I found this post criticizing Objectivist arguments for abortion - or at least criticizing the persuasiveness of such arguments - by citing others’ criticisms. I tried to formulate my own responses but could not come up with anything convincing. I would be interested to know how others here would respond to the following supposed criticisms:
[The Objectivist position on abortion], of all things I have read and understood of objectivism, as advocated by A.R.I., is the single most inconsistent area of the Institute’s intellectual endeavors. Human life is human life. “A is A.” Mr. Peikoff would lead a reader to believe that an infant developed instantaneously, at the moment of birth, into a “real human being.” This defies all known logic. Rather than simply stating the facts, perhaps what is needed is a further demonstration of them:
Mr Peikoff claims that the embryo “exists as part of the woman’s body.” True or false? False. It is dependent upon the woman’s body, but the real test of it as an integral part of her body is whether it can successfully be removed without harm to her, and implanted in another woman without harm to either the surrogate or the embryo. The answer is “yes” in each instance. Can it, at this stage, exist independent of some woman’s body, other than by freezing? No. That does not, however, make it part of a woman’s body.
Another cited criticism attempts to use the “potential human being” argument against itself:
The question then becomes, “When does a potential cease being a mere alternative among many?” Prior to the conception of a child, there is absolutely no guarantee that a particular genetic code will be furnished to serve as the basis for the uniquely adjusted rational faculty of a child-to-be. Therefore it is moral to prevent conception by means of abstinence or contraceptives, and the couple will therefore possess a genuine choice of whether or not to expend a substantial portion of their lives and finances on the upbringing of offspring. However, once conception has occurred, the peculiar genome is already in place, which will result in the inevitable development of a rational creature absent intervention. Granted, the fetus does not yet possess volitional consciousness, but neither does a man who is asleep. Does that grant a serial murderer the right to enter his home, loot his property and kill one whom he mistakenly judges to be “potentially awake”? The fact that that particular man (or child) will, if unhindered, be able to exercise his volitional consciousness, classifies him as a human being.
The question then becomes, “When does a potential cease being a mere alternative among many?” Prior to the conception of a child, there is absolutely no guarantee that a particular genetic code will be furnished to serve as the basis for the uniquely adjusted rational faculty of a child-to-be. Therefore it is moral to prevent conception by means of abstinence or contraceptives, and the couple will therefore possess a genuine choice of whether or not to expend a substantial portion of their lives and finances on the upbringing of offspring. However, once conception has occurred, the peculiar genome is already in place, which will result in the inevitable development of a rational creature absent intervention. Granted, the fetus does not yet possess volitional consciousness, but neither does a man who is asleep. Does that grant a serial murderer the right to enter his home, loot his property and kill one whom he mistakenly judges to be “potentially awake”? The fact that that particular man (or child) will, if unhindered, be able to exercise his volitional consciousness, classifies him as a human being.
Aha. I spot what may be a contradiction and the point that he misses. In his first bit he states; “Mr Peikoff claims that the embryo “exists as part of the woman’s body.” True or false? False.” Yet in this one he openly admits that “Granted, the fetus does not yet possess volitional consciousness.” So in other words, even though the embryo is still not “part of the woman’s body” in a very, very, very narrow sense of the term (because, granted, with modern technology we can take any organ and put it successfully in another human being with little to no mishaps, so his woman to woman argument does not fly at all), the fetus isn’t human yet either. It has the “potential” to be a human, but potential means jack squat. He is also lying blatantly about the fact that if “left alone” it will grow into a baby. If “left alone” i.e. if not given what it needs to survive, it will die and the woman will have a miscarriage. His potential argument is also equally flawed in that he completely leaves out the care and attention a developed baby needs to become adequate, let alone rational and good. He is essentially making the fallacious Beethoven argument. What he fails to acknowledge that while a fetus COULD be the next Beethoven, it also has a very, very, real chance to become the next Adolf Hitler. His analogy about the sleeping man is fallacious at best. He fails to acknowledge the difference between sleep, which is a temporary subconscious state, and the fetus, which lacks consciousness completely. In the early stages, a fetus lack’s a brain for Christ’s sake. Most of his arguments rely on a fallacious equivocation of late term abortions, in which the baby is almost fully developed, with all abortions. I can’t see how he can justify his anti-abortion stance within the first month when the fetus is not fit to even be called an animal. The rudimentary brain doesn’t even appear until week three. It doesn’t even finish developing until week thrity-five (at least as far as I can tell from wikipedia).
He attempts to make some arguments but falls short. In the end he is still making the faulty “fetuses are human too!” argument. Don’t let him get away with it.
Although the extract that you quoted was contained in a Nyquist rant, the actual text comes from this essay by Mark La Vigne in response to Peikoff’s article “Abortion Rights are Pro-Life”. La Vigne’s problem is that he is not used to thinking in principles and making sharp distinctions, thus he finds it “ludicrous” to compare an infant to an adult and see them both as instances of the concept “person”. In this case, he is waving the magic wand of unsupported assertion, failing to distinguish clearly distinct things. There are many differences between various people, including skin color, hair, weight, intelligence, but of all of those differences, none includes “people with gills”, or “people with wings”. There simply are no such things, because it is outside of the nature of the concept “person”. That should be obvious: and another thing should be obvious, namely that there is no such thing as a “person who is biologically contained inside another person”.
La Vigne rants about Peikoff’s argument regarding the embryo being a part of the mother’s body, claiming that “the real test of it as an integral part of her body is whether it can successfully be removed without harm to her, and implanted in another woman without harm to either the surrogate or the embryo”. Let’s see if this argument passes the test for ridiculousness. A lung can be successfully removed without harm to a donor, and can be implanted in another person without harm to either the recipient or the organ; the same is true of livers, kidneys, blood, all sorts of body parts. From La Vigne’s logic, we would have to conclude that these organs are not part of the donor’s body.
And what exactly is the logic behind claiming that crucial part of the concept “part of the body” is whether or not it can be transplanted to another person? He gives no justification for this bizarre collection of ideas underlying his notion of “body part”, which defies all logic. Whether or not a lobe of the brain is a “part of the body” apparently depends on whether it can be successfully implanted in another person. Right now, a brain is a body part; a liver is no longer a body part, but 30 years ago it was a body part (because it couldn’t be sucessfully transplanted). A kidney can generally be transplanted, thus it is not a body part, by La Vigne’s “logic”. But cometimes, the transplant fails – does that mean in those cases that the kidney was a body part?
By La Vigne’s arbitrary definition, a fetus / embryo passes the La Vigne test for “body part” from a very early point after conception until birth. You cannot transplant a 20 week old fetus from womb to womb. A fetus is necessarily part of the body of another female human.