This is what abortion has led to
Posted by ycandrea 5 years, 9 months ago to Government
OK. I just vomited and I am still very shaken up when I heard that the governors of Virginia and New York want to kill babies after they are born in the name of abortion rights. I am really upset. I have always believed a baby is a human being with the right to live from the point of conception. Yes, a woman has a right to make choices about her body, but she does not have the right to kill another human being. She can give it up for adoption if she doesn’t want the baby. But now they can kill the child after it is born. Isn’t that murder? So, how do all of you who think it's OK to kill humans inside the womb think about killing them outside the womb feel? To me, there is no difference but some of you rationalize it. So did Ayn Rand. This is one issue I did not agree with her about and this is why. This is where your rights to abortion/murder have led. There should be a category for morality.
Previous comments...
This pic attached to this link shows the progressive politics that brought us where we are. Apologies, I can't post it directly.
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoEhhif6eYPVhkXdb...
My 2 bits.
At conception it is "human" in the sense of being human cells with human dna, but not a person. When it develops "brain waves" at a time still well before birth it is still human in that sense, but still not yet a person.
They scream "You can't tell me what to do with my body!". But that little body inside of them can't scream, can't recoil in horror in anticipation of what's about to happen.
But how old were you when you had your first cognitive thought? At what age did you become sentient?
Since I highly doubt a 1 month old child can think conceptually abut a future human life, they by your definition it's also not a person.
The explanations of the rights of the woman and of the fallacies of strained rationalizations for "rights" of the unborn show where the knowledge is and isn't. It isn't in the personal attacks and emotionally defiant dogma by anti-abortionists who don't acknowledge responses, let alone attempt to answer them. This is illustrated over and over by repetitive contradictory appeals shrieking that doctors are "murdering" "unborn babies, while ignoring the impact of forcing women to bear unwanted children.
There is very little knowledge or interest in Ayn Rand's philosophy on this forum.
War with whom, you might ask? Perhaps the Comintern, established in 1919. Though dissolved in 1943, its mission seems to continue, primarily in the USA through the Democrat Party..
What reality have we worked hardest at evading? I would say cause and effect, starting with the removal of consequence from our sexual urges. First we created "The Pill," then we went wild. From there began the great flood of human degeneracy.
No wonder the Muslims feel threatened by our great western civilization.
I think reactionary elements of all the major religions of the world feel threatened by reason and liberty, i.e. "Western civilization".
Neither was the invention of anesthesia to avoid pain -- which was also opposed by the Church as contrary to nature determined by God -- an avoidance of causality. The invention of methods of contraception and abortion, like anesthesia, depended on understanding the mechanisms of causality in order to achieve a human value and avoid an unwanted disvalue.
Moral choice in principle requires identifying means in accordance with causality in order to achieve human values, not following duties whether or not imposed by religion. See Ayn Rand's "Causality Versus Duty" in *Philosophy: Who Needs It". It's telling that you take the side of the Muslims whose mystical duties reject human understanding of causality and rational thought and action.
"Of Living Death" is another great article dealing with a different aspect: the vicious anti-human motives of the Catholic Church’s injunctions on sex, contraception and abortion. That article was referred to elsewhere on this page in the context of "mental health" as a valid reason for abortion: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
And yes, there are militants here who rotely bulk 'downvote' posts based on who wrote them. It didn't start with this thread.
We have laws. Actually, had them since the Ten Commandments came into existence a few thousand years ago.
It says: "Thou shall not kill".
It is NOT the woman's choice to kill the newborn. It is NOT abortion any more.
While there are arguments back and forth when does life start and I don't want to get into that, there is no argument about a newborn child.
It is a human, capable of surviving outside the womb and if its life terminated, it is murder.
Plain and simple.
No one has argued for killing children. The article stirring up all this anti-abortion hysteria in the name of "children" already born is phony.
The issue of abortion is one where two individuals' rights are in conflict. It makes me think of thought experiments in which you can push someone in front of a train to save someone else. I think of it as wrong to take action to that kills someone, even if it's to save another. But I also think it's wrong to use force to make someone take action to sustain a life. Applied to abortion, I might think we should use force to stop someone from killing the fetus, but we should not use force to make the mother incubate the fetus. Their lives are tied together, though, so forcing her not to kill is the same as forcing her to support another. I don't see how outlaw hurting the fetus without saying once you're pregnant you lose all rights. Society decides if you can work a dangerous job, work around chemicals, ignore a doctor's orders to rest, take medical interventions that put the fetus at risk, and so on.
I agree with you that a constitution is an important framework but cannot resolve complicated questions where people's rights are in conflict.
So, when a woman is 3 weeks from birth I know exactly what's in there -- it's a baby. Take it out and you'll get what I was holding. Now there is no instant when this happens. From conception on there is a continuity. About the only explicit change is a heartbeat, but that's really early.
It makes the issue really clear to pretend the baby doesn't exist until it's outside and breathes it's first breath. But that isn't reality.
The fetus does not have "cognition of themselves". It passively reacts to vague stimuli. Birth is not just another new experience in "our whole lives made up of new experiences". It is the first experience of the new born person. Becoming a biologically independent person from a biologically parasitic is a "change in what we are", to be identified and distinguished conceptually, not lumped together as if the essential differences were irrelevant.
You can imagine it suddenly changes into something else, but there is ample evidence that a late term baby reacts to external stimuli, including sounds from the mother's environment.
Other than starting to breathe, the mind and nervous system are exactly the same immediately before birth and after it. Pretty much all the systems in the body are functioning just the same.
In my son's case he needed bilirubin lights because the liver is one of the last organs to mature and his wasn't quite up to managing his body.
The other big difference is breathing on their own, but we don't declare someone dead because they are on a respirator with clear brain activity.
A fetus "capable" of what it could do if it is later born is a potential person. You are not an undead corpse, a kind of corpse, because you "just haven't been presented with the opportunity" to cease all life functions.
I'm making looking at this from an objective biological perspective without any reference to a soul -- which is the religious argument.
A fetus is a potential person, not a person, and so are the original cells at conception. They are part of the development of what will be a person, and are a requirement for the person's life to begin as a person. The concept of rights does not apply to a potential human being, and can't be smuggled into cells or fetuses in the name of an entire "life" including before becoming a person at birth. The concept of rights cannot be rationalistically made to apply with a verbal manipulation. The floating abstraction version of 'rights' remains a floating abstraction.
This is neither religion nor context dropping analytical philosophy.
Biologically, though, I stick with my position that the organism is biologically identical before and after birth. Of course after birth it will go through another period of rapid change because it's in a significantly different environment and has to do that breathing thing.
A person is a human being. Everyone knows what that means. It does not require "voting". Moral philosophy does not require advanced special knowledge of the special sciences such as biology to understand what a person, a fetus and more primitive stages are. People knew this centuries ago.
The fetus is not biologically identical to a new born infant. It's functioning is radically different, as has been discussed on this forum several times.
Having ruled out thinking in terms of rights, person, philosophy, and the difference between pre and post birth, insisting that only a structural "biology of an organism" out of context and without regard to function may be employed, you are understandably left not able to make essential distinctions, and in the name of science, emotionally accept the barbaric process of forcing women to bear children.
Can you give any objective, measurable difference in what it is. (By the way, you may have to take it out to check).
"the barbaric process of forcing women to bear children."
Thank you for the interesting discussion. This stands out to me b/c I find the use of force to make people be incubators for another absolutely barbaric and immoral. At the same time, I see babies under 3 months as being in the "fourth trimester". Loud sounds, even a vacuum cleaner, consistent with the sounds in the womb sooth them. This makes me think newborns and third-trimester fetuses are similar in some ways.
So I am torn but err on the side of not forcing people to support/carry someone.
No abortion occurs a couple of days before birth, so it's an irrelevant comparison anyway.
A sleeping person is not an unborn person for obvious reasons that if you can't see, I'm not sure we have a basis for any discussion anyway.
For example, if you dispute the self evident fact that 1+1 = 2, requiring supporting arguments for something that straight forward, then no real discussion is possible.
In other words, you are intentionally playing dumb, to avoid conceding.
Also, detailed arguments have been repeatedly provided by others here, so I would just direct you to any post by ewv.
It gets tiresome.
A good lecture to listen to or review is Leonard Peikoff's 1998 Ford Hall Forum talk "A Picture is Not an Argument" at http://www.peikoff.com/2014/11/17/a-p... One of the picture-substitutes he describes is the anti-abortionists' imagery replacing concepts with percepts and emotion.
When do rights begin?
It seems arbitrary to draw the lines at birth and 18.
Objectivity in law means both an objective justification and an objective definition telling everyone what the law is. If you can't justify a particular point over others within a range then it doesn't matter which one it is, but something must be chosen and fixed so that everyone knows what it is and you must know that it is optional before doing it or invoking secondary considerations to decide. So there is a sense in which it has to be optional, but that does not mean arbitrary.
A key point is to remember that you aren't trying to discover something intrinsic to reality, and neither are you subjectively deciding. You must, in accordance with the proper principles, objectively identify goals and relevant facts to whatever degree of precision you can and need to, defined in a way that is practical to implement for the purpose.
This also arises in defining birth, which does not occur instantaneously -- is it 1 minute after this, or required to be before that, etc. But the requirement to be born -- outside of the womb as a biologically independent entity -- is not arbitrary. Deciding on such definitions is not a big controversy if everyone understands the basic principles and the process isn't corrupted by an anti-abortion "rights of cells" agenda, etc.
For laws regarding later stages of adolescent and adult life, people do mature at different rates and have other differences, which must be taken into account when defining a range of options and possible exceptions depending on well-defined conditions.
Adults can also differ, but the law can specify what can be normally and reasonably understood. If some don't take the responsibility to do that then they are outside of the law without excuse. If a large portion of the culture is ignorant of basic principles then trying to establish a civilized society is a big problem no matter what you do.
As Ayn Rand put it in IOE, "And although I hesitate to talk about volition on the preconceptual level—because the subject isn't aware of it in those terms—even a preconceptual infant has the power to look around or not look, to listen or not listen. He has a certain minimal, primitive form of volition over the function of his senses. But volition in the full sense of a conscious choice, and a choice which he can observe by introspection, begins when he forms concepts..."
Birth is the beginning of the fundamental right to life, required for all other rights, and which requires a person, not a potential person. That an earlier birth might be viable, with or without artificial incubation, means that it is still a potential, and does not justify forcing the woman, violating her rights.
Other rights accumulate with the capacity to exercise them. That is the principle for rights as a moral concept, remembering that it an objective process based on known facts and principles, neither a discovery of the intrinsic nor subjective inventions, as discussed previously.
Implementing it in civil rights is a political and legal process, requiring establishment of legal definitions and for which the onset of various derivative rights is in optional ranges as discussed previously.
That principle of the objective versus the subjective and intrinsic is very important throughout all the branches of philosophy and you will see Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff refer to it frequently. It is the way knowledge and philosophy, and how we formulate them in conceptual form, are based in facts, not arbitrary or mystic.
For why civil rights like the right to enter into contracts begin when they do, and what that depends on, you would have to look into the legal history and the arguments given to see why they begin as defined in law and whether or not you think it was reasonable.
I felt like this started at around 3 months of age for my kids, but I cannot be sure.
"That an earlier birth might be viable, with or without artificial incubation, means that it is still a potential, and does not justify forcing the woman, violating her rights."
I know. I try to imagine future technologies that could save the fetus without violating anyone's rights. For right now, people look to this philosophical issue as justification to violate people's rights to their own bodies.
The concept of rights is a moral concept based on the factual nature of living people who use their minds to comprehend the external world and make choices. See Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Ethics" and "Man's Rights". That is the basis for the fact that rights pertain to people, not whatever someone feels like. It's not "just opinion".
To take the concept of rights and misapply it as an entitlement to be born by an entity without the characteristics that give rise to morality and rights is to misuse the concept of rights as a floating abstraction that is meaningless. Yet that is at best what anti-abortionists do when they glibly demand "rights" for the unborn based on a vague notion of human rights. Worse are the religious mystics demanding a duty to procreate and protect mystical souls in accordance with faith in duty to God's Will.
That cognitive misappropriation of the concept 'rights' is not just as good as any other "opinion". It sabotages rational understanding. Further using it to rationalize government force to control other people by the force of law is an unconscionable injustice and violation of rights on the basis of nothing but subjectivism -- mostly inspired in this case by its origins in, or overt repetition of, religious faith.
Such is the nature of faith and force when reason is abandoned for competing and conflicting subjective "opinions" deemed to be 'just as good' as any other opinion, while denying the relevance of the rational basis for "opinions" the perpetrator does not happen to like.
Thanks ewv.
I used to think a constitution needed to be structured just right to prevent mob rule. I'm beginning to think a constitution is just codifying the philosophy behind a democratic republic that holds rights above the will the of the majority. That means no constitution can be powerful enough to prevent mob rule. We need philosophy, maybe Objectivism or maybe a broader philosophy that hold individual rights as sacrosanct.
Because all it takes is a leader with a lot of public support and you get "a New Deal", who needs to pay attention to that old constitution. You get Supreme Court judges upholding the concept that growing wheat for your own use is "Interstate commerce".
This would be the problem with any real "Gulch", because it would probably be stunningly productive and attract looters. If they became numerous enough they would vote in new rules, or seize Midas Mulligan's property "for the common good".
Might does not make right, but it can certainly make reality.
A constitutional government does not prevent mob rule if the people running the government ignore it.
An area where I think Rand is guilty of wishful thinking is that postulating a philosophy that it is immoral to initiate force against another human being does not automatically make other human beings observe that philosophy. The use of force has been and sadly will continue to be one of the forces that have driven historical development. Most nations of the world exist because someone with a bunch of weapons came and killed the people who didn't do what they said. It's only in football that you can throw a yellow flag for excessive force and they have to stop.
Ayn Rand did not "postulate" a philosophy, and philosophy, including her philosophy based on reason, is far broader than "Immoral to initiate force". That premise of anti-intellectual, a-philosophical libertarianism, which concrete bound cynical mentality declaring everything to permanently be a "mob", also can't see a cause of the world-history beyond "here now weapons".
It is not true that "we will always have mob rule". The people with whom you live and work among in this country today are not just a "mob". This country was not founded as "rule by a mob", and in the 19th century especially, was not "ruled by a mob".
The politics of a country follows its broadly accepted philosophy. Ayn Rand recognized that cause and advocated changing fundamental ideas over the time that that takes, not "wishful thinking" from "postulating" libertarianism. Whether or not a country is "ruled by a mob" depends on what the people understand and think about the importance of reason and individualism.
Yes. I used to think the constitution needed "teeth" to prevent mob rule, but pieces of paper do not have teeth.
"This would be the problem with any real "Gulch", because it would probably be stunningly productive and attract looters."
Even if outside force could be prevented, eventually citizens get careless with their republic. The prosperity leads to a feeling that there's no danger whatsoever of the republic turning into a mob.
I don't know if the quote/story is apocryphal, but Ben Franklin supposedly said it's a Republic "if you can keep it" walking out of the constitutional convention.
A proper society based on understanding the right philosophical ideas retains knowledge and rationality as virtues; it does not fall by default into recklessly turning into a mob.
The Enlightenment made the constitution and the founding of this country possible, but it did not have a full philosophical defense of the rights of the individual, and the emphasis on egoism was only implicit in the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Those intellectual weaknesses made the counter Enlightenment appeal to altruism and collectivism much easier.
Being carried to term is not a right, anymore than free healthcare is a right.
No one should be forced in either case.
Please refer to the Galt's Gulch Code of Conduct: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/faq#...
Those advocating someone can be forced to carry to term, are in principle, no different to those advocating forcing someone to pay for your healthcare.
So, the Dumocrats in Virginia are debating murder of a human being. They are pushing a bill that will allow 'abortion' after birth. In my eyes, that is murder and Dumocrats will have blood on their hands. Just another reason that the Dumocrats Hate God, Hate Christians, Hate America. Just another reason to not vote for any Democrat,
Next, I suspect that once you get outside the DC area of Virginia and eliminate the state legislature locale most of Virginia does NOT agree with Tran or the governor.
To me, the most disgusting thing is that while the provision claims that it must be "for the health of the mother", this is a smokescreen because they can cite anything including emotional duress or economic hardship as a "health" consideration.
Here is an excerpt from Ayn Rand writing on this topic regarding a reform partially repealing NY's then 86-year old anti-abortion law in 1969. It is a principled, moral statement, not a "smokescreen".
"Readers of The Objectivist do not need lengthy arguments to know why the present law is irrational and immoral. I refer you to my article 'Of Living Death' (in the September-November 1968 issues of this magazine [https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1968...]), particularly to the passage: 'Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered.'
...
"A consistently proper stand on this issue would require the total repeal of the law forbidding abortion. This is not likely to pass at present, but the kind of amended laws that have been proposed would represent a great step forward, would save many lives and alleviate an incalculable amount of human suffering—provided they include a clause which permits legal abortion when the pregnancy endangers a woman's physical or mental health. Such a clause would protect a woman from lifelong despair and would give her a chance to assert her rights.
A news story in The New York Times (January 30, 1969) said: 'The provision about mental health is particularly significant because opponents of abortion-law change, led by the Roman Catholic bishops of the state, have argued that this would allow women with unwanted pregnancies to obtain legal abortions simply by attesting that they were distraught about having the child.' Yes, of course. That is the point. (Judge for yourself the motives—and the humanity—of men who would raise an objection of that kind.)
"A clause including the protection of a woman's mental health, is essential to a meaningful abortion-law reform. Without it, any reform passed would be worse than none: it would be a pretense that might delay actual reform for another 86 years.
"There are few political actions today that we can support without supporting a number of dangerous contradictions at the same time. The abortion-law reform is one such action; it is clear-cut, unequivocal and crucially important. It is not a partisan issue in the narrow sense of practical politics. It is a fundamental moral issue of enlightened respect for individual rights versus savagely primitive superstition."
The article referred to, "Of Living Death", was from a lecture at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum in Dec. 1968 and as a radio address and was anthologized in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. It is "an extended analysis of the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, laying bare the vicious motives behind the Catholic Church’s views on sex, contraception and abortion." https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1968... (1989).
https://youtu.be/jjxwVuozMnU.
Follow the money.
https://youtu.be/6LPlHjP1DVw
There is plenty more evidence from undercover investigators. When or if you excuse this for some reason I will offer more clear evidence. I agree For PP the majority of funding comes from fed subsidies.
The “specimens “ meaning Organs. Brains. Lungs , and other parts of the fetus. They are all purchased separately.
But $50-75 per part of which could mean $500 to $750 per abortion x20 per week is big money. BTW you clearly wrote they do it for research.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
Using one's own stem cells is far cheaper and safer. This is why the "specimens" get so little now.
Anti-abortionists opposed to stem cell research pronounced a false equivalence from the beginning as propaganda to ban use of embryonic stem cells. They partially succeeded when the Bush administration intruded in the scientific research on behalf of religion by banning funding, moving it to 'approved' work. Despite the fact that the taxes did not go down because the funding was only shifted, there was a lot of protest and private funding increased to continue the embryonic stem cell research.
I didn't agree or disagree with Bush on embryonic stem cells, but Yamanaka and others adapted to come up with a solution that was both ethically and economically better.
The embryonic stem cell debate is at this point essentially moot.
Don't you see something peculiar in the fad to routinely refer to embryonic stem cells as not "ethical", instilling the association "unethical embryonic stem cells" to be automatic? It reflects the drive by anti-abortionists to inculcate the notion that ebryonic stem cells are allegedly "unethical" because they are embryonic.
"Control over one's own cells' explains nothing for ethics. Whose control over what cells in comparison with what?
"Risk of lawsuits" from irrationalists is most ethically eliminated by removing the improper legal grounds for them so there is no standing. There is no "third party" rationally involved in embryo cells.
Democratic candidates recieved between $30- 60 million in campaign donations. Basically a kick back from fed funds.
Planned Parenthood is also a politically "progressive" organization comprised of mostly or all leftists. Of course they support Democrats. Those Federal subsidies should not exist at all, but it doesn't mean that Planned Parenthood exists for money and power as a kickback scheme rather than their stated goals.
There are all kinds of financial corruption throughout the whole system, but that is not what determines ideological goals of leftists exploiting and participating in the corruption and it doesn't mean that everyone who supports the right of abortion is a leftist. The left 'package-deals' a lot with its "pro-choice" stance, including Obamacare and worse, which is not what Ayn Rand supported.
Stating other fraud and corruption exists doesn’t strengthen your support of such actions.
They have consistently turned a blind eye and even gives suggestions to cover up sex trafficking of minors.
Case in point: In 2008, Live Action released its child sexual abuse investigation into Planned Parenthood, which found that eight Planned Parenthood facilities in six different states were willing to cover up sexual abuse, including disregarding mandatory reporting laws of suspected statutory rape. Facilities even provided instructions to the undercover investigators on how to circumvent parental consent laws.
Yet, this abortion corporation, which flaunts the law, continued to receive half a billion dollars every year from the taxpayer, while politicians and media alike approved.
In 2011, Live Action’s first investigation was followed by another, which set out to see how Planned Parenthood would respond to sex traffickers seeking services, including abortions, for their underage sex slaves.
In this investigation, Live Action sent a male and female undercover investigator into Planned Parenthood facilities in New Jersey, Virginia, New York, and D.C., posing as pimps seeking health services, including abortions, for underaged girls. Live Action claimed the videos proved Planned Parenthood was in violation of the law, which states that sex trafficking of minors is a crime and anyone who aids or abets a sex trafficker could also be punished with a crime.
And again, the millions in taxpayer dollars kept flowing to Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that government dollars can be removed when providers of Title X Family Planning funds fail to report child abuse.
Planned Parenthood’s response was to simply deny the accusation while claiming they would retain staffers. And they were able to get away with it, because instead of joining with Live Action and demanding an investigation, the media became part of Planned Parenthood’s PR machine, attempting to alleviate all concerns.
Even when, in 2016, Live Action produced FOIA documents disproving Planned Parenthood’s claim that it had contacted authorities to report the pimp, the media turned a blind eye.
Embryonic stem cells are not unethical by their nature. What gives them value is their pluripotency, their ability to differentiate into any organ type. If you can get that functionality more cheaply, with fewer legal and regulatory entanglements, and for less money, why expose yourself to the additional risk for no added benefit?
An even better analogy would be to invest in solar energy instead of fossil fuels. The energy associated with solar cell manufacturing solar cells is more than you typically get out of them. Moreover, enough of the chemicals, particularly arsenic, involved in solar cell manufacturing have enough real hazards to make the environmental argument for solar cells a specious one. In that case, the environmental benefits are highly dubious and the cost is over twice that of fossil fuel-derived energy. The choice should be an obvious one.
Perhaps the best analogy to the one I am drawing regarding the lack of value of embryonic stem cells vs. induced pluripotent stem cells would be to say that we should be using horses and carriages instead of cars.
2686
Q
!!mG7VJxZNCI
10 Feb 2019 - 5:24:09 PM
https://www.liveaction.org/what-we-do...
Why do D's push to fund [PP] using taxpayer dollars ($500m/year)?
Where does the money go?
Past political donations of [PP]?
What is the process of disposal re: aborted fetus?
What regulations (who monitors) are in place to ensure that process is being followed?
Why is there a new push by D's to legalize late term abortions?
See past drops re: [PP] re: Congressional report (WARNING: GRAPHIC)
This has nothing to do w/ a woman's right to choose (tactic they deploy when challenged to activate liberals/media hysteria).
The focus is on the organization itself.
https://www.crainsnewyork.com/awards/...
Ask yourself a very simple question:
Given the amount of evidence demonstrating illegal & disturbing activities by [PP]- where is the FBI investigation?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/plan...
[RR][MCCABE]
What senior political officials are providing cover to [PP]?
Will action be taken by DOJ/FBI?
2019?
Q
Freedom means freedom from physical compulsion. The morality of freedom, i.e., the rights of the individual, are principles based on the nature of man -- his requirements to live as a rational human being. That requires recognizing the same rights of others. They do not require, and are incompatible with, the imposition of unwanted duties in the name of "embracing responsibility" and crude threats of "regulate your ass".
Olduglycarl: "Life begins at conception, Life that becomes aware of it's environment, aware of pain and hunger, begins very soon after that."
A living cell in not a living person. Living cells at "conception" do not mean a human being that lives and has rights at conception, which is nonsensical. Awareness of the "environment" and "pain and hunger" do not "begin soon after" conception, and neither define being a person nor have anything to do with the basis of rights. The progression from a few cells at conception to a fetus is a potential human being, not a person with rights. The demands that a woman bear a child she does not want are a barbaric violation of the rights of a woman, not a "responsibility".
Not at all. This is like saying, "to obtain maximum freedom, one needs to embrace maximum tyranny."
Freedom is defined in Objectivism, as a rights protecting government.
"Life begins at conception, Life that becomes aware of it's environment, aware of pain and hunger, begins very soon after that."
Not human life, but more importantly, no RIGHTS begin until you are born.
"Leftest, the global delete, aka, the great unwashed, want you complacent or dead."
That is your position, along with anyone else who doesn't understand how rights work, so advocates reducing half the population to the level of cattle.
If you are anti-rights, as anti-abortionists necessarily are, then you are anti-LIFE.
Even Northam clearly stated, "And its done in case where there may be severe deformities, where there may be a fetus that is non-viable."
Other than a perfectly legitimate exercise of a persons individual rights?
"the left wants to take it further..."
The left are the ones trying to ban abortion, by trying to mischaracterize it as murder, or something.
You are also still continuing to try and push a line you have been clearly proved wrong on.
You said that people were advocating to kill "AFTER" birth, but clearly that's not what has been suggested at all, and the transcript proves it.
It's the height of intellectual dishonesty to continue to double down, not only on a topic you clearly don't understand, but even when your direct assertions are directly proven wrong.
It's time we all wake up and smell the afterbirth.
Is that really unreasonable?
Abortion must be perfectly legal, because no rights are violated.
Rights begin, in a rudimentary fashion, only after birth.
That's the line. It's black and white and crystal clear.
There is no more clear line in the sand then rights beginning at birth.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital,
or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
As to the relevant part concerning abortion, "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...", the argument has waxed and waned pro and anti abortion throughout our history without resulting in a universally accepted definition of whether a fetus in utero acquires personhood and constitutional protection at conception, or, at some point after exiting the womb.
Ayn Rand, a virulent pro-choice advocate, distinguished between early pregnancy as "protoplasm" not worthy of rights, and, the later stages of pregnancy.
"Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a “right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable. . . . Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives. The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals. For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone’s benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings."
The Ayn Rand Letter “A Last Survey”
The Ayn Rand Letter, IV, 2, 3
"...but the essential issue concerns only the first three months..."
Even Rand was open to the argument that as the term of pregnancy neared its end, that living thing in the womb was no longer "a piece of protoplasm" but a living person finishing another stage in a life-long process. Birth is not an abrupt change.
Therefore, I conclude that abortion should be legal in the first trimester and criminally illegal there after.
She wrote in "Of Living Death" in her anthology The Voice of Reason:
"A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).
"Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?"
"Exiting from the womb", i.e., birth, is not "merely another step" of what you called an "arbitrary stage" in the life of a person. Being born is the first step of being the person.
Leonard Peikoff also explained the principle in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:
"Just as there are no rights of collections of individuals, so there are no rights of parts of individuals—no rights of arms or of tumors or of any piece of tissue growing within a woman, even if it has the capacity to become in time a human being. A potentiality is not an actuality, and a fertilized ovum, an embryo, or a fetus is not a human being. Rights belong only to man—and men are entities, organisms that are biologically formed and physically separate from one another. That which lives within the body of another can claim no prerogatives against its host.
"To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers'."
You further misrepresented Ayn Rand by quoting her out of context, "the essential issue concerns only the first three months", without mentioning what she said it is "essential" for, switching her context to mean your claim that she would accept your criminalization after three months.
In context she wrote "One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable".
That is the essential issue in the argument. The anti-abortion movement generally wants to ban all abortion including abortion of what they call "life at conception". Ayn Rand observed that the essence of the debate is seen in the nature of the first trimester, for which there are no grounds for even confused argument invoking rationalizations about imagery with "ten little fingers" and the rest of it. That first stage strips the anti-abortionist argument bare to its essentials because it is so obvious that there is no organism at all, even a parasitic organism, let alone one capable of rights. The mysticism and barbarism of sacrificing a woman to that is the essential. That same observation is why the anti-abortion activists, who still want all abortion banned, now play a shell game shifting attention away from it to propagandistic imagery at the latest stage and false associations with "infanticide".
Her sentence "One may argue" does not mean she was "open" to accepting such arguments over the last six months or that she was "open" to your notion that it is a "person" with "constitutional rights". She explicitly rejected that.
Neither did the founders of this country, in drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, form a government to prohibit abortion, which was common at the time -- there is no mention of "rights" of embryos and fetuses in the founding documents or their Enlightenment philosophy. They were not Catholic theologians. To "quote" the Constitution, and worse Ayn Rand, as allegedly supporting and "open to" your goal of "criminalization" -- which she emphatically rejected as "unspeakable" -- is not honest. In of "Of Living Death she wrote, "The Catholic church is responsible for this country's disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished".
To "argue" about later stages of development requires a basis of more understanding of the nature and source of rights in order to know at least something about how to evaluate and expose rationalizations over secondary factors such developing primitive organs and "twitching when poked". Those who are on a crusade to ban abortion don't have that understanding of rights, only a word "rights" mystically associated with anything "human", including cells, and an emotional obsession with a vague entitlement to be born -- while demanding to sacrifice the rights of the woman. As this thread illustrates, with that kind of premise and lack of understanding no serious discussion is possible from them.
To assert facts not in evidence is subjective. To accuse me of dishonesty and agreeing with the mysticism of the Catholic Church and those who believe that conception confers personhood is grotesque. You ought to apologize.
Nor did I write that the founding fathers created the Constitution and the fifth amendment "to prohibit abortion". Please stop putting words at my fingertips.
To begin a paragraph " To "argue" about later stages of development requires a basis of more understanding of the nature and source of rights in order to know at least something about how to evaluate and expose rationalizations over secondary factors..." is little more than a floating abstraction written to demonstrate your self-imagined superior intellect and denigrate your opponent. The attempt fails on its face.
The potentiality of human existence lies in the disconnected state of sperm and ovum. Once joined in the womb and the fertilized cell attaches itself to the wall of the womb, it becomes an actuality, an existent.
That a woman ought not be a slave to her enjoyment of sex and the whims of the control freak mystics is not in question in the first trimester. But what is the mindset of a woman who carries a living thing inside her body for forty weeks and then chooses to terminate that living thing on the delivery table? what is the mindset of someone who would advocate that the mother's right to terminate that living thing's existence up to the moment its head appears at the entrance of the birth canal?
According to this site at 38 weeks of gestation:
"You are 38 weeks pregnant...Development is complete, baby's main job is to gain weight..."
http://baby2see.com/development/week3...
"development is complete..." Is there no place in Rand's philosophy to concede that he is a human being waiting to make his appearance on earth?
And worthy of protection under the fifth amendment?
Again: "A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).
"Abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?"
And: "To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable".
And: "The Catholic church is responsible for this country's disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished".
That was Ayn Rand's position.
Whether or not you choose to explicitly embrace Catholicism in any of its dogmas or simply choose to carry on its tradition sacrificing women to an unborn potential for nine or six months or any other period, it is still "unspeakable". Banning abortion for six months is still banning abortion. Repudiating your position for what it is is not "dishonest".
Your assertion that the Constitution, "Specifically, the fifth amendment", "protects" the unborn is also false and a-historical. The founders did not mention or discuss abortion, and protecting an alleged entitlement to be born was not a function or purpose of the Constitution, which pertains to the purpose and organization of government for the people, not the unborn. Claiming that "protection under the Fifth Amendment" pertains to the unborn makes no more sense than would invoking the First Amendment's "freedom of assembly". Like the left, you "find" an entitlement that is not there.
Understanding the nature and source of rights most certainly is required to discuss and argue for "rights". In particular, the bizarre rationalizations for "rights" of a fetus ignore the nature and source of rights, instead invoking secondary characteristics like "heart beat", "brain activity", "ten little fingers", "twitches when poked", "registers pain", "attaches to the wall of the womb", an alleged "main job of gaining weight", "shape" in an ultrasound and the rest of the nonsense we typically hear as pseudo-scientific appeals attaching a mystical notion of "rights" to the unborn. None of it has anything to do with rights. All of it uses 'rights' as a stolen concept ignoring the meaning and source of a rational concept of moral rights and the facts on which it depends and therefore to what it applies.
Conceptual understanding is a requirement for rational discussion, not a "floating abstraction written to demonstrate your self-imagined superior intellect and denigrate your opponent" followed by the pretentiously irrelevant academic lingo "The attempt fails on its face".
Objectivity in use of concepts does not permit a crusade banning abortion with the understanding of 'rights' replaced by the word 'rights' mystically associated with anything 'human' (including cells) and an emotional obsession with a vague entitlement to be born -- while demanding to sacrifice the rights of the woman.
When a "fertilized cell attaches itself to the wall of the womb" the "actuality, an existent", i.e., a biologically parasitic entity, is still only a potential human being. "Potential" does not mean a free-floating potential that does not exist at all. It has to be something to be a potential for something else. That it is an "actual" something does not turn it into what it is a potential for, an actual person. Before it is born it is not a person as a biologically independent entity. It is only potentially a person. The concept of rights pertains to persons, not what is potentially a person.
The "mindset of the woman who carries a living thing inside her body for forty weeks and then chooses to terminate that living thing on" what otherwise would have been "the delivery table" is that she chooses not to bear a child for reasons of her own that she has a right to for her own life -- with the vast majority terminating the process long before, and with late term abortions almost entirely for reasons of protecting the life and health of the woman. No one deliberately puts it off to make it harder or does it for joy on a whim.
The dishonest hysterical imagery of "head appears at the entrance of the birth canal" does not represent when women discover the necessity to make a decision, why they make it, and when they choose to exercise their right to abort the process of bearing a child they do not want or which threatens their own health. Yet the dramatic false imagery is necessary for the misleading polemics. The false anti-conceptual imagery together with the emotional appeals with floating abstractions of 'human' and 'rights' do not excuse banning abortions for all, or anywhere within, the entire nine months -- including "to be a slave to her enjoyment of sex and the whims of the control freak mystics" for "only" six months and remaining lifespan.
The "mindset of someone who would advocate that the mother's right to terminate that living thing's existence" is the protection of the rights of the woman from the barbaric practice of forcing women to bear children they don't want, including those who may have wanted it but who find their own lives and health threatened and therefore choose not to do it.
No, there is "no place in Rand's philosophy to concede that he is a human being waiting to make his appearance on earth and worthy of protection under the fifth amendment". Ayn Rand's philosophy explicitly observes that a fetus is a potential human being developing and waiting to be born, if it at all, when it begins to acquire rights -- but without the religious metaphor of "make his appearance on earth".
As Ayn Rand made clear herself, her philosophy does not make "concessions" to the irrational, there is "no place" in her philosophy for "only" six months of barbarism, and she was not "open" to arguments for that.
Please consult the guidelines for posting here.
I say that accusation is BS, especially as pertaining to those here in the Gulch.
Also, I have not down voted any of your posts and I wish whoever is doing so would state why.
Except it's obviously not BS as it has been made by numerous posters here. Hint: whenever someone brings up a variant of, "don't have sex if you don't want to get pregnant," what they really want is to control peoples sex lives.
I'm being voted down, because I'm simply demonstrating that the posters here haven't the faintest about what they are saying and my posts are triggering them.
This is supposed to be an Objectivist forum, but it seems to be quite overrun by confused, religious leftists of the conservative movement.
"...what they really want is to control peoples sex lives." There you go again, making up stuff. No one here wants to control anyone's sex life. The point being made is having sex can have consequences as in a cause-effect relationship. That simple position has nothing to do with any kind of control. It just is, like A=A.
The thing that stands out to me is how I and many others are morbidly drawn to looking at train wrecks and how the Internet can provide an endless supply of them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/op...
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abo...
Edit: Oh, I have been on the abortion conversation I jumped the gun. Infanticide is murder as they are individuals with inalienable rights.
Edit 2: You all need to not forget the context of the right to pursuit your happiness and set the course of your life; that there is no duty, especially to being pregnant; and "Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?"
PS - glad you brought up happiness. How happy are women who have had abortions? Studies say most live under a pall of regret.
His demand for "self regulation" to not have sex in anticipation of the state coming down on you with prohibitions is just as ugly -- like the culture of 'self regulatory' dhimmitude of the Muslims.
Anyone who has sex already "takes the risk of pregnancy", with or without contraceptives. Pregnancy does not imply a duty to bear a child. Blarman's appeal to his notion of "don't take the risk" means "don't have sex unless you are willing to take the risk of being forced by theocrats to bear a child". That is oppressive "regulation of sex" and worse.
His arbitrary pronouncement that unmentioned "studies" have somehow proven that women who don't want children are "happier" if they don't have an abortion takes us back to the Dark Ages when Augustine redefined "happiness" to mean sacrifice to duties imposed by the supernatural.
"Where is you concern for drug addicts and their happiness levels?"
I am concerned about the government's responsibility to protect the Right to Pursue happiness, but I don't pretend that happiness can be found in self-delusion and the avoidance of reality. Nor do I pretend that I can divest consequence from choice on a personal whim.
The difference between government and self regulating are vast, but you stated you are for self-regulating. I meant that if you believe people should be rational, then you complaint is nitpicking compared to the usual topic of government regulated. You are just complaining to complain if your view is just that you wish people would do better
Not get knocked up in the first place if they aren't willing to bear the resulting child! Use contraception at a bare minimum.
The whole argument in this debate is from people who want to have it both ways: they want the pleasure that comes with sex but not the responsibilities that come with the resulting children. It is an avoidance of reality - an attempt to redefine choice and consequence.
"what do you want drug addicts to do?"
Not shoot up, obviously! I want rational people, absolutely! If one is consuming mind-altering substances, he or she is by definition no longer rational. Thus all talk about using reason on those who have intentionally removed it from their life is in and of itself a farce.
"You are just complaining to complain if your view is just that you wish people would do better"
To the contrary, I can't avail myself of someone's particular expertise, their products, or their services if they are not in a rational state of mind to conduct business. I lose out on that opportunity to pursue my own self interest - and so do they. Not only that, but the person in a drug-induced irrational state is more likely to infringe upon my self-interested pursuits than the rational person. I'd say those were pretty valid complaints, wouldn't you?
Getting "knocked up" is a disgusting way to characterize sex. But whatever anyone having sex thinks of it in contrast to that mentality, the purpose of sex is obviously often not to "bear the resulting child", nor is there any need to. There is no duty to bear a child as a result of pregnancy, whether or not contraception is used and whether or not it works if it is.
Blarman: "The whole argument in this debate is from people who want to have it both ways: they want the pleasure that comes with sex but not the responsibilities that come with the resulting children. It is an avoidance of reality - an attempt to redefine choice and consequence."
This dogma has been refuted here many times and Blarman keeps repeating it as if it means something other than his own authoritarian impositions.
The "whole argument" is not from "having it both ways". The argument against the anti-abortionists is that they savagely violate the rights of the individual on behalf of their mystical injunctions demanding a woman to bear a child. What he denigrates as "having it both ways" is a choice to pursue human pleasure and to not bear a child.
His mystical injunctions denying that are not "reality" and not bearing a child isn't "avoidance of reality". Bearing a child is a choice, not a duty required to be paid as the cost of pleasure. Choosing pleasure without having to bear a child is not "redefining choice and consequence". It is rejection of Blarman's obnoxious demand to prohibit choice and to dictate the consequences he wants himself.
That obnoxious demand is right out of the dogma of the Church denigrating human pleasure as an end in itself while imposing a duty to act in accordance with an imagined God's will dictating what "consequences" are allowed. It is the same Church mentality that tried to ban anesthesia on the dogma that it was Godl's will that people suffer as "natural" to being "His creatures".
All of it is disgusting anti-man dogma, not "reality" that we dare not avoid.
Blarman: " I want rational people, absolutely!".
Is that a joke? Obviously he does not want rational people. He wants submissive people. He demands that we follow mystical dogma in accordance with an imposed duty. He denies the morality, and our right, to make our own choices to achieve our own rational goals through rational means in accordance with rational knowledge of cause and effect -- that he damns as "avoiding reality" for not submitting to a sick, anti-man "reality" he wants to impose.
Blarman does not get to dictate to the rest of us what reality is. He does not get to dictate which causal factors, such as the cause and effect of abortion, are not allowed to be employed through choices he prohibits in the name of an unchosen duty he misrepresents as "responsibility".
That he comes onto an Ayn Rand Forum demanding such mysticism and duty in the name of reality and responsibility is truly obnoxious.
Procreation is not a duty, Sobriety is not a duty. They are not avoiding reality, abortion and drugs are a part of reality, and they made their choice.
Rights don't care about your hopes.
I never intimated otherwise. But along the same path, I have no responsibility to treat the irrational as if it were rational.
"Procreation is not a duty"
Again, I never intimated otherwise. But when one chooses to employ one's procreative powers, one can not choose to divest one's self of the consequences.
"Sobriety is not a duty."
Here I will simply ask the following question: is it moral to pursue self-delusion, i.e. is there a moral imperative to pursue Reality?
"Rights don't care about your hopes."
Neither do they respect one's self-afflicted delusions. On the other hand, Rights do carry with them a duty for responsible use or they may be restricted or taken away.
As to the rest, please answer my very simple and direct question: "is it moral to pursue self-delusion, i.e. is there a moral imperative to pursue Reality?"
No one said it is "moral to pursue self delusion" or "perfectly acceptable" to panic people in a crowded theater in the name of "free speech". No one has to "answer" Blarman's "simple questions" diverting discussion into irrelevancy.
An action that can cause disaster. So should there be a limit on free speech?
A good question.
Answer- With free speech you may shout FIRE anywhere,
but, a government with Objectivist principles would have legislation on these lines-
When you are in court you will face charges of Causing panic, Acting in a malicious manner so as to cause damage or injury, Resisting theatre staff who do have the right to remove you fast as others' rights are threatened by you. You may be sued for disruption, and for interfering with the obligations of management to perform a contract with patrons, etc.
Similar, driving a car, firing a rifle.
blarman- thanks for the question, it made me think, and I note the word theatre, I had to look it up, your usage is correct.
It is moral to pursue self-delusion, it is irrational, but it is moral to pursuit your happiness.
As ewv points out, you are just pushing a theology which states that rights require following a single path defined by you.
So therefore the Right to Speech is not unlimited as you suggest, i.e. there are limits to its proper expression. I completely agree. Duty is nothing more and nothing less than to recognize and respect the boundaries inherent in our expression of Rights. To violate those boundaries and infringe on others' rights is an abrogation of duty and may be penalized.
"It is moral to pursue self-delusion, it is irrational, but it is moral to pursuit your happiness."
So according to your view, it is entirely moral to be irrational, i.e. refusing to acknowledge Reality. Oooookay, then. I'll leave you to your pursuit of irrationality and the happiness you think may result from such.
Duty is an injunction to do what you are told because it is your duty to obey an alleged higher authority, not a "boundary inherent" in rights -- as in the fallacies promoted here to destroy the right of abortion in the name of an arbitrary "duty" to bear a child.
It is immoral to pursue self-delusion, which is the opposite of rationality. "Reality" is not the duties you want to impose to prohibit personal moral choice.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/res...
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ind...
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abo...
That is what I addressed, so don't change the topic of what I addressed as if you meant "the point of delivery". That is not at the "moment of birth", whatever you now mean by "mostly referring" to something else.
You started the thread with the assertion, "the governors of Virginia and New York want to kill babies after they are born in the name of abortion rights." That is the false impression given by the article you linked to, but it isn't true. It is what the anti-abortion lobby wants to believe because it doesn't itself understand the difference between pre vs post birth -- abortion vs infanticide -- and is drumming up hysteria over "infanticide" as if it means abortion.
The anti-abortion movement demands to prohibit as much abortion as it can get away with, beginning with conception, and that is a big problem for the rights of the individual, specifically the women it seeks to control. All of it is dishonestly portrayed as opposing "killing babies".
Your religious opinion that "life begins at conception" to mean a few cells are a person with rights makes no sense. A person is not a few cells without organs, a human mind, and much more. Abortion has nothing to do with "killing babies", either literally or in the confusion of calling everything from cells to a fetus a "baby".
We are not all "parasites". Getting food from the environment is not the concept of biological parasite.
These are fact not "just opinion". Your opinions are based on invalid concepts lumping together things that are essentially different, based on feelings. You end up with a war of "opinions" put into the force of law in which you recognize nothing as objective and no way to resolve conflicting subjectivism without force. That is the classical "faith and force" that comes from rejecting reason.
The other issue is that the only way to prevent a women from going home and aborting it herself is physical force against her, and by what right do you claim to have the ability to stop her?
Third, she has a right to pursuit her happiness, including being childless if she so chooses. Its her stem cells and blood and time and effort, it's up to her to choose.
Man is a rational animal, try reasoning with them to keep it or dispose of it before 3 months, but outlawing it will stop nothing.
The point as ewv states is that it demonstrates that the fetus is not an individual, and therefore cannot have any individual rights.
Here is a better argument: A fetus is inside an egg. The egg is used to form a bunch of stem cells into a life form. Until the stems cells have fully formed the genetic zygotes into the fully evolved form of the creature, that creature is not yet ready to exist in the world. Evolution "designed" life to be able to survive the world, and until the creature is fully evolved by the process of fetal development, it is not a life. When does a fetus become an individual? When it makes its first individual "decision" to leave the egg, (i.e., when the water breaks). How can we know this? Well the water breaks when the Surfactant protein A has reached a peak, which means the fetus's lungs are ready to breath air.
The article uses the "pull on the heart strings" tactic by saying the "horror" of unwanted parenthood forced on the mother is nothing but slavery. It doesn't mention the adoption option to escape said "slavery".
Then the article tries to make you believe there really is no difference between the cells of a viable fetus and an infected appendix. My BS meter pegged on that one.
I have my own copy of the Lexicon as well as many of Rand's books. I definitely agree with her on many topics, but I have great reservations on this one. IMHO a civilization that can come up with reasons to murder its children by the millions is a civilization that doesn't deserve to survive.
No one said a fetus is "no different" than an infected appendix. An appendix does not have the potential to be a person. They are the same in that neither is a human being and neither have "rights". They are both essentially different from a person. Not every organized collection of (human) cells is a person.
Not bearing a child is not "murdering children by the millions" and has nothing to do with the hyperbole of our civilization allegedly not deserving to survive. The right of a woman to not be forced to bear a child is a right, to be exercised in accordance with whatever reasons she chooses -- without regard for alleged duties to serve civilization, religion or subjective entitlements of an embryo or fetus, and is not "pulling on heartstrings". Rights are moral principles based on the nature of rational beings, not heartstrings. The lack of concern for women throughout history and into the future being forced to raise unwanted children reveals the motives of those who have supported and imposed that. The Catholic Church and may others argued and still argue that a woman has a duty to bear and care for the child regardless of her values and desires. That is supposed to be the justification for forced child bearing, packaged with the mystical notion of a mystic soul at conception that must be allowed to develop. Whether or not today someone else might later adopt a child or whether or not the potential mother would want to turn a child over to someone else is not relevant to the right to not have it and not going through an unwanted ordeal of having it out of imposed duty.
Also, what's missing is, if they honestly thought that mindless cells are human beings, then opposing abortion doesn't make any sense.
Humans are worthless by their own definition.
Another flip and the up side may result opining the event of successful fertilization IS an actual human being whereas potential is the existence of the sperm and egg separately before joining. Assuming there is no concern for the mother here is a false assumption as there is very much concern for the mother, but there is also concern for the child (or children as the case may be). The mysticism of the Catholic Church is irrelevant and I don't care what the pope thinks.
"Not bearing a child is not "murdering children by the millions..." A single mother having an abortion may not have an impact on any civilization, but millions of mothers lining up for millions of abortions carried out to its fullest potential can have a severe impact. Yes, my statement above may be hyperbole, but it was made to illustrate that point.
The most troubling development I see happening now in the legal world is the changing of the definition of what is called a potential human being such that it encroaches more and more into the area of what used to be considered an actual human being. The argument over "trimesters" seems to have been replaced with arguing over whether or not the child is actually born into the world or not. Could it be possible in my lifetime that an unhappy mother will be able to bring her one year old to a special clinic and have it legally put down? It seems as society becomes increasingly collectivist the value of a single individual (other than the ruling elite) becomes less and less and the lives of the children of the "masses" become worth virtually nothing.
Edit: Fixed a typo
There are no aborted children. That is a contradiction in terms. Without birth there is no child.
Sacrificing woman to the unborn because it is potentially a person, forcing her to bear a child she does not want, is barbaric. It is not "concern for the mother" or "child". There is no child. As Ayn Rand put it, to sacrifice the actual woman for a potential child is "unspeakable".
Zygotes, embryos and fetuses are not "children". An abortion is not "murder", and millions of them are not "murdering children by the millions". That the hyperbole was deliberate only illustrates the kinds of irrational smears employed as emotional manipulation.
The "impact on civilization" of "millions of abortions" is irrelevant. No one lives and breeds for civilization. That is pure collectivism.
The moral "impact" of forcing even one woman to bear a child is "unspeakable". With that kind of barbarism no one's rights are safe. That is how our lives become worthless in the eyes of the state.
The current arguments of "trimesters" is political jockeying by the anti-abortion lobby that has been trying to control as much as it can after progressively losing the battle to prevent both contraception and all abortion. It muddies the waters by trying to ascribe "rights" to the unborn in accordance with accumulating characteristics irrelevant to the concept of 'rights'. They would very much like to force the birth of children and make that the only argument but have been falling to the rights of women, who do not choose to be treated as breeding stock.
Ya takes your chances and you deal with the outcome...ahhhh, that's called accountability for one's own actions!
PS...the father must be included in the outcome too...he is responsible as well.
You know darn well today's left takes no responsibility for anything.
Angry at the issue...not you dear.
"The only real related choice a women has is: to screw or not to screw...that is the question. Ya takes your chances and you deal with the outcome...ahhhh, that's called accountability for one's own actions!"
That is indeed a sick view of sex and responsibility. This is supposed to be an Ayn Rand forum.
I'll say it again...you play you pay. I, in my day, was fully aware of that.
Rape, incest, malformation is another thing, and should be dealt with early.
A woman who chooses to exercise her right not to bear a child has good reasons for it; it isn't frivolous "convenience" of the moment, though that would be her right as well. You don't tell another person to go through the ordeal of bearing a child only to go through another ordeal of putting the child not wanted at all up for adoption, with no regard in addition for how she will always feel about her unknown child out there somewhere.
Your cynically cavalier "pay to play" in the name of "responsibility", vicious rhetoric accusing people of "murder", complete illogic of imposing an entitlement to be born in the name of "human rights" and other floating abstractions (like any leftist), and arrogant lack of concern for what you demand to put the woman through -- sneered away as nothing but lack of "convenience" -- are all vicious and disgusting.
Secondly, abortion doesn't murder anyone, it's not even a rights violation, so should be perfectly legal.
Having said that, I can understand the arguments re viable fetuses.
"Rape, incest, malformation is another thing, and should be dealt with early."
This contradicts the position you put forward originally of abortion being murder.
Are you saying just because you were raped, you can murder an "innocent human being?"
"Trying to force responsibility is what the left always tries to do." Are you kidding? Sometimes the right acts to force responsibility. The left actively promotes irresponsibility.
Thanks for your patience and clarity.
That's true. You should no more be forced to pay for someone's abortion, than someone should be forced to carry to term.
"Are you kidding? Sometimes the right acts to force responsibility. The left actively promotes irresponsibility."
So, those who are properly defined as right wing, support rights protecting government. Such a government only acts when rights are violated, not merely when someone is acting irresponsible.
The whole "responsibility" angle, is what conservatives grasp onto, because they don't really know anything about politics.
The responsibility "angle" is not something to be "grasped onto". When Ayn Rand says that each individual must generate enough self-sustaining actions for his/her own life, that is a responsibility to oneself. Rand also talks about we should not "be our brother's keeper"; in order for that to be possible, each individual has to be his/her own keeper. The problem that society has now is that way too many moochers think that they have no such responsibility to take care of themselves. Then looters assume a responsibility that is not their own to confiscate our well-earned fortunes to pay for the irresponsible.
As for the 'responsibility angle', they mix that up as well. The moral responsibility for one's own life is the opposite of conservative duties demanded to be accepted as our "responsibility" -- including the notion of "responsibility" for an entitlement for the unborn to be born in the name of "rights" -- just like the left.
Liberal is esp confusing b/c in most countries it means classical liberalism, in some ways opposite to US liberalism.
Yes, these people are collectivists and therefore left wing like all the rest of collectivists.
"Most of those on the so-called "right wing" want limited government, rather than support rights protecting government."
Then they are not right wing.
"Limited government," is politically illiterate boilerplate.
Objectivists support rights protecting government.
That is the properly consistent, individualistic and therefore right wing, political position.
"When Ayn Rand says that each individual must generate enough self-sustaining actions for his/her own life, that is a responsibility to oneself."
Yes. But that's not a political argument. She isn't saying the state's job is to enforce "responsibility" like the anti-abortionists are.
While I find abortion repugnant, I am not going to stop people from having them for precisely the reasons that Ayn Rand quotes. However, where I disagree with her vehemently is the idea that she can say that just because a baby is outside the womb that he/she now has the right to life when minutes before he/she didn't. That distinction is completely inconsistent with her own definition of self-generating a sufficient number of self-sustaining actions. With Rand's definition, it becomes perfectly OK for Casey Anthony to dump her daughter Caylee into a swamp, where the then almost three-year-old has no hope of extracting herself from the swamp. If it is all about the mother's convenience as Rand claims, then Casey Anthony was well within her right to just absolve herself of any parental responsibility and dump her daughter in the swamp.
This is the example that properly defines the "This is what abortion has led to.", not the termination of a pregnancy.
They do know about politics, but not a political philosophy of freedom and the ethics on which it is based. Faith, family and tradition are no basis for freedom, and we see that in spades with the opposition to a woman's right to her own body, which opposition comes straight out of the old subjectivist Church dogma claiming to be an absolute in terms of intrinsicism. Whether or not they believe the same old dogmas literally, it's the same psychology of thinking.
They claim to care, yet the teach bullcrap, the confound the language, they poison the food, they ruin a child's life in all respects and now want to kill them even after birth.
A baby is a human being that has a right to life, liberty and happiness?
What are you even trying to say in this sentence?
Either abortion is murder, in which case it must be illegal in ALL contexts, or it's not.
"A baby is a human being that has a right to life, liberty and happiness?"
What does this have to do with abortion?
You understand abortion doesn't involve any "baby," right?
"current Roe v. Wade is currently a reasonable compromise..."
It is horrible legal precedent no matter how one slices it. Roe v Wade basically exempted the government from its primary duty to protect the life of the innocent. What is also wrong is that it tramples on States' rights; there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gave jurisprudence in the case to the Federal Government. It was solely an ideological decision, because even the science they pointed to at the time was horribly flawed and they knew it.
The government does not have a "primary duty to protect the life of the innocent" equivocally misused to mean the unborn. The unborn cannot be "innocent" or "guilty" of anything. The notion makes no sense at all and it isn't even historic: there was no intent in the constitution to ban abortion, just as there is no such thing as "states' rights". Only individual human beings have rights. In particular they have legally protected rights under the 10th and 14th and amendments.
^This.
So good to have someone point this out so clearly.
(My comment regarding Roe was referring to WHEN in the embryos' development our current legal system will begin to give the embryo some rights. I was not particularly referring to the Roe process, nor how it might trample States' rights. In other words, a State deciding an embryo develops rights around 24 weeks is the legal decision determine when an "innocent life" actually exists and the State gets to decide what you eat, how long you sleep, what you drink, how often you see a doctor at your neighbors expense, when and how you should delver and how closely you should be monitored via your Apple Watch or BigBrother, etc.).
"a State deciding an embryo develops rights around 24 weeks is the legal decision"
And a completely arbitrary one - which is the entire point of the article. It is a slippery slope argument because it is a judgment call. And because it is a judgment call subject to human biases, it is not bound to moral principle and so that point of judgment can - and will - vary. This article exemplifies the dangers in attempting to justify morality in terms of legality - rather than the other way around.
I completely agree that the thought of Big Brother monitoring my health is a repugnant one, but at the same time, it is government's primary duty to protect life: anyone found intentionally destroying life represents a threat to the individual and by extension any moral government. Abortion requires intentional action - actions which should not be condoned by the State.
Roe v Wade needed to be worded and argued better, by focusing on individual rights and the governments role to protect them.
It should've said something like, "since the function of government is to protect rights, only rights violations can be illegal. Since the unborn don't have rights, nor is being carried to term a right, abortion is not a rights violation, so should be perfectly legal."
The choice was whether or not to have sex in the first place. Pregnancy is a consequence - not an choice. If you choose to have sex, you choose to take the risk of getting pregnant - with all that pregnancy entails. You want to decrease that risk, use protection, know your cycle, etc., but it is a denial of reality to deny that the responsibility lies in the decision to have sex. No one "chooses" to get pregnant. I could point to any number of childless couples as evidence that it works both ways. Blaming someone else (in this case the unborn) for the consequences of your own actions is not only immature, but immoral. Each of us is responsible for our own decisions and no one else's.
Indeed, this whole story is the epitome of the slippery slope fallacy that abortionists must rely on. First, they say that the unborn have no rights, but can't specify when those rights begin or by what methods the acquisition of those rights is maintained. And so the bar for true "humanhood" shifts constantly according to the subjective whim. It enables some to justify abortion based on the desirability of the child, potential for health defects, race, gender, and more. And then, because the bar isn't based on a fixed moral standard, it then becomes okay to kill other people based on any "undesired" categorization such as hair-color... or religion.
"Roe v Wade needed to be worded and argued better,"
I agree, but here's my version:
"Recognizing as per the Declaration of Independence that Life is the primary Right from which all other Rights are derived and that Government's duty is to protect and preserve the inherent Rights of the individual, this court finds that it is the utmost duty of a moral government to protect Life and to punish those who would seek to abrogate that Right as pertaining to another human being. We hold that to attempt to deny the Right of Life to the unborn is to draw an arbitrary line in the sand based not on science, but on ideology. To those who would seek to deny the right to Life to the unborn, we ask them to identify humanity itself, for in doing so they must either acknowledge that Rights are inherent and therefore not subject to the whims of man, or they must argue that Rights are not inherent, but rather the products of some arbitrary judgment. We choose to recognize - with the Declaration of Independence - that rights are inherent."
People do "choose" pregnancy -- they do it by the means of sex, just as all moral choices employ causality as the means to an end. That includes the choice of an abortion to terminate a pregnancy, employed because it causes the termination.
A person's rights begin when he is born. Birth is a fact, not what Blarman calls "whim". To claim that it "then becomes okay to kill other people based on any 'undesired' categorization such as hair-color... or religion" is stupid.
The subjectivist fallacy of rights of the unborn is emphasized in Blarman's totalitarian theocratic "version" he wants to replace Roe v Wade: He explicitly invokes the false alternative of the "inherent" (intrinsicism) versus "whims" (subjectivism), which are two sides of the same coin. The means for the mystical invocation of intrinsicism is subjectivism claiming to establish the intrinsic in order for the mystic's consciousness to dominate everyone else's. He left out the objective.
But regulating peoples sex lives is the real agenda behind the anti-abortionists, who are religious leftists.
Sex can be like a loaded gun. A person chooses to pull the trigger and once the round leaves the chamber that person has to own what it does.
Sex is not like a loaded gun that cannot be stopped once the trigger is pulled. There are nine months in which to take other causal actions that terminate a pregnancy -- that is the refutation of the arbitrary claims that a person "has" to bear a child. She does not and has no duty to do so. Arbitrarily assigning duties is not "real world cause and effect" that "cannot be denied". The claimed "resultant responsibilities" do not come from the "real world", they come from demands to impose unwanted duties.
What do you mean? You're the one that said, "The choice was whether or not to have sex in the first place," thus betraying what the true motivation here is, from you religious leftists.
As for religion, the worship of baal in Babylon right up to today commands the new born be toasted upon the fires in the temple.
Today, they may not be having a barbecue but the result is the same.
Blarman had it right on his dissertation of the Declaration of Independence.
No, it doesn't. Only the religious left of the conservative movement think sex is just about procreation, when in reality it is far more important recreationally. Legal abortion is crucial to that.
"Today, they may not be having a barbecue but the result is the same."
It is not in any way the same. No newborns are involved with abortion.
"Blarman had it right on his dissertation of the Declaration of Independence."
The Declaration of Independence protects individual rights, including the right to an abortion.
It cannot be used as a tool by religious leftists, to justify turning half the population into cattle.
Life begins at conception, Life that becomes aware of it's environment, aware of pain and hunger, begins very soon after that.
That moment needs to be determined and the line in the sand drawn at that point.
Leftest, the global delete, aka, the great unwashed, want you complacent or dead...they can't take the competition.
In the case of the unborn, religious conservatives want to force you to carry to term.
It's strange that the latter don't realize how similar they are in principle, to the former.
You also have to be careful about the meaning of "responsible" and not inadvertently concede false hoods. A couple is responsible to themselves for using suitable protection so as to avoid more serious intervention later. They are not responsible to have a child if they don't. The anti-abortionists tend to package-deal those two.
This contradicts the position you put forward originally of abortion being murder.
Are you saying just because you were raped, you can murder an 'innocent human being?'"
They have no answer to that. They are inconsistent, just as they try to finesse the legal penalties they want for what they call "murder": Their bills have morphed from penalizing the woman to putting it all on the doctor, just as their total ban has morphed into "sometimes". Their disregard for the woman was becoming too obvious, so her participation became both murder and not murder for the "convenience" of their Fabian leftist style of incrementalism imposing controls.
But the inconsistency is inconsistency among floating abstractions because none of it makes sense to begin with: subjectively decreed intrinsic "rights" of what is called an "innocent" entity that cannot be innocent or not-innocent of anything.
Malformation is fundamentally different in that it is a matter of convenience, and perhaps a justifiable one given the mother's ability and willingness to bear the substantial burden of a malformed child.
"Bearing the substantial burden of a malformed child" is not a "matter of convenience".
But misusing the concept of "rights" as a floating abstraction disconnected from the facts that give rise to it as a moral concept is more fundamental than the various narrower contradictions among the arbitrary maneuvering with "special cases".
Those who are demanding that pregnancy entails a duty to bear a child in the name of "causality" and a conservative duty called "responsibility" -- with no regard for rational moral choices employing different causes to achieve different outcomes -- are echoing the old religious line of duty to God as the ultimate cause that no one dare question or deviate from. Even those whose confusion lies only in the 'intrinsic' notion of human rights mysteriously tied to human cells in the name of "science" invoking dna, "brain activity", "heartbeats", and "twitching when poked" -- none of which are the source of rights -- are a result of the same mystic, intrinsicist philosophy. None of that employs a rational concept of rights based on an objective ethics; it invokes floating abstractions taken from "science" exploited out of context to rationalize old mystic premises, still clung to out of feeling. In the end, the bad premises still lead to regulation of sex in addition to the obvious violations of the broader rights of a woman to choose what to do with her own body.