclusions drawn will assume preference to the Orthodox Christian perspective and the libertarian creed. It also deals primarily with the Abolitionist movement against abortion, although not limited to that in scope.
What is an Abolitionist?
At the highest level, an Abolitionist, loosely defined by Murray Rothbard, is a person who adopts immediatism as a means to achieve a social goal. From a Christian perspective, an abolitionist is he who seeks to abolish evil in every form, without resorting to gradualism, and demands its abolition by bringing said evil into conflict with the Gospel. Abolitionists highlight an evil that needs to be abolished, and work diligently to provoke the culture to abolish it “immediately and without compromise”. Their scope is not limited to that highlighted evil, in fact when they succeed in abolishing it, they begin anew, fighting again to abolish the next major societal evil in their day.
“Well Henry, what should we abolish next?” — William Wilberforce
In the context of Abortion, Abolitionists take issue with the pro-life movement and demand an end to the practice “immediately and without compromise”. They take issue with the pro-life movement’s continued policy preference to simply wait for Roe v Wade to be overturned, and demand that local legislators force the issue by nullifying Roe v Wade at their level, whether that be state, county, or municipality. The pro-life movement seeks primarily to end abortion via gradualism — that is, by slowly regulating it into oblivion. They essentially ask the supreme court over and over what they can get away with, and seek to slowly chip away at the beast. We’ve had nearly 50 years of conducting this experiment, and there’s no data to suggest that this method has been productive in any way when it comes to seriously decreasing the number of abortions performed.
How should the Libertarian Christian Anarchist respond to Abortion?
This article assumes the position that abortion is a direct and principal violation of self-ownership and the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). In the well-known debate between Kerry Baldwin of the Libertarian Christian Institute and distinguished libertarian writer Walter Block, we were shown that the most effective means of arguing against abortion from the libertarian perspective involved applying the NAP to fetal self-owners. This has immediate implications for how abortion would be approached in a libertarian social order, as well. A truly libertarian society would protect all of the rights of the individual through common law and competitive governance, including the rights of the fetus. Therefore, we know that it is possible to have a stateless society that doesn’t allow for abortion, or slavery for that matter. Given that abortion clearly violates the rights of a sovereign self-owner, a true exegete of the libertarian social order would rightly define abortion as a crime. This inherently puts it in the same category of other crimes in the libertarian social order, like theft, rape, chattel slavery, or pedophilia. We should regard abortion as such, thus, of the same severity.
While that distinction is necessary, the ways in which abortion can be rejected in the libertarian utopia is not the goal of this article, although it will be touched on briefly. The goal of this article is to urge libertarians to actively fight as abolitionists in the fight against abortion.
The main objection lobbied against abolitionism from the libertarian perspective is that abolition requires positive action from the state to be achieved, and is therefore unjust. The preeminent determination of this article, therefore, is to approach this objection with challenge and grace. The prevailing perspective of libertarian anarchists is that the state should never be prescribed a solution that involves doing something, but should always be prescribed solutions that limit it’s own action. It could be said that libertarians should always approach policy with erasers instead of pens. This ideal would ultimately disqualify abolitionism on its most basic level, because (in certain key areas) it currently requires state action to compel the evil’s end. How can a libertarian advocate for state action against something, when it affirms the illegitimacy of the state?
First, it’s helpful to point out how abortion would be abolished in a stateless society — interposition. Interposition is the act of inserting one’s self between an attacker and a victim, and demanding an end, by force if necessary. (This is justified force, as it’s a response to the initiation of aggression by the perpetrator) This act of interposition is most acutely personified in the person of Jesus, whom interposed between God the Father and the elect and took the wrath of God meant for them upon himself, so that they could be justified and reconciled. In a libertarian order, the immediate response of seeing a child be endangered by an aggressor would be interposition; to put yourself in front of the child as a shield. Common law would then dictate punishment and retribution for the aggressor, delegated by either contract law, societal norms, or private town charter. Take the example of the drowning baby in a backyard pool, for example. The libertarian social order would allow for the interposition of a bystander between the water and the baby, even though that action violated private property boundaries. It was a necessity to save a life. We can see this doctrine being accepted in today’s context, as well. If you were to walk by a house and be shocked to see missing children being held captive behind the front bay window, the current court system would surely exonerate your “crime” of breaking that window as a justified means to the end of freeing the children. The main issue here when contemplating abortion in our current context is that direct interposition is illegal. In this illegitimate system, we simply are prohibited from ending the holocaust that is abortion directly.
We simply cannot interpose directly in the process of the abortionist and mother performing an abortion on the innocent fetus right now. It is state action that prevents this.
The Abolitionist prescription deals primarily in nullification. Any libertarian worth his salt knows that nullification is a necessary step in the advancement of liberty in our age. We have all lauded the ideals of removing federal regulations by local nullification, but what if that federal regulation enforced negative action upon prosecuting a crime? What if, the federal government was to dictate that local municipalities no longer have a constitutional right to prosecute pedophilia? Kidnapping? This is exactly the dilemma we face in the prospect of abortion. Through Roe v Wade, the federal government has imposed a prohibition of banning abortions.
We’re anarchists, so we applaud any law that prevents law, correct? I believe this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the libertarian proposition. For example, in Oklahoma’s 2018 election, the state made a landmark move to legalize medical marijuana. In doing so, they also prohibited local municipalities from enacting zoning restrictions relating to dispensaries. This decision, while on its face seems libertarian, is in fact ill-libertarian because it centralizes the decision for local communities. In a libertarian society, a man or woman should feel free to live in a town where they have contractually agreed to not allow marijuana dispensaries. The libertarian prioritizes decentralization over fiat federal libertinism. So, even though Roe v Wade prevents law, it is ill-libertarian because it makes the decision for the local municipalities. Indeed, an anarchist society is not a society without laws, but rather a system in which enacting law is not monopolized.
Therefore, this is the primary lament of the Libertarian Christian Anarchist: not that the civil authority enacts justice, but that the state has a monopoly on enacting justice. The Libertarian Christian Anarchist still celebrates justice being served in the public realm. He does not advocate for a justice-free system of government.
So, if this is the primary lament that the anarchist has in regards to civil authority, this has direct implications on our consideration of abortion in the modern age. We lament that the kings of this world have a monopoly, and additionally judge unjustly. In speaking to the kings of the world, God asks in Psalm 82, “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.” If the illegitimate kings of the world are not to use their power to judge justly, then why does God petition them to do so? Indeed, the problem is that they’ve used their God-ordained authority with partiality. It is therefore not unjust for the anarchist to petition the governing authority to correct that costly mistake, in fact if we are to take the examples of Moses, Esther and Paul as imperatives, we are compelled to do so by scripture.
In the story of Esther, we see a woman who petitions a king to judge justly. She urges him to enact positive action that rescues the Jews who were being carried off to slaughter. Haman, the primary aggressor, is also delivered justice. This was a decree from the king that punished criminal behavior. The bible does not treat this action as unjust, but as an action that glorifies God. Does this exonerate kings in a general sense? Does is grant legitimacy to their worldly power? No, but it does add to the myriad of examples of kingly action that is treated as just.
Therefore, the thesis of this article is that positive action should not be seen as a net negative at all times. In humbleness and grace, I believe that the position that “Abolishing abortion with state action can never be justified” is the result of a lazy approach towards libertarian ethics. If you were to take this position, that would mean that any state action to curtail murder or aggressing upon an individual at all should be seen as unjust.
No anarchist believes that the penultimate prescription for fixing society starts with the police ceasing to prosecute murder. Indeed, they have a solution for how murder shall be prosecuted in a stateless society, but bringing about that stateless society should not be instigated by a failure of the state to deal with murderers justly. So, we as libertarians, while affirming the ultimate illegitimacy of the state, shall still petition it to judge justly. This glorifies God.
To hammer my point more effectively, the argument that abortion should not be abolished via state action in our current context can be further explored in a exigent hypothetical scenario where child molestation was legalized. In this scenario, a supreme court ruling prohibits states from enacting policies that prohibit child molestation. As libertarians, we would correctly petition our local governments to nullify that supreme court decision. We would not say, “Well, fixing this would require the police to be involved, and that would just make child molestation happen behind closed doors.” We would not say this, however, this is the argument we encounter when it comes to abortion. “It’s better that it remains in the open, where it’s transparent and regulated”, libertarians regularly posit. They (correctly) compare a hypothetical prohibition of abortion to the drug war, where the action is not stopped, but rather shifted to the black market. This is an obvious inevitability. However, we should treat abortion differently, because it is not a victimless crime. Yes, prohibition will cause abortions to be performed more dangerously, and without market sanitation, but this failure of effective prosecution is a failure of the modern nation-state monopoly. This is a problem that will be solved by the more efficient libertarian legal order in the future, God willing. That failure cannot be used as an excuse for the state to cease bearing the sword justly, and let murderers go unpunished.
As another example, I’ll point to Murray Rothbard’s 1978 article in the Libertarian Review, “What Libertarians Should Learn from the Abolitionists”. Murray Rothbard suffered from a blind spot in the case of fetal self-ownership, and was pro-choice. This does not invalidate his urge to abolitionism, as his ideas on the abolition of slavery can be directly applied to the plight of the unborn.
If victory is indeed our given end, an end given to us by the requirements of justice, then we must strive to achieve that end as rapidly as we can.
But this means that libertarians must not adopt gradualism as part of their goal; they must wish to achieve liberty as early and as rapidly as possible. Otherwise, they would be ratifying the continuation of injustice. They must be “abolitionists.” — Murray Rothbard
He correctly points to William Lloyd Garrison as a charter example of a libertarian abolitionist. He also lauds his courage in his 1973 book, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.
Keep in mind, that abolishing slavery required positive state action, because of the imperfect system in which they (and we) lived. This did not stop the libertarian abolitionist Garrison from advocating for immediate abolition of slavery, as we also should advocate for the immediate abolition of abortion. Now, this is not to mean that Garrison pointed to war as the ultimate solution to this problem, in fact I have yet to be made aware of an abolitionist who did. However, as the abolitionist Frances Harper pointed out in her poem, To The Cleveland Union-Savers, war would be an inevitability. War would be God’s punishment upon a land with blood on it’s hands.
…
There is blood upon your city, —
Dark and dismal is the stain;
And your hands would fail to cleanse it,
Though you should lake Erie drain.There’s a curse upon your Union!
Fearful sounds are in the air;
As if thunderbolts were forging,
Answers to the bondsman’s prayer.Ye may bind your trembling victims,
Like the heathen priests of old;
And may barter manly honor
For the Union and for gold; —But ye cannot stay the whirlwind,
When the storm begins to break;
And our God doth rise in judgment,
For the poor and needy’s sake.”— Frances Harper
War is never the answer, but if we do not do everything in our power to end the suffering of the innocent, God will judge us and our land in his sovereign ways. The Day of the Lord is very rarely diplomatic negotiation.
Notice that Rothbard does not chastise Garrison in his article. He has the benefit of sitting in the modern day, looking back on the horrors of slavery with hindsight. Perhaps, if he had lived during that day, he would have taken the stance that many libertarians take today in regards to abortion, that prohibition would be futile and unjust. Perhaps he wouldn’t. However, if he did, he would simply be making the same mistake many of us do today. Take what we say and apply it to that context. “Silly Garrison, don’t you know that prohibiting slavery would only lead to slavery being performed in the black market? That it would be too costly for the government to handle? Don’t you know that compelling the state to act on this evil is using an evil means to fight it?”. This is something we should ponder. If our arguments cannot be applied to similar things of the past effectively, why do we continue to use them today?
In conclusion, it is not an inherent contradiction to believe that state action is justified when it comes to aggressive crimes, and that the state itself is illegitimate. It simply is the truth that the state has the monopoly on instituting justice, and our scriptures compel us to petition that state to judge justly and end its partiality to the wicked. Abolitionism is the answer, and we as libertarians should add our intellectual input to this movement, and fight to abolish abortion in our lifetimes. The Abolitionist movement, in its modern context regarding abortion, is a movement that is very close to taking the white pill of libertarianism — that Jesus is King and Caesar is not, and that justice ultimately rides on the kingship of Christ on earth. Its direct prescription is nullification, and its theological distinctive is providential gospel-centrality. If anyone reading this has any interest in learning more about the Abolitionist movement, they’ll come to find that it is teeming with scripture and the beauty of Christ. I do not want us to miss this, because when the body of Christ works together to bring the Gospel into conflict with the evil of its day, we see the beauty of the church in full display.
