Both the anti-abortion argument and the argument for abortion rights in last week’s issue of the Maroon get something wrong — they don’t look at the property rights involved in abortion.

Although correct conclusions can sometimes be gotten from shoddy foundations, this is rare, and it’s why I believe so many people are unsure or have weak positions on abortion.

The main tenets of evictionism are two-fold. First, that life begins at conception. For a sperm alone cannot eventually develop to become a human being and an egg alone cannot develop to become a human being, while a fertilized egg might.

Secondly, the evictionist position is predicated on the self-ownership of the mother and the unborn fetus, which is hopefully self-evident
to all.

The mother of an unborn child owns her womb and has the right to evict an unwanted person from her property at any time. At any point in the pregnancy process the unborn person may be legally evicted under evictionism.

At the same time, the child owns itself, meaning that no direct harm may be done to it by outside actors. Problems arise pre-viability when the eviction of the fetus would cause its death.

However, there are no positive obligations on the part of the mother. Just as I may not be punished for not feeding or supporting starving children around the world, the mother of the fetus has no obligation to use her womb to support and shield the fetus from the outside environment.

To force the woman to keep something inside of her which she doesn’t want is to trespass against her in one of her most personal places.

At the same time, a woman has very limited rights under evictionism to partial birth abortions. One legal precedent about eviction is that it must be done in the least harmful way possible to the person being evicted, and killing an unborn child when you could remove it alive is a blatant murder.

The one exception to this would be if the only way to evict the child would also kill it; in this scenario, the death of the fetus would not be murder, so long as there are no other possible means of eviction.

Under evictionism, the mother has the right to evict the child but not to kill it, unless the only way to save the mother’s life is to kill the unborn child.

Nathan Fryzek, Economics junior, [email protected]