This file is a short 1991 polemical legal-political essay. Rothbard uses the Wichita Operation Rescue controversy not chiefly to argue abortion policy, but to redirect attention to jurisdiction, federal force, and the “denationalizing” of courts. His thesis is that even a right Rothbard supports—abortion choice—should not license federal courts or marshals to nationalize police power.
Rothbard opens by attacking media simplification: Wichita has been reduced to abortion and Judge Patrick Kelly’s supposed heroism, while the deeper constitutional question disappears.
One baleful feature of American political debate is its trivialization by the mass-dominated and left-liberal media.
Against the media’s reverence for Roe-era judicial supremacy, Rothbard invokes an older constitutional pluralism. The Supreme Court, he argues, was not originally treated as the final oracle of constitutional meaning.
No one proposed to leave such vital matters up to nine oligarchic hacks in Washington.
The essay’s key conceptual move is to separate moral agreement from institutional authorization. Rothbard explicitly identifies as pro-choice, but insists that libertarians must ask who may legitimately use coercion to secure that outcome.
To put it bluntly, I am firmly pro-choice, and here I agree with most libertarians.
This distinction lets him analogize domestic federal intervention to foreign intervention. Just as opposition to compulsory abortions in China would not justify U.S. military action or world government, support for abortion rights in Kansas does not justify federal police power. The real issue is not abortion as such, but the locus of legitimate coercive authority.
This may indeed be a “legalistic” issue, but it is no less a vital one, especially since the legal question of when any particular organization or institution may use violence is the very heart of libertarian political theory.
Rothbard then broadens the Wichita case into an argument for decentralization. He portrays the United States as a “swollen” imperium that should not be presumed to act as a single consolidated jurisdiction. Libertarians, he says, should pair the Ninth Amendment’s protection of unenumerated rights with the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of powers to states and localities.
We must return to the radical Jeffersonian view of the U.S. government and hence of the federal courts.
Applied to Wichita, this means that protection of clinics belongs to Kansas authorities, not federal judges. Rothbard’s federalism is deliberately stark: if he were in Kansas, he would urge local or state police protection, but as a non-Kansan he denies federal jurisdiction.
Therefore, the power to defend, say, the Wichita abortion clinic belongs solely to the state of Kansas.
The essay’s most provocative formulation converts anti-imperial language into domestic constitutional politics.
The slogan here should be “U.S. Out of Kansas,” or “Kansas for the Kansans”; let the Kansans settle their own affairs.
Rothbard also rejects liberal appeals to precedent. Eisenhower’s intervention at Little Rock, in his account, was not a model to extend but a violation to repudiate; schools and policing are state matters. Likewise, the Reconstruction-era anti-Klan statute invoked by Judge Kelly is dismissed as a product of constitutional trampling and as an obsolete pretext for federal jurisdiction.
The closing section presses the practical consequences of decentralization. If Kansas does not defend abortion clinics, women may go to states where local sentiment supports abortion access. Rothbard anticipates the egalitarian objection about poor women and folds it into his broader critique of welfare-state reasoning: once inability to pay becomes an argument for taxpayer provision of abortion, the same logic extends to all consumption.
The essay’s relevance lies in its fusion of libertarian abortion-rights sympathy with radical anti-nationalism. Rothbard is less interested in adjudicating Wichita’s immediate moral drama than in using it to discipline libertarian thought: a just end does not validate the wrong sovereign instrument. Its enduring conceptual move is to treat federal domestic intervention as structurally analogous to foreign intervention, making “denationalizing the courts” part of a wider project of dismantling centralized political power.
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