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June 14th, 2013 
Peter Nolan Baby Veronica
is three and a half years old. She is the focus of a contentious
Supreme Court decision concerning her custody status. One contending
party are her adoptive parents, Matt and Melanie Capobianco who
have raised her since birth, when her natural mother gave her
up for adoption. On the other side of this legal quandary is Dusten
Brown, the natural father, who showed no interest in her nor offered
financial or any other type of support for her since she was born.
The case
is complicated by the fact that Veronica is 3/256th
Cherokee (don’t ask), and according to the 1978 Indian Child Welfare
Act, the nod should go to the biological dad. The purpose of this
law was to prevent the involuntary breakup of first nation families
(Brewer, 2013; ICTMN, 2013; Wolf, 2013).
What is the
libertarian take on this issue? We need not concern ourselves
with this bit of racist legislation. For the principled voluntaryist,
people are people are people. There are no just laws that make
invidious or any other distinction between us based on ethnicity,
tribe, race, etc.
In order
to ferret out the libertarian perspective, we must get back to
basics. Children occupy an intermediate ground between that of
animals and other adult human beings. (I know, I know, this sounds
a bit weird, but hear me out.) The former can be owned and disposed
of at will. The latter, apart from voluntary slavery, cannot be
the private property of anyone else. Children, in sharp contrast
to both, may be controlled by parents, under a very different
type of legal provision, not ownership, of course, but, rather,
attainment and retention of guardianship rights. This means that
as long as the parent is properly guarding, safe-guarding, caring
for, bringing up, the child, he maintains his right to continue
to do so. No one else may take his child away from him, even if
the latter can give the youngster a better life, even if that
would be in the child’s best interest. Bill and Melinda Gates
could, presumably, give any children they adopt more advantages
than practically any other parents on the planet. But they may
not seize anyone else’s children from their parents despite this
stipulated fact. For it is the biological parents who own
these guardianship rights; the right to bring up their children
as they wish, provided only that they continue to nurture and
care for them, and do not engage in child abuse. These rights
of theirs then protect them against a Gates’ or anyone else’s
takeover of their progeny.
How are these
rights first established? In the good old fashioned way: through
pregnancy and child birth of course. The parents in effect “homestead”
not of course any ownership over their children which do not and
cannot exist, but rather guardianship rights over them.
May they
give up these rights? Yes. To the extent a person may not give
up, or sell, or relinquish rights, it is to that extent he does
not really fully own them. If the parents do not continue to feed,
clothe and otherwise care for their children, or abandon them,
they lose these guardianship rights. Or, the parents may give
them up for adoption to others who will properly exercise these
rights, and lose them in this manner. May the parents do this
in return for financial compensation? Of course, at least in the
libertarian universe. Here, if an act is licit, it changes matters
not by one iota when money changes hands over this transfer of
rights. Similarly if sexual relations are legal, then so is prostitution.
If donating blood or organs is not against the law, then neither
should be selling them.
However,
guardianship over children is not a sometime thing. Once the parent
fails to fulfill this ownership obligation, he loses it. Entirely.
There should be no question about Brown’s parental rights over
Baby Veronica. They no longer exist. He gave them up when he failed
to provide guardianship services to her at birth. The rightful
ownership, of course, belongs not to Baby Veronica but to the
parent/guardian, or the adoptive parents the Capobiancos.
For background
on the Baby Veronica case: here,
here
and here.
For more
on the libertarian theory of children’s rights and parental obligations,
go here,
here, here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here
and here.
Source Article from http://lewrockwell.com/block/block224.html
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