A True Human Rights Approach to Abortion

Abortion would not really be a contentious issue if only people used common sense and logic in their evaluation of its ethicality. And yet there have been volumes of published works pertaining to it, and supporting some argument or another over "abortion rights". Logic is dead - Aristotle would be devastated. But let me shorty explain what is in my opinion the only truly justifiable position in the abortion debate. There are a couple of basic premises on which I base my conclusions:
1. Everyone has the right of self-defense against any unprovoked aggression.
2. Everyone has a right to life unless he/she infringes the equal right of any other person (this is a paraphrased version of Spencer's Law of Equal Liberty of which I am a strong supporter)
Now let's apply these principles (which are definitions of basic human rights) to a few of the usually controversial cases in abortion debates. (If someone does not believe in human rights, then I assume everything that follows in this discussion is irrelevant.)
A. Abortion on request - the woman simply wants to "get rid of" the baby, giving no coherent reason other than her being willing to have the abortion performed. This case clearly violates statement number 2. The baby is not infringing the right to life of the mother, therefore she has no way to justify attacking the baby. Killing members of species homo sapiens simply because they exist or you don't like them is clearly wrong.
B. Abortion for "socioeconomic reasons" - here the mother offers certain dubious and very subjective arguments to prove her case; she can, for example, state that she doesn't know who the father is (and the baby will be worse off once it's born) or that she is unable to financially cope with taking care of a child (and the baby will be worse off once it's born). This once again violates statement number 2. Just because someone may be an inconvenience to you, does not mean you have the right to kill them (or otherwise get rid of them).
C. Abortion due to fetal defects - the baby has some genetic or developmental disorder which will impair it in later life after birth. Again (as stated in number 2), just because someone is quote "not normal" and may at some stage be a burden to you or other people, does not give anyone the right to kill that person.

These three cases were very straightforward, let's now move on to more complicated matters.

D. "Medically justified" abortion - the mother can prove with testable results that the pregnancy will harm her health (this can be anything from loss of eye-sight or hearing to death of the mother). This is a more complicated issue, I approach it from the angle of the existence of a mother-child implied contract*. Thus, when a woman willingly engages in any activity which can lead to pregnancy, she willingly creates a scenario where she says (implicitly) "this activity may result in me becoming pregnant". Therefore, once she says this, she cannot classify the possible pregnancy as something that was forced on her, but rather has to acknowledge that she now has a responsibility for the baby in her womb (I am explaining it here, but this also applies to cases A,B, and C discussed above). The woman understands the possible consequences of her pregnancy, and one of those is physical harm to her own body. Therefore strictly speaking even if she is in mortal danger she cannot kill the baby, she can only get rid of it if, for instance, the fetus is already dead. It could be said that here the woman can invoke the right given her by statement 1 (self-defense), however, it is not so. By accepting the consequences of the possible pregnancy, she has also accepted the possibility of danger! There is another solution to this problem, which I will discuss below with reference to case E (look for "evictionism").

E. Abortion after rape - the pregnancy was caused by rape. In this case, can the woman simply kill the baby because she had no implicit contract with it? I say - she cannot. As long as the baby does not pose any threat to her, she cannot kill it - it has a right to life as stated in statement 2 (even though it "entered her body" without her consent). Let me explain this with an analogous situation. If a person walks onto your property unaware that he/she is trespassing, it does not give you the right to automatically shoot or otherwise kill that person. You may only evict them from your property. Now, the baby is certainly not aware that it is trespassing inside the mother's body - it cannot yet at its low developmental stage comprehend the concept of property rights. Therefore the mother can only evict the fetus, but may not kill it. This is called evictionism (a marvelous approach developed by Dr. Walter Block). Evictionism gives the mother the right to protect her rights while also not violating the rights of the baby. It is, of course, not possible with current medical technology to evict a fetus early on in the pregnancy, but with the passage of time it will be. (Now that I have introduced evictionism, let me also say that it is a option in case D, above. It does not violate the mother-child implicit contract because it does not harm the child's rights in any way. It simply saves the mother's health). There is, however, in the case of rape, one example of abortion (killing the unborn baby) that can be justified. For this, two circumstances must exist: a) she has been raped and therefore has no implicit contract with the child (she did not agree to the risks before becoming pregnant) and b) the pregnancy is as such that it threatens her life if continued. Thus the baby (althought mentally incapable of understanding its own actions) is attacking the woman and she can invoke her right of self-defense against an unprovoked attack (as stated in premise 1 at the beginning of this discussion). In an analogous situation: if someone suddenly attacks you in the street and it is clear he/she will harm you, you have the right to strike that person down by any means possible and, if they do not stop the attack, kill them if necessary to save yourself.

*An implied contract is a contractual agreement which is not stated out loud or written down, but is still binding. An example of an implied contract is: "If I take a gun and shoot a bullet up into the sky at random, I am responsible for the damage it causes once it lands back on the ground." or "If I put a pen in my pocket and the ink leaks out, I am responsible for the damage to my trousers."