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.