A Journal for Western Man
Part II
G. Stolyarov II
Because I consider myself an Objectivist, I like to think of all proper actions in terms of trade, or the consensual exchange of value for value. What is parenthood, you ask? Is it a selfless sacrifice of time, money, and psychological calm to an �unintelligent growth� or an �ungrateful little ruffian�? No. It is an investment like all others. A child can be a pillar of support during one�s retirement years and can be morally conditioned to offer aid to his elderly ancestors not as a duty but simply as back payment for the sustenance provided to him during his youth. But more significant is the direct spiritual value that a child brings to a sound home as a complex, inquisitive entity on its path to full mental competence. The relationship between parent and child is undertaken for the same reason and with the same value-value symbiosis as a business contract between a producer and a consumer. The violation of a contract after a single party has paid its dues is called fraud and is a variety of the initiation of force, rightly prohibited by law. Is it then not fraud to deprive a futuristically certain human being of its life after it had already been created? Within conception is implicit a particular expectation from the child-to-be. While it may not always be fulfilled, just like a product one purchases may not necessarily turn out to be as practical and ameliorating of one�s life as one might have envisioned, that does not nullify the exchange itself. There is also a �full refund� option, commonly known as adopting out the child, which should even be encouraged in cases where his remaining in his original homestead will subject him to the misery of parents who do not love him and his parents to the misery of living with a child they do not love.
What, you might say, should occur if the contract were undertaken without express knowledge by all parties of the consequences involved or of the benefits they should expect from it? In a similar manner, a customer may purchase an unnecessary product out of sheer unthinking whim, but that does not nullify the consensual nature of the exchange already undertaken. If anything, such a mistake will serve to persuade the erring party to be more prudent in its further analyses. Reality punishes the man who misuses his rational faculty, and that particular truth was embraced by Rand as a further reinforcement for man�s need to discover and apply reason. If a couple decides to engage in physical intercourse but does not wish to give birth to offspring, then artificial preventive measures are its reality-applicable solution. Thus, in any situation of unwanted conception, the parents are to blame for negligence and are not liable for compensation as a result of their capricious defiance of the laws of reality and of the metaphysical properties of physical intercourse which, when unamended by technology, result in the development of a futuristically certain being of volitional consciousness. The only genuine victim is the innocent little human who is to be sacrificed to the irrational.
Objectivist writer Glenn Woiceshyn brings a historical argument into the �pro-choicers�� intellectual arsenal which it is necessary to analyze for the sake of judging its applicability to the consistent moral framework that was Rand�s. He is quoted by Watkins, "When abortion was illegal in America," writes Glenn Woiceshyn, senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, "many women died or suffered serious medical problems from either self-induced or illegal, 'back-alley' abortions. Women streamed into emergency rooms with punctured wombs, massive bleeding, and rampant infections" (Woiceshyn 1). Now, how can we respond to this? Firstly, the vigilante actions of the mothers-to-be against futuristically certain human beings were an initiation of physical force, an inherent violation of man�s right to life which is derived from his metaphysical identity. Force is an attempt to conform reality to whims, and because of its nature, it is inevitably punished by reality. The coercer cannot survive and prosper, and so were these immoral women punished by reality. Additionally, it is the proper function of law to prevent and penalize the initiation of physical force, and henceforth it is not compassion that we must exhibit toward these child killers but imprisonment. It is also fitting to note that because man is a being of volitional consciousness, �social pressures� are not a defining factor in his (or, in this case, her) decisions. No matter how displeased a woman may have been with her pregnancy, and no matter how rigid anti-abortion laws have been in the past, she possessed the choice not to take the matter into her own hands. The fact that she had willfully abandoned that course of action classifies her as a criminal.
I have elucidated here a rational, secular, Objectivist position to be employed by the anti-abortionist movement. I view abortion as a horrendous evil, a circumstantial Holocaust in many ways because it involves the murder of individuals due to characteristics beyond their control, such as age. What will this give the Objectivist thinkers who are willing to take their splendid premises to their logical conclusions? It will allow them to join ad hoc movements in collaboration with religious conservatives and miscellaneous pro-lifers for the express purpose of abolishing abortion, no matter what their philosophical justification. While we may disagree with their reasoning, we should not disagree with their policy standpoints in this regard because, objectively speaking, abortion is immoral. What the support of Objectivists might grant the anti-abortion movement is the momentum and popular backing necessary to exercise a major influence on our representatives and our courts so that soon we may overturn the abomination that is Roe v. Wade.
