An intruder in your house
Shawn St Peter • September 8, 2021
A story and a message.
I want to tell you a little story. One day you decide to have a few friends over to your place. You are all hanging out, and it’s a little warm, so you open a window. At the end of the night, you go to bed, but you forget to shut the window. Later that night, someone climbs into that window. You reach into your nightstand and grab your gun. What do you do? What can you do? Do you shoot the intruder? You left the window open; you are partly responsible for their presence in your home. Does that even matter? If you’re like me, you’ll pull the trigger and feel no remorse. It’s your property and you have every right to protect it and keep any unwanted people out of it, regardless if you left the window open or not.
Now imagine your “place” is your body, and the intruder is a baby. Don’t you still have the right protect your “home” and keep any wanted people – even an embryo – out of your personal space?
According to the Cato Institute: “America’s Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights — the rights of people to acquire, use, and dispose of property freely.” Private property is the foundation of freedom itself. That same common law, which has been the basis of all property rights, has provided a set of protections that have the effect of granting certain property rights on one’s own body.
We are protected from non consensual physical contact and physical invasions through tort law. For example, if one person punches another in the nose, that first person is liable for battery. Another example is a doctor who fails to get the informed consent of a patient before performing surgery commits a battery. “This doctrine implies that the law gives us the right to possess our own bodies and to exclude others from using our bodies. Tort law also prohibits others from unreasonably confining us, through the tort of false imprisonment; giving us the right to direct our own bodies as we see fit.” (source) Again, from the Cato Institute: “In a nutshell, the basic rights [common law courts] recognized, beyond acquisition and disposal, were the right of sole dominion — variously described as a right to exclude others, a right against trespass, or a right of quiet enjoyment, which all can exercise equally at the same time and in the same respect — and the right of active use, at least to the point where such use violates the rights of others to quiet enjoyment.”
Another common law concept that we rely on is the castle doctrine. From Wikipedia: “A castle doctrine, also known as a castle law or a defense of habitation law, is a legal doctrine that designates a person's abode or any legally occupied place (for example, a vehicle or home) as a place in which that person has protections and immunities permitting one, in certain circumstances, to use force (up to and including deadly force) to defend oneself against an intruder, free from legal prosecution for the consequences of the force used.” From the NJ Self Defense Law: “The ‘Castle Doctrine’ is a long-standing American legal concept arising from English Common Law that provides that one's abode is a special area in which one enjoys certain protections and immunities, that one is not obligated to retreat before defending oneself against attack, and that one may do so without fear of prosecution.”
Within the US, 25 states (including, notably, Texas) have used the castle doctrine to expand their laws to “allow that there is no duty to retreat an attacker in any place in which one is lawfully present.”2 Florida has probably the most well known “stand you ground” law (which protected Trayvon Martin’s killer George Zimmerman) and states “a person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
I mentioned that Texas was among the 25 states that have clear laws protecting one from liability in self-defense. From the Blog of the John T. Floyd law firm in TX: “In Texas, the law provides legal justification for the use of force in certain circumstances when a person does not have a duty to retreat. A great example of this is a homeowner who has no duty to retreat and can use force to protect themselves from an armed intruder. The same can be true for business owners in their place of business. The protections provided by the law allow a person on trial for using deadly force to claim self-defense when:
- They believed in a reasonable way that deadly force was necessary
- They had the right to legally be on the property
- The defendant did not provoke the person upon whom they used deadly force
- The defendant was not engaged in criminal activity when the deadly force was used”
As we connect the dots here, it seems pretty clear that a woman who has become pregnant and does not want the embryo in her body, has a right to remove that embryo. The problem comes in how this happens, because unlike the situation where I can pull a gun from my nightstand to defend my home, a woman cannot safely perform an abortion on herself without help. And the new abortion law in Texas doesn’t target the women who have abortions, but rather those that help a women get an abortion. Specifically, the law allows private citizens to sue those who provide abortions (like abortion clinics) as wells as anyone else who helps a women obtain an abortion – which includes people who provide transportation to an abortion clinic or provide financial assistance to the woman.
If the state bans access to the help a woman needs to maintain her rights over her body, do those rights still exist? The answer is no different than a law that impedes a person’s ability to own a firearm infringing on that right. Without access to enforce the right, the right ceases to exist. And clearly, the Texas law removes the right of the woman to decide what remains in her body – it makes it so she cannot remove an unwanted invader from her protected domain. If you believe in the rights of individual property, and the right to protect that property without liability for the consequences, you must believe that abortion is acceptable. And you cannot punish those who help women remove the intruders to their body.
One final note – a case should never need to be made for women to have the right over their bodies. It will forever remain a shame that a group of mostly men can establish laws to determine what a woman can and cannot do with her body. That is the biggest tragedy of any abortion law.
Come back tomorrow for my blog post on why abortion laws are anti-Christian. And remember to join Ras and I tomorrow (Thursday, September 9) at 10 PM eastern on the Stereo App
for our weekly live show where the topic this week will be abortion and the new Texas law.
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Note – this article was written by ChatGPT. I asked it to write an explainer post for my website in the style of Malcolm Gladwell. As part of this week’s podcast, I had ChatGPT co-produce it with me. It came up with script suggestions. I asked it to help me write an explainer companion post for the website. I did not really like the first one it wrote, and so I tried asking for different types of articles, asking for a particular style(witty, snarky, etc) or well know writers (Bill Simmons, Malcolm Gladwell). The below is the one by Gladwell, which I liked the best.
I have made no edits.
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