Natural Rights and the Right to Choose

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.