Who Owns People?

On the Lew Rockwell Blog Saturday, Michael Rozeff started the discussion of who owns people by bringing up U.S. Supreme Court decision Nebbia v. New York, and Justice James McReynolds’s dissent, with McReynolds favoring the right of contract and viewing so-called price regulations as “management, control, and dictation.” Butler Shaffer responded to that in the context of “state ownership of human beings,” and concluded with

…efforts by the state to preserve and promote our health serve the same purpose as a rancher’s interests in caring for his cattle prior to their shipment to the slaughterhouse!

Christopher Manion responded by referring to the subject of state ownership of children, as beginning in America in the 1860s with the start of the mainly anti-Catholic public school movement.

The “civil religion” taught in government schools was designed to neutralize the papist heresies taught in the parochial schools. For the Know-Nothings, Catholic families were not only the competition: they were the enemy.

This reminded me of a post I did in September, regarding the abortion issue,  asking the question, “When does self-ownership begin?” which was a response to a Mises Blog post by Skip Oliva, in which he noted,

Let’s say that, in fact, creation is a source of property rights. Does that mean parents have intellectual property rights in their children? After all, they created them.

In my post, I wrote,

Parents can’t own their offspring, regardless of their labor they exerted  and “tools” they used, because their “product” happens to be another separate, individual human being.

Human beings inherently have natural, inalienable rights, among them the rights to life and liberty. Part of the right to life and liberty is the right of an individual to self-ownership. The right to self-ownership begins when the human being begins. But when does the human being’s life actually begin?

At the time of the  Roe v. Wade decision, the concept of “personhood” was brought up by Justice Harry Blackmun:

“(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”

I’ve seen references to “personhood,” “viability,” “sentience,” and “consciousness, “  and I have some questions.

What is the viability of a born baby? If baby is left alone for a particular amount of time, one cannot survive for very long, because at that early stage of development one is dependent on one’s caretakers for feeding. The same can be said of a 2-year-old, maybe even older children, although the older the child, the more able one is to go out and seek food, unless one is locked inside and can’t get out. Is there a difference between the viability of a born individual and an unborn individual (at whatever stage of development)?

What about “sentience” and “consciousness?” How do we know whether or not a two-month-old “fetus” or a 2-day-old “fetus” can have any physical sensation or conscious awareness? If it is important whether or not that individual has sentience or consciousness in considering whether that individual has any right to life and liberty, and self-ownership, then, what about a born human being or a grown adult who has a neurological disorder and has no “sentience” or who is in a “persistent vegetative state” and has no consciousness, but is still “alive” (or can be kept alive via artificial means)?

However, more recently I’ve seen in Murray Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty, his comments on the abortion issue. Rothbard asks this question:

….when, or in what way, does a growing child acquire his natural right to liberty and self-ownership?

If one has a natural right to liberty and self-ownership, and “natural rights,” as far as I know, means “inherent” in us as human beings (i.e. from conception onward, or just a part of the human being’s “nature”), then how can you “acquire” a natural right to liberty and self-ownership?