Not actual rights -- not the same rights possessed by normal individuals. In effect, they have the right to be protected as perennial children. Like children, retarded people are entitled to protection because, as humans, they may improve and become partly able to stand on their own. The protection of their rights is a courtesy extended to them for being human, even if not properly formed ones....[p. 4]

Adam Reed wrote: 

As I wrote elsewhere, I view Rand's abandonment of the integration of philosophy with the sciences (at some point between 1969 and 1973) as a retrogression and a mistake. By 1974, and possibly some years earlier, Rand had broken contact with Robert Efron, and had no one who could help her ground her assumptions in the facts of cognitive and biological science.

Adam, do you really believe that, without the guidance of a neurophysiologist, Rand was unable to learn of and grasp the concept of “fetal viability”? That is, after all, what she was talking about in her 1974 Ford Hall Forum comments:

I'd like to express my indignation at the idea of confusing a living human being with an embryo, which is only some undeveloped cells. (Abortion at the last minute -- when a baby is formed -- is a different issue.)...The basic principles here are: never sacrifice the living to the nonliving, and never confuse an actuality with a potentiality. An "unborn child," before it's formed, is not a human, it's not a living entity, it has no rights...(Ford Hall Forum QA, 1974, emphasis added)

 Surely, with Rand’s intense interest in the subject, she was well aware of Roe v. Wade, decided by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, just months before Rand’s above-quoted remarks about the stage of pregnancy where “a baby is formed.” Surely, she would have read had occasion to read and ponder these passages from the Blackmun majority opinion (emphasis added): 

For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164-165.

 

Most Greek thinkers, on the other hand, commended abortion, at least prior to viability. See Plato, Republic, V, 461; Aristotle, Politics, VII, 1335b 25.

 

As we have noted, the common law found greater significance in quickening. Physicians and their scientific colleagues have regarded that event with less interest and have tended to focus either upon conception, upon live birth, or upon the interim point at which the fetus becomes "viable," that is, potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. 59 Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.

 

…the State does have an important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health of the pregnant woman, whether she be a resident of the State or a nonresident who seeks medical consultation and treatment there, and that it has still another important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life. These interests are separate and distinct. Each grows in substantiality as the woman approaches term and, at a point during pregnancy, each becomes "compelling."…With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in potential life, the "compelling" point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. 

Adam writes further:

The fact remains that a statement which specifically addresses the issue in question trumps conjectures from subsequent vagueness. The vagueness is more likely a result of Rand's loss of contact and integration with science. This is a loss of grounding and not a principled change in Rand's position.

Says you, Adam. It's clear to me that Rand’s 1974 position was well grounded and closely paralleled the Supreme Court opinion. And with good reason. The Court, in one of its too infrequent flashes of wisdom actually set up the approximately correct dividing line establishing the right to life of third-trimester fetuses. Rand, to her credit, assimilated this decision and modified her own views accordingly. Nothing vague about her 1974 comments at all.

Adam again:  

The facts of reality that grounded Rand's 1969 position start with the classic studies of Held and Hein (1963) which showed that when kittens were prevented from actively exploring the visual world, even though they received the same visual stimulation as their normal counterparts, they failed to develop normal visual perception - and failed to develop the brain structures necessary for perception. But, as Rand often said, to be conscious is to be conscious of something. This requires perception - and perception requires active interaction with objects in the environment, which is not possible until after birth.

This is a gross misinterpretation of Held/Hein (1963). What their study shows is what motor deprivation does for the development of perception after birth. It does not at all establish what Adam claims, namely, that perception does not exist before birth. In fact, as was established in the mid to late 1970s and reported by Stephen Rose in The Conscious Brain and in newspaper articles at the time which interviewed the chief researcher in this area, Dominic Purpura, the fetal brain is already engaging in patterned awareness of reality by about the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy. Late-term fetuses have brain waves essentially like those of premature babies and full-term babies and adults, and essentially unlike those of earlier fetuses. They are not passive little lumps inside the mother’s body. How on earth could you assume that they are not, in albeit limited fashion, engaging in “active interaction” with their environment? They suck their thumbs, they kick out at the mother’s body, they change position at the most embarrassing times (for the mother), etc. Granted, their perceptual awareness is a pale shadow of the richness that awaits them “on the outside,” but they are not cognitive blank slates at birth. It may or may not be true that singing a particular tune over and over to your baby in the womb is etched in the baby’s memory, as some research claims. But at birth, babies hit the ground running – well, so to speak. They are not “tabula rasa.”

Adam, once more:

Once Rand lost touch with Robert Efron, and thus with the grounding of her position in the facts of reality, she did become more vague and uncertain. But the core of Rand's philosophy is primacy of existence - which means that the uncertain Rand of 1974, the Rand who by then lost contact with science, is - to the extent that she changed her position to one less well grounded in the facts of reality - not the true Rand.

I wish the "true Rand" were still alive and could kick your ass for saying that, Adam. There is nothing “vague and uncertain” about her informed views of 1974. The Supreme Court’s views were grounded in reality, and so were Rand’s, and the subsequent findings of Purpura et al only served to more firmly establish that the “bright line” for individual rights is not birth, but the third trimester, when, in Rand's unequivocal words, "a baby is formed."

REB