Hundreds of students over the past few months have been asking for further resources to help them on this controversial topic. Listed below are a few tips to help you write a class paper, or to help you further understand the nature of the issue.


How to use this site

The first thing I recommend you do to study this issue is to carefully listen to Dr. Peikoff's real audio lecture on why abortion is pro-life. This will require Real Audio's free Real Player plug in. I would listen to this about 10 times, or so over several days, as there is so much information condensed into this brief lecture.

The second thing I recommend is that they read the essays on the essay page. These essays will have much of the information you are looking for and they may be used as sited references for papers. The citations may reference either Capitalism Magazine, or the Ayn Rand Institute's Media Link.

The third thing I recommend is that they read through all of the questions and answers in the question and answer section.


Grasping the essence of the abortion issue

The two key issues to focus on are: the nature of a fetus, and the nature of individual rights.

The first issue to grasp is the difference between potential and actual. A fetus is not an actual human being, but is human tissue. A fetus is only a potential human being, just like an acorn is a potential oak tree. That a fetus is potential human being, does not make it an actual one. Once you grasp this point, you need to grasp a much more complex point — which is not self-evident — about the nature of rights.

The second issue to grasp is that rights only apply to actual human beings. Rights only apply to human beings; they apply to human beings because man survives by reason. Men do not survive — at least for long — like animals do in the jungle. Rather then hunting for food like an animal, man grows it. He builds houses to protect himself from hurricanes and storms. He creates clothing to keep warm. He discovers drugs to kill bacteria that may cause him harm. He manufactures refrigerators to keep his food fresh. This is why man has rights — and animals do not — to leave his mind free to think, and his body free to act on that thinking. As a fetus does not use reason to survive; but, rather it survives on the sustenance provided by the body of its' host, a fetus has no rights, and no need for rights. A fetus has no right to life, liberty, property.

The key issue in this context is that a fetus has no right to be inside the body of another human being, because no such right exists. Yet, this is the only kind of 'right' it requires to exist. To grant the fetus such a right, would make its host — the pregnant mother — a slave. Slavery is not a right.

This in essence is the case for a woman's moral right to abortion: a fetus is not an actual human being, but is only human tissue inside the body of an actual human being. Rights only apply to actual human beings (whether a new born child, or a hundred year old grandfather, or a pregnant woman), as they require freedom to act by the use of their mind.



Books and Tapes

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff
To help you further explore the philosophical issues concerning abortion, I recommend Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. The key sections to study in this book are pages 351-363 on individual rights as absolutes, and pages 357-359 on their application to abortion. Every good library carries this book — especially college libraries, if not be sure to ask your librarian to carry it, or purchase it online.

The Right to Abortion by Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D.
This talk is an unequivocal defense—on philosophic grounds—of the moral right to abortion. He reveals the errors in the scientific arguments of anti-abortionists; the failure to recognize the biological nature of the fetus; the equivocation on key terms; and the obliteration of the distinction between the actual and the potential. More broadly, he upholds the principle of individual rights, and contrasts it with the theory of self-sacrifice espoused by the anti-abortionists. This hard-hitting talk will unsettle both conservatives and liberals.

A Picture is Not an Argument by Leonard Peikoff
More and more in today's culture, people — on behalf of causes ranging from anti-abortion to anti-war — are trying to defend some viewpoint not by words but by pictures. This lecture indicates why presenting visually shocking pictures is an epistemologically invalid, anti-conceptual method of presenting an issue.

Of Living Death by Ayn Rand
Also worth reading is Ayn Rand' 1968 Ford Hall Forum lecture on the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, titled Of Living Death published in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand. Also see the article Man's Rights published in Capitalism : The Unknown Ideal.