How will you feel about yourself going forward if, as the only possible protector of the life of a helpless innocent, you choose to exterminate that life? Egoists ask those kinds of questions. Juveniles do not.
That much doesn’t matter. I invented egoism as a (no pun intended) self-consistent moral philosophy, and so it falls to me to explain why abortion – intrauterine infanticide – is, alike unto every other kind of murder, necessarily anti-egoistic.
This is not difficult, at least not for me. For one very big thing, being instrumentally involved in an abortion is enduringly damaging to the lifelong self-image of the actor:
[H]aving an abortion, performing one, encouraging one or paying for it are all morally-reprehensible acts. They cannot advance or enhance your own self-adoration, and, necessarily, they must retard and diminish your self-love, in the immediate moment and enduringly thereafter. It is not even necessary to look for real-life evidence of this argument, but, of course, that evidence abounds.
Do you want to dispute this? If one abortion enhances your self-love a little, will six abortions cause you to love your self a whole lot more? How about strangling kittens? Whether you like it or not, seeing your self committing atrocities is abhorrent to your mind, and no amount of rationalizing self-destructive behavior will turn vices into virtues.
You could argue that abortion or exposure can be exigently necessary — as, for instance, in extreme emergencies or when your family is already starving to death. But even then, the action cannot make you love your self more and must make you love your self less. Again, existentially, in real life, there are no counter-examples. Too much the contrary.
Worse, the Ayn Rand Institute-sanctioned cult of abortionism robs the human race of its humanity itself:
A pregnancy, expected or not, makes you take the long view. Choices that once seemed inconsequential – take that job or hike the Andes? – are now throbbing with moment. Adults commit to their spouses in their marriages, to their children in their families, to their neighbors with their homes and to their communities by putting down roots. None of these things happen for the adolescents-of-any-age who choose to – or expect to – slaughter their own offspring. They die alone, unfamilied and unmourned, but all of Western Civilization dies with them.
Marriage makes us adults and families make us self-responsible parents. But since the family is the sine qua non building block of peaceful civilization, to be anti-family is necessarily to be anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.
We become human in consequence of human upbringing, but if that upbringing is arrested at age 18 – if we live as Ayn Rand counseled, as perpetual teenagers – we alienate ourselves from our very nature as things.
The official Ayn Rand Institute argument for abortion is absurdly stupid, the enshrined rantings of a outraged teenager, but – so much worse – it is hideously anti-egoistic. The people who followed Ayn Rand’s awful advice on marriage, career and abortion not only did enduring damage to their ongoing self-adoration, they diverted their attention away from the human values that make lifelong happiness possible.
Abortion is always and necessarily anti-egoistic – even in the case of rape, even where killing the child is the only way to save the life of the mother. As Ayn Rand proved with her miserable life, you cannot brow-beat unwelcome facts into submission. Accordingly, you must respond to reality as it actually is, not as you wish it were.
And from that observation alone, we can see why advocating abortion is destructive of the rational interests of the self: As with the Ayn Rand Institute, you are left making absurdly stupid anti-factual claims in order to buttress a whim you already know is morally repugnant, with no defense for your knowing evil but rank, cowardly, excruciatingly-obvious evasion.
That’s not just self-destruction, it is willful, knowing, deliberate lifelong self-annihilation. And it sure ain’t egoism…
