Leonard Peikoff's "Pre-Human" Defense of Abortion

Leonard Peikoff, who was one of Ayn Rand's closest associates, is the founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, a former professor of philosophy, and undoubtedly the foremost proponent of Rand's philosophy.

My attention was drawn to a statement in support of abortion that professor Peikoff makes in an article entitled "Abortion Rights are Pro-Life", which can be found at his personal Web site.

Peikoff states, very courageously, that abortion would be murder if a fetus were a person, but then he goes on to assert that an embryo is clearly pre-human. (No distinction appears to be made between 'person' and 'human being', or between 'embryo' and 'fetus'.)

This defense of abortion is fallacious, because pre-humans simply do not exist. The term 'pre-human' has only been used by anthropologists to refer to presumed prehistoric ancestors of Homo Sapiens.

A pre-human fetus would be a creature that is not human but which could become human. But such a creature has escaped the vigilant notice of the sciences of biology, genetics, embryology, and obstetrics. In fact, given current knowledge about the human genome, such a creature would seem to be impossible. Every species has a characteristic arrangement of genes called its genome, e.g., the mouse genome, that is present in the cells of all its members but not present in any other species. Human embryos and fetuses carry the human genome in their cells, just like human adults.

Life is not discontinuous, as the term pre-human would suggest; it is continuous. In the process called mitosis, a living cell splits into two living cells, as when single-celled organisms reproduce or when multi-celled organisms, such as humans, grow.

In the process called meiosis, a living cell splits into two living gametes (i.e., sperms and ova), each of which is capable of recombining with a different living gamete to create a new living cell called a zygote, which is the first cell in a new embryo.

In human reproduction, a new zygote receives the human genome from its two parents when the genes in their gametes are recombined in the zygote. But the genes are recombined in such a way that the new zygote is genetically different from its parents, i.e., it is a new individual.

The zygote begins to grow as it divides into two cells, and those and subsequent cells continue to divide through mitosis. The new pairs of cells retain the zygote's genome, which contains all the instructions needed to grow into an adult human being by means of continued cell division over the course of years.

In other words, a human being begins as a single cell called a zygote and grows continuously by cell division through the phases that we call an embryo, fetus, newborn, baby, child, youth, and full-grown adult.

Eugene Paul