Yep, but then cells have "rights" that require an actual person to be used as cattle.

Bingo.

Exactly. Thanks for posting this.

No, that's what I'M saying.

What a stupid comment!

When cells form tissues in a lab, they are actually self-generating actions to sustain themselves. This is a necessary, but insufficient, requirement for life. You and Rand include rationality as a requirement for sustaining one's life. On that, it would be unreasonable to disagree. However, by that definition, it is not reasonable to assign rights at birth because clearly the infant is incapable of either rationality or sustaining its own life. If one makes the convenience argument that Rand does as the basis against abortion, then it is OK for Casey Anthony to abandon Caylee Anthony in a swamp at nearly 3 years of age. Caylee still needed her mother to survive and was incapable of sufficient rational thought to sustain her life.

This kind of abortion talk I find disturbing.
“If a mother is in labor...the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians & mother"

The right of abortion does not evade consequences. It recognizes the consequences of not taking action and responds in conformance with causal factors required to then not bear a child. Having sex is not a duty to bear an unwanted child any more than stepping off a curb in front of an oncoming bus is a duty to be run over -- you embrace cause and effect by properly taking the action of jumping out of the way to avoid it. It is not "going wild" or "a great flood of human degeneracy" and neither was the invention of "the pill".

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.

The "little body" that will not come a person can't do that because it's not a human person with a mental capacity to even conceive of it. It can't conceive of anything. It's what you imagine yourself.

You don't get to tell me what I get to do. I did not say, nor do I say now that I CAN stop a person from having an abortion, but in every day and at every opportunity I will continue to say what I already said.

Here, I'll say it for you again, just because I can: "Honestly, I don't think that's a good reason for abortion, myself."

Now you just TRY taking my thoughts about right and wrong away from me and see what that gets you.

You're advocating murder of a person because you disagree with an idea that someone else attributed to her.

The definition of life is not the basis of human rights. Human life is a particular kind of life that depends on rationality as the fundamental means for sustaining ones life. You don't see rationality swimming around as cells forming tissue in a lab.

A woman choosing to not have a child does not lead to "infanticide", which is also not what is "happening now". "Infanticide" is an hysterical misrepresentation of a third trimester abortion.

But I am quite capable of self-generating adequate food and water for myself. Arguably even most teenagers can't do that and certainly not senior citizens after they have lost parts of their minds and/or mobility. At those points, Rand's definition of life has serious limitations.

Rape is not the only rational reason for an abortion and you do not make the decision for the woman who chooses not to have a child.

I am not denying anyone's right to an abortion. Others can do it if they want, but abortion is just the first "town" on the road to infanticide and then euthanasia and ultimately forced euthanasia. It starts with tolerance and then required acceptance and then persecution of those who disagree with the required acceptance.

As Ayn Rand put it "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."

That does not denigrate life, it distinguishes between human and non-human life. Human life as a "person" is required for rights. Not the presence of dna in a clump of cells and not the alleged presence of a mystic "soul". That vicious nonsense replacing the basis of rights with mysticism is worse than a "slippery slope", it openly leads to the denial of human rights, starting with the right of a woman to her own choices for her own body.

Distinguishing between human life as the basis of rights and "clumps of cells" is not a "moving line". It makes it possible to stop the "slaughter" and "start in with the gas chambers and ethnic cleansing" that Blarman disgustingly attributes to Ayn Rand and a rational standard for human rights as the source of its opposite.

Abortion in the third trimester is not "cold blooded murder". It is not about infanticide as it has been hysterically mischaracterized.

Abortion in the third trimester is not a heinous law. It is not about infanticide as it has been hysterically mischaracterized.

Medicine is not "racket" that has "very little to do with health". That kind of reckless rhetoric is no better than Kamela and Poco.

"Procedure" is a general medical term. It is not used to hide immorality.

Doctors do not "murder babies". The bill was about the third trimester of pregnancy, not the "infanticide" recklessly accused by those who don't know the difference.

It's also not abortion and is not what was being advocated.

A fetus is not a child. Murdering children is not relevant to the abortion discussion.

All life does not have rights and "help" does not imply sacrifice.

The availability of contraception does not negate anyone's rights. The consequences of not using it are the possibility of more complex means required for an abortion, not a duty to have a child.

The intrinsic notion of rights for anything genetically "human" also implies a duty to not use 'artificial' means of birth control, which is why the Catholic Church lobbied to make and keep it illegal, and still damns it as "sin" now that their impositions are unconstitutional.