Ayn Rand with her mother.

The first day I met Barbara Branden we hit it off immediately. A short interview turned into a long conversation and it continued from September 8, 1985 until December 11, 2013, just over 28 years.

That day something happened which I have rarely spoken of. It had to do with a question I asked her about Ayn Rand.

“Did Ayn have an abortion?”

The question literally startled Barbara, I suspect she had been asked thousands of question about Ayn but never this one. I’m a collector of facts and that was one fact I wanted to know.

She then said, “Can we talk off the record?” Of course, I said yes and turned off the tape recorder.

She seemed astounded I asked the question, perhaps wondering if I knew more than I was letting on, but I didn’t. I would have accepted any answer she gave. She asked me to tell her what caused me to ask that specific question. More precisely she was trying to determine why I even considered this a possibility — given the years in which Rand lived.

This required a moment of introspection. It is one thing to think something and another to know why you think it — an exercise too many people avoid.

My answer dealt with how Ayn responded to questions about abortion. I said her responses always sounded to me as very personal — it wasn’t just a philosophical or political issues to her, something to ruminate about at one’s leisure. She held to her pro-choice view with a passion which sounded more personal than philosophical to me.

Barbara’s question to me was one I interpreted as a “yes.” I also thought implicit in it was she didn’t wish to speak of it directly and wouldn’t and I was happy to respect that. So, over the years, I rarely mentioned it to others and in the next 28 years of our friendship never brought it up again. I didn’t need to, I had my answer, even if Barbara never said anything.

The first confirmation of my suspicion came when I read the proofs of the Anne Heller’s book, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. There is a small section where Heller repeats a common myth about Ayn: “Children don’t figure much in Rand’s fictional universe, with the exception of a few flashbacks and the character of eight-year-old Acia Dunaeva in We the Living…” There are several problems with this assertion, which I address in Ayn Rand and Children.

Rand’s view was parenting a child was a very serious and important matter and not one to take lightly. She felt too many women and men did just that. She told Playboy, child rearing “is a very responsible task and a very important one, but only when treated as a science, not as a mere emotional indulgence.”

It is something so important those unable to give the child what they need should be able to terminate a pregnancy before an actual person exists. In her essay Requiem for Man, she spoke of children this way:

I will ask you to project the look on a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world — inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as “sacred” — meaning: the best, the highest possible to man — this look is the sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.

Rand felt parenting was a serious business and one that should consume a great deal of time from the parents. So, when she found herself pregnant in her 20s her husband, Frank O’Connor, borrowed funds from a relative, A. M. Papurt, to pay for the procedure.

Ayn never abandoned her esteem and admiration of children nor the view that parenting them should be taken seriously. But, she equally felt it was necessary to support reproductive freedom. Heller wrote of the numerous speeches Rand gave and said “her specific positions on issues of the day were often classically liberal, as well as farsighted and brave. As an extension of her commitment to individual rights, she consistently championed minority civil rights and equality of opportunity… And she spoke plainly and forcefully against state governments bans on abortion. ‘Abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved,’ she said.” (p 320–321)

In 1968 Rand wrote an insightful essay rebuking Vatican teaching on human sexuality and abortion. She noted the Vatican had long held sex was sinful and evil and could only be redeemed if held to a higher purpose — the possibility of conception. Otherwise, those who could should be celibate, even if married.

Recording of Rand’s lecture “On Living Death.”

Rand compared Papal damnations of free markets and contraceptives as entirely consistent, albeit evil.

“Both sides claim to be puzzled and disappointed by what they regard as a contradiction in the two recent encyclicals of Pope Paul VI. The so-called conservatives (speaking in religious, not political, terms) were dismayed by the encyclical Populorum Progressio(On the Development of Peoples) — which advocated global statism — while the so-called liberals hailed it as a progressive document. Now the conservatives are hailing the encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) — which forbids the use of contraceptives — while the liberals are dismayed by it. Both sides seem to find the two documents inconsistent. But the inconsistency is theirs, not the pontiff’s. The two encyclicals are strictly, flawlessly consistent in respect to their basic philosophy and ultimate goal: both come from the same view of man’s nature and are aimed at establishing the same conditions for his life on earth. The first of these two encyclicals forbade ambition, the second forbids enjoyment; the first enslaved man to the physical needs of others, the second enslaves him to the physical capacities of his own body; the first damned achievement, the second damns love.

Rand believed, and I think accurately, that Vatican teaching was meant to discourage all sex by instilling fear. Every sexual act must have risks associated and the higher the risks the better. No contraception was allowed, fear of pregnancy was to prevent sexual relationships. Even today, where HIV in the Third World can lead to death, the Vatican insists men must never use a condom to prevent spreading a deadly disease. Sexual activity — and most AIDS cases are among heterosexuals — must not just include the danger of an unwanted preganancy, but carry a potential death sentence as well. That was going to teach sinners to avoid the evils of human sexuality.

Even Protestant fundamentalists have adopted Catholic views about sex, contraception and abortion. At one point evangelicals did not oppose abortion rights, but as fundamentalism moved from the authoritarian left to the authoritarian right, it adopted these views—including the distinctly non-Protestant view that the sole purpose of marriage is reproduction, a position they incorporated solely to justify opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Rand rips into the Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae:

Admitting that the young are “vulnerable on this point,” and declaring that they need “encouragement to be faithful to the moral law,” the encyclical forbids them the use of contraceptives, thus making it cold-bloodedly clear that its idea of moral encouragement consists of terror — the sheer, stark terror of young people caught between their first experience of love and the primitive brutality of the moral code of their elders. Surely the authors of the encyclical cannot be ignorant of the fact that it is not the young chasers or the teenage sluts who would be the victims of a ban on contraceptives, but the innocent young who risk their lives in the quest for love — the girl who finds herself pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, or the boy who is trapped into a premature, unwanted marriage. To ignore the agony of such victims — the countless suicides, the deaths at the hands of quack abortionists, the drained lives wasted under the double burden of a spurious “dishonor” and of an unwanted child — to ignore all that in the name of “the moral law” is to make a mockery of morality.

She also called out the anti-choice advocates for what they are — hypocrites. Today we witness the Republican Party in the grips of radical theocrats, mentally unstable fundamentalists and narcissistic authoritarians. They shriek and howl about the rights of zygotes and embryos while simultaneously doing their level best to destroy equality of rights for actual fully mature humans: gays, trans individuals, refugees, immigrants, African-Americans, women, and Muslims. In 1968 she damned this trend even before it was as explicit as it is today.

Observe that the men who uphold such a concept as “the rights of an embryo,” are the men who deny, negate, and violate the rights of a living human being.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not yet living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body? The Catholic church is responsible for this country’s disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished.