Ayn Rand, Abortion, and Planned Parenthood.
Kevin Williamson of National Review did a follow-up to his piece which I posted here yesterday.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/...
In this current piece, again on the Planned Parenthood atrocity (my word), he takes a shot at Planned Parenthhood apologists by referencing Rand
"Why not have a Fast Freddy’s Fetal Livers Emporium and Bait Shop in every town large enough to merit a Dairy Queen? If you are having some difficulty answering that question, perhaps you should, as some famous abortion-rights advocate once put it, check your premises."
Some people have taken this line to also be an implication of Rand.
Me, I'm not sure, there's a few things I disagree with Rand on, abortion being one of them.
But, what is Rand's view on abortion?
Here is a link the entry in the Ayn Rand Lexicon.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abo...
I think the most relevant portion is this.
"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."
In Rand's day, that's what abortion was.
Now, I'm no doctor, but I doubt very much that organ tissue can be harvested from a first trimester embryo.
I speculate that Planned Parenthood was harvesting exclusively from late term and even partial-birth abortions.
What Rand would say about this is also speculative, although we can infer from her words "One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy..."
So, Objectivists, what say you?
Disclosure, my personal opinions on abortion - the human animal is a biological machine, as such it has core programming (instinctual drives). Maternal instincts are some of the most powerful any animal possesses, even stronger than Self-preservation or Species-reproduction. As such, I believe that when a woman has an abortion, regardless of the trimester, her maternal instinct kicks in at some level - automatic, unstoppable, irrevocable, unaffected by popular opinion of what abortion is supposed to be. As such, I believe that when a woman gets an abortion, she is doing deep and permanent psychological damage to herself. The existence of groups such as Silent No More lead me to suspect that my opinion is correct. What is the percentage of women who are psychologically damaged by an abortion? Who knows, and with today's Lysenko "scientists" I doubt there will be any unbiased research done. Regardless, until women who are considering an abortion first get counselling on the (what I believe) strong probability of psychological damage from the procedure, I can not be anything but against it.
This disclosure is also open for debate on this thread.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/...
In this current piece, again on the Planned Parenthood atrocity (my word), he takes a shot at Planned Parenthhood apologists by referencing Rand
"Why not have a Fast Freddy’s Fetal Livers Emporium and Bait Shop in every town large enough to merit a Dairy Queen? If you are having some difficulty answering that question, perhaps you should, as some famous abortion-rights advocate once put it, check your premises."
Some people have taken this line to also be an implication of Rand.
Me, I'm not sure, there's a few things I disagree with Rand on, abortion being one of them.
But, what is Rand's view on abortion?
Here is a link the entry in the Ayn Rand Lexicon.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abo...
I think the most relevant portion is this.
"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."
In Rand's day, that's what abortion was.
Now, I'm no doctor, but I doubt very much that organ tissue can be harvested from a first trimester embryo.
I speculate that Planned Parenthood was harvesting exclusively from late term and even partial-birth abortions.
What Rand would say about this is also speculative, although we can infer from her words "One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy..."
So, Objectivists, what say you?
Disclosure, my personal opinions on abortion - the human animal is a biological machine, as such it has core programming (instinctual drives). Maternal instincts are some of the most powerful any animal possesses, even stronger than Self-preservation or Species-reproduction. As such, I believe that when a woman has an abortion, regardless of the trimester, her maternal instinct kicks in at some level - automatic, unstoppable, irrevocable, unaffected by popular opinion of what abortion is supposed to be. As such, I believe that when a woman gets an abortion, she is doing deep and permanent psychological damage to herself. The existence of groups such as Silent No More lead me to suspect that my opinion is correct. What is the percentage of women who are psychologically damaged by an abortion? Who knows, and with today's Lysenko "scientists" I doubt there will be any unbiased research done. Regardless, until women who are considering an abortion first get counselling on the (what I believe) strong probability of psychological damage from the procedure, I can not be anything but against it.
This disclosure is also open for debate on this thread.
Previous comments... You are currently on page 15.
The first problem regards the ethics of how the livers were generated.
A good primer on stem cells is at
http://biochem158.stanford.edu/14%20S...
Particularly focus on slide 13. The reference to Yamanaka at the bottom of the page should have ended the stem cell debate, at least from a moral standpoint because it is no longer necessary to harvest embryos to obtain pluripotent stem cells.
The second problem with the generation of tissues is the immune response. If one reprograms one's own stem cells, the immune response is nonexistent. If one uses a different source of stem cells, the immunogenic responses range from minimal to outright rejection, with most responses being significant but not showstoppers.
The third problem is the long-term cancer risk. Because such tissues are not native to that human being, this is a significant biological control problem. In 20-50 years, biomedical engineers will understand all of the necessary control variables and their levels, but right now we (and I have moved into this field over the last several years) have a teenager's understanding of such tissue engineering. Sometimes we get it right. Other times there are some serious accidents, just like teenagers in cars. Fortunately the vast majority of these "accidents" happen long before clinical trials.
As with a couple of her other definitions, most notably atheism, I disagree with her definition of when life begins. From what I have read of her opinions, it appears that her definition of the beginning of the rights of the unborn would start at the age of viability outside the womb at the earliest.
The cases of rape and incest can certainly be reasonably argued, and in those cases, the psychological scarring is coming from the perpetrator.
Tissue from later stage pregnancies are preferred for some studies, but certainly not most.
The transition from "embryonic" (read pluripotent) to "adult" stem cells (not pluripotent) happens much quicker than previously thought. A heart starts beating in the 3rd week of pregnancy.
I do nothing that I or anyone else would consider ethically compromised in this respect.
And later, when the situation was right for both women, I had two fantastic sons.
I was also raised by a widowed mother with five (5) sons and I directly experienced the turmoil, stress anxiety, internal and external conflicts of her life as well as the failures of three (3) of those boys.
Had I convinced those two women to have those children even with their concerns at the time, I'm not sure that wouldn't have done more damage to them than supporting them in their wishes to control when it was right for them.
If I am correct (which is neither provable nor disprovable with our current politicized science), women should be made aware of that probability so that they have all of the information possible to make their decision.
That said, I can only go by what I have experienced myself - and that is Objectivist.