The Post-Dobbs Landscape: Biojurisprudence, Philosophy, and Emerging Technologies
I. Introduction
On June 24, 2022, the constitutional landscape of the United States was profoundly altered: abortion, long considered a federally protected constitutional right, became a state-regulated privilege [1]. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court declared that the federal Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, returning the power to legislate this contentious issue to individual states [2]. This seismic decision reignited one of the most polarizing debates of our time.
Justice Alito, writing for the Court’s majority, captured the intensity of this moral and legal conflict by stating that “[a]bortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” [3] Alito identified three dominant perspectives: those who believe that life begins at conception and view abortion as ending an innocent life; those who see restrictions on abortion as a fundamental violation of a woman’s autonomy and equality; and those who support abortion access in certain circumstances while advocating for specific limitations[4]. By returning the authority to regulate abortion to the states, the Supreme Court effectively reframed the debate, shifting it from a constitutional right to a question of legislative discretion. This decision, however, does not resolve the profound ethical questions underlying the abortion debate; it amplifies them. Abortion remains one of the most contested issues in modern bioethics, challenging societies to grapple with fundamental questions about human life, bodily autonomy, and the role of government in regulating personal decisions [5].
This essay contends that the traditional binary of "life versus choice" is ill-equipped to address the challenges posed by emerging reproductive technologies—such as artificial wombs, fetal transfer, and gestational outsourcing—which complicate the moral, legal, and ontological categories on which abortion law has historically relied. In a transhumanist future where pregnancy may be safely ended without ending fetal life, the most pressing legal questions will no longer concern whether abortion should be permitted, but rather how states will regulate the new boundaries between autonomy, viability, and technological intervention.
To address this shift, the essay advances the claim that philosophical frameworks like evictionism and departurism, when interpreted through the lenses of legal bionomics and biopolitics, offer a more adaptable and ethically coherent basis for navigating abortion law in an era of technological acceleration. Unlike absolutist moral positions, these frameworks allow for the decoupling of pregnancy termination from fetal death, thus transforming the abortion debate from an intractable moral impasse into a solvable regulatory challenge. They provide a structure through which states can craft policies that preserve bodily autonomy while also acknowledging the moral status of fetal life—without requiring either side to forfeit its foundational commitments.
Rooted in bioethics and legal theory, legal bionomics frames the law as an evolving system responsive to developments in medicine, biotechnology, and social values. This article places legal bionomics in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, which explores how states exercise power over the biological aspects of life. These frameworks not only clarify the ethical tensions in abortion regulation, but also provide tools for integrating emerging reproductive technologies into public policy.
To explore how law might evolve alongside science, this article examines the contrasting moral and legal claims of evictionism and departurism. Both frameworks acknowledge the complex ethical questions surrounding abortion, particularly the tension between fetal moral status and a pregnant person's bodily autonomy. Evictionism asserts that a fetus may be evicted in the least harmful manner—even if this leads to its death—whereas departurism permits eviction only when it is not fatal to the fetus. As reproductive technologies increasingly enable non-lethal pregnancy termination, these frameworks may provide the jurisprudential scaffolding for abortion law in a transhumanist future.
This interdisciplinary approach offers a more precise and forward-looking understanding of abortion regulation in the post-Dobbs era, one that transcends entrenched ideological divides and anticipates the profound ways in which science may soon reshape the legal and moral architecture of reproductive rights.
II. Legal Bionomics and Biopolitics as a Theoretical Framework
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has intensified the legal and ethical complexities surrounding abortion, revealing how reproductive regulation is not merely a legal question, but a form of biopolitical governance. To better understand this shift, this article draws on the concept of legal bionomics (bionomía jurídica) developed by Spanish scholar Carlos Lema Añón. Legal bionomics refines traditional bioethics by explicitly integrating legal structures into the analysis of biomedical and biotechnological innovation[6] Rather than focusing on individual clinical dilemmas, legal bionomics addresses how advances such as artificial wombs, prenatal genetic diagnostics, and fetal viability technologies challenge existing legal categories like autonomy, personhood, and justice. It treats the law as a normative field shaped by science, politics, and values—moving beyond technocratic solutions and toward a democratic ethics of regulation.
This framework resonates with Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, [7] which examines how states manage biological life through regulatory and institutional mechanisms[8]. Biopolitics is one of the principal modes through which Foucault’s broader concept of biopower operates—focusing not on individual bodies, but on populations as objects of governance. In this sense, legal bionomics and biopolitics converge: both conceptualize law not merely as a constraint or arbiter of rights, but as an instrument for shaping biological life. Historical examples—such as eugenic sterilization programs, contraception mandates, and maternal health policies—illustrate how reproductive capacities become juridical and political targets [9] [10].
Abortion, within this framework, becomes a key site of biopolitical intervention[11]. Legal decisions around abortion are not only moral or constitutional determinations—they are also instruments for shaping population policy,[12] gender roles,[13] and technological thresholds like viability[14]. Legal bionomics, when integrated with biopolitics, highlights how these decisions are embedded in broader struggles over rights, scientific progress, and the governance of life itself [15]. For example, state-level abortion restrictions reflect not only legal frameworks but also biopolitical strategies aimed at defining and controlling population dynamics[16].
Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs outlines three dominant perspectives on abortion: those who believe life begins at conception, those who emphasize bodily autonomy and equality, and those who advocate for conditional access with limitations. However, these categories do not exhaust the philosophical landscape. Approaches such as evictionism and departurism offer alternative frameworks for evaluating the moral and legal status of abortion in a world increasingly shaped by transhumanist technologies. By examining these theories, we can better anticipate how future innovations may redefine the legal principles that govern reproduction and autonomy.
III. Evictionism and Departurism
The Dobbs decision exposed the inadequacy of existing legal frameworks to address the evolving intersection of reproductive rights and emerging technologies. Philosophical approaches such as evictionism and departurism offer alternative ways of understanding abortion that may become increasingly relevant as reproductive technologies evolve. These frameworks challenge the binary legal narratives of "life versus choice" that dominate jurisprudence and public discourse. They invite a reevaluation of how bodily autonomy, fetal rights, and viability are conceptualized in a society moving toward a technological singularity—a future in which technological progress accelerates beyond human predictive capacity, including in reproductive technologies such as artificial wombs, fetal transplantation, and earlier viability thresholds.
Evictionism is a libertarian philosophical framework developed by economist Walter Block[17]. It posits that human life begins at conception, and that the fetus—though biologically dependent on the pregnant person—exists as a distinct legal and moral being[18]. Under this theory, the pregnant person's womb is conceptualized as her property, and the fetus as an innocent trespasser. The fetus may be lawfully evicted so long as the expulsion is carried out in the least harmful manner possible, a principle Block terms “gentleness.”[17]
Block draws a critical legal distinction between abortion and expulsion. Whereas abortion entails both the removal and intentional destruction of the fetus, expulsion refers solely to the termination of pregnancy, without necessarily causing fetal death[18]. Thus, in Block’s account, abortion is only justifiable when the fetus is non-viable and its death is an unavoidable consequence of eviction[19].
Viability, understood as the fetus’s ability to survive ex utero, is therefore a threshold criterion within the evictionist framework. Prior to viability, fetal life is biologically unsustainable outside the womb, rendering its death an unavoidable result of eviction. In such cases, lethal expulsion is legally permissible, not because the fetus lacks personhood, but because no individual has a legal obligation to sustain another through involuntary bodily support.
However, once the fetus reaches viability—either through natural development or emerging technologies such as artificial wombs or uterine transfers—the ethical and legal calculus shifts. At this stage, eviction no longer necessitates fetal death, and the intentional destruction of a viable fetus becomes unjustifiable under the principle of gentleness[20]. Accordingly, the pregnant person may still terminate the pregnancy, but only through non-lethal means, such as transferring the fetus to a viable caregiver or technological surrogate.
Block thus affirms the pregnant individual’s enduring right to withdraw bodily support at any stage of pregnancy. However, he simultaneously argues that once the fetus is viable, any act that directly causes fetal death—as opposed to mere eviction—constitutes what he considers an unjustified aggression against a being with negative rights, and is therefore legally impermissible. In this way, evictionism supports the legal prohibition of late-term abortion, but only insofar as such procedures involve unnecessary fetal death. The theory imposes a negative obligation: the state may not compel gestation, but it may prohibit acts of lethal expulsion when alternatives to preserve fetal life exist. Block further anticipates that advances in biotechnology will continue to lower the threshold of viability, thereby narrowing the circumstances under which lethal eviction is permissible. In a sufficiently advanced transhumanist future, lethal abortion may become legally obsolete, as early-stage eviction and fetal rescue technologies mature.
Departurism significantly differs in its conclusions from evictionism. It rejects the characterization of the fetus as a trespasser, viewing it instead as an innocent being with no criminal intent[21]. Departurists argue that the principle of gentleness precludes expelling the fetus if doing so would inevitably result in its death. This framework emphasizes the moral responsibility to treat the fetus with care, given its inherent innocence and temporary dependency[22]. According to Sean Parr, if the trespasser is not willfully violating the property owner’s rights and is in the process of ceasing the intrusion, then lethal force is unwarranted and indeed impermissible[23].
Departurists argue that a fetus, whose gestational stay is finite and biologically directed toward departure, must be permitted to complete that process unless removal would be non-lethal or necessary to prevent a direct and imminent threat to the pregnant person's life [24]. This position becomes especially salient in the later stages of pregnancy, when viability outside the womb is possible [25].
This line of reasoning supports the legal prohibition of late-term abortions. Within the libertarian framework underpinning evictionism, the use of force must always be proportionate to the threat posed and directed only against aggressors. Once viability is reached—and especially when technological means exist to preserve fetal life post-eviction (e.g., artificial wombs or neonatal care)—terminating a viable fetus is seen as a form of excessive force. Because the fetus is not an aggressor and can be safely separated, its lethal removal violates the principles of non-aggression and the “gentlest means” standard that libertarian theorists like Block argue should govern all conflicts, including those involving gestation[26].
Furthermore, Block acknowledges a duty to “notify” potential caretakers—such as hospitals, churches, orphanages, or other institutions—before evicting a viable fetus [27]. He contends that this requirement does not constitute a “positive obligation” incompatible with libertarianism, because it does not compel continued bodily support or active provision of care. Rather, it flows from the principle of gentleness: the fetus must be removed in the least harmful way possible, which includes offering a chance for rescue by third parties. Departurists challenge this interpretation by noting that the notification duty entails a temporary suspension of the mother’s eviction right until that process is complete [28]. In their view, this concession reveals that libertarianism already tolerates narrowly tailored delays in eviction when they serve to prevent avoidable harm to non-aggressors. If such a delay is justified by the availability of a potential rescuer, then a similar delay—postponing eviction until the fetus can survive independently—rests on the same ethical foundation. Both are minimal intrusions aimed at preventing gratuitous death, and both operate within the constraints of the non-aggression principle. Thus, what Block defends as a procedural safeguard, departurists reinterpret as a broader normative obligation grounded in the same libertarian logic.
In sum, departurism does not require a radical departure from libertarian tenets, but rather a deeper fidelity to its foundational commitments—particularly the principles of non-aggression, gentleness, and proportional response. The latter, in libertarian theory, refers to the requirement that force must be limited to what is necessary to repel a rights violation. From this standpoint, late-term abortion that results in the death of a viable fetus, when non-lethal alternatives exist, constitutes a disproportionate use of force against a non-aggressor. Yet the significance of the evictionism vs. departurism framework lies not merely in how it applies libertarian principles, but in how it reframes the abortion debate itself. Unlike the conventional pro-choice vs. pro-life binary—which hinges on moral absolutism or on contested claims about fetal personhood—this framework asks a different question: how should the law navigate competing rights when two entities occupy the same space under conditions of evolving technological possibility? By shifting the focus from metaphysical status to relational obligations and from moral intuitions to legal thresholds, evictionism and departurism offer a more precise, dynamic, and normatively coherent way to assess the permissibility of abortion. They illuminate not only what is at stake, but when and why certain interventions may be justified—thus helping legal agents draw judgments that are principled without being rigid.
Evictionism emphasizes the property rights of the mother, framing her body as a domain over which she retains sovereign control. From the perspective of biopower as articulated by Michel Foucault, this approach underscores the individual’s autonomy in regulating their biological functions against external interference. Evictionism seeks to reconcile this autonomy with the least harmful treatment of the fetus, reflecting the ethical principle of gentleness. Yet because evictionism ultimately vests the decision to expel the fetus in the mother’s discretion, the outcome of abortion remains susceptible to biopolitical influence—not through legal coercion, but through the ideological shaping of individual choice. In a context where reproductive decisions are entangled with discourses of national interest, public health, or demographic control, the mother’s judgment may reflect more than just personal autonomy. Legal bionomics situates this tension within a broader legal framework, highlighting the need for laws that adapt to technological advancements which could eventually render lethal expulsion obsolete.
Departurism, on the other hand, shifts the ethical focus toward the fetus’s status as an innocent being. Rooted in the principle of gentleness, departurism aligns with biopolitical interventions that prioritize the preservation of life within a framework of regulated reproduction. While it challenges the absolute property rights espoused by evictionism, it also reflects Foucault’s observation that biopolitics often operates at the intersection of individual autonomy and collective responsibility.
At this moment, the transhumanist horizon reframes not only the mechanics of reproduction but also the legal ontology of personhood, gestational labor, and parental obligation. Within this horizon, evictionism and departurism cease to be marginal libertarian thought experiments and emerge as serious contenders for reconfiguring reproductive jurisprudence. Both frameworks resist essentialist views of motherhood and challenge the assumption that gestation implies consent to parental duty or biological sacrifice. Yet, it is precisely through the technological decoupling of pregnancy from the female body—via ectogenesis and fetal transfer—that these frameworks may evolve from philosophical positions into actionable legal theories.
Through the lens of legal bionomics, both evictionism and departurism share a common commitment to adaptive legal reasoning. Unlike the prevailing pro-life vs. pro-choice framework—which tends to anchor reproductive rights in static doctrinal categories such as fetal personhood or absolute bodily autonomy—these theories reject moral binaries in favor of context-sensitive analysis. The traditional framework often compels courts to take definitive stances on metaphysical questions that resist legal consensus, thereby ossifying jurisprudence around fixed ideological lines. In contrast, evictionism and departurism conceptualize abortion not as a singular moral event but as a relational conflict mediated by time, viability, and technological feasibility. This shift allows the law to function more like an evolving organism, one capable of responding to changes in medical capability, social expectation, and ethical reasoning. Just as Roe responded to the medical landscape of 1973 and Casey adapted in 1992, the future jurisprudence of reproduction must confront imminent advances such as artificial wombs, fetal surgery, and viability at earlier stages. Evictionism and departurism offer the conceptual scaffolding needed for that task.
Moreover, biopolitical analysis reveals how both evictionism and departurism could be co-opted by state power. Evictionism, for instance, could be instrumentalized to justify compulsory fetal transfers in cases of elective abortion—mandating the use of artificial wombs or neonatal extraction technologies where available, in order to preserve fetal life. Such a policy would reframe bodily autonomy not as a right to terminate pregnancy, but merely as a right to evict, thereby authorizing state intervention to control the terms of separation. Departurism, conversely, could underpin state-imposed gestational mandates, requiring pregnant individuals to carry viable fetuses to term unless immediate danger is proven—effectively transforming the principle of gentleness into a legal mechanism for compelling unwanted pregnancies. In both cases, what begin as libertarian constraints on harm can be reinterpreted by the state as obligations to preserve life at the expense of personal sovereignty.
In the post-gestational legal order that transhumanism portends, we may face unprecedented doctrinal dilemmas: Can the State compel artificial gestation as a condition for lawful abortion? Does the right not to procreate include a right to prevent others (or machines) from gestating one’s embryo? Must reproductive law distinguish between termination of pregnancy and termination of fetal life as two analytically distinct rights?
These questions suggest that the future of reproductive law will not be settled by precedent alone, but by the law’s capacity to integrate ethical theory, technological innovation, and evolving norms of dignity and autonomy. In this new ecology of reproduction, legal doctrine must move away from blanket prohibition or permission, or abortion in certain fixed contexts, and toward a more nuanced grammar of allocation, transfer, and responsibility. The central legal figure may no longer be the pregnant woman or the unborn child, but a triadic constellation: pregnant person, fetal entity, and gestational machine. The task of law will be to mediate that triad without collapsing into technological determinism or reactionary biopolitics. Evictionism and departurism thus offer more than abstract libertarian solutions—they are jurisprudential laboratories for interrogating how the law might reconcile autonomy and protection, choice and constraint in a post-biological reproductive future.
The dominant legal and political frameworks governing abortion—typically framed as a binary between pro-life and pro-choice—are increasingly inadequate in addressing the complexities introduced by modern and emerging reproductive technologies. These paradigms rely on essentialist assumptions: either that fetal personhood warrants full legal protection from conception, or that bodily autonomy justifies unqualified access to abortion. Both positions tend to reduce abortion to a singular moral event, flattening its temporal, relational, and technological dimensions. As a result, the law becomes trapped in categorical absolutes—life or choice, autonomy or dependency—leaving little room for nuanced adjudication as science introduces new gestational possibilities such as artificial wombs, fetal transplants, and accelerated viability thresholds. In this context, doctrines rooted in fixed metaphysical or rights-based claims struggle to evolve alongside medical innovation. What is needed, then, is a conceptual framework that treats reproductive law not as a battlefield of opposing moral axioms, but as a space of adaptive legal reasoning. It is precisely this jurisprudential openness that theories like evictionism and departurism begin to offer.
IV. The Technological Singularity, Transhumanism, and the Juridical Future of Abortion
Reproductive law is entering a phase shaped not only by ethical conflict, but by technological acceleration. Concepts like technological singularity, transhumanism, and biopolitics—once reserved for speculative philosophy—now have concrete implications for abortion jurisprudence. The technological singularity refers to the threshold at which innovation outpaces legal and social comprehension, particularly when machines begin to replicate or surpass biological functions. Transhumanism envisions a future where human capacities, including reproduction, are enhanced, outsourced, or entirely transformed by technology. In this context, artificial wombs and fetal transfers challenge long-standing legal assumptions about the boundaries of gestation. Together, these forces compel a reconsideration of abortion law not merely as a question of moral belief, but as a site of ontological, technological, and political transformation.
The emergence of artificial gestation technologies compels a fundamental shift in abortion law: from regulating pregnancy as a binary moral issue to adjudicating it as a matter of biological distribution, legal ontology, and biopolitical risk. As technologies such as artificial wombs and fetal transfers disrupt the biological conditions that once defined the limits of pregnancy, they also destabilize the legal categories of viability, autonomy, and dependency. In doing so, they invite a rethinking of abortion not as a singular event but as a complex interaction between persons, technologies, and state power.
Traditionally, abortion law has been framed as a contest between the pregnant person’s autonomy and the state’s interest in protecting fetal life. But this binary falter when pregnancy can be safely ended without ending fetal existence. What was once a choice between two irreconcilable outcomes now becomes a question of how to regulate competing claims to bodily integrity, reproductive liberty, and the conditions under which gestation occurs. As artificial gestation becomes more viable, the legal question shifts: should the state permit termination of pregnancy even when it can preserve fetal life? Or must the law now balance autonomy with emerging technological alternatives that could reframe abortion as a form of fetal transfer?
This transformation forces a broader re-evaluation of constitutional and statutory regimes across the United States. Courts and legislatures will need to determine whether long-standing precedents, developed in a world without artificial gestation, can meaningfully address the new legal dilemmas these technologies create. For example, if the state offers a technological means to end pregnancy without ending life, does it have a compelling interest in requiring its use? Can it mandate fetal transfer over lethal abortion? And how should these mandates be reconciled with doctrines of undue burden or substantive due process?
Such questions are not merely technical. They reflect deeper tensions in how the law constructs and governs biological life. As Michel Foucault observed, “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” [31] Modern power does not operate only by coercing or punishing—it governs by organizing life, managing populations, and producing norms of health and reproduction. Rather than prohibiting abortion through law (a sovereign act), biopolitical states might regulate reproduction by defining what counts as “healthy gestation” or “viable life,” thereby naturalizing technological mandates as medical standards. What begins as a policy grounded in compassion or medical progress may function, in practice, as a mode of control.
Foucault distinguishes between the old sovereign power—centered on the right to kill—and modern biopower, which administers life through two poles: the anatomo-politics of the body and the biopolitics of the population [32]. In this framework, artificial gestation technologies emerge not only as tools for expanding individual choice, but as instruments for optimizing reproductive processes on a collective scale. The pregnant body becomes the site of intervention, but it is the population—the birth rate, the viability threshold, the demographic future—that becomes the object of regulation. The shift from sovereign interdiction to administrative normalization marks a profound transformation in how states govern reproduction.
To illustrate, imagine a policy that requires transferring a fetus to an artificial womb at sixteen weeks to avoid an abortion. On its face, this might appear to balance life and choice. But it could also shift the burden of gestation from a person’s body to a state-managed system, introducing new forms of control and surveillance. Under the guise of protecting life, the state may come to dictate not only whether pregnancy continues but also how it must proceed. This biopolitical dynamic reveals a second challenge: emerging technologies may enhance autonomy while simultaneously expanding the state’s capacity to monitor and discipline reproductive conduct. A legal system unprepared for this duality risks either romanticizing technological neutrality or allowing innovation to justify new forms of inequality and coercion.
To meet this challenge, reproductive law must evolve from a reactive framework into a proactive jurisprudence—one that safeguards autonomy not only from moral prohibition, but from the bureaucratic logics of optimization. It must remain vigilant against the normalization of gestational mandates disguised as technological solutions. The goal is not to resolve every future conflict in advance, but to design a legal order capable of adapting to profound change without surrendering its ethical commitments.
V. Conclusion: Reconciling Legal Bionomics, Bioethics, and the Abortion Debate
The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey marks not merely a doctrinal recalibration of constitutional jurisprudence but a broader devolution of ethical and regulatory responsibility to the fifty states. Yet this decentralization occurs at a time when the foundational categories that once anchored abortion law—viability, autonomy, termination—are themselves being destabilized by rapid advances in reproductive biotechnology. Within this context, it is increasingly apparent that the juridical dilemmas of the future will not be defined by the classical binary of life versus choice, but by a far more intricate matrix of biotechnological possibility, constitutional interpretation, and ethical deliberation.
In this evolving legal and ontological landscape, the frameworks of evictionism and departurism—though originally situated within libertarian philosophical discourse—offer valuable conceptual tools for navigating the emergent complexities of post-gestational abortion law. Their normative architectures, especially when interpreted through the lenses of legal bionomics and biopolitics, provide a means of disentangling pregnancy termination from fetal death. By emphasizing principles such as gentleness, non-aggression, and the decoupling of dependency from personhood, these theories facilitate the construction of policy regimes capable of adapting to unprecedented scenarios—such as ectogenesis, embryonic transfer, or gestational outsourcing.
This is not to endorse any specific normative position, but rather to illustrate how philosophical frameworks can operate as jurisprudential laboratories for future litigation and legislation. As states confront the integration of artificial gestation into their legal systems, they will face new questions of constitutional magnitude: May the state compel gestational transfer in lieu of abortion? Does the right to reproductive autonomy entail a negative liberty or a positive obligation with respect to new technological alternatives? Can termination of pregnancy and termination of fetal life be separated into distinct legal rights, each subject to its own standard of review?
These are not speculative abstractions. They are foreseeable consequences of the transhumanist trajectory in which the biological constraints that once shaped legal reasoning are increasingly supplanted by technological capability. In this context, the law must become more than a reactive institution; it must function as a normative architecture capable of absorbing innovation without collapsing into coercion, obsolescence, or ethical fragmentation.
Legal bionomics provides the intellectual scaffolding for such a task. It resists both legal essentialism and technological determinism, urging instead a jurisprudence that is neither static nor utilitarian, but responsive to evolving configurations of dependency, vulnerability, and dignity. Likewise, the biopolitical dimension of abortion law—as articulated by Michel Foucault—reminds us that reproductive governance always implicates broader regimes of power: who decides, for whom, and to what end.
Ultimately, the future of abortion regulation will not be settled by appeals to constitutional originalism or biomedical neutrality. It will be shaped by the capacity of legal systems to reconcile autonomy with interdependence, individual rights with collective ethics, and innovation with justice. In this endeavor, evictionism and departurism offer not prescriptive solutions but conceptual clarity—helping to transform abortion from a battleground of irreconcilable absolutes into a forum of legal adaptation, ethical deliberation, and technological responsibility.
Bibliography
[1] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
[2] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973); Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
[3] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
[4] Ibid.
[5] F.J. León Correa, “Abortion from a Bioethical Viewpoint: Autonomy and Beneficency versus Justice?,” Journal of Clinical Research and Bioethics 4 (2013): 151.
[6] Lema Añón, Carlos. “Bionomía, Bioética y Derechos Fundamentales.” In Bioética y Religión, edited by J.J. Tamayo Acosta, 30–32. Madrid: Dykinson, 2007.
[7] M. Gómez, “El Racismo de Estado y el Estado de Excepción Como Respuesta Neoliberal a las Crisis Humanitarias del Siglo XXI: Biopoder y Biopolítica Como Una Crítica al Estado-Nación,” Revista Realidad 151 (2018): 165, 167.
[8] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.
[9] Ibid., 42–44.
[10] See Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) (upholding Virginia’s eugenic sterilization law and declaring that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”); Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U.S. 535 (1942) (striking down a sterilization law for certain felons and recognizing procreation as a fundamental right); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (establishing a constitutional right to marital privacy and striking down a ban on contraceptives for married couples); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (extending the right to use contraceptives to unmarried individuals based on equal protection and privacy); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014) (holding that closely held corporations may refuse to comply with contraception mandates based on religious objections under RFRA); Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (recognizing a constitutional right to abortion and limiting state interference in maternal health decisions); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (reaffirming the right to abortion while allowing greater state regulation under the “undue burden” standard); Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215, 142 S. Ct. 2228 (2022) (overruling Roe and Casey, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returning the issue to the states).
[11] M. Gómez, “El Racismo de Estado y el Estado de Excepción Como Respuesta Neoliberal a las Crisis Humanitarias del Siglo XXI: Biopoder y Biopolítica Como Una Crítica al Estado-Nación,” Revista Realidad 151 (2018): 165, 167.
[12] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 245 (David Macey trans., Picador 2003) (1977) (“Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.”).
[13] Reva Siegel, Reasoning from the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and Questions of Equal Protection, 44 STAN. L. REV. 261, 269 (1992) (“Judgments about women's capacity to bear children play a key role in social definitions of gender roles and thus in the social logic of “discrimination based on gender as such.”).
[14] Planned Parenthood of Se. Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 860 (1992) (“that viability marks the earliest point at which the State's interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions”).
[15] D.J. García López, Bioestado de Excepción: Suspensión del Derecho e Insurgencia de las Corporalidades Vivientes (Madrid: Editora Educación Emergente, 2019), 42.
[16] Ibid., at 44.
[17] Walter E. Block, Abortion, Woman and Fetus: Rights in Conflict?, 9 Reason 18 (1978).
[18] Ibid.; see also Walter E. Block, Toward a Libertarian Theory of Evictionism, 35 J. Fam. & Econ. Issues 287, 288 (2014); Walter E. Block, Response to Wisniewski on Abortion, Round Two, 3 Libertarian Papers 4, 1–2 (2011) (“My version of the evictionist hypothesis stipulates that human life begins at the fertilized egg stage…”).
[19] Walter E. Block, Response to Wisniewski on Abortion, Round Two, 3 Libertarian Papers 4, 1–2 (2011) at 2 (“The property owner is entitled to remove the trespasser in the gentlest manner possible…”); see also ibid. at 4 (“The full principle… is the gentlest manner possible consistent with stopping the crime.”).
[20] Ibid. at 3–4 (distinguishing “evict” from “kill” and applying the gentleness principle to the act of expulsion).
[21] Ibid. at 3 (“If the gentlest manner possible implies the death of this very young human being, then so be it: the mother still has that right.”); but see ibid. at 4–5 (emphasizing that if technology allows for survival, gentleness requires non-lethal expulsion).
[22] Ibid. at 2–3 (“[T]he mother is within her rights to evict, but not kill, the fetus.”); see also Walter E. Block, Toward a Libertarian Theory of Evictionism, 35 J. Fam. & Econ. Issues 290, 292–94 (2013).
[23] S. Parr, “Departurism and the Libertarian Axiom of Gentleness,” Libertarian Papers 3, no. 34 (2011): 34–35.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., 4.
[27] Ibid., 5.
[28] Ibid. at 19–21.
[29] Walter E. Block, Response to Wisniewski on Abortion, Round Two, 3 Libertarian Papers 4, 8–9 (2011).
[30] S. Parr, “Departurism and the Libertarian Axiom of Gentleness,” Libertarian Papers 3, no. 34 (2011).
[31] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 138.
[32] Ibid. at 139.