Josh in Springfield, Illinois. Josh, thank
you for calling Catholic Answers Live.
Tell Trent horn why you are pro-choice. Hi there. I
am not starkly pro-choice, but I
basically view it as a right to cease
supporting something that depends on you
for life. So I draw a distinction between
killing a child--which is, you know,
capable of eating food and
beating its own heart and things like
that--
as compared to something that's living
inside of you and depending on you for
food and nutrients and all that. Okay,
Josh. So you're saying that when a child
is really really helpless, the parent has
the right to not help them and kill them;
but then after the child is born, when
they're just helpless, if the parent were
to not help the child and let them die,
that would be wrong? No, no, no. I didn't--
you're not allowed to...so yeah, when
the child is born, you're not allowed to
to let the child die, but you are allowed
to abandon your child, right? Wait,
you can't just abandon them in the woods,
right? This is true. You're not allowed to
abandon them in the woods. You can't kill
them. Or, you might say, you have to place
them in--let's say they say, "Well,
you know, we can't take your child right
now, Mrs. So-and-so, for another 48 hours,"
and Mrs. So-and-so says, "I can't handle
this child another minute," and puts them
outside, and it happens to be January in
North Dakota...yeah, so I guess that just
seems odd to me that, okay, so you're
saying that when it comes to a born
child who is helpless, for sure, you have
to help them and they're a
helpless little creature and so they
they have a right to your assistance; but
when they're unborn, the only difference is
they're just a lot more helpless, and
because they're more helpless they don't
have the right to that same assistance?
How does that follow? So I actually had a
lot of...I tend to lean left on most
social issues, but this one
is not, I always frequently go back and
forth on this. So one thing that I heard,
have you ever heard of the the argument
of the...what is it, I think he's a
violinist?
The violinist guy. Right, there's a
there's a violinist who knows where a
group of other terrorist violinists have
planted an atom bomb in New York City--
No, that was the ticking time bomb, no, I'm
just messing with you Josh.
I'm gonna have to look this one up, 
this sounds interesting. No I've heard
this one, this comes from Judith Jarvis
Thompson, her 1971 essay "A Defense of
Abortion." The idea is, you wake up one
night and it turns out you've been
kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers
and hooked up to an unconscious
violinist, because you're the only one
whose kidneys can filter the violinists
blood. Do you have to stay plugged into
him? And Thompson says, "Well, it would be
nice if you did, but you don't have to, so
you have the right to unplug from the
violinist and he dies. But that's
not your problem." To me that seems to not
be a correct analogy for abortion on
several reasons. Number one: in that case,
that would only work for abortion in the
case of rape. Yes. Because of the consent factor.
I actually heard a slightly different
version of it, which is this: you are
driving a car, which you--when you're
driving a car you are consenting to all
of the terrible things that might happen
to you by driving that car--and through
no fault of either of the persons, you
are involved in an accident with this
violinist. To save his life, you're
hooked up to him. Right, okay. Now for that, I
think it would still be a little bit
different, for several reasons. Number one:
driving a car is not naturally ordered
towards the condition of having someone
connected to you in order to live.
Now pregnancy, the case of having someone
connected to you there, is the natural end,
the ordinary natural end, of sexual
function. I know that because we all went
through that at one point. So to me, while
it would be extraordinary to ask someone
to stay plugged into an accident victim
through a car accident, it's not
extraordinary to ask someone to do that
through pregnancy. Also because,
in these cases, it's
extraordinary to ask that because my
kidneys aren't made for another person;
but the uterus itself, it is designed to
sustain the life of another
child. The second point, Josh, should be
this: there's a difference between
"killing" versus "letting die." If for
some reason I'm hooked into someone, and
they're dying and my body's saving them
and I disconnect, the reason they die
isn't because of me. They're already
dying from some other kind of injury or
disease. But in abortion, you don't have a
sick person who needs you to live; you
have a healthy person. And when you
rip them out of the womb, that's just
straight-up killing them. So I think
there's crucial differences in the analogy.
I don't see it quite that way, and again,
you don't have to convince me that
abortion is not a nice thing, obviously.
But I guess I would draw a distinction
between what's good and and
what's allowed, right? I might view--
because I do view an abortion, at least
in probably that late term,
I don't know how I can draw that
distinction with any objectivity-- Well Josh,
let me tell you a counter-analogy I
use in my book "Persuasive Pro-Life" that
I owe to my friend Tony George. I call it
"Reverse Violinist." Suppose the Society of
Music Lovers goes out on the town one
night, and they like to drink and carouse
and have fun, and they know there's a
chance they'll get a bit too tipsy and
they'll plug one of their members into
an innocent person who will need them to
live. And this person wakes up and finds
out they're connected to you. They knew
this could happen, and you were dependent
on this violinist to live. And the violinist
says, "This Josh guy? Well, he's totally
dependent on my body, I don't have to
sustain him." So he unplugs himself from
you and then you die. Okay. I understand the
distinction here, because it's it's in
that case...yeah-- Here's why the violinist
analogy, Josh, Thomson's analogy, it works
because you are only looking at the
situation from-- The violinist also consented to the
possibility of the situation, where
the fetus has no control over that.
The violinist analogy focuses solely on the
woman's perspective, not the child's;
which you can turn around by
saying, "What if you were the violinist,
and through this other
person doing things have put you into
this helpless condition?" So yeah, if you
want to check out my book "Persuasive
Pro-Life," I have a whole chapter devoted
to this kind of bodily rights arguments.
You can also search for guy named
Francis Beckwith, I think it's called
"Unstringing the Violinist," but he's written
a lengthy rejoinder to that. So hopefully
that'll be helpful to you. All right,
interesting.
I appreciate the the show. I'm an
atheist, and normally when I hear, you
know, religious channels talking about
this stuff, it's not very interesting to
me, there's a lot of Bible
references and stuff that just, because I
don't follow that, it isn't relevant to
my argument. I can't argue with that. But
you're saying we do it differently?
Yeah, I appreciate the way that you
conduct these, so thanks.
Oh, I like that as a blurb for us. Before you go, Josh,
real quick, I don't know if, Trent, you
or Nick or Darin or someone, I know you
do at Catholic Answers Live, don't you do
"Why are you an atheist" shows as well? Oh
that's right, I think--so Josh, keep
listening to the show--
Or go online maybe-- Yeah, go online
to Catholic.com, look at the show calendar,
Catholic.com/audio/cal, Josh, and
you can find, I'll be doing another show
I think next week or the week after
called "Why are you an atheist?" August
26th. Yeah, see, we can keep the
conversation going that way. Those are
always a lot of fun too.
