I knew you would ignore the reality of directors of those clinics profiting from “specimens “
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.

Providing abortions, which is apparently most of what Planned Parenthood does, is in the women's self interest, which interest is ethical. It doesn't mean like Planned Parenthood.

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.

Even the edited video produced by the activists does not show "Money and power for the Demonrats nothing else matters".

I know that Planned Parenthood doesn't do it's own research. It supports the kind of research it desires by supplying the organs to those who do. Someone joking about a Lamborghini, which almost no one anywhere buys or could afford, doesn't mean that they are providing organs or functioning as an organizasation at all solely or primarily for money.

My comment said nothing about the “woman’s ethic self interest” it was about the pro life activists (Dems) and Planned Parenthood.
Democratic candidates recieved between $30- 60 million in campaign donations. Basically a kick back from fed funds.

“Over two years ago, citizen journalists at The Center for Medical Progress first caught Planned Parenthood’s top abortion doctors in a series of undercover videos callously and flippantly negotiating the sale of tiny baby hearts, lungs, livers, and brains,”

You are wrong sir . “They do it for research , but I doesn’t happen for free “ planned parenthood does not do any research . The buyer is On site at PP and the specimen is harvested by an employee of the buyer not a PP employee. The director of a PP clinic is video taped negotiating price per specimen and jokes that she wants a Lamborghini.
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.

An unborn child is by default legally innocent, since it has had no chance to commit any act to prove it has unlawful intent. That has nothing to do with religion.

I guess we should ignore the cheering and clapping, and all the happy faces in the New York legislature with the passage of the law legalizing third trimester abortion. It sure looked like a celebration to me.

Gosnell benefited from a lack of interest in what was occurring in his abortion clinic. His abortions butchered children and mothers alike, resulting in the death of at least one woman, and serious injury to a number of others. With abortion now legal under any conditions, what would motivate New York law enforcement to carry out even the sloppy inspection protocol that allowed Gosnell to operate for so many years? When a woman pays to have her child aborted, how many abortionists will feel duty bound to make sure a surviving infant is terminated? Gosnell made sure any baby that took a breath was quickly finished off with a scissors to the brain, and he was operating in an environment that had some small risk of prosecution.

I do feel strongly that all forms of contraception should be readily available, to avoid a situation that can result in an abortion. I also feel that amniocentesis should be covered for any mother who wants it, so that developing infants with severe genetic disorders can be terminated early.

Euthanasia is a dangerous proposition, whether performed early or late in life. It creates societal approval for a disregard for human life. It fits in well for authoritarian rule, which can set standards for termination of the "unfit."

Cowrdly emotionalists on their crusade of defiance who trash-downvote and don't bother to comment on simple links to the Ayn Rand Lexicon don't belong here at all.

They do it for research, but it doesn't happen for free so they try to recover funding for it. "Demonrats" for money and power doesn't explain it as a sole or primary motive. The bigger funding source is Federal subsidies, which no NGO should be getting.

There is overwhelming lack of knowledge of the nature and source of rights as well as the distinction between a person and the unborn. Emotions routinely replace concepts.

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.

That cartoon, once again appealing to deceptive emotional imagery rather than conceptual understanding, is a disgusting smear by anti-abortionists. Even progressive politics has not brought us that. Protection of the rights of a woman to not be barbarically forced to bear a child she does not want is not "vile" 'disgusting" and "less than animals".

Ayn Rand most certainly did not support your attempt to criminalize abortions after the first three months of pregnancy. She did not say she was "open to the argument" that a fetus is a "living person finishing another stage in a life-long process" and "Birth is not an abrupt change". Contrary to your assertion she did not morally "distinguish between early pregnancy" "not worthy of rights and later stages" that you claim are.

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.

DrZ: "So, from your perspective, a developing human being has no value beyond that which the mother attributes to it?"

"So, from your perspective" a woman's life has no value to herself when you decide a fetus has intrinsic value superseding her own life, which supposed intrinsic value supposedly makes it more important for her to bear a child she does not want?

You did not address anything I wrote, so let us review it.

You now say that "abortion should be legal, and it is the right of the mother to decide". You don't say why. It contradicts your opposite ethical premises expressed here. The moral principles are the more fundamental and ultimately lead to a politics reflecting them.

That a woman does not want the burden of bearing a child for any reason at some or all points of her life is not subject to your "inclinations", sarcastic demeaning as "crimping a social life", or claims of an intrinsic value of a fetus over her own values for her own life. There is no moral duty for what you misrepresent as merely "extending kindness" under penalty of forced sterilization and your stated desire for it. Appealing to altruistic sacrifice with "sterilization" is not "kindness" and not a proper ethics for man or anything a free society can be based on.

That morality is the fundamental issue: The abortion controversy in the country is a "grim testament to its moral state", but it is the opposite of what you wrote. It is the topic of Ayn Rand's "Of Living Death" referred to previously https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1968...

She concluded that article:

"Such is the tragic futility of attempting to fight the existential consequences of a philosophical issue, without facing and challenging the philosophy that produced them.

"This issue is not confined to the Catholic church, and it is deeper than the problem of contraception; it is a moral crisis approaching a climax. The core of the issue is Western civilization's view of man and of his life. The essence of that view depends on the answer to two interrelated questions: Is man (man the individual) an end in himself?—and: Does man have the right to be happy on this earth? [emphasis added]

"Throughout its history, the West has been torn by a profound ambivalence on these questions: all of its achievements came from those periods when men acted as if the answer were 'Yes'—but, with exceedingly rare exceptions, their spokesmen, the philosophers, kept proclaiming a thunderous 'No' in countless forms.

"Neither an individual nor an entire civilization can exist indefinitely with an unresolved conflict of that kind. Our age is paying the penalty for it. And it is our age that will have to resolve it."

The first purpose of this forum for Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and rational egoism is described https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/about "We have ideas to spread - We're passionate about Ayn Rand's ideas and we hope to assist in their propagation by engaging in some inspired conversation." Those who participate on this forum should at least know what those ideas are and not use the forum to promote the opposite.

Aside from the more fundamental anti-individualist morality expressed in that post demeaning the value of the woman to herself (discussed separately) there are number of contradictions and falsehoods.

Society is not "blessing and celebrating an execution of the innocent". Abortion is not "execution" and a fetus cannot be either innocent or guilty: Moral concepts do not apply to it at all -- other than by religionists harboring the anti-concept of "original sin".

"Society" is not "celebrating" any of this, any more than an individual "celebrates" having an appendix removed. An abortion is a temporary setback required so one can move on and continue to live and pursue value. One may "celebrate" that aspect -- like celebrating the end of World War II -- which is why the passage of the NY law was commemorated.

"Society" is not "blessing" anything; "blessing" is a religious ritual.

There is no law "insuring butchers like Gosnell can't be held accountable" and there is no "party atmosphere" around it.

The VA state law under consideration, and the NY law now in effect, pertain to third trimester abortions, not infanticide. The NY law previously banned abortions after 6 months unless the woman's life was in danger; it now includes the woman's "health" in addition to her "life", which is what Ayn Rand supported 50 years ago, as discussed here on his forum: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

Anti-abortion propagandists made the rest up, in part because they don't themselves know the difference between abortion and infanticide, and in part because they realize that others do know they are different, and want to incite hysteria with false claims of legalizing real infanticide falsely tied to abortion. Some anti-abortionists are hysterical over it because, lacking objectivity, they are gullible and believed it. They were gullible because they want to believe it as confirmation of their ideological and religious beliefs and speculations.

How is what? The logic was just explained. Do you understand the logical difference between a necessary versus a sufficient condition? How do you propose to get, in logic, from a person being alive requiring, at a minimum, brain activity, to brain activity in any parasitic organism meaning it must be a person?

Just how is that?

Here Here!

So, from your perspective, a developing human being has no value beyond that which the mother attributes to it? When a society blesses and celebrates an execution of the innocent, it's a grim testament to its moral state. Abortion should be legal, and it is the right of the mother to decide. What is repulsive to witness is the party atmosphere associated with the passage of a law that insures butchers like Gosnell can't be held accountable.

All life is a process begun in conception and ending in death. In a human pregnancy, the process is divided into arbitrary stages based on the major changes in the developing fetus. The exiting from the womb is merely another step in the process. These changes will continue for the rest of his life. The child is and will continue to be dependent on its parents for many years. The sole critical unanswered question is when, at what point in time, ought this living entity comes under the protection of the Constitution. Specifically, the fifth amendment, the full text of which is:


"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.

The "looking around" you refer at three months is much more advanced than the basic choice of even an infant to want to just take in what is around him in the most general wonder that is typical.

"even a preconceptual infant has the power to look around or not look"
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.

Yes there is a continuous process of growth for a healthy person throughout his life. You see it in our own life constantly.

Loud noise wakes you up, too, but that, or a loud boring TV program putting you to sleep, are not relevant to rights.

The fetus has some characteristics in common with persons -- it has to in order to develop in order to become a person, even though its development of organs, including the brain, is less mature and more limited in capacity. But it's functioning in a very limited environment, supported parasitically and blocked from the outside world, making human functioning like that of even an infant impossible, is essentially different.

It's a milestone for rights because after birth there is a person. Before that it is a parasitic organism that is a potential person. The newborn person is a biologically independent organism with a human consciousness aware of the external world and whose use rapidly develops to focus and think, though in pre-conceptual form at the very beginning.

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.

"There is a continuous process with a primitive mental function developing right up to the time of birth."
Doesn't it continue beyond birth?
"passively reacting to stimuli like a vacuum cleaner noises coming in from the outside as "soothing" is a very crude and low resolution "
I was not thinking of fetuses reacting to sounds but rather babies in their first three months. I'm saying newborns share traits with fetuses. Loud environments can wake up a one year old and can be disturbing to them. The same environment, maybe a loud restaurant, puts newborns to sleep.