After reading how Ayn Rand feels about abortion I am quite surprised. She has completely stated that she believes it is up to the woman to decide how she will handle the situation. This is somewhat surprising and in some ways it isn't. After reading Anthem part of me would believe that she would argue that every being has a right and that the embryo has these same rights. In Anthem she makes people realize that the ego is really very important, and it is important to be an individual. She also expresses the importance of individual rights in Anthem. However she believes that an embryo is not "man" and therefore has no rights yet.
However, you can also see her expressing her feelings of individual rights because she feels that it is the right of the woman to make the choice for abortion. This gives the woman power to make her own choices and that is the philosophy that Ayn Rand lives.
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Hi, Kayla -
Yes, I felt the same exact way that you did about Rand's opinion. In a way, though, it makes total sense that she feels that the woman should have the right to decide.
She felt very strongly about people having the right to chart the course of their own lives. But she was an atheist, and she was childless. There's little reason to think life begins before delivery, if you're an atheist; just the knowledge you'd gain about the clinical developments of the pregnancy, and if you don't go through a pregnancy you don't have that experience either.
To even allow for the possibility that the fetus has become a human being sometime in the nine months, is to open the door to the possibility that abortion might be the ultimate Ayn Rand nightmare -- legitimizing an atrocity by defining the victim out of existence. Had she lived onward until we had our more contentious debates about partial-birth abortion, she might've been forced to reconsider. Although there's little-to-no evidence Rand had the intellectual flexibility to confess a change-of-course on anything.
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