Why am I pro-choice? Because when a lady
is pregnant,
it's not a living thing until
it's actually out of the
mother's womb.
Okay. Well John, let me ask you this
question: if
the fetus is not a
living thing
within a pregnant woman, why do you need
abortion at all?
It's not alive, so you don't need to kill it.
Well, under your explanation of "alive,"
yes, it needs nutrients to grow,
correct. I mean, would you say a virus is
living? No, it's not.
It grows. Well viruses—
for biologists, "virus" is sort of a gray
category of growth, because a virus
doesn't grow by cellular reproduction. It
hijacks cells and creates
genetic copies of itself that then
go out from it.
But if you look at things, if the
definition of life—if something is
living, if it
takes in food and nutrients and
grows by cellular reproduction,
under that definition of life, an unborn
embryo
or fetus is clearly biologically alive
in that case. Would you agree with that
definition?
Sure. Okay. So then—but I agree with
you that not everything that's alive has
human rights. I mean,
slugs are alive, bacteria are alive, we
kill those things all the time.
But I do think there's certain kinds of
living things we don't kill. We gotta
figure out what what those things are.
And for me, they would be human living
things. So if you
are growing by cellular reproduction, you
are a whole organism that is developing,
you're not a mere
body part, you're a whole
organism that is growing and developing,
and you have human parents and human DNA.
well then I would say you're
a biological human being under
that definition.
Would you offer a contrary definition, or
what would you think?
Well I didn't hear half of that—
Here,
let me just re-summarize it, John: a human
being is an individual member of the
human species.
If you're an organism that is developing,
and you have human parents and human DNA,
you would be human being.
Correct, yes. Okay. Would that definition
apply to a human embryo or a human fetus?
It's an embryo, it's not a human being.
Well why don't we pick this up
across the break, then? Because that's
an interesting objection you raised.
Would you be willing to do that?
Sure. Okay, great. Thanks, John. Before we
went to the break, John, you said
that there's a difference between
being an embryo
and being a human being. Is that correct?
Yeah, I mean, we could go on on
this all day, but
the whole idea is that, you know, an
embryo, if you take an embryo out,
it's gone within a couple of seconds.
Well hold on, John, I want to go
back to this, because this is a very
crucial point:
what is an embryo?
A human embryo? What is it?
An embryo is, basically, it's part of
the
developmental stage of any type of
organism
before it's actually living in an actual,
you know, out in the environment,
basically. I don't know too much about
the development of any type of
biological organism,
but I understand the embryo is part of
the early stages of development,
correct. So it's not...my understanding of
a living organism
is that it needs to be breathing air, it
can consume
food, it basically can live on its own,
you know, without, you know,
having to be inside of somebody's womb.
For something to be a living
being or a living thing?
A living thing. But, you know, I—the
whole reason I called in, to be honest
was—
I don't want to get sidetracked—is that
I've never heard the idea of being
lumped into suicide as being a
pro-choice advocate, and
I don't agree with suicide, but I
don't agree with the lumping in of
abortion and suicide. It just brings
in a
bad connotation to the pro-choicer.
Well that's interesting, John, because i
think a lot of people who support
the right to have an abortion also
support things like
the right to engage in assisted suicide,
for example. They'd say just as a
woman has autonomy over her
her body—in fact, for many people
who would balk at abortion because
it involves another living thing,
they would say "Well suicide only
involves yourself."
So the way that pro-life is
connected, how people
define it—like, I define it as
respecting the right to life of all
human beings, born and unborn.
And I do believe laws that allow for
legalizing suicide do not protect the
lives of
born people. But for me, though, I really
do want to talk about this
issue involving whether an
embryo is a human being or not, because
that really is, like, I mean that's really
the crux of the issue right there.
And your concern, what you said is—
and I would agree with you on two out of
the three points—
for something to be living, it
has to be growing, it has to be taking in
food;
but it doesn't have to be outside of
another being's body.
I mean a parasite, for example, a tapeworm,
or bacteria,
they're living beings inside
of my body.
But I can kill them, not in virtue of the
fact that they live in my body, but
because they're not human. They're not
human beings.
But I would say for a human embryo, they
are alive, they're growing, it's the
earliest stage of the life of that human
being;
I just don't see the moral relevance of
the fact that this human being lives
in his mother's body instead of outside
near his mother's body. I just don't see
the location of the child
changing his value. What do you think of
that?
Well that's the idea, is the whole
conversation is when has it become an
actual living thing? I get it, you know,
within eight and a half months of
pregnancy, that's straight-up
murder, you know, but
the whole idea is these laws are in
place to protect the women that are
vulnerable, that are 16, that did
not have a choice, that
literally were raped, and their whole life is
ruined because
they have this unborn child in front of
them, and
the father is completely out of the
picture,
you know, and what are they supposed
to do? Put it into
the system and put them back into, you
know, foster care? I mean, is that
a way that you want
these children to live?
Okay sure, John, let me let me jump in
here, because we're losing your
your audio a little bit. Hopefully
we could bring you back one more
time and see if it improves.
But what i would say is that your
reasoning there is interesting,
that if it's just about whether the
unborn is not a living being,
it doesn't matter the motivation of the
woman who chooses abortion.
If she just wants to go to Europe for
three months, and she doesn't want to be
pregnant anymore,
if it's not a living being, who cares? So
we don't actually need to appeal
to these very difficult cases if the
unborn is not a human being.
But if the unborn is a human being with
the same right to life that you and I
have,
then we can't appeal to these difficult
cases any more than we could appeal to:
what about the woman, the single mom with
a two-year-old, who loses her job,
no one's going to hire her, she doesn't
know how to take care of her child, is
her child going to end up in foster care,
and you know she's in a difficult
position trying to raise a toddler,
and then she decides "Well, why not just
euthanize this toddler?"
Just as we wouldn't kill one- or
two-year-olds who live
in extremely impoverished circumstances,
we shouldn't kill the unborn
just because they live in that same
circumstance—if they're equally human
beings. So I think
the source of our disagreement is going
to be over
the term "what is a living
being?"
I would say that where you can live
does not change how you ought to be
treated.
You know, people are viable—
you know, you and I could not live in the
womb. It's an
aqueous environment. So like, maybe from
the fetus' perspective, we're not people.
A child can survive in the womb where we
can't. We survive here where he can't.
But people live in different places,
it doesn't change their value.
So I'll let you have your last thought
on that.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, to be
honest—I'll take the
answer off-air when I'm off—but
I want to ask the question to—I always
ask the question to
people that are pro-life:
what
should the woman do when she's
16 and gets raped? You know, what
is your thought about this? Should
she raise the child as her own, even
though she didn't want it and
almost died by being raped? Or she should
give it up to foster care?
Thank you for taking my call,
I have these debates all the
time with everybody, and
I need to hone up on my skills.
Feel free to call back any time, and
then feel free to check out my
book "Persuasive Pro-Life" as well
if you'd like to see more extended
treatment of the subject.
So the question would be:
what would be my advice for
a teenager who is a victim of sexual
assault who's become pregnant?
And I've never had to actually give this
advice in person to someone.
In fact, my advice would probably be for
them to talk to someone who actually is
capable
of helping them work through that
situation who's been there before, such
as
a volunteer at a pregnancy resource
center, even one who—there
there are those I know who have worked
at these centers, who had become
pregnant
under less than ideal or criminal
circumstances
that could offer support and care for
this young woman.
But if I was to offer something, I would
say the bottom line is this for
everyone who's involved:
you don't respond to evil with more evil.
Or I can put it this way: it's better to
suffer evil
than to inflict evil on other people. For
example, let's say,
you know, her rapist is caught. Maybe
he goes to prison, maybe not.
Maybe he gets off. You know, he gets off,
or he only goes to jail for a minimal
amount of time,
and she's terrified, and maybe her
parents are upset and angry and
they conspire together: "Let's kill this
guy. Let's murder him ourselves."
Many people would find that
understandable, but at the same time, you
would see that
even that rapist has a
right to life, and can't be the victim of
vigilante justice.
And yet if we agree, even in that
extraordinary circumstance, that this
vile person should not be the
subject of vigilante violence,
then the child who is conceived in rape,
the innocent child,
should not be the victim of state-
sanctioned violence
against them in the womb. Rather, we
should promote non-violent solutions to
the mother and child. And if we're
concerned about the mother
being traumatized by the crime that she
has been afflicted with,
I'd be also be concerned about making
her an accomplice to the death of her
own child.
How much more—it's one thing to have
trauma from
being the victim of violence; it's the
other thing, it's something quite else to
have
trauma from being an afflicter of
violence against other people.
It's better to be a victim of violence
than a perpetrator of it, because it is
better to suffer evil
than to do evil. I think that even
non-religious people can understand
the virtue and wisdom like that. But i'm
grateful you called, and
look forward to speaking to a lot of other
people on this subject.
