Woman who choose not to bear a child are not "Demonrats" and it is not done for money and power. They make choice based on what they want for the rest of their lives.

It certainly is not arbitrary. It is when the heart is developed. It is human. I believe your statements are "arbitrary with no objective moral import". It is your opinion. We have a right to ours also, based on facts.

Of course it is in a woman's ethical self interest to choose whether or not to bear a child. It concerns a large portion of her life and the values she chooses to pursue.

You can defiantly hold any "thoughts about right and wrong" you want to -- expect to have them challenged when you publicly post them here, especially when you make false accusations of murder. Yes, we do "get to" reject that. Abortion does not "KILL the baby"; there is no "baby". "Thoughts about right and wrong" determine restrictions put into law. False ethical ideas harm people through oppressive laws. Laws prohibiting abortion do in fact force a woman to bear a child. The justifications for a woman to choose for herself an abortion are not restricted to what you think is "a good reason for abortion yourself", are not restricted to "rape", "whatever gestation period", or your preference to "adopt it out".

Just because you say that does not make it so. They are human whether you accept it or not.

You don't decide by when a woman decides not to bear a child for any reason she wants, including the accumulating knowledge of normal or abnormal progression of the potential birth. "Twelve weeks" is an arbitrary decree with no objective moral import.

Health does in fact include avoiding emotional duress, especially the long term duress from an unchosen responsibility for bearing a child that was not wanted. Contrary to demands for religious duty to sacrifice, "health of the mother" is a value, not a "smokescreen".

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).

On the other hand, forcing people to carry to term because the unborn have "rights," is no different to arguing that people have a right to healthcare.
In this way, the anti-abortionists have just put forward socialism, but are too confused to see it.

Yep the Nazi's were loudly anti-abortion.
They were also shamefully supported by both the catholic and protestant churches for this reason and for being anti-homosexual.

That's the non-sequitur.
There are no "unborn human beings."

Words have meaning and you are using them all incorrectly, with an agenda of reducing half the population to the level of cattle.

This makes Bernie Bro's seem reasonable by comparison.

"Adulthood" does not mean gullibley latching onto a dishonest article, let alone hysterically accusing proponents of the right of abortion as advocating infanticide. We have all "heard of" adulthood and don't need your snide insults substituting for rational discussion.

When you give the go ahead to kill unborn human beings, it does and is leading to giving the go ahead to kill human beings while they are being born and after they have left the womb.

Here is a March 2018 article on contemporary reform partially repealing 1930s Nazi anti-abortion law: https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...

But Northop did not "propose infanticide" of babies well after birth, which is not abortion and not what proponents of the right of abortion mean by it or advocate. The hysterical article linked at the top of this thread is not honest. "Infanticide" has been added as 'interpretation' by those who don't know the difference and want him to have said it as "proof" "confirming" their own confusion over abortion.

As you wrote, they want to ban all abortion (and often contraception), and constantly and dishonestly conflate it with "infanticide", "killing babies" and, at best, late term abortions they can emotionally demagogue through imagery as if it were "babies". Mark Levin shouts himself hoarse with this demagoguery all the time on his radio show.

As the latest in the pattern, the anti-abortion movement hysterically latched onto the recently released video of Northam, 'interpeting' it to mean real babies being "killed" to try to make their own confused slogans sound plausible to those with actual concern for human rights. The article cited by this thread does this with fabricated misrepresentations as to what he 'must have meant' because they can't imagine it meaning anything else. It's all picked up as it goes hysterically 'viral' -- including on this forum where people should know better -- and picks up more and more misrepresentation, like a snowball rolling downhill, parroted and expanded as truth as the shrieking hysteria grows.

This kind of demagoguery comparing proponents of the right of a woman to not bear a child as like "Hitler", the eugenics of Sanger and an allegedly "prized letter", and "the value of human life was subjective and depended on such characteristics as race, skin color, and even religion" are a disgusting smear. The Nazis did criminalize abortion and even if they hadn't it wouldn't say anything about a rational ethics supporting a woman's right of abortion.

Well, there is another milestone: the heart:

"A baby’s heart begins to develop early and begins beating just 22 days after conception. Between days 22 and 24, the heart begins to bend to the right and fold itself into a loop. By day 28, the tube has a general heart-shaped form with the structures of the chambers and blood vessels in place."

Reading the article, there are many stumbling blocks to define with certainty when does life begin?

There is no such thing as an "after birth abortion law".

He did not say "waiting to be killed". That has been added by the hysteria dishonestly misrepresenting his statement through selective omission of the context and reinsertion of misrepresentation as if it were part of a quote. Stop calling people "Nazis".

Abortion is not murder; killing a person -- who necessarily has been born -- is murder.

Letting an nonviable infant die after being born is not related to a threat to a woman's health during childbirth. It is not abortion and was not included in the bill on third trimester abortions. The confusion arises from the hysterical attempt to conflate them by those who do not themselves understand the difference between the unborn and those already born as human beings.

Yes, it is. Just because you say it is not a child holds no water. That child could and should exist outside the womb. There is no difference.

Then what is it? It is a human life. You can rationalize this all you want, but your stance makes no sense to a thinking person.

It was a joke! Geez.

There is no such thing as a "right of the unborn". Lumping the right of abortion with welfare entitlements because the left tends to support both is not logical. Ascribing an alleged "right to be born" is itself an arbitrarily imposed entitlement of the unborn -- at the expense of a woman who does not want to bear a child -- worse than welfare statism.

I totally disagree and as I have stated before, I do not recognize yours or Ayn Rand's authority on the matter. You do not possess the knowledge necessary to make such a proclamation. It is just opinion. And so is mine.

Good to see a clear thinking Objectivist on an Objectivist blog :)