Natural Rights and the Right to Choose

This book argues that the 'right to abortion' has shifted American politics away from the doctrine of natural rights held by the Founders.

Hadley Arkes (Author)

9780521812184, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 September 2002

332 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.585 kg

'Hadley Arkes is one of the keenest observers of law and culture in America. I read - no, devour - his writings. Thank God for him.' Charles W. Colson, Prison Fellowship Ministries, Washington, DC

Over the last thirty years the American political class has come to talk itself out of the doctrines of 'natural rights' that formed the main teaching of the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln. With that move, it has removed the ground for its own rights. Ironically, this transition has been made without awareness, with a serene conviction that constitutional rights are being expanded. In the name of 'privacy' and 'autonomy', new claims of liberty have been unfolded, all of them bound up in some way with the notion of sexual freedom. The 'right to choose an abortion' has been the 'right' to shift the political class from doctrines of natural right. This new right overturned the liberal jurisprudence of the New Deal, placing jurisprudence on a different foundation. If there is a right to abortion, it has been detached from the logic of natural rights and stripped of moral substance.

1. Introduction: backing into treason
2. The drift from natural rights
3. On the things the founders knew - and how our judges came to forget them
4. Abortion and the 'modest first step'
5. Anti-jural jurisprudence
6. Prudent warning and imprudent reactions: 'judicial usurpation' and the unravelling of rights
7. Finding home ground: the axioms of the constitution
8. Epilogue: spring becomes fall becomes spring: a memoir.

Subject Areas: Political control & freedoms [JPV], Political science & theory [JPA], Ethical issues: abortion & birth control [JFMA]