Pro-Choice is Pro-Life: The Philosophical Basis for a Woman's Right to Choose
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 at 6:30pm
USC Campus: THH 101
This talk is a defense--on philosophical grounds--of the right to abortion. To validate this right requires a rational theory of rights, one grounded in fact, not faith or feeling. In establishing the basis of this right, Dr. Bernstein also demonstrates that anti-abortionists have no rational basis for using the phrase "right to life."
Dr. Bernstein presents the scientific arguments used by anti-abortionists, then demonstrates the errors in those arguments: failure to recognize the biological nature of the fetus; equivocation on key terms; and obliteration of the distinction between actual and potential.
Dr. Bernstein grounds his view of rights in an ethics of rational egoism and contrasts it with the theory of self-sacrifice espoused by anti-abortionists.
Both political conservatives and liberals deny the principle of individual rights and the egoist ethics on which rights depend. Only Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism validates both rights and egoism, thereby providing the only valid philosophical basis of a woman's right to abortion.
(description from the USC Objectivist Club)
