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A non-aborted child’s quality of life matters, too. One benefit of allowing abortion at any time is that, if a mother decides not to abort despite having had ample opportunity to do so, she is definitely responsible for the child’s wellbeing. Then she can’t blame lawmakers or having had too little time; she can’t evade accountability for the living child as easily.
(Dirk)
Building on #123, cutting the umbilical does not make the baby an “independent person”. The baby still depends on the parents physically, financially, emotionally, etc.
Physical (in)dependence isn’t a valid yardstick because it does not confer rights. The only thing that confers rights to an organism is personhood.
Building on #121, a baby is not a “trespasser”. A pregnant woman ‘invited’ the baby into her womb. Unless she was raped, in which case the rapist ‘put’ the baby there. But the baby is blameless either way and thus can’t be likened to a trespasser.
The linked Wikipedia article says:
Evictionists view a woman's womb as her property and an unwanted fetus as a "trespasser or parasite", even while lacking the will to act. They argue that a pregnant woman has the right to evict a fetus from her body since she has no obligation to care for a trespasser.
If this is an accurate description of the evictionist view, it strikes me as deeply flawed.
A pregnant woman does have an obligation to care for her fetus (at least once it’s a person). She took an action which resulted in the fetus’s existence.
There’s ‘evictionism’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evictionism
I like this view because it sidesteps the issue of personhood and at what point it arises. It says you’re free to evict anything, person or not. We don’t how creativity (ie the universal-explainer software mentioned in #119) works so this is handy.
(Amaro)
Because personhood is not the result of something physical but of having and running the right software.
Specifically, it’s the universal-explainer software David Deutsch outlines in his book The Beginning of Infinity.
This software presumably can’t run in the baby before its nervous system is formed to some sufficient degree. At the earliest, it’s when the nervous system reaches computational universality. (Does anyone know when that is?)
Why would a fetus without a nervous system not be a person?
If the baby is a person, the mother has a responsibility to it. She can’t just be allowed to kill it. That makes no sense.
(Danny)
While the fetus is attached to the mother, it’s her property and she is free to do what she wants with it. Therefore, she can abort the baby at any time prior to being born and the umbilical being but, at which point the baby is an independent person.
(John)
It’s arguably a sexually active woman’s responsibility to monitor whether she’s pregnant.
If it weren’t her responsibility, then a burden would fall on the baby, which can’t be right because the baby only exists because of the mother’s choices.
Home pregnancy tests are affordable and reliable. According to https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-early-can-you-tell-if-you-are-pregnant, “[h]ome pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy just two weeks after ovulation”. So there’s plenty of time.
It’s arguably a sexually active woman’s responsibility to monitor whether she’s pregnant.
If it weren’t her responsibility, then a burden would fall on the baby, which can’t be right because the baby only exists because of the mother’s choices.
There are some practical considerations, too.
There’s no point allowing abortion only in the first six weeks because many women don’t realize they’re pregnant until later.
(Danny)
It’s arguably a sexually active woman’s responsibility to monitor whether she’s pregnant.
If it’s not her responsibility, then a burden falls on the baby, which can’t be right because the baby only exists because of the mother’s choices.
There are some practical considerations, too.
There’s no point allowing abortion only in the first six weeks because many women don’t realize they’re pregnant until later.
I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.
Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.
Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.
Clearly, a fetus without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.
According to https://www.neurosciencefoundation.org/post/brain-development-in-fetus, “an embryo’s brain and nervous system begin to develop at around the 6-week mark.” And: “At as early as 8 weeks (about 2 months), you can see physical evidence of the brain working (the electric impulses) as ultrasounds show the embryo moving.”
Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.
When is that?
I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.
Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.
Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.
Clearly, a fetus without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.
I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.
Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.
Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.
Clearly, a fetus without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right?
That is not what freedom means.
Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.
Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.
If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is forced.
It doesn't matter that he is a physicist, because his thoughts on the subject are of a philosophical/epistemological nature.
Requiring one government per physical territory is an anachronism that Rand retains. Seems unnecessary – see criticisms to #2.
One difference between having multiple objectivist countries and having private arbitration services is that the latter can operate in the same territory whereas the former have distinct territories. So this may not be a stolen concept after all.
Building on #17 and #22, imagine a world with multiple objectivist countries. Say the US is purely objectivist, and so is England.
Presumably, Rand would see no problem with multiple objectivist countries coexisting. She would consider this state of affairs not only possible but desirable.
Yet how is that state different from the problem she describes in #14? Objectivist countries would be voluntarily financed by voluntary taxation; private arbitration services would be voluntarily financed through voluntary payments as well.
Isn’t this an instance of a stolen concept?
The “stolen concept” fallacy, first identified by Ayn Rand, is the fallacy of using a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept(s) on which it logically depends.
Rand is using a concept – objectivism, which logically depends on peaceful coexistence of voluntarily financed groups of people – to argue against the possibility of the peaceful coexistence of voluntarily financed groups of people!