Since the 1960s, a combination of views towards the rights of children has become prevalent in the West. This view combines no acknowledgement of children's rights before birth with a strong acknowledgement of children's rights after birth.
Boomers and subsequent generations have desired a moral code that tells them aborting children before birth is morally legitimate but– at the same time– they do not want a moral code that would justify infanticide, or child abandonment, or starving a child to death, or beating, or any other mistreatment of children after they are born. In the contrary, they profess moral horror at such thoughts. They want parents to have enforceable obligations to look after children after they are born. Yet they also want parents to have the option to kill any children–blamelessly– before they are born, if they choose to.
People who hold this view start with moral conclusions that they want to hold, and then seek to retrofit some foundational principles that would justify these conclusions. Roderick Long gives an explicit example of this kind of motivated reasoning. After setting out the propositions that women can always legitimately choose abortion, and that child abandonment is wrong, he states:
I regard it as a desirable constraint on any theory of positive rights that it give (what I regard as) the “right answer” to the questions raised by [these] propositions.
The majority of intellectuals in the West today really want these contradictory positions about children to be justifiable, but sincerely desiring something to be true doesn't make it so. The problem is that each proposition refutes the other, creating a contradiction:
- Any justification for granting newborns rights logically entails granting rights to unborn children.
- Any justification for denying rights to unborn children logically entails denying rights to newborns, infants and sometimes even older children.
It is impossible to justify killing a child before birth unless one is also willing to justify many acts towards newborns that most intellectuals do not want to justify. Justifying abortion logically entails justifying infanticide. Intellectuals are usually not called out on this contradiction in polite company. If they are pushed to confront it, there are four possible responses:
- Give up the boomer contradiction by acknowledging rights for both unborn and born children. This was the position of the libertarian Doris Gordon . I agree with it.
- Give up the boomer contradiction by denying rights to both the unborn and born children. This is the position of the more consistent pro-choice philosophers such as Peter Singer and Michael Tooley.
- Defend the boomer contradiction by conceding that it does indeed seem to be some contradictory, but argue that it is not really contradictory. Versions of this position have been argued by Walter Block and Roderick Long.
- Deny that there is any problem with the boomer view on children's rights at all. This position is best represented by Ayn Rand.