Natural Rights and the Right to Choose [Hardcover]

This book argues that the 'right to abortion' has shifted American politics away from the doctrine of natural rights held by the Founders.The American political class has talked itself out of the doctrines of natural rights that formed the main teaching of the American Founders. In the name of privacy , vast new liberties have been claimed, all of them bound up in some way with the notion of sexual freedom. Hadley Arkes argues that the right to choose an abortion overturned the liberal jurisprudence of the New Deal, so that if there is a right to abortion, it has been detached from the logic of natural rights and stripped of moral substance.The American political class has talked itself out of the doctrines of natural rights that formed the main teaching of the American Founders. In the name of privacy , vast new liberties have been claimed, all of them bound up in some way with the notion of sexual freedom. Hadley Arkes argues that the right to choose an abortion overturned the liberal jurisprudence of the New Deal, so that if there is a right to abortion, it has been detached from the logic of natural rights and stripped of moral substance.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, they have talked themselves out of the ground of their own rights. But the irony is that they have made this transition without the least awareness, and indeed with a kind of serene conviction that they have been expanding constitutional rights. Since 1965, in the name of privacy and autonomy, they have unfolded, vast new claims of liberty, all of them bound up in some way with the notion of sexual freedom, and yet this new scheme of rights depends on a denial, at the root, of the premises and logic of natural rights. Hadley Arkes argues that the right to choose an abortion has functioned as the rilC