Author: Adnan Abbasi
Something extraordinary happened on June 24, 2022. The 1973 landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States— which upheld the idea that access to abortion is a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment—was revoked and declared unconstitutional, making access to abortion almost impossible in most of the conservative states. This has again brought into focus the historical progressive-conservative debate: should abortion be legal and is it moral? But unlike with the partisan debate between progressives and conservatives, both camps exist within the liberty movement.
One of the fiercest advocates of the pro-choice side is Ayn Rand. In this piece, I aim to defend the pro-life position against Rand’s arguments by making the case that abortion amounts to the killing of a living human being that has individual rights. I argue that life starts at fertilization and that the embryo and fetus deserve natural rights by their mere belonging to the human species.
In 1968, Ayn Rand stated that:
“An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. 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.”
Thus, it is apparent that Ayn Rand does not recognize a fetus as a living thing, but only a potential life. But, how do we know that the fetus is not a living thing? Even more fundamentally, what does it mean for a thing to be living? What is life after all?
Revisiting Plato’s views helps us understand this question more coherently. He saw life in three categories: vegetable life, animal life, and rational life. In Platonic imagination, no other being than human beings has one access to rational life. This part of life pertains to the faculty of reason and intellectual growth. However, despite the distinct nature of rational life it has one striking similarity with both other forms of life, which is that of growth. The vegetable life deals with the aspect of physical growth, animal life with locomotive growth, and rational life with mental growth.
Plato is right about his idea of life, but his understanding — or at least what he wrote — is incomplete on the idea of human life, as it necessitates the existence of rational life and animal life. Although most human beings have these capabilities, even if some don’t, they are still considered to be human beings who have individual rights. Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking lost his animal life at a very young age, but as his rational life and vegetative life was still functioning, he obviously remains a human being. Some people even lose their rational life, and become brain dead, while others are born that way as well, all of them are still considered human beings. Why?
Perhaps, then, the question of human life has more to do with the potentiality of life. The mere fact that a human body has the capacity to reason and to have a locomotive life, even if it was not developed or stopped working for some reason, but as long as the heart still beats, the vegetative functions of the body keep working, the human being is alive.
If the general idea of life is that of growth and the idea of human life as the potentiality of life then Ayn Rand’s premise — “Rights do not pertain to a potential” — falls flat. As put by the Pro-Life Action League: “Human life is a continuum, beginning with the newly conceived zygote, moving through the stages of embryo and fetus on through to adult. Although a fetus doesn’t look like an adult yet, neither does a newborn baby. A human fetus is no less human simply because it is smaller and more delicate. For that matter, neither is an embryo less human, though it looks quite strange to our eyes, even in comparison to a fetus. Still, it is our duty to recognize our common humanity at all stages of development.”
Another claim that might still defend Ayn Rand’s position is that perhaps before delivery the being inside the womb is part of the mother. According to Rand, “The fact of birth is an absolute — that is, up to that moment, the child is not an independent, living organism. It’s part of the body of the mother. But at birth, a child is an individual, and has the rights inherent in the nature of a human individual.”
However, is that the case? Since Ayn Rand herself did not offer any elaboration here, I am referring to Philosopher of Medicine Dr. Elselijn Kingma’s defense of the idea, she writes:
“I am inclined to argue that the fetus is indeed part of the maternal organism. First, it is immunologically tolerated by the pregnant organism. Second, it is directly and topologically connected to the rest of the maternal organism via the umbilical cord and placenta, which is composed of fetal and maternal-origin cells, without a clear or defined boundary between the two. Third, the fetus is physiologically integrated into the pregnant organism, and regulated as part of one metabolic system.”
The first argument that the fetus is immunologically tolerated by the mother is incomplete. Although the fetus is dependent on the mother for the immune system, it is so because the child’s own immune system is suppressed, otherwise it will treat the mother’s body as an external tissue and attack it as the baby is not genetically identical to the mother. Then, a protective jacket of cells around the fetal body is also created through collaborative effort of the maternal and the fetal cells to stop the maternal antibodies from entering the embryo or fetus thus protecting it from harm by the mother’s immune system as well, furthering the point that mother and fetus are two different organisms.
The second and third argument has an implicit assumption that any organism that is dependent on another organism for its survival is a part of it. However, Dr. Kingma fails to recognize that the fetus is not made up of the maternal organism’s cells. The umbilical cord and placenta are of course mother’s organs that are meant to feed the fetus, which is not a different organ, but a different organism.
Thus, that which is formed from the process of fertilization is a different being, a being that is alive, a being that is human. Yet, Ayn Rand would call anyone who opposes her stance an enemy of freedom. She stated that:
“Anyone who . . . denies the right to abortion cannot be a defender of rights. Period. . . . […]
Religionist conservatives are out to destroy the two-party system in this country, they are out to destroy the Republican Party. Now the Republican Party, like any “defenders” of free enterprise all over the world . . . is very busy trying to commit suicide. . . . [T]he religious conservative[s] . . . are pure fascists. They are not even for free enterprise; they are for controls, and what’s worse, they are always for spiritual, moral, intellectual controls. Oh yes, they might leave you some freedom to work for a while; it’s intellectual freedom that they want to cut. . . .”
Ayn Rand assumes that those who oppose abortions are religious conservatives, which is not true; there are people from all walks of life, irreligious and non-practicing, atheists and agnostics, as well as secular humanists oppose abortion.
One thing that I like about Ayn Rand’s epistemology is that she holds that objective reality is what it is, and that it doesn’t matter what we believe in, that the universe exists outside of us and our view does not change anything whatsoever. Yet, life begins at conception and life itself depends on the potentiality of life, and this fact won’t change. Ayn Rand writes it in her book, the Virtue of Selfishness when criticizing collectivism ““Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.” It is sheer collectivism when a group of people, declare human beings who are currently at one stage of life as non-persons, and then we have abortion on demand. I urge my Objectivist colleagues today to renounce this practice and join me (and several others) in the pro-life movement.
This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.
