Thank you. They are trying to drive you down to prevent you from 'voting' yourself and then forcing your posts to be 'hidden'. Stick with it and they will fail. But if you choose to not bother because of the behavior here (not just the bulk 'downvoting') on what is supposed to be an Ayn Rand forum but is not run that way, I can't blame you.

It is vicious and disgusting. So is mindless attack on women who choose not to bear children they don't want, smearing them as "pagan humanoids, devoid of conscience and appreciation for one's own existence". So are the militant anti-abortionist trolls 'upvoting' that in support.

agreff1949@gmail.com

Yes, that is a fundamental distinction. There has been a lot of false propaganda claiming that the Virginia and/or NY legislation permitted that. They did not.

Ayn Rand emphatically disagreed with you. She opposed all laws banning abortion and gave the reasons, starting with a moral foundation of rights, not arbitrary "opinion". See "The Objectivist Ethics" and "Man's Rights".

On abortion in particular:

"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?"

"To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable".

"The Catholic church is responsible for this country's disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished".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. That it was her position is not my "opinion", it is what she wrote in opposing the alleged 'rights of the unborn' over many years.

Your "opinion" that she would agree with you despite her explicitly and emphatically saying the opposite is false.

Abortion did not "lead to live killings of babies". A fetus in not a "baby" and abortion laws cover the period up to birth, not "infanticide". The article you linked to is, in the contemporary phraseology, fake news. It was intended to get you upset and it succeeded.

What you publicly post here is subject to response. Don't be surprised when anti-Ayn Rand, anti-reason, anti-rights emotionalism is rejected for what it is.

Repeatedly dismissing everything you don't like as just "opinion", with complete disregard for the reasons given, while clinging to your own repetitive baseless opinion as immune from criticism because it is your opinion, advocated to be rammed down our throats through the force of law, is not appropriate on a forum for Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and individualism.

And you do not get to dictate what is appropriate to post in this forum. It is not your forum. I may post what I like and as far as I am concerned, and in my opinion, Ayn Rand would agree with me on this. I am sure she never in her wildest nightmares ever thought abortions would lead to live killings of babies. You do NOT get to claim a more righteous viewpoint. It IS just your opinion.

This is a forum for Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and individualism, not arbitrary opinions repetitively asserted while rejecting everything else as "just opinion", intending to put your opinion into law to be imposed by force. Those with an interest in this forum you should at least try to understand what Ayn Rand's philosophy is and why. That is not "nasty".

You also do not dictate what is appropriate when I may respond to posts in a backlog I have not yet seen.

Everyone knows your position on this issue, ewv. I, for one, am done talking about it with you. You will never be able to change my mind, and I will never be able to change yours. What's the point of keeping this going? We have each expressed ourselves. You are now responding to something I said over a week ago. Go figure.

Anti abortion laws are brute force. Nasty is the barbarism of forcing women's sacrifice to bear children they don't want. Rights of the individual are not just "opinion".

I am not forcing anything. Why are you so nasty?

There is coward on a militant crusade who is routinely downvoting all my posts, without responding. That too is contrary to the guidelines for civilized behavior on this forum.

We have a right to not have yours forced down our throats.

This isn't about flipping coins. From the first cells to the fetus, it's a potential human being. It has the potential to be born. It isn't a person until it's born. Fertilized cells are not a person and neither is a fetus.

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.

j_IR1776wg: "little more than a floating abstraction written to demonstrate your self-imagined superior intellect and denigrate your opponent."

Please consult the guidelines for posting here.

Your assertion that Ayn Rand was "open" to your arguments against abortion is false, for the detailed reasons given and which you did not address. You modified and twisted out-of-context selected quotes and left out her explicit rejection of your position. To claim that Ayn Rand was "open" to views she explicitly denounced as "unspeakable" -- any banning of abortion -- is not honest.

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.

Of course, I think that once the baby is born, then killing it is murder, pure and simple.

Mankind has vacillated for untold centuries between Objectivity (Aristotle's Logic and Galileo's experimental method, primarily) and Subjectivity (Protagoras' "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.").

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?

What you fail to appreciate is that embryonic stem cells have a much lower value (perhaps even negative) from a technical standpoint as well, at least until humanity has mastered how to control the growth and differentiation of stem cells. Any pluripotent stem cell is going to have so much higher a risk for becoming cancerous at this point in time that there are very few businesspersons who would take on that risk, even if one takes the FDA out of the equation, and those who do will at least try to minimize that risk by using induced pluripotent stem cells rather than embryonic. Perhaps in another decade or two, we will know how to control this well enough such that people like me will be able to "do no harm" in the use of stem cells, but we aren't there yet except for adult stem cells.

You misunderstood me, and I think intentionally so. The ethics in my argument are based on simple utilitarianism regarding squandering of a resource. A better analogy to my argument would be building an oil refinery now in California when you know there are going to be both individuals and governments that are going to oppose you instead of building that refinery in Texas where the opposition will be substantially less. Minimizing unnecessary risk is a critical part of any business strategy.

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.

That does not just give in to the irrational, it sanctions it by calling use of the cells unethical instead of the attacks. Would you also routinely refer to taxation as paying "more ethical taxes", leaving unmentioned the unethical IRS? The automatic use of "unethical stem cells" has been instilled by propagandists who want people to automatically accept it as unethical because the cells are embryonic.

Fair enough. Thanks for the replies.

I did not say that Planned Parenthood generally acts ethically. I said that its providing abortion is ethical.

There may not be third parties "rationally involved" with embryonic cells, but there are nonetheless such third parties (lawyers, government agencies (particularly the FDA).

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?

Stating other fraud and corruption exists doesn’t strengthen your Argument that planned Parenthood acts ethically. Here is another example of un ethical behavior or worse.
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.