Abortion is Incompatible With Parental Obligations

An AI narration of the article 'Abortion is Incompatible With Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. If parents are causally responsible for the peril they place a child in by bringing them into existence, what does that imply for abortion? Jake traces a striking line of argument first sketched by Richard Werner in 1974 and made explicit by Doris Gordon a few years later: causal parental obligations begin at conception, and abortion is therefore incompatible with them. Werner dismantles Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous burglar analogy and offers a strict-liability gun analogy in its place. Gordon, an Ayn Rand disciple who went on to found Libertarians for Life, shows why the standard Objectivist defence of abortion contradicts the Objectivist account of parental responsibility. Those who deny the incompatibility must abandon causal parental responsibility altogether and resort to a voluntary social-contract theory of parenting. Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 1:04 Richard Werner's Argument 3:51 Doris Gordon and the Objectivist Origin 8:59 The Logical Argument First published at https://www.jakedesyllas.com/blog/2024/11/18/abortion-is-incompatible-with-parental-obligations on 18 November 2024.