 Good. So let's go to another related issue again related to the church and related to religion and related to and that's the issue which is controversial even among, I'm sure the listeners today and among a lot of people who are fans of Ayn Rand, which is the issue of abortion. And you wrote an article about how people use science in order to, or the opponents of abortion are using science to try to attack a woman's right to an abortion. And I think they'd say it's a really interesting issue because you see it all the time. You see this issue of science and them raising the issue of science constantly with regard to abortion. I think they, you point out three examples of this, but I actually think there's a fourth which will probably. Yeah, well the fourth is viability, which is, which is the one they, you know, there is not so much deals with the first trimester. But because they don't want to argue about the first trimester, I mean, it's much more convenient for the anti-abortionist to argue about the last trimester, even though they're barely any abortions in the last trimester. But the first trimester is more difficult, but the three, tell us about the three uses of science that to object to abortion and we'll talk about why they're irrelevant to the philosophical moral ethical decision or legal decision about abortion. Sure. So the first one is almost always the first one I hear when I would when I would teach this controversy in college is the heartbeat issues, but the fetus has a heartbeat, and so it's alive. And I mean, to some extent, this is true at a certain point. You can detect either the actual sound, but even before that with ultrasound you can you can detect the visual evidence at least of some kind of something that looks like a heartbeat at least, whether you should really consider that it biologically a heartbeat is an interesting question but so that's one point. Second is the issue of fetal pain. And I mean, I think that I often see commenters from the left say that it's a pseudo scientific claim that the fetus experiences pain and I've now spent a fair amount of time looking at the scientific literature on that I don't think that's true I think there's an open question, which I don't think that even the best scientists in the field believe is settled about whether they do or not. And it's a very complex debate but the argument they make is well if they can feel pain, then abortion would cause pain and be awful. And then the third is just the fact that the fetus has human DNA which we've known for decades and decades obviously not 100 years but that's definitely an important scientific discovery was the foundation of modern embryology, but their idea is that if it's got human DNA, it must be a human being, and therefore, it's wrong to kill it. Those are the three big ones and the one that I spend, I spend more time talking about the pain issue and the DNA issue in the article because the heartbeat is a little bit easier to dispense with because I mean lots of living creatures have human beings and unless you're a vegetarian, that that doesn't stop us from having sometimes having reason to kill them. And the same issue really is what's at stake with the fetal pain issue which is that I mean lots of animals besides feel pain too but unless you're a vegetarian and most anti-abortion people aren't, it's that doesn't seem to by itself at least justify the idea that they have rights. I mean, it's not like it's a completely irrelevant issue. If, for example, you're pregnant and you want to have a child and there's different medical procedures that might be involved in having that, you don't want to cause unnecessary pain. And there's good evidence that when the fetus is subjected to noxious stimuli in utero that it can have adverse health effects on it later on in life. And if it turned out even that you didn't want to keep the child, say you wanted it originally but it turns out there's some birth defect and you need to abort it, there's no reason to cause it pain if it could feel pain. So, but the end of the story is not nothing here helps establish that the child has rights or even that there shouldn't be an abortion. For the reason I already mentioned about how animals don't have rights either. But also, I mean, there's such a thing as fetal analgesia. You can actually, you can numb the pain that the fetus feels. And so, I mean, at most what any discovery of fetal pain would give us would be maybe you should give some painkiller to the fetus before the abortion happens. Well, but there's also isn't there a tradition in philosophy, suddenly like Paul Singer and others, where all of morality is kind of, and this is why Paul Singer is a huge animal rights person, because he standard from morality is the absence of pain. And once he establishes a standard, give him credit at least, that he's willing to go all the way to animals because he says as soon as there's pain. And I wonder what his position on abortion is. Well, that's interesting. So Peter Singer is, he's actually in favor of abortion. So how does he, in fact, he's even in favor of infanticide. And it's in cases where he thinks it would use too many resources and deprive people of those resources. And measures the relative pain in a utilitarian sense of Yes. And, but more important for his position as I understand it, and I think this is true of most utilitarians is that they they even most utilitarians don't think that every kind of pleasure and pain matters. And if there's not a sufficient degree of self consciousness that an organism has of its own pleasure or pain, then they don't think that it, it has any intrinsic value, which of course I think raises all kinds of interesting questions about the merits of utilitarianism because it's not the pleasure or pain by themselves that have value significance. It starts, you start to see that they have to build more facts about consciousness and reason in to understand the value and that I think pushes you out of utilitarianism. There are a few, I think utilitarians who are against late term abortion for that reason but not too many. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about this controversy, and it connects then also to the DNA question is that it, and one of the reasons I'm interested in this whole controversy is because I think the whole abortion question is a really excellent example for understanding that is distinctive about the objectivist view of rights, because it's it's really on this kind of topic where you see a really clear cut distinction between what objectivists think rights are for, and what other people think so your typical religious conservative is somebody who thinks that rights are these intrinsic attributes that are sort of magically assigned by God. And that's the reason they think we should respect people's rights. And so if that's what you think they are then there's there's nothing improbable at all about saying well maybe maybe the fetus has rights maybe the infant has rights or maybe the embryo has rights heck maybe the sperm cell has rights. And it again comes down to you know which revelation are you consulting to find out when you think God assigned these magical attributes. But for objectivism rights are not magical attributes that it rejects the idea that there are these God given natural rights rights are not any kind of attribute at all they are the concept of rights is a moral principle that we use to understand what's necessary for coexistence of rational beings in a society. And the whole context that the concept presupposes both a philosophical cons context, and, and a social context, and we need rights in objectivism's view for very specific reasons we, we, we. I liked, I like your reference on Cargate's talk from a couple of summers ago we in Pittsburgh on productiveness interestingly being there's a little clip from that talk which is up on YouTube where objectivism is about love for productive ability. And he uses this point to illustrate for example what's weird about the libertarian view of rights that libertarian say you've got a right to do anything that doesn't hurt anybody else and your rights begin where my fist ends and he says this is the image of people running around with their fists and what's so special about that and exactly it's a rights are not about protecting people and their fists they're they're about protecting the ability of rational productive adults in a society who need the freedom of the mind to create the the great benefits of civilization. And so that doesn't mean that only adult productive people have rights but they're the paradigm case of who has rights, and then any other beings who get rights get it kind of by extension by courtesy from that fact what is necessary what kind of rights do we need to assign do we need to understand people as having, you know, for this ultimate kind of person to be protected, given that people grow up over the course of many years and so yes children have rights to but especially when you when you when something like an embryo or a fetus comes into conflict with the rights of that grown up adult woman. You know who's she's the one who's the paradigm case here of the bearer of rights. And so rights are all about resolving conflict with people they can't be the kinds of things that that that bring you into conflict. And so that's why there's just no basis for saying that an infant sorry, an embryo or a fetus can have rights, especially when it comes into conflict with with the woman her rights come first. And this is I think part of the reason why this was a really important issue for Iran and this is something she got, you know, very angry about you know she she decided her whole, you know, decisions about who to vote for based on who was assaulting abortion rights and I think it was because she could see that somebody who alleges that they believe in freedom and individual rights, who wants to sacrifice actual adult rational beings to protoplasm is not somebody who believes in rights and they have a completely different worldview from her and there's there's there's nothing in common. And she was fighting this idea of natural rights she was fighting this idea of a mystical source of rights and it's no accident that the people who believe in this mystical source of rights are the same people were anti abortion. And they're the conservatives and they're on the right and they're, you know, they don't understand rights nets. It's one of the things among combined with their altruism and the two are connected, which makes them such enemies of freedom and such enemies of liberty, ultimately, and they can't they can't stand up to the left, because ultimately they agree with the left.