Footnotes for "Abortion and Rights: Applying Libertarian Principles Correctly" by Doris Gordon

  1. Ron Paul, "Being Pro_Life Necessary To Defend Liberty," LFL Reports no. 1 (1981).
  2. Children's Rights plank, Libertarian Party Platform, 1994.
  3. Some Libertarians for Life associates are religious; others are not. The writer is a Jewish atheist. Originally an abortion choicer, she changed sides in 1976. It was at the 1976 Libertarian Party convention that she conceived of LFL.
  4. Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights," The Objectivist Newsletter, co-edited and published by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, 2, no. 4 (April, 1963): 14.
  5. "A Last Survey," Ayn Rand Letter IV, (November_December 1975): 383.
  6. "The Age of Mediocrity," The Objectivist Forum (June 1981): 3.
  7. Rand, "Man's Rights," p. 14.
  8. Nathaniel Branden, "What Are the Respective Obligations of Parents to Children and Children to Parents?" The Objectivist Newsletter, 1, no. 12 (December 1962): 55.
  9. Congressional Record , 88th Cong., November 28, 1979, E5825_E5826.
  10. Roe v Wade , 410 US 113, 159 (Sup. Ct. 1973).
  11. "The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade," The Yale Law Journal, 82 (1973): 935.
  12. Ibid., p. 947.
  13. Commentaries on the Common Law , published between 1765-1769, quoted in Joan Kennedy Taylor, Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992): 45
  14. "Dred Scott v Sandford: March 6, 1857," Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court II, Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert, eds., Landmark Decisions Series 1992: 16.
  15. "Summary View of the Rights of British America," The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 21.
  16. Frederic Bastiat, The Law, (pamphlet), Dean Russell, trans. (The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1987): 45
  17. Ibid. p. 5.
  18. Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, told Judge Robert Bork that we don't need the Ninth Amendment and the Constitution to have rights; we have rights by virtue of being human beings. (American Enterprise Institute conference, C-Span 2, 12 October 1993). I asked her, if having rights is pre-Constitutional, then why not our personhood, from which our rights flow? She only noted that here we disagree. (Private conversation, Women's Freedom Network Conference, American University, 2 October 1994.)
  19. One was J.M. Individually, v V.C., et al., October 1993. The other was New Jersey v Alexander Loce, February 1994. Libertarians for Life was a signatory to amicus briefs of the University Faculty for Life in both cases.
  20. The Washington Times , 19 January 1995, p. A9.
  21. Edmund A. Opitz, Letter to the Editor, Insight, 3 April 1989: 4.
  22. Roe v Wade , 410 U.S. 113, 163 (Sup. Ct. 1973).
  23. City of Akron v Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc. , 462 US Reports 416 at 458, 15 December 1983.
  24. The Court said in Roe (410 US 113, 163) that "for the stage subsequent to viability the State ... may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother." In Doe (410 US 179, 192), the Court defined "health" to include "all factors--physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age--relevant to the well_being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs to make his best medical judgment. And it is room that operates for the benefit, not the disadvantage, of the pregnant woman."
  25. Richard A. Epstein, "Substantive Due Process by Any Other Name: The Abortion Cases," in Philip B. Kurland et al., The Supreme Court Review, 1973, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974): 184.
  26. Sharon Presley and Robert Cooke, "The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense," Association of Libertarian Feminists Discussion Paper, 1979: 3.
  27. Discrimination plank, Libertarian Party Platform, 1994.
  28. Children's Rights plank, Libertarian Party Platform, 1994.
  29. "Books," The Objectivist Newsletter (May 1963): 18. Rand differed, however, with Aristotle on "essence." She thought of it as "epistemological," whereas Aristotle thought of it as "metaphysical."
  30. Tom Flynn, "The Future of Abortion," Free Inquiry (Fall 1989): 44-46. Flynn suggested that a pro_infanticide position would help withstand attacks against abortion, and that abortion-choicers would do well "to follow [their] rational line [of thinking] wherever it leads"--meaning euthanasia also.
  31. See also John Walker, "Abortion and the Question of the Person,"; Walker, "Power and Act"; Stephen Schwarz, The Moral Question of Abortion, chapters 1_7 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1990).
  32. "Nine Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal," Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., The Washington Post, 6 October 1988.
  33. Laurence H. Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990): 138.
  34. Presley and Cooke, "The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense," 4.
  35. "The New Biology," Reason, (August 1972): 9. In endnote 26, Duke cited Jerome Kagan, "Do Infants Think?," Scientific American, (March 1972).
  36. Quoted in Madalyn Murray O'Hair, "Who Decides?" American Atheist (July 1989):26
  37. Doug Hennessy and Martha Reilly, "Fetal Attraction: High_tech Tests for High_risk Pregnancies," Ms., November 1988: 22, 24.
  38. John Hart Ely and Laurence H. Tribe, "Let There Be Life," The New York Times, 17 March 1981, p. A17.
  39. Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman, "The Coming New Debate On Abortion," Tikkun 8, no.5, (Sept./Oct. 1993): 32.
  40. Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs 47 (1971); reprinted in a collection of her essays, Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory, William Parent, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986): 1-19.
  41. See Tribe. Murray Rothbard also defended abortion as ejection in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978): 108.
  42. See Doris Gordon, "Abortion and Thomson's Violinist: Unplugging a Bad Analogy," (Libertarians for Life, 1993, pamphlet).
  43. Richard A. Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 350 (footnotes omitted).
  44. Ibid., p. 351.
  45. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Pocket Books, 1977): 93.