Ayn Rand Was Wrong About Abortion

"a piece of protoplasm has no rights"

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“[T]he idea of some bitches—and I don’t apologize—trying to prescribe to the whole world, to all other women, what they should do with their lives—it is so disgusting” —Ayn Rand, 1974

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As with many people—including me—Ayn Rand’s take on abortion wasn’t born fully developed.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, the interviewer asks Objectivist Harry Binswanger about his role in editing Rand’s speeches. “If what you were saying was rational,” he recalls, “she actively appreciated it. She was not touchy about getting my editorial suggestions, she was completely open to them and interested in them and thought them through.” “Of course”, Binswanger continues,

in this case [a speech called The Age of Mediocrity, delivered in 1981], it was mainly changes in connection with preparing a speech for written publication. But I remember one substantive intellectual issue that came up. In this speech, the topic of abortion was covered. I asked her, “Don’t you think that there is a right to abort in the eighth or ninth month of pregnancy?” because the way one sentence was worded, it sounded like there might not be a right to abort in the eighth or ninth month when the fetus could live outside the womb. She said, “It’s fully formed then,” which is true; it can live outside. I said, “Yes, but isn’t your point here that there’s a crucial difference between the potential and the actual? It hasn’t lived yet.” And she said, “Yes, but it would be wrong to kill it.” I argued, “Well, are you saying it’s morally wrong but within the woman’s rights?” So we discussed these kind of issues for a minute or two. Then she reached for the pen and decisively and dramatically scratched out the previous phrase, and wrote, in one stroke, this unambiguous statement: “a human being’s life begins at birth.”

In that she was pro-choice, I think Rand was on the right side of the abortion dispute¹. But you can be right about something for entirely the wrong reasons. You can be pro-choice, let’s say, but only because you think all foetuses deserve to be executed for something they did in a past life, or be pro-life, but only because you want to control women’s bodies.

Rand—I assert, effetely pounding my fists on the table—landed on the right side of the issue, but did so largely by accident: as I hope to show, Rand’s justifications for legal abortion, insofar as she gave them, are impressively unconvincing.

(For the real reasons to be pro-choice, I recommend this interview I filmed with Dustin Crummett, cool guy, director of the Insect Institute, and the philosopher who converted me back to theism:

I endorse practically everything he says.)

I. Bald Assertion

Much of what Rand has to say in defence of abortion amounts to bald, table-thumping assertions that the foetus is not a person (a term which means, in the abortion context, a human organism with at least a prima facie right not to be killed). E.g.,

• “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).” (Of Living Death).

• “Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a “right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable…” (A Last Survey).