A dilemma for a constitutionally protected, publicly funded right to abortion

File:Womens March on Washington.jpg

Whatever permits being publicly funded by the state is deemed a public good by the polity that funds it.

Nothing deemed to be a private good can also be deemed to be a public good by the same polity.

Therefore, nothing which permits being publicly funded by the state is a private good

Whatever is deemed constitutionally protected under the justification of privacy is a private good. Since private and public are mutually exclusive categories, no such goods are public goods.

Public funding for abortion is required by law in multiple U. S. jurisdictions, and hence would be deemed a public good by those same jurisdictions.

By the same criterion, it cannot constitute a private good in contradistinction to a public one, and thus cannot be legally protected under grounds of privacy.

But the grounds on which abortion is legally protected are exactly those of privacy.

Thus, if abortion is constitutionally protected on the grounds of its being a private good, then it is not permissible to publicly fund it. Likewise, if abortion is publicly funded, and hence treated as a public good, it is not constitutionally protected.

Therefore, abortion may be publicly funded in U. S. jurisdictions if and only if it is not constitutionally protected.

File:Pro-Life Demonstration at Supreme Court.jpg

One thought on “A dilemma for a constitutionally protected, publicly funded right to abortion

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s