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During a recent episode of her Miss Me? podcast, Lily Allen, the popstar singer known for her hit single “Smile,” admitted that she had had so many abortions, she could not remember the exact number, as she just kept getting pregnant all the time.
“Abortions. I’ve had a few, but then again, I can’t remember exactly how many,” Allen sang to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s classic, “My Way.” She later added that she believed she’d had four or five abortions.
There has been a spate of celebrities lately celebrating their abortions in a crudely vulgar and cavalier manner. How did we, as a civilization, arrive at the point where a woman could take a Sinatra song and, in a pathologically narcissistic and homicidal spirit, use it as a vehicle to boast about the killing of her four or five unborn children? How did we as a civilization become so morally numb and psychologically insensitive that we see her behavior as nothing more than a jocular exercise in free speech? How and when did our ethical sensibilities become so calcified that we celebrate abortion as a blood sport, a victory for women to use their bodies in any manner they choose without any overarching moral principle to regulate or guide those choices?
One could attempt to function like an indiscriminate wholesaler in the realm of diagnostics here by pointing to the moral relativism of our culture, the rampant nihilism that is constitutive of our civilization, and the erosion of objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. But these arbitrating referents might be too broad. It might be more helpful to look directly at the explicit premises that undergird the abortion movement, and, more specifically, the foundational premises that guide the thinking of women who defend their right to abortion.
I contend that it is sloppy and nefarious ideas that got us into this state of affairs, where celebrating abortion and, as seems to be the case with Allen (pictured above left), allegedly using it as a form of birth control, came to be regarded as a virtue. It is only moral principles and rigorous reasoning that will pave a way for us to understand why life, regardless of when it begins, is a non-negotiable, sanctified phenomenon. It is, I shall argue, an indubitable moral axiom.
We begin with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson argues that even if we grant that a fetus is a person with a right to life, this does not automatically make abortion morally impermissible. She believes that the right to life does not entail the right to use someone else’s body to sustain that life.
To amplify this point, she employs a particular thought experiment known as the violinist analogy. It goes as follows: imagine that you are involuntarily, surgically connected to a famous unconscious violinist who needs your body to survive because he suffers from a fatal kidney ailment, and you have the correct blood type to save him. Without your consent, the Society of Music Lovers has connected his circulatory system to yours. If you unplug yours, he will die. If you remain connected, he will recover in nine months. Thomas argues that although the violinist has a right to survive, he does not have the right to use your body against your will. Therefore, unplugging yourself, although it will result in his death, is morally permissible because his right to life does not supersede your right to bodily autonomy.
The analogy is used to argue that a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body can justify abortion even if the fetus is considered a person with a right to life. Abortion can be permissible because it is not a violation of the fetus’s right to life but a refusal to allow the fetus the use of the woman’s body, to which the fetus has no intrinsic right.
Before I begin to assail Thomson’s argument logically, a statement on her methodology is necessary. It is grossly improper in moral philosophy or in any form of reasoning involving ethics to hypothesize a scenario so far-fetched that one is never likely to encounter it in reality. To attempt to secure a moral principle from science-fiction scenarios is more than implausible; it is immoral. Moral principles are based not only on what is plausible but, more importantly, on what is factual and rooted in objective reality – i.e., that which corresponds to concrete referents in real life.
Thomson’s attempt to reason from a hypothetical scenario in which one is taken by force and surgically hooked up to an ailing kidney patient, and extrapolates that to the case of abortion fails one important philosophical meaning test. I shall call it Causal Responsibility. In the Violinist Argument, the one who is hooked up to the ailing kidney patient is forced against her will. She is a victim of a cruel hoax and plays no causal responsibility in the status and well-being of the violinist.
In the case of abortion, what is real is that two people are causally and, therefore, morally responsible for that fetus. They have consented to an act of sex which they knew could result in the creation of a child—use of birth control notwithstanding, as no form of birth control is one hundred percent effective. One has voluntarily used one’s body to create a life—intention here is irrelevant; consent to heterosexual sex always comes with the full knowledge that it could result in a pregnancy. To move forward with the act, therefore, is to implicitly consent to the creation of a life.
If two people are causally implicated in the creation of a life, what is called clinically as pregnancy, that life cannot, on moral grounds, be annihilated by an appeal to expediency any more than a four-year-old child could be abandoned or killed because both parents have found themselves unemployed or mired in debt and poverty. The right to life is an absolute. If, as Thomson claims, the fetus is a person, then it is an end itself with no higher or lesser degree of humanity, moral human status, than those possessed by the mother. It cannot, therefore, be subject to variables in reality that can modify the value of its life and render it as something whose life could be terminated. I do not believe that Thomson can properly refer to the fetus – even for arguments’ sake – as a person, for the simple fact that she has not identified the traditional criteria for personhood. I shall, instead, use the term “fetus-human.”
If a person causes a car accident, whether through impaired judgment or not, that has injured several people, and that person is not financially equipped or psychologically mature enough to deal with the ramifications of what he or she has caused, their psychological or financial inadequacies are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for them to evade accountability for their actions. There is no “exit clause” predicated on personal inconvenience to which one can appeal. A court of law will find that person culpable. The same goes for someone who embezzles money he cannot repay.
In the case of the creation of a life, one played a constitutive causal role in using one’s body in a manner that leaves one duty-bound to honor the right of that life to exist. One cannot by some moral legerdemain make an analytic or moral distinction between one’s body and the body of the fetus-human. As a causal creator of human life, one is co-imbricated in a nexus of relational commitments to the fetus-human one carries in the womb.
Let us return here to two of the compelling beliefs that underlie a woman’s idea that she has a right to abortion: choice and autonomy. Choice as such, without any need to qualify or frame it within a moral context, is taken as sacrosanct, as in the popular slogan that is a predicate of the abortion defense position: My body, my choice. On the surface this issue is nonsensical and guilty of the fallacy of context dropping. We don’t indiscriminately use an autonomous right to our bodies to defend any choice we make, such as murder, cutting off the tails of cats, or torturing homeless people.
The slogan only makes sense because of the assumption that the fetus is an entity that has no right to life on its own. But if, as Thomson has already granted, that the fetus may be regarded as a person, then its moral status is indistinguishable from that of the mother and the slogan is reprehensible. It is not scaffolded by any higher regulative principle save the subjective whims, desires, and capricious moods of a woman. The choice is sufficient unto itself, and it supersedes any inherent value a fetus-human possesses—even by the lowest standards of a cynical skeptic.
One is here reminded of women in the Roman Republic and Empire who were known to have several abortions for the sole reason of preserving their slender figures. This aesthetic choice, made because it was a non-moral value, took precedence over another competing value, this one moral: the value of the life of the fetus-human whose life exists as an end in itself. The issue of autonomy has already been challenged throughout this article. Thomson’s reliance on autonomy as an unassailable feature of moral life fails to take into account the fact that autonomy ends where moral jurisdiction over an independent life will end if one attempts to annihilate it.
You read that correctly. If by Thomson’s admission for argument’s sake the fetus is a person (or as I have termed it, “fetus-human”), then it is not a mere appendage of the mother. It is an independent agent in its own right. The mother can no longer exercise her right to choose her autonomy in a way that contravenes the bodily integrity of the fetus-human. Since the fetus-human has no choice in whether it lives or dies, we have to assert its inherent autonomous status as an end in itself. If it exists as an end in itself, it has a right to life and bodily integrity. This is the intrinsic moral language that inheres in its nature; and it is its only defense to its own life.
The most charitable interpretation of abortion is that it is an exercise in moral delinquency, and moral laziness. It is to use one’s body to generate a human life, and then to opt out of any moral responsibility for that life by asserting that one’s choice, body, and autonomy have a higher and superior moral and metaphysical status than the fetus-human one has brought into existence.
The world lost God and any sense of responsibility or guilt for wrongdoing.
If we apply Jason’s argument consistently then deriving your ethics from religious fantasy-fiction is as immoral as deriving your ethics from science-fiction.
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff
Immoral only to you, shyte-head.
Really? It would seem that rational self interest when applied to abortion would be an exclamation of the right of self impervious to the impact upon a newly-developing life. Such is the hidden selfishness imbued in Ayn’s philosophy when rational self interest comes into conflict with the rights of another and that “other” is a developing life created through the actions of said proclaimed rational self interest.
Obviously, rational self interest in sexual expression must include the evident biological imperative of procreation.
From the fanatical perspective of the liberal feminist, rational self interest is automatically tailored to abortion as a newly-developing life resulting from sexual intimacy acts as a significant counter to her freedom and right of rational self interest without rational accountability.
Paradoxically, the most relevant, rational self interest is that of a new life developing as the result of fertilization. It should be viewed as encompassing the highest, essential value of rational self interest as it is the natural result of procreation. Anyone postulating their rational self interest as having a rightful claim to abort this life, is, in fact, claiming their right to murder with impunity.
To irrationally do otherwise, is to willfully, and selfishly exclude the right of the other rational self interest interest to exist, with abortion evidencing this as the most egregious, self-centered act of self interest resulting in death and not life.
Ayn Rand’s assertions of “reality is” and “rational self interest” cannot be held out as being morally superior if in doing so death, not life, is rationalized as having greater value.
Beside the point.
Ayn Rand screwed her fanboys line an Imam running a grooming gang.
In THX’s case, it shows.
“ It should be viewed as encompassing the highest, essential value of rational self interest as it is the natural result of procreation.”
Yes, a baby can be a very high value in the life of the mother. In such cases, every action that she pursues to protect and nurture the developing baby is a virtuous, selfish act.
In other circumstances a baby may be a disvalue in the life of a pregnant woman. In this case, it is a negation of her self-interest to carry the baby to term out of a sense of duty to anyone (including the unborn baby). It is a violation of her rights for anyone to force her to act against her self-interest in this matter, as in all matters.
Whether based on religious or secular beliefs, the pro-life, anti-abortion view is that a woman loses the right to pursue her self-interest because she chose to have unprotected sex.
Rand tackles this at a fundamental level: does a developing fetus (a potential baby) that is physiologically connected and dependent on a woman have “rights”?
But she doesn’t argue her case in a vacuum … she has a large body of work on the topic of individual rights, which she considers the prerequisite conditions for a flourishing, human life. This is encapsulated in her essay “Individual Rights” which you may want to read before reading her essay “The rights of the unborn”. Both essays can be found online.
A woman’s pregnancy devalues her life. Hum, nobody who volitionally engages in sex, knowing that pregnancy can result has any grounds for blaming the developing new life. This is the selfishness of which I speak and it being called rational self interest is categorically BS.
A woman’s freedom comes in recognition of her understanding that as a menstruating female, she monthly cycles through a state of fertility where sexual intimacy can readily result in pregnancy. If she has no interest in becoming pregnant, her rational self interest should dictate the necessary restraint so that pregnancy does not occur.
Your attempt to obfuscate her responsibility has nothing to do with reason at all. Instead you paint a picture of irrationality operating to facilitate this abominable behavior.
“Only a man who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction….”
So men who labor, in part or in whole, for the good of their society, would lose their moral sanction to the extent their labors were not selfishly motivated?
So morality is grounded in selfishness. I think Jeffrey Epstein would agree.
Huh? In a free society every individual is free to do whatever they want to do, so long as they do not violate the rights of others. Your rights end where mine begin, and my rights end where yours begin.
In a free society if you want to give all your money away to someone else you are free to do so. No , Objectivist is going to use FORCE to stop you from self-immolation.
For Objectivism the “self” is your mind, Jeffrey Epstein betrayed and abandoned his mind for mindless hedonism and exploitation of children. When a man betrays and abandons his mind death and destruction are what await him.
“The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” – Ayn Rand
If the basic political principle of objectivism is that no man may initiate the use of force against another, then your Christian animus is unfounded. I enjoy sifting your frame. I am curious about the world it would create and its internal cohesion. Your defensive attempts often paint a fuller picture which I find interesting — a man who lauds reason but who often abandons it when grappling with others. Why? It is a failure of my imagination most likely.
Your view produced the French Revolution, together with its rolling heads for those whom Ayn Rand would describe as the “unreasoning animals” because we believe in the supernatural and see virtue and courage living the Christian life of faith.
You failed to address my point, but made another, unrelated one. You asserted that men have no moral authority unless pursuing their own selfish ends. Rather than offer explanation or reasoned defense, you squid ink by bloviating about the initiation-of-force principle? What do we call men who assiduously avoid joining the battle?
Your anti-Christian screeds never engage Christianity on a level playing field of reason and truth. Worse, you insist upon your OWN supernatural faith claims. Your Genesis 1:1 is nothing created everything –or worse, that Matter is the eternal and possesses complex organizational properties. And you talk about faith without evidence! So what motivates your anti-religious animus? Whatever it is, It certainly is not reason.
THX, in these matters, how are you different from an emotional woman or a progressive liberal, getting triggered when reality might be conceived in a way different from what you desire?
Downvote away, but it is impotent screeching unless you deal with the argument.
To Kynarion Hellenis :
“You failed to address my point, but made another, unrelated one. You asserted that men have no moral authority unless pursuing their own selfish ends.”
I did NOT assert any such thing, either you lack reading comprehension or you are willfully misrepresenting what I posted.
Here is the Peikoff quote once more : “All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff
Are you referring to this specific sentence? “Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action.”? The word “authority” is not in that sentence but the word “sanction” is.
In the context the word sanction is being used by Leonard Peikoff it does not mean sanctioned by an outside authority but sanctioned by man’s nature. By his very nature every individual is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. No other being has the right to use compulsion on any other being, each man by his nature has his own mind, his own agency, and his own free will, and no one has the right to force another man’s mind or actions, including your imaginary friend in the sky.
I strongly suspect that you intensely do NOT want to understand Objectivist principles or ideas.
The French Terror is NOT an example of reason and rationality, no matter what the claims of the participants were. The French Terror consisted of men abandoning reason but claiming t0 be rational just as today we have Anthony Fauci claiming that he speaks for science when in fact he is an evil charlatan spouting anti-science. Just as Global Warming claims to be rational science but is in fact irrational anti-science.
Rationalizations are not rationality and you surely understand the difference, don’t you?
Here is your sentence: “Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action.”
Stated more simply: Only someone whose end is himself can claim a moral authority.
THX, I don’t think Dr. Hill mentioned Christianity or the supernatural. He was dealing with the reasoning / logic of Lily Allen. It was using reason. He was being rational.
What aroused your anti-Christian animus? It’s almost like you are haunted!
Jason, the undercover theologian, did not name his religious premises EXPLICITLY but they are there IMPLICITLY. He begins his stealth theology argument with a Christian premise, namely that a fertilized egg, embryo, and a fetus are ACTUAL human beings.
They are not.
“The status of the embryo in the first trimester is the basic issue that cannot be sidestepped. The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.
We must not confuse potentiality with actuality. An embryo is a potential human being. It can, granted the woman’s choice, develop into an infant. But what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman’s body. If we consider what it is rather than what it might become, we must acknowledge that the embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish. To compare it to an infant is ludicrous.” – Leonard Peikoff
So you basically admit you were arguing against what he did not say. Bravo.
Jason Hill’s fundamental premise that a fetus is an actual human being comes from Christianity even if he will not admit it.
The understanding that human life begins at conception need not stem from Christianity. Many non-Christians of every walk of life also believe this. It is a rational, logical belief.
Your characterization of embryos as a “clump of cells” is grossly distorted and inaccurate. These cells are highly differentiated from the earliest moments of life.
Maybe he is haunted. The supernatural is real. you know. I’ve experienced things that curled my toes.
He probably needs a good scare, though.
Since there exists no empirical evidence that God does not exist, as no one can prove a negative thesis, then on what basis can one reject divine morality other than through ones own non-metaphysical” assumptions regarding what they believe does not exist, God and God’s moral perfections? Both belief and non-belief involve faith.
“Objectivism’s refutation of theism, to take another example, is not a case of “proving a negative” in the sense vetoed by the onus-of-proof principle. Ayn Rand does not start with a zero and seek to discover evidence of God’s nonexistence. She starts with reality, i.e., with (philosophically) known fact, then denies a claim that clashes with it. Nor, as I have made clear, does she expect any such refutation to be accepted by apostles of the arbitrary. These individuals will merely reformulate the claim so as to protect it from evidence, then insist again: “Prove that it is not so.”
To this demand, there is only one valid response: “I refuse even to attempt such a task.” An assertion outside the realm of cognition can impose no cognitive responsibility on a rational mind, neither of proof nor of disproof. The arbitrary is not open to either; it simply cannot be cognitively processed. The proper treatment of such an aberration is to refrain from sanctioning it by argument or discussion.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
THX, do you not realize that you and Spirit of TJ are in agreement about proving a negative thesis?
But you assiduously avoid TJ’s central point: both belief and non-belief involve faith.
And you will not engage on that point unless you can use a definition of faith that comports with your religion, but not Christianity. Christian faith is NEVER belief without evidence.
THX 1138-
Then all one can conclude logically and scientifically is we do not know. Historical evidence of course is a different matter.
As Rand asserted, “neither proof nor disproof.” Yet, what happens? Theism is rejected allegedly on grounds there is no empirical evidence, But, but (Voltairean but), one cannot then proclaim the non-existence of God as incontrovertible science and truth. Yet that is exactly what is proclaimed.
So, theism and atheism are both based on faith. Yet only one can be true. Which one?
By the way, science is never settled, it is always tentative. Why? It is always subject to new discovery and it is always bounded by uncertainty and the limits of knowledge.
Are you an automaton? All you ever do is quote Lenard Jackoff and Ayn Rank.
If you think you made some kind of rational argument, you will be disappointed that was straight out of the Kamala Harris handbook of word salad deluxe edition.
And people like THX-the-Ayn Randian-spitfire are as irrationally dug-in as any religious or ideologically-driven fanatic has ever been.
People necessarily operate under SOME body of faith and morals (even when these take the form of a godless political or philosophical crusade) that necessarily guides their actions and choices in life. And there are always narratives of suffering, and potential triumph over that suffering, to accompany this body of “faith” no matter how materialist or objectivist.
There is also no such thing as perfect knowledge as to whether one has ever made the RIGHT choice in some ultimate or end-of-the-day fashion. We are all perfectly capable of doing things we later come to regret.
That said, I cannot imagine having or condoning abortion outside of some incredibly tragic situation involving the life of the mother and/or the ultimate non-viability of the child.
I knew a woman—back in the 1970s—with cystic fibrosis—where both she and the baby would have died—and it was totally the right choice to go ahead with the abortion. And some years later, she did finally waste away and die.
I’m not impervious to reason. But I do feel guided by my Christian faith to know that abortion is wrong except in those extreme life-and-death situations. And that we are ALL guided by something that partakes of a higher power. Which you will know by its fruits.
Very well and reasonably stated. Thank you.
A baby’s life is always worth more than the “mothers’.”
Wow!
And what if my baby is more important to me than your baby but I have only one bottle of milk to save only one baby? Is your baby’s life worth more than my baby’s life?
Should I sacrifice my baby’s life so your baby can live?
Thank you for stating the evil of self-sacrifice so clearly!
I see we have five demonic scumbags here.
Enjoy the Hellfire.
Most mothers would agree with you.
And after their Pro-Abortion Rally they attend their Save the Polar Bears Rally or pour out the Milk at the Store to protests so called Animal Abuse or Block the Cattle Trucks at the Slaughterhouse
To be brutally honest, I have no problems with stupid liberal women getting abortions. The human species is greatly improved when such women voluntarily exclude their DNA contribution to the human gene pool (aka, addition by subtraction.)
Now if we could sell leftists/democrats on the idea of why self termination would be the noblest thing they could do to improve the human species. Think of all the problems that could be solved if more leftists/democrats had the gumption to self terminated: global warming, overcrowding, debt & deficits, lower crime, unchecked hedonism, moral rot, etc., etc.
They’re all for “population control”, but never LEAD by example!
And send a $500 check to PETA after they have recovered from having a Abortion
It seems that the Republican Party has become cavalier, or apathetic, about abortion, ever since the ‘Dobbs’ decision. From all I have heard, Trump has become pro-choice, and very few care, or dare to voice their actual pro-life views. Many seem to have the opinion that as long as you are against late term abortion, the pro-life people will be content.
From what Tony Perkins says(almost no one else I listen to even mentions it), the Trump administration is not placing strict regulations on the abortifacient, mifepristone. The pro-death regulations from the Biden regime are still in effect. Pastors and Christian leaders should be boldly speaking out to save the unborn, but few want to engage in this battle.
I do not believe God will bless the USA, and make America great again, while the slaughter of the unborn goes on. Rather, judgement will be our future.
AS a practical matter we have a century of accepting ‘Planned Parenthood’, half of it under Roe-v-Wade. It won’t take a century to get out of the mess, away from anti-life, but our culture is not going to change overnight. The Kansas referendum was an horrifying example of that.
Trump’s approach is correct: find the point where most people can agree and make that the law. Change the culture, reset the law. Rinse and repeat. But there is no silver bullet to save us, it’ll be incremental work we must not give up on.
Verginius:
Why do you capitulate to leftist terminology by saying “Planned Parenthood”? The term “Planned Parenthood” is a logical fallacy since their true intentions is planned genocide.
Planned Parenthood is an innocent sounding term to make murder of the unborn acceptable. The unmitigated truth is, murder done on an industrial scale is nothing less than genocide and that’s exactly the business those sinister bastards behind “Planned Parenthood” are in.
Ans thats only one reason why heaven will not. There are so many others. Slaughtering Druze, men raping a 5 years old girl (video shown at Knesset) is now…… a wait for it…….”miscommunication.” .
Whether good or bad, everybody will get their just rewards. It seems the attitude now is: ‘I have a right to kill that baby’ !!
I straight up and unashamedly call them what they, baby killers.
If they don’t like, tough titties.
Abortion as a necessary medical procedure should be as Slick Willy categorized it, safe, legal and rare.
It should not be used for contraception, particularly given the ready availability and cheapness of multiple methods of contraception, whose efficacy stacks if you use more than one of them.
“Abortions. I’ve had a few, but then again,”
The actual lyrics start with REGRET.
They won’t listen to your moral arguments but they might realise that one day they WILL regret their actions.
Women want everything but responsibility.
Oh please. The so called sexual revolution was for men, about men and about nothing else. The immediate impulses of immature men, that is. These deluded women are bragging that they can behave like such young men. They think it elevates them to coolness. Perhaps hormones and the Y chromosome are some kind of excuse for the impulses of young men on the prowl. There is so excuse for such women. They not only lack maternal feelings (which is fine, so don’t have children) but they brag about their glee in murdering what is and will be children.
Must we all be reduced to adolescent drives without heart and conscience to be trendy?
Personally, I think she should be hooked up to a violinist and donate her body. At least we could have beautiful music instead of her ugly rendition. .
“It is grossly improper in moral philosophy or in any form of reasoning involving ethics to hypothesize a scenario so far-fetched that one is never likely to encounter it in reality. To attempt to secure a moral principle from science-fiction scenarios is more than implausible; it is immoral. Moral principles are based not only on what is plausible but, more importantly, on what is factual and rooted in objective reality – i.e., that which corresponds to concrete referents in real life.”
Well, thank you, that obliterates the ethics derived from fantasy-fiction Judeo-Christianity as well. Ethics for successfully living on earth cannot be derived from science-fiction or religious fantasy-fiction either.
One of the reasons Objectivism never took off is because it is rooted such obtuse mumbo jumbo that no one has patience to wade through it.
And the fact that you never miss an opportunity to crap on the very people you are desperately trying to recruit.
Can you say: I am a loser? Because you are.
Understanding Francisco’s Money Speech is within the grasp of the typical 8th grader. Get one to explain it to you. After that, explain to President Trump that lowering interest rates by 3%, which is what he claims is the right amount, would require the Fed increase the money supply. After someone explains Francisco’s Money Speech to you, get them to explain to you, and President Trump, what causes inflation.
Like I’m going to take financial advice from someone named Aisha Imsix. But what the hell, THX needs all the help he can get.
“I believe that the right of an actual living human being comes above any potential human. I never equate the actual with the potential in any issue. But what’s more important, if you’re going to make the case that a potential human being is entitled to life, then I would say that all of us are murderers every moment that we don’t stay in bed trying to reproduce.” – Ayn Rand
Hey Jason, how Leonard Peikoff allowed you to come anywhere near him is beyond me.
Hey THX, how your mommy allowed you to live is beyond me. Perhaps she had the same warped values as you. It’s a good thing you have influenced anyone except the same 20 or so freaks.
Typo alert:
haven’t, not have
Because only freaks support the free market principles advocated by Ayn Rand, right? Objectivism, with its emphasis on limited government and merit, is for freaks?
But hey, who cares about the big deficits after the Big Beautiful Bill? The government can just print the money, right?
Thankfully you aren’t employed by Trump, so bugger off, freak.
Good grief — Ayn Rand is your guru?
Beyond guru Muggs. She is a sick insatiable obsession for our T.
Mandatory abortions for Democrats seems to be a good compromise, but not babies. Just Democrats. Let’s say for example that the fetus, at or after the 54th trimester, were to sign a Democrat registration card. That would be the sign that there is no intelligent cogent life, and should be immediately self-aborted. There is no downside. It’s a win-win for all.
Thank you, Mr. Hill. Excellent and courageous work.
There are three arguments against abortion:
First there is the religious and moral argument.
Second, there is the scientific argument. Life begins at inception, not at birth.
Finally, there is the Natural Rights argument. Indeed, the very basis upon which this great nation was founded can be seen in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. In short, all people, in all places, and in all times have a God-given natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Abortion undermines that concept.
How?
Abortion arbitrarily grants special privilege to a select few (the mothers) that consequently have the power to essentially deny another human being (the fetus/child) destined to be born a natural right to life, but for an act of God, or sadly of man. Moreover, the third human being involved (the father) has no rights whatsoever.
So, abortion undermines the very American grand experiment in liberty. It therefore represents an existential threat to liberty.
Finally, it can be argued that Rowe v. Wade (1973) was fundamentally unconstitutional.
i can recall that when the pill was made available for women the cry went out that it would put and end to unwanted pregnancy . but then women decided why should they be lumbered with the responsibility of taking a pill . from then on it was russian roulette , pregnant !! no worries i ‘ll get an abortion . if you wanted the child everyone congratulated the mother , if you didnt want it it was a fetus , everyone cheered because it was your body . and you were too lazy to keep your legs together . once a nation murders its own its the death knell for the country . rome suffered the same fate as did israel when it fed its children to molech .
As you note, context is important. Half of all abortions are self-induced miscarriages. These occur before sentience, the traditional point of personhood. Aquinas called this point ensoulment. We just say consciousness.
Now late term abortions are another matter. This context requires more than general abstractions.
The boomer generation was widely influenced by a best-seller entitled “Life Before Life” by Dr. Raymond Moody.
“Sentience”-a vague word stating nothing.
modern technology can detect a heartbeat at 18 days after conception.
We can SEE the heart actually beat after 22 days, from that point onward the heart never stops beating until the person passes away and is declared dead.
6 weeks in technology can measure brainwaves,
the unborn baby can hiccup at 7 weeks, and by the 9th week the baby has a unique set of fingerprints and the sex can be determined.
by the 12th week the baby can cry.
The heartbeat and brainwaves are the measures we use to determine life on earth.
Consciousness and ensoulment isn’t vague and clearly described by Aristotle, Aquinas, and others. This criteria for the emergence of an individual human being is a core concept in Western tradition. Science can tell us when this happens but does not set the criteria.
“It is grossly improper in moral philosophy or in any form of reasoning involving ethics to hypothesize a scenario so far-fetched that one is never likely to encounter it in reality. To attempt to secure a moral principle from science-fiction scenarios is more than implausible; it is immoral. Moral principles are based not only on what is plausible but, more importantly, on what is factual and rooted in objective reality – i.e., that which corresponds to concrete referents in real life.”
Thank you for this article. The above quote interested me greatly. I wonder if your statement could be used as a response to the (in)famous “Trolly Problem” which seems to come up fairly often in introductory philosophy courses and popular philosophy books, at least in my experience. It always struck me as an improbable scenario and quite wrong-headed to spend time in discussing such an unlikely event especially as a question of ethics. My usual and quite inadequate response when I was confronted with it was “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” A similar and quite obnoxious variant to the “Trolly Problem” was set forth by a popular Philosophy professor at my local community college and even published in as a column in the local press. It had to do with what physical capacities one would choose to give up if God came to one and said that He was going to take life from you little by little, but the individual could decide the order in which the loss would occur.
In any event, your reasoned statement above helped me overcome any lingering doubt I might have had as to the legitimacy of such immoral scenarios.
What a woman does with her body is none of my or anyone else’s business. On the other hand, if a woman chooses to abort her unborn fetus, it’s none of her or anyone else’s business if I call it murder. Like it or not, agree or disagree, that’s the nature of freedom.
Can someone tell me: why is a prenatal murder a “right” and a postnatal murder a felony? There’s an inherent injustice between the two.
Women who abort are very miserable, confused and live with regret and denial – if their denial is strong enough, they can mask regret but in the quiet spaces, truth and reality kicks in – and the woman become increasingly psychotic because of abortions. If this whore had several abortions she is a total whack job and not someone I want to know, talk to and pity the poor dude who marries her.
Every aborted fetus from a woman leaves behind the cells of that or those aborted babies in the mother and that is the anxiety of abortion,
This is why a mother can be a flaming crazy bitch to her children but lay a hand on her child she is a tiger that will fight to the death for her child.
Baby’s Cells Stay With Mom Forever – If children were taught this today – they would understand life deeper and more and never be limited to how good truth feels.
Baby’s Cells Stay With Mom Forever
I first encountered Judith Jarvis Thomson’s argument when I was teaching philosophy/ethics. As I recall Jarvis eventually admits that her argument applies only in cases of rape, where the pregnancy (hookup to the violinist) is involuntary. Of course, anyone who starts from the most difficult case but quickly pivots to apply that to all cases is being dishonest. Jarvis doesn’t want to permit abortion just for rape victims (only about 1%). She wants it for everybody. Nearly all babies are conceived with mutually consensual sex. This is how the species propagates; it’s part of being human. To compare that to a science fiction scenario makes her argument incomprehensible. Not just incomprehensible to some people; incomprehensible in principle to everyone. There is no way to make any sense of it.
Abortion advocates do not want abortion only in case of rape; they refuse to even allow life saving measures for a child who survives the abortion attempt and is outside the ‘my body my choice” arena. They want abortion up to and after birth. And the same people who lobby for abortion are now the ones advocating the sexual mutilation of underage children who have somehow managed to survive the womb. They even sometimes claim that a child in the womb can know it is transexual; no word on whether or not it’s still OK to kill it. The left wants absolute moral autonomy, They need it to wage war on children, families … and on our civilization.
As Dostoyevsky said, “If there is no God, then all things are permitted”.
Yep. All things.
And what will they say when they stand before the Father and must explain their lives? They’ll see their lies in their true light.
If the violinist needs you for 9 months in order to live, why not do it? Let’s do the HEROIC thing once in a while, and if you are inconvenienced for 9 months so what? You saved a life. If you cannot keep the baby put him/her up for adoption. SAVE A LIFE.
Very fine analysis. I would add from Europe, abortion is a continuation of the nazi’s physical eugenism, in a social eugenism. I listened to Obama’s podcast, about his gay teacher, I remember having one at the college de Saussure, where Tarik Ramadan was a dean, and where no class on the Shoah were taught, this German teacher used the book « Homo Faber » from Max Frisch to promote the idea of abortion. I don’t recall having any class neither on civism, nor on ethics or religion, but a lot on communism. I don’t believe that any women can promote abortion without having been or abused in her own family and/or deeply indoctrinated by Jungians, from the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, the right hand of Heinrich Himmler, who will be once exposed as the masterminds of psychological control and infiltration of families after 1945. Have you noticed how many Jungian Institutes exist and especially in the United States?
“Autonomy ends where moral jurisdiction over an independent life will end if one attempts to annihilate it.”
Isn’t this the sense of prohibitions on the second tablet of the Ten Commandments with respect to “neighbors”? The prohibitions set boundaries such that our actions don’t impinge in a harmful way upon lives independent of our own.
The number of people who have no mercy or empathy for the unborn is sad. To make flippant remarks about abortion, seeking to endear oneself to listeners, requires a truly strange mind.
“Your eyes even saw me as an embryo;
All its parts were written in your book
Regarding the days when they were formed,
Before any of them existed.”
Psal, 139:16
Our Creator, the God of Abraham, knows us from the moment of conception – all our parts being written down in his book. As we now know about the genetic code, we can understand the power of this verse much more fully.
I understand of course that women can be put in some awful situations – pregnancy through rape being an example – but we do need to know and understand what the Creator of life tells us about human life, from the moment of conception, about how precious it is.
.
What would be said about a woman that was forced to have abortions during the depression
Or the women that turned to abortion when they had no food in the house
Like the Irish?
Not saying it’s ok
However it is something that has to be discussed
Unless said women were forcibly raped or low IQ naive morons, they had the option of keeping their legs closed.
Why should a woman deny herself the intense pleasure of sex? That’s the actual intent of Female Genital Mutilation, to destroy the woman’s sexual pleasure because according to Islam a woman’s sexuality was created by Allah to serve Allah and not to serve the woman herself.
Christianity also shares this hatred of sexual pleasure for the sake of sexual pleasure.
“The Medieval Church was obsessed with sex to a quite painful degree. Sexual issues dominated its thinking in a manner which we should regard as entirely pathological. It is hardly too much to say that the ideal which it held out to Christians was primarily a sexual ideal.
This ideal was a highly consistent one and was embodied in a most elaborate code of regulations. The Christian code was based, quite simply on the conviction that the sexual act was to be avoided like the plague, except for the bare minimum necessary to keep the race in existence. Even when performed for this purpose, it remained a regrettable necessity. Those who could were exhorted to avoid it entirely, even if married. For those incapable of such heroic self-denial, there was a great spider’s web of regulations whose overriding purpose was to make the sexual act as joyless as possible and to restrict its performance to the minimum. — that is, to restrict it exclusively to the function of procreation. It was not actually the sexual act which was damnable, but the pleasure derived from it — and this pleasure remained damnable even when the act was performed for the purpose of procreation….” – G. Rattray Taylor, “Sex in History”
Sexual pleasure in and of itself is not a bad thing. The problem is when humans act like dogs in heat and expect there to be no consequences.
I’m irreligious so a Christian (or Muslim) perspective on the matter is of little utility to me. Religion gets in the way of objective thinking. My education and experience is in the sciences. I leave religion to lesser minds.
That last sentence is going to bring out the hatred and cat calls. Bring it!
“There are many legitimate reasons why a rational woman might have an abortion — accidental pregnancy, rape, birth defects, danger to her health. The issue here is the proper role for government. If a pregnant woman acts wantonly or capriciously, then she should be condemned morally — but not treated as a murderer.
If someone capriciously puts to death his cat or dog, that can well be reprehensible, even immoral, but it is not the province of the state to interfere. The same is true of an abortion, which puts to death a far less-developed growth in a woman’s body.
If anti-abortionists object that an embryo has the genetic equipment of a human being, remember: so does every cell in the human body.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Abortion Rights Are Pro-life”
I agree Diana. Women have been, and still are, put in the most awful situations the way the world is now. So I would never want to judge. I am not anyone’s judge anyway. And don’t we all need undeserved kindness from our Creator if we are to have back the life and perfection our first parents so tragically lost?
But don’t we need to realise how known and how valued every one of us is from the moment of conception, how precious human life is?
Sue:
Do you really want a realistic perspective on just how precious “all” life on this planet is? Go to the NASA website and look up:
From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth
Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars
Our at the Planetary Society’s website: Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars Orbit
It is very humbling and puts our reality in perspective. The little blue ball floating in space is the entirety of humankind end everything that exists on this planet.
By the way:
I had the privilege of being at JPL and seeing those images in real time as the were being transmitted back to earth.
Hello Rob A. Yes we are so tiny in an universe so immense its beyond our comprehension – well, certainly beyond mine. And nobody knows better just how small and fragile we are than our Creator, the God of Abraham.
“Look! The nations are like a drop from a bucket,
And as the film of dust on the scales they are regarded.
Look! He lifts up the islands like fine dust.”
– Isaiah 40:15
“For he well knows how we are formed,
Remembering that we are dust.”
Psalm 103:14
The nations, so powerful from our point of view, are just a film of dust on the scales, and we are such fragile creatures, made from the dust of the ground. And we are all born damaged and dying through no fault of our own.
Yet Jehovah, our Creator, searches every heart. He knows and values every one of us, and wants to give us back the life, perfection and paradise that our first parents so tragically lost.
All demonic pagan religions have had human sacrifice, child sacrifice is their favorite. Satan is the ruler of this world.
Hello Lee Ann. Yes. As you say Satan is the ruler of the current wicked system of things on the earth. The Inspired Scriptures tell us so.
For example 1 John 5:19 tells us, clearly and simply that “We know that we originate with God, but the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one.”
And Revelation tells us that it was Satan – identified as “the original serpent” – who lied to our first parents in the Garden of Eden, thus setting in train the tragedy we, their damaged children, are still living in.
“So down the great dragon+ was hurled, the original serpent,+ the one called Devil+ and Satan,+ who is misleading the entire inhabited earth;+ he was hurled down to the earth,+ and his angels were hurled down with him”. – Revelation 12:9
If those words are true – and I see ot reason to doubt them – then Satan is misleading the entire inhabited earth.
Isn’t this why we pray for God;s Kingdom to come? We need a different rulership over the earth – the perfect one, the heavenly one, the one that knows and cares for every one of its subjects?
Especially those Aztecs Incans and Myan’s were notorious for that kind of practice
Another rational piece of the equation -= what is the purpose of the uterus? It is not like a heart or brain or lungs.
“The capacity to procreate is merely a potential which man is not obligated to actualize. The choice to have children or not is morally optional. Nature endows man with a variety of potentials—and it is his mind that must decide which capacities he chooses to exercise, according to his own hierarchy of rational goals and values…
…the mere fact that man has the capacity to procreate, does not mean that it is his duty to commit spiritual suicide by making procreation his primary goal and turning himself into a stud-farm animal . . . .
To an animal, the rearing of its young is a matter of temporary cycles. To man, it is a lifelong responsibility—a grave responsibility that must not be undertaken causelessly, thoughtlessly or accidentally.
In regard to the moral aspects of birth control, the primary right involved is not the “right” of an unborn child, nor of the family, nor of society, nor of God. The primary right is one which—in today’s public clamor on the subject—few, if any, voices have had the courage to uphold: the right of man and woman to their own life and happiness—the right not to be regarded as the means to any end.” – Ayn Rand
The uterus has only one purpose. I did not say anything about choice, procreation or potentiality. You are squid inking again. Downvotes for a simple, uncontrovertible truth – the uterus has a purpose.
So now I ask you and the downvoters — What did I say that was incorrect of offensive?
If you cannot answer that simple question, then how are you different from the snowflake progressives screaming at the sky because reality triggers them?
as long as you pay for your abortions and i pay for mine, you and i do not have a problem.
when MY tax money is used for YOUR abortions we have a big problem!
Yes it is a blood sport. These wicked murderers would rather destroy God’s gift of reproducing human life than use contraception.
Morals and ethics are such a drag when you want to do anything you want. So many now have become rudderless in life. Sad……..
“Planned Parenthood”? Is that like “Affordable Care Act”? NOPE! Call it what it IS: “PLANNED ABORTIONHOOD”! “Your BODY” is NOT “YOUR body”, it belongs to God Who bade it for you to reside in while you decide where you wont to spend Eternity! – “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” 1 Corinthians 6:19 KJV!
“Planned Parenthood”? Is that like “Affordable Care Act”? NOPE! Call it what it IS: “PLANNED ABORTIONHOOD”! Abort “it”? “You know, the ‘Thing’”? Your little “fetus”, “tumor”, or whatever you want to call it, other than a living, separately identified Human Being, is going to ask its mother at “The Great White Throne Judgment”, “Mommy, why didn’t you let me have a life”? “Your BODY” is NOT “YOUR body”, it belongs to God Who bade it for you to reside in while you decide where you wont to spend Eternity! – (“What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” 1 Corinthians 6:19 KJV) And, you “Pregnant People”, GOD ALSO owns “It”, the “Fetus”, “you know, the Thing”! It is a human life with a Soul. It has a “Right to Life”. You do NOT have the “Right”, or “Permission from the Creator”, to kill it!
How did we as a civilization become so morally numb? is the question…
Answer…..By electing and reelecting democrats and Rino’s to leadership positions…
THAT’S HOW.😏
Dr. Hill’s new photograph of himself radiates happiness. I hope that he is as happy as that photo seems to indicate. He is a deeply good man. May God grant him much joy and encouragement.
Notes:
1.) It interests me how few seem to notice that a pregnant woman does not, herself, kill the baby—a doctor does. This is becoming less true, of course, as abortifacients become more common—that sacred “choice” is now one to be made between a woman and the vending machine in the basement of her college dorm. But no less a sage than Ruth Bader-Ginsberg recognized that it is doctors rather than women who are doing the killing, and who therefore are granted, by the state, the right to kill.
2.) There isn’t any condition comparable to pregnancy, and no human relationship that resembles that of the pregnant woman and her unborn child. Having a baby is natural and good…but it is a self-sacrificial act, even if everything goes well. Pro-life advocates should refrain from using the word “inconvenience” to describe what a pregnant woman endures.
3.) Unfortunately, realism about biological reality is not the strong suit of the left in general and the pro-abortion movement/industry specifically. There is never a moment when a conceptus is a “blob” of cells, if by “blob” one means undifferentiated and undifferentiated material, like snot. Indeed, the period in which tahe embryo cannot be recognized as human is astonishingly brief. The low-paid lab techs tasked with examining the results of even a relatively early abortion find tiny hands, kidneys, recognizable genitals in the pyrex dish. That the entire and distinctly human body is not recognizable is a result of the procedure itself: You’d look like a blob of cells too if someone put you through a wood chipper.
4.) The notion that it is men, not women, who are opposed to abortion because they want to “control” women through pregnancy is surely one of the most if not the most ludicrous assertions of the addled progressive. Hugh Hefner was an early and enthusiastic supporter of abortion “rights”—were men flocking to the Playboy Club because they were hoping to impregnate the bunnies? What would Epstein have done with any young woman impregnated by his pals — “forced” her to give birth, or airmailed her back to the mainland via the Lolita Express for an abortion?