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.