Where did defenders of Roe v. Wade go wrong? Why did they lose the moral high ground? What does it take to defend abortion rights in the United States?
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because it claimed that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” But if the intellectual tradition the American founders drew on was the doctrine of individual rights, then it is relevant that this doctrine has logical implications that even they might not have grasped. In that respect, the original philosophy of the founders supports an absolute individual right to abortion.
To defend abortion as an inviolable right, it has to be understood as a claim of uncompromising justice. The hard-hitting essays in this book make that case.
Challenging both defenders of Roe and its conservative critics, Ben Bayer lays out a rational, secular defense of the right to abortion based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Bayer shows how the principles of Rand’s individualist ethics enshrine a woman’s right to her own happiness, without limitation by any competing “rights” of the fetus.
Can the controversy over abortion be settled by scientific facts alone? No, Bayer explains, because philosophical reasoning is needed to interpret the relevance of the science.
Ultimately the right to abortion—which Bayer argues should be legal until birth—allows a woman to protect what’s sacred about life: her own life and future.
About the Author
Ben Bayer
Ben Bayer is an instructor and fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He brings to ARI more than a decade of experience in teaching a wide range of philosophy courses at colleges and universities around the United States. He was a visiting assistant professor at Loyola University New Orleans for seven years, and previously taught at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado College, Loyola University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
In his time as a professor, Dr. Bayer’s research focused on epistemology and metaphysics (especially, free will and determinism). He has published scholarly articles in American Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese, Philosophia, and Acta Analytica, among others. He has also contributed essays to Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology and Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
Dr. Bayer was one of the two co-founders of the student publication The Undercurrent, for which he served as an editor and contributor between 2005 and 2016. He edited checkyourpremises.org, the blog of the Ayn Rand Society (a professional association affiliated with the American Philosophical Association), from 2016 to 2017.
Dr. Bayer received his Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2007. He also completed the program of coursework in ARI’s Objectivist Graduate Center, a forerunner of the Objectivist Academic Center.
