An article was published on the website of the Libertarian Party of Russia by Karl Franco, known for the sharpness of his views, concerning children. The author is a member of the LPR and the lead of the Telegram channel No Compromises, a name that already quite well characterizes this thinker inclined toward dogmatism. In short, he claims to outline how libertarians should approach the issue of dealing with children based on strictly libertarian principles of law, namely the principle of self-ownership, which every child possesses from the moment of conception.

I have also had to write repeatedly on the subject of children, which can be seen via the “children” tag, so you likely have an idea of my position on many specific issues related to children, and perhaps in general. In short, I view law as a spontaneous order for resolving conflicts (and morality as a spontaneous order for entering conflicts), and I consider the principle of self-ownership to be nothing more than a characteristic of a libertarian society, showing that the right to dispose of oneself is respected significantly more than a claimant to self-ownership could achieve by force, but it is still not elevated to an absolute, just as many other useful principles, such as regular tooth brushing, are not elevated to an absolute.

But today we are not talking about my position, but about the position of the article. Its key premise is the assertion that by the very act of conceiving a child, parents commit a tort against the child, because the consequence of conception is the plunging of a self-owning subject of law into a state of complete helplessness. From this, parental duties, principles of upbringing, and other such beauties are derived. And they are derived, of course, completely incorrectly, because such a rigid premise leads to conclusions entirely different from those Karl makes.

You have been raped. This is a tort committed by the rapist against you. The judge obliges the rapist, as restitution for damages, to live with you and care for you for a certain fixed term. Would you not tell such a judge to get lost with such sentences? The first and most important thing you need is to be completely out of reach of the rapist, and only then can you think about the amount of compensation. If conceiving a child is a tort against the child, then the first thing that must be done after birth is to take the child away from the criminals and give the child to truly worthy people who have certainly never encroached upon the birth of any children. Ideally, they should even be incapable of it. For example, those who have undergone sterilization. After all, people get vaccinated to prevent accidental torts against uninvolved bystanders whom they might infect. The same principle applies here: get sterilized, and you will protect children from the danger of being conceived.

From time to time, people are hit by cars on the road. These are tragedies that stir the public, and the public seeks ways to reduce accident mortality, ideally to zero. Additionally, people from time to time conceive children. If conception is a tort, then such tragedies should also stir the public, and then the public should seek ways to reduce the birth rate, ideally to zero. At least accidental conceptions. Again, whose behavior is more responsible: a driver who was driving in their lane while observing the speed limit, but a pedestrian who suddenly jumped under the wheels gave them no chance to avoid the collision—or a driver who consciously rams a pedestrian on the sidewalk? The same goes for childbearing: if conception is a tort, then the behavior of those who manage to get pregnant despite all efforts at contraception should be recognized as more responsible and perhaps even exempt them from paying serious compensation to the child for this accident. And those who consciously practice unprotected sex, pursuing the criminal intent to conceive a child, should be recognized as malicious thugs and punished exemplarily more severely, should they not?

Why did Karl Franco enter into a conspiracy with a girl and cohabit with her without first undergoing a vasectomy? Was it not with the aim of plunging a self-owning being into a state of helplessness by conceiving them into the world? Should we not lynch this hypocrite, who discourses on torts while himself craftily making preparations for one?

Of course, all of this is nonsense. When we live to see the invention of fully autonomous, self-developing embryos, within the framework of a creative free search, downloading info from the internet and self-modifying their bodies, assimilating necessary resources from a dispersed state—then we can talk about archaic procreation being a terrible tort. For now, humanity proceeds from different premises, and the acceptance of the notion of conception as a tort (real acceptance, not hypocritical intellectual constructs that have no connection to reality) makes the systematic extinction of humanity a moral duty, until the last happy childless old man leaves this former abode of sin.