Easy Truth

Sure, they could be mistaken but the issue is why are they so confident in their knowledge. If it's about the high stakes, meaning, "I can't afford to be wrong", then the heightened emotions are causing the irrationality. At that point anything goes, and if you have confidence in them, then you are in trouble. Otherwise, if they know they are being arbitrary, I don't know what the motive would be, other than maybe they want to hurt you/misguide you.

ET, ownership rights are a bundle of specific rights of control over a single property. So for example, I have a right to cut down any timber I please on my acreage and to exclude by force of law anyone coming on my land to spray paint words on the house or set fire to my woods. But in the bundle of specific rights making up my property rights is not a right of mine to burn leaves under all wind conditions.
There was no claim of some collective right to land within some boundaries encompassing all the individual land ownerships. There is only a mutual alliance concerning the process for recognitions and enforcements of private property rights in lands owned (or would-like-to-be owned) by alliance members.
(Rights to "airwave" bands for radio broadcasting are rights to land in the economic sense of land, contrasting with other factors of production such as labor. These rights too require alliance of potential frequency-band owners who have their rights perfected [backed by effective force, might]. But these exclusivities of the transmission medium for its exploitation get their property rights perfection by piggy-back on the social mechanism for perfecting property claims in land and transmission facilities built on that land. If air waves over that land can be usurped (or made useless, speaking more practically) by contesters from offshore, then the alliance will have a decision of response to take to best secure their own perfections of property rights of broadcasters based within the alliances' boundaries of perfected property rights in land.) 
The rights to private ownership of a land property are not something conferred by the alliance, but by claimants in their exploitations of that land. But the mutual alliance confers recognitions, backed up with force, supported by alliance dues, for what processes submitted by claimants for why something is their property are valid within the alliance. Rothbard's rules for coming to own previously unowned land are not the same as Epstein's, etc. To neglect to mention any conventions in such purported property rights acquisition, to pretend that such is all settled by natural law, and to paint a picture in which only one or the other—say Rothbard's or Epstein's—is a just acquisition process, is more plausibly deceptiveness of the salesperson (notably Rothbard) than reflection of stupidity.
But all this and more can be learned by carefully studying my old article of some thirty years ago. It is probably not that no one besides me and the editor carefully studied the article, but because the readership was not large and I was a nobody, that no public notice of it was made until its reappearance, on the website Rebirth of Reason early in this century. In truth by now it is such old hat to me, and my intellectual work has since been no longer in political philosophy, theory of rights, and theory of strategic games, that it's not exciting to me any more, and it is a distraction from what I should be working on the remainder of this year, a topic in history of metaphysics and epistemology. I have lately had other reason to dig into the latest anthropology on pre-state organizations of society in their religions and collective violence powers—tribes of hunter-gathers, then chiefdoms—and on to subsequent archaic states and more recent states in those respects, for the sake of my long-term ethical theorizing and not for ever returning to the cutting edge of political philosophy.
But I wanted to show you the window on financing and the topic within which that proposal arose, at least for me. I had not set out, those decades ago, to find a solution to the just financing problem. But once I had the theory of the land state in the earlier part of the text, well, I was driving on a Sunday on the Stevenson southwest out of Chicago to put in some needed overtime commercial work. It was morning. I was traveling to a nuclear plant (the last built in America) where I worked and which was in its pre-operational testing phase. Thinking, as most always in a moment to do so, a shadow went by in the back of my mind, I followed it and thought: "Well I'll be damned. That's it." Given the analysis and conception of the land state, the natural attendant method of financing fell out as natural as an apple. That I still remember that scene is an indication that it was a very fine moment in that stage of my life.
(I doubt this is the case, but I hope in your remarks, you were not and will not be looking about for a wedge into discussing anarcho-capitalism v. minarchy. It bores me a long time now. It remains a mystery to me that there are people, even professional philosophers as a side-interest of theirs, who are so old that they could be my own children and yet they remain interested in that sub-sub-sub-department of political philosophy and take an interest in persuading the young folks for whom the world was born this morning of the correctness of anarcho-capitalism, instead of persuading and inspiring the young people to get out and make some money, incur no debts, and be the serious business that is happiness. Top priority. No excuses. I'm fine to just leave that pretty-old-folk behavior as one of those mysteries of life not worth solving, and at any rate, I'll not be discussing the issue, beyond what I wrote decades ago.)
By the way, as you will see in wider study of the article text, it is not that only land owners have rights. It was only the need of perfecting the claims to ownerships in land in the economic sense that was needed to also perfect the exclusivity rights individuals have in their labor and bodies, where as you also noticed or repeated, those boundaries are given by nature, not drafted by our coordinated behaviors.

ET, the proper way to fund the proper government is here and here.

If it's bad for business, the market will deliver their proper consequence.
Is your proposal to regulate how they attempt to act as arbiters of the truth?

Degree or by venue, as in where you say something?
If you go to someone's party at their house and you say something they don't like, when they ask you to leave and call the police, will you say that is a little bit of censorship?
If a company wants to hire and and in the contract they say you can't talk about such and such, is that censorship? (assuming the government is not involved)
If this forum has a terms of service that if you violate, you will be kicked out, is that censorship?
When you are sued for slander or libel, is that censorship since the government/judicial system will be involved?
When culturally, many people will insult you for saying something, are you being censored?
The fact is if one includes some or all of these as censorship, it will muddy the water when it comes to protecting freedom of speech. Suddenly anything and everything is censorship.
The other problem is that it normalizes censorship. Everyone does it, so it must be okay.

To be clear
If by "ban" you mean be allowed to refuse to sell to a certain group, the answer has to be yes. It's the right of any individual to refuse to do business with another (and suffer the consequences).
Otherwise, "ban" would have to mean: actively put a gun to the head of someone and say "don't drink it".

The provocation argument has a serious flaw in that:
There seems to be some sort of inherent or objective standard of where the lines should exist and that the west provoked Putin. If it is based on some history, then the overriding issue that effects our long term security is the fact that when the Soviet Union Broke up, Ukraine had nuclear weapons and gave them up for the implicit assurance that it would be safer without them. If in fact the west does not protect Ukraine, any country that will want to develop and or keep nuclear weapons. If we defend Ukraine, any country that wants to develop nuclear weapons will know that it is better off, or will be defended if it gave them up.
Now if in fact Ukraine itself became a rogue nation invading other countries, then this implicit protection should be ignored.
If the argument is that we supported a coup, then all that would mean is that Putin also has a right to support a coup. Currently Putin has chosen a war, not a clandestine coup.
The other issue is the idea that you can change borderlines without a voluntary deal.
The idea that NATO is expanding, as if NATO is gobbling up nations, like it is invading them, is a false narrative. Nations are requesting to join. This is through voluntary means. If they join, NATO expands, legitimately and in a morally sound way. The idea that Putin has a right to have the current members of NATO not allow any new members is an overstepping. 
The argument here seems to be that if a nation gives you an ultimatum regarding something you are doing, stop doing what you are doing. That seems to be what Putin did, he simply gave an ultimatum. We can't pay ransoms or appease a bully.
Now if we did meddle, then there is a corresponding right for Putin to meddle and he has done far more by absorbing Crimea. Again, if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, Crimea would have stayed Ukrainian.
If there was a judge, in a world court, the final judgement would be, Russia get out of Ukraine and let's settle this thing through negotiation. One way or the other, Putin would have to get out.

Let us accept the premise that NATO or the united states put pressure, or was threatening enough. Then Russia was retaliating or defending itself against agression. Then one could say that China is defending itself over Taiwan, that the Arabs are defending themselves over Israel, that Iran is defending itself over what happened a long time ago. And then in turn, the west is defending itself against them defending themselves.
NATO is a threat, it is meant to be a threat. At the heart of the argument is: NATO should not be a threat. Is it now a bigger threat since more countries have joined it? Should we now expect more violence from Russia? Is it more justified now?
The case has to be made that Russia had a right to use violence at this stage of the game. Or shall we say Putin has a right to do that. The west  set up a coup in Ukraine, fine. Russia set up an election to separate Crimea. Why not do that again? Why get hundreds of thousands of people killed and bring the world closer to a nuclear accidental war?
The undeniable fact is that any country that makes territorial claims that it expects through violence is a threat. China is a threat to almost all countries surrounding it. That is why they are all beefing up their militaries. Do we have that happening with the US and its neighbors? No because there are no territorial claims. There has not been any threat of violence from NATO, only an allowance of countries joining. That is what people and the press see. What are they missing?

So, we are to believe that a Nazi regime will tolerate a Jewish president. I guess these are the good kind of Nazis we hear about.
With this reasoning, NATO should in fact be frightened. It means that Russia would drive into the neighbors of Ukraine to create the buffer zone that it would supposedly need.  (since military strategy requires he go "much further")
No wonder, they are all beefing up their militaries.
Putin obviously did not mean to occupy the capital Kyiv. He obviously did not mean to invade Ukraine. It is because of his benevolent nature, that he is in retreat right now.
Tell me more, I'm willing to believe anything because I'm not a "proper" military expert.  

Yes you are. Inanimate nature does not plot or conspire to defeat and enslave you. Your attempt to equivocate being trapped in a mine with being imprisoned by a kidnapper anthropomorphizes nature by attributing intent and volition to it. Nature simply is, and being trapped in a mine is not an instance of coercion by nature.


The situation of a man trapped in the hands of a kidnapper is unjust, while a man trapped in the jaws of a crocodile just is. The way to apply the principle of the metaphysical vs. the man-made to the crocodile is not to just accept it, but also not to attempt to reason with or pray to the animal. Just kill the damn thing if you can. The nature of the crocodile is metaphysically given, but your nature as a man is also metaphysically given. You are only supposed to accept things that are beyond your power to change. Not everything metaphysically given is also immutable.

The point of Ayn Rand's essay "The Metaphysical Versus The Man-Made" is that "To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion". It is practical to deal with nature by force and men by persuasion. The crocodile is practical in attacking you, and so are you in trying to kill it. The kidnapper is being impractical in trying to dealing with men by force, but using force against the kidnapper would be practical.

Your reasoning is a fallacious use of analogy. The relation between a man and another man who is his kidnapper is not all similar to the relation between a man and the collapsed mine he is inside of, or a man and the crocodile that has him in its jaws.

I had never gotten around to reading Ronald Merrill’s original The Ideas of Ayn Rand until now, in parallel with Marsha Enright’s expanded version Ayn Rand Explained. Enright has expanded Ideas considerably in Explained, beyond the three new chapters. For example, Merrill wrote in Ideas: “Rand’s predilection for paradox and her pleasure in surprising and shocking the reader probably owed much to the influence of O. Henry and Oscar Wilde.” That statement, its paragraph, and its section remain in Explained. But the element of paradox and six others (mostly additional to those remarked by Merrill) in Rand’s literature receive fresh and delightful notice and discussion from Enright.

One of the hazards Nathaniel Branden had attended to in “The Benefits and Hazards of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy” (1984) is perhaps more a psychological hazard than a philosophical one: repression.* As I mentioned in another thread,* his lectures The Basic Principles of Objectivism, as transcribed in The Vision of Ayn Rand, contain much more psychology than does Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. As readers here know, Branden published quite a bit of psychology in The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist. In recent years, he has allowed that the psychology he propounded then as well as his later corrections and extensions to it are not part of the philosophy of Objectivism, and he has acknowledged that Peikoff’s OPAR is an accurate representation of Rand’s philosophy.

The divide between philosophical psychology (as my Thomist first philosophy professor called it) and what we call cognitive psychology* or therapeutic psychology* is not sharp. For example, Rand would not have gotten far in posing her view of the nature and role of reason in human life without saying things about the nature of perception and emotions and their relations with reason. Theory of perception and emotions at some level of outline has to be part of a philosophy such as hers.

Moreover, emotional dynamics figure into film, such as Love Letters,* and novels, such as Fountainhead and Atlas. It is in connection with Rand’s literature that Branden came to see a hazard in the “philosophy” of Ayn Rand. He wrote:

No such lesson took on me as a young person reading those books. In Fountainhead again and again Roark is shown to be the character not evasive about himself, the character most not evasive about himself. In Atlas Dagny, Rearden, and Galt are shown as kin of Roark in that respect. Rand was no Doris Lessing when it came to space devoted to self-reflection in characters. Lessing is no Rand when it comes to space devoted to the glory of sustained productive achievement. The two authors had different aspects of human existence, both of them important, that they especially wanted to embroidery.

The view that Rand’s protagonists are emotionally and introspectively inept has become a cliché. It was a pleasant surprise to find that in Ayn Rand Explained that cliché is challenged. This work counters that image, specifically with respect to Branden’s contentions about emotions and repression as portrayed in Atlas (pp. 120–25 in Explained; 79–84 in Ideas).

Yes, that kind of awareness and pursuit is ignored by Ayn Rand. Possibly as part of her disdain for mysticism. In the area of "states of awareness", I have found little even in Branden's work.
I have done biofeedback for many years and I am aware of "me" through artifacts of my biology. I could be aware of it and only it. I am also aware in real time, how I can and do lie to myself because of the objective measure. Nevertheless, exploration of sensation or that which I am aware of can be a sensation in itself or a conceptual view point of what is happening. Either way, it is an awareness of only myself by ignoring everything else that exists. Only myself does not mean devoid of existence.
Branden would say that she would say I know anything about psychology. It was probably rhetorical, but in the area you bring up, it would fit. I have seen this with many Objectivists I know. The other issue I have seen is regarding the idea of multiplicities, i.e. the different selves in one self that many Objectivists will negate by saying "no, there is only one self". As in, a part of you thinks you sacrificed but on the whole you think you did what needed to be done.

My impression of transhumanism is that it is technological eugenics. Although I’m not sure how close that comes to an apt description, as I don’t know much about it. Actually just looking around in order to respond to your comments , I learned the ‘movement’ is ‘larger’ than I presumed apparently there is a domestic political party established enough to have fielded a presidential candidate and affiliates with other similar political organizations multinationally.
Ive found what looks like a philosophic critique and perhaps a discussion on the bioethics of transhumanism. :
https://academic.oup.com/jmp/article/42/3/237/3817401

I'm willing to look at the reports but they have to be coherent. The uptick in mortality can be causes by the sudden change in economics and Covid itself, and lock downs and changes in life style so it can be refuted. Reports of undetermined this or that simply means, they are undetermined, until they are determined. You are deciding to be the determiner. It's just not enough.
The hold up here is the word "safe".
Is the vaccine safe enough for the government to mandate it? No, not even if it were 100 percent safe, there is NO place for government to do that.
Safe enough for someone at high risk to take it. Probably yes, including the manipulated media's reporting. The fact is that you are making an assertion based on some news source, or some information source. I am going with the media and my own personal experience and the recommendations of Doctors that I believe care. We could be wrong, but then, you could be wrong by that standard too, so the "you could be wrong" angle is a moot point.
For instance, I will grant you that Biden is corrupt, that Ukraine is corrupt, and that the Covid jab has risks involved. But Biden and a Republican congress is better than a Trump with a Republican congress, meaning gridlock is best. That is not based on news sources, just an over all assessment. Ukraine is corrupt, but not corrupt enough for the population to abandon and not fight and die for their country. Again, I don't need a special new source to see that. And with Covid, again, no mandate on principle, but is it as dangerous as ingesting same amounts of arsenic? no it is not.

Stephen Boydstun provided the following as an example of the government's attack on the gold standard.
“Genuine free banking, as we have noted, exists where entry into the banking business is totally free, where banks are neither subsidized nor controlled, and where at the first sign of failure to redeem in specie, the bank is forced to declare insolvency and close its doors.”
Doug, it looks like Murray Rothbard's book The Mystery of Banking is a good resource on this controversy, including the historical record. The book is available online. Pages 197-234 of the book (220-257 in the PDF pagination) look to be exactly the pertinent material, though it is challenging and probably requires some portions earlier in the book to understand it well.
(i would suggest starting one page earlier.)
 

In each of the following your friends may have additional questions, so try to be prepared to answer such.
"Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”"
"Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite."
It can help in both these cases to provide context from the novel.  Also, make the point that the encounter between Roark and Dominique is an unusual encounter between unusual people, not a guide to ordinary relationships.
"Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.
And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good."
No one should rule the world.  Such positions should be eliminated, not just filled by someone from a different faction.
"Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good."
Neither "illegal" immigrants nor anyone else should be put in cages or concentration camps.  Imprisonment should only be for people convicted of serious crimes, which does not include "illegal" immigration, and should be done in a properly thought-out manner, especially if children are involved. 
Rand's personal life is not relevant to evaluating her philosophy.  If anyone insists on digging into her personal life, we need to sort out actual imperfections from smears.
" Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” "
The working class are producers, not looters.  The looters are politicians who seize people's wealth.  Government should not "help" anyone at anyone else's expense.  Its sole proper function is to keep physical coercion out of it, leaving everyone free to produce and trade and to enjoy the fruits thereof.
 Of course Ayn Rand disagrees with the traditional Judaeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, for reasons which she has explained.  It might be helpful to explain about metaethics here, for those people that are willing to listen.
"Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982,"
Government takes a lot more from us in direct and indirect taxes and reduced economic efficiency than it ever gives back.  Anyone who leads a basically productive life and does not vote or advocate for government handouts is entitled to take whatever government is willing to give back to them.  Ayn Rand first explained this in "The Question of Scholarships", written long before she got cancer.
"over a million dead Americans from Covid"
I don't think Ayn Rand would be a vaccine denier or a vaccine skeptic.
Lockdowns kill people too.
"an epidemic of homelessness, and the collapse of this nation’s working class."
This is the result of mixed-economy statism, certainly not of laissez-faire capitalism, which we haven't even approximated for a long time.  (Here you may have to persuade people that this is a well-thought=out position, even if they still don't agree.)
"the Republican Great Depression"
(If people want to argue with the following, you may have to research it.)  The gold standard provided a natural discipline which prevented monetary and financial matters from getting too far out of balance.  The government sabotaged the gold standard and moved further and further away from it, giving more and more control to the Federal Reserve.  In the buildup to the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve loosened money and banking up too much, creating a speculative bubble which had to burst sooner or later, creating a massive dislocation.  The specific trigger that burst it was a combination of crop failure and financial panic.  Then Herbert Hoover intervened in ways that may have been well-intentioned, but made things worse.  He propped up wages and prices, pricing people, goods, and services out of the market.  He signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which restricted trade when it needed to be opened up, and provoked retaliatory restrictions from other countries.  If Hoover had been a do-nothing President as some people say, the Depression would not have lasted as long or been as bad.
"pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day." 
It is mixed-economy statism that does this, not laissez-faire capitalism.  Mixed-economy statism pits people against each other in pressure-group warfare and impairs the functioning of the economy.
"get billionaires and their money out of politics"
The way to do this is to get away from mixed-economy statism and the resulting pressure-group warfare, and establish laissez-faire capitalism.
(Sorry, I can't get rid of the bolding here.)
 
 

I’ve followed up on the last paragraph of the preceding post.
My American Heritage dictionary defines volition as:
An act of willing, choosing, or deciding. A conscious choice; decision. The power or capability of choosing; the will. On their surface, one might slide into thinking those definitions come to free will. The debates over free will/determinism/compatibilism, however, are about whether and what sorts of freedom are behind willings, choices, and decisions. So in common usage volition is not equivalent to free will in a full-bodied sense. That is, volition does not mean free volition, but leaves open the controversy of whether and which volitions are free.
When one looks in the index of The Virtue of Selfishness or of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand for free will, one is simply directed to see volition. Peikoff speaks of free will in OPAR (55), but clearly volition (meaning free volition) is his preferred term of art in expressing Rand’s theory. He remarks at the end of his discussion (55–72) that Rand’s layout of (free) volition, joining it inalienably to the conceptual power, fits this fundamental sort of freedom smoothly into the natural world and removes it from its modern refuge in constructs supernatural. Because of its common residence in distinctly religious frameworks, one might think it better to shift its name from free will to (free) volition in shifting the thing itself from its religious sanctuary into the light of plain day.
Rand and subsequent Objectivists have used the term volition idiosyncratically in taking it to mean always free volition. Some of us, when young, first learned the term volition from writings of Rand and Branden and were not awakened to its meaning in the wider educated culture until we opened the dictionary on the term. This disparity is no great problem, I’d say.
Blackwell’s A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016) indexes free will, and under volition the Index simply directs one to free will and to the subsidiary volitional under the entry reason. In his Chapter “A Being of Self-Made Soul,” Onkar Ghate has a subsection titled “Free Will” (107–12) with an endnote 9 in which he states: “Rand uses the terms ‘free will’ and ‘volition’ interchangeably, and I will follow suit.” (I see that incorrect conjugation of the verb to be, first person, simple future, in many scholarly books from some high class presses these days. Still, if you would like to avoid irritating some of the elderly, please use I shall and we shall for simple future tense when writing formally.)
Ghate’s presentation is good (107–12), and he relies on and quotes from the Rand and Branden compositions that are included among the Objectivist references on free will that he lists in that endnote 9. Among those references, Rand, Peikoff, and Binswanger, had stuck with volition in preference to free will. Branden had traded expressly in free will all along. The Rand references are to Galt’s Speech and “The Objectivist Ethics,” and the Peikoff is OPAR. The Branden references are four articles in The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist journal. The Binswanger reference is to a 1991 monograph in which he redrafted those Branden contributions and made some additions and cast all in a nicely biocentric way. Branden’s compositions were incorporated into his The Psychology of Self-Esteem – A New Concept of Man’s Psychological Nature (1969). That book indexes volition, and has for free will: see volition. Binswanger’s monograph treatment is incorporated into the “Free Will” chapter of his How We Know – Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation (2014). That book simply indexes free will/volition. (Binswanger’s monograph and book and Peikoff’s OPAR never write the name Branden, but with the Blackwell book, that dark public stamp of personal animosities in major Objectivist scholarly work has been dispelled with honest light.)

They all indicate possession of something i.e. a "pairing of".
But:
My country
My planet
are two that can indicate ownership similar to wife or child. As in "belonging to".
This type of ownership has an element of responsibility while the others don't. It's almost ownership of consequences. What you own, you are responsible for i.e. consequences of "it's" actions should have ramification to the owner. If it is profit, the owner profits, if it is loss, they lose. If your child breaks the neighbor's window, you own the problem. It's yours. Not like your eye color, but like standing in front of the judge and pleading your case.

I'm not talking chattel or slavery or any absolute right to "them" but a particular right to interact in a certain way.
Ownership rights ultimately is a definition of the boundaries between people. How would you differentiate you're wife from the neighbor's? Basically isn't there a message "don't cross this line regarding my wife"? It's unwritten but isn't it there?
Ownership of anything indicates an exclusive way of relating to it, that others don't have and shouldn't have.
I would argue this type of exclusive relationship between you and to your body exists that should not be violated by others. That is true of a mother of an unborn too.

One of the problems that makes the issue extra difficult is that both in Objectivism and in Libertarianism, the role and place of children is not well defined.
The other issue that you are making a case for "compassion" which on one hand is a behavioral but also an emotional response.
If we go the evolutionary route, we have some monkey traits in us. The natural love of children is one of them.
I have seen Christian apologists argue against atheists by saying "If there was no Christian morality, you would eat your children".
And yet we don't … and we won't. Because, I would agree, it is not our nature.
But why is it not our nature? The answer must be related to evolution. That answer is a "species" survival argument.
Most here don't seem to want to follow that line of thinking and emphasize it, but it all seems to fall into that area. 
We are not ALL cannibals all of the time, because won't survive. We are not all sociopaths because societies can't form in the first place because of the anti social behaviors.
So we have a nature that promotes our species to survive. That desire may be inherent like the desire to eat, and the desire to have sex most likely is part of that.
But that is simply motivation, i.e. we are motivated to do that by nature.
If survival of the species is objectively a human value, then we should take care of children and other humans, every chance we get.
Boydstun brought up that Branden had said something positive about preserving one's species. 
I don't see it as being used as a core argument, while justifying sacrifice for a child may hinge on it.
Furthermore, I would put forth the idea that emotions do count in ways that we may not allow (as Objectivists). As in, there is more to do around the question of "where do emotions in fact fit in" within the thought process.
Not that we can feel our way to the truth, but our feelings must have a say in the final conclusion of the next steps we will take in our lives.
So the current argument is something like: it would be disgusting, heinous, to willingly/on purpose, abandon/walk away from a helpless child. That is not natural. Fine. 
But if you see many children being abandoned do you have the right to force someone to take care of them is still the question. Even acknowledging our natural tendencies we don't have that right. Children don't have that positive right, just as adults don't have it. But they do have the negative right, as in, that of not being harmed by force.
Love should not be legislated, as to make it duty. Love is a natural response and what is loved is in the eyes of the beholder. 
At the core of liberty is to not love, or to not respond as if you love someone. Meaning there is a right to indifference. It's just not mentioned very often.
 

I see, so it is the law of the land. Meaning, currently, the mother does not have complete control after the viability stage.

That would be "physically speaking", rather than "philosophically speaking". Viability is purely a physical condition. That there are parties willing to support the viable fetus does not confer the status "viable". It is rather: passing the point of viability, others can take on the project of support without requiring continued pregnancy of the mother.
To your question, ET: Yes, just as the volunteered custodian (or the agencies for such possible custodians) has rights in the matter of other people's children in the community. Their right is not over the body of the pregnant woman, but over a part of her body coincident with the whole. Specifically, it is a right over what anyone, including the mother, can do with that entity once it is assessed as viable. A right against the killing of the viable fetus,  delivered infant, or young child is not a right those developing little characters hold against all the adults in the community, rather, it is the right of adults in the community against anyone killing those living entities. Admittedly, the right stems from the specialness of the project of making progeny of the human species. (The community would not have a right against our family killing at birth an undesired litter of pups from our dog.)
(This way of looking at the abortion issue I have advocated [since first formulating it in 1984] was built around Rand's idea of what a right is, which partly but importantly included the point that rights are coordinating principles under which each person is left, vis-a-vis others, to their autonomous self-activity. Keeping moral obligations to others tied to potentials or actualities of the others making their own life, composed of certain sorts of projects, is also consonant with Rand's ethics. However, if one lets that idea of Rand's I mentioned above, near the end of her essay "Causality versus Duty" that the only rational obligations between people are those by promise, agreement, and contract, run everywhere; then one cannot go the way I have gone on this. With my outlook, of course, contract cannot be the only way under which governments can be legitimate. I'd like to mention, however, that while I have described all this as "my outlook", that cannot be a fully correct ascription. I have my own metaphysics now, and because of a couple of differences in its most basic part with Rand's in its most basic part, it seems likely that if I were to develop a value theory and ethical theory [partly] upon that new base it would differ from what can be drafted from Rand's.)

Here is my original article on the topic (which was in 1983, not 1984).
 

Whenever the fetus has become capable of sustained survival outside the womb with or without artificial support, it is a living being worthy of adult protections and support (far beyond such worthiness of one's dog, for example). And adults willing to step up and provide that protection and support should have a right against interference with their project by other adults. As to when an infant or child becomes a person, that is a gradual process.
We usually and correctly think of individual rights as belonging to (obtaining between) autonomous human persons and sourced in such personhood. In abortion rights and child rights, the question all along the way is not about rights of the little one not yet autonomous, but about rights of various adults concerning protection and support of the particular little one at all stages of development. Persons not the mother don't have a proper right to control the pregnancy until the fetus is capable of sustained life outside the womb with or without artificial support. It is only then that support-projects by persons not the mother can get underway without impressing the mother into service of their project. In other words, when does the fetus/infant become a person has always been a faulty and distracting way of looking at the rights that are actually in play over Law concerning abortion. Rights between various adults are the whole story.

I just wanted to emphasize that private experience, i.e. subjective experience is not unknowable as the person having it, knows it. It maybe unascertainable or duplicatable by others but it by definition is knowable because it is known at some point by someone. When I say eternally unknowable, I mean never ever known, past present future by ANYONE.