Natural rights and the right to choose / Hadley Arkes.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Introduction: backing into treason -- 2. The drift from natural rights -- 3. On the things the founders knew - and how our judges came to forget them -- 4. Abortion and the 'modest first step' -- 5. Anti-jural jurisprudence -- 6. Prudent warning and imprudent reactions: 'judicial usurpation' and the unravelling of rights -- 7. Finding home ground: the axioms of the constitution -- 8. Epilogue: spring becomes fall becomes spring: a memoir.

Publisher description: Over the last thirty years the American political class has come to talk itself out of the doctrines of 'natural rights' that formed the main teaching of the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln. With that move, it has removed the ground for its own rights. Ironically, this transition has been made without awareness, with a serene conviction that constitutional rights are being expanded. In the name of 'privacy' and 'autonomy', new claims of liberty have been unfolded, all of them bound up in some way with the notion of sexual freedom. Hadley Arkes argues that the 'right to choose an abortion' has been the 'right' to shift the political class from doctrines of natural right. This new right overturned the liberal jurisprudence of the New Deal, placing jurisprudence on a different foundation.