Audio only:
In this episode Trent shares his “lost abortion debate” recorded about ten years ago.
Transcription:
Trent:
Hey guys, while I’m taking some time off, I thought you might enjoy this abortion debate I took part in about 10 years ago. I don’t even think the Atheist channel it was hosted on exists anymore, but I found this in my archives and I hope you find the discussion edifying. So check it out and God bless
Debate Host:
Johnny. You are welcome to go ahead and go first and I will start that timer. If you are ready to go,
Johnny:
Let’s make it happen. Thanks Chris. Thank you so much for organizing this debate. Chris, thank you for doing the welcoming and the intro and all that kind of stuff and putting this together. Thank you Trent for joining in and allowing me to share kind of a digital stage with you. I appreciate that. It’s a very exciting opportunity. This is a very interesting topic. It’s a very challenging topic I think It’s not one of those things that we take very lightly. There’s a lot of research and a lot of information out there and I definitely recommend everybody look into all those kinds of things before making any sort of decision on this, but from my understanding, pro-lifers are pro-life because they believe that every human being, no matter their race, age, sex, religion, sexual orientation or their functional abilities has equal basic rights principle. Amongst these is the right to live right to life acts as some sort of a Trump card in ace of spades against all other rights.
While I reluctantly accept the concept of right to life and some of the complications that it carries with it, I personally have difficulty drawing the line on what qualifies as human, but more importantly, what qualifies a human for the right to life. Pro-lifers typically operate under the blanket understanding that human DNA is the only qualification, so it would necessarily follow that a fetus would be protected under this criteria. Hence the moment of consumption argument. I’m personally not convinced that human DNA is the only qualification for right to life. Human DNA is a blueprint, genetic code information, a blueprint is not a building. Even a foundation or structural beams is not a building. At some point, a blueprint becomes a building, but not until that point is a building, a building. Tonight I am pro right to life and some may find my approach uniquely vague.
Some of you might be outraged and some intrigued, quote miners, don’t carry it away. I’m simply stating that right to life is a human right that I significantly value and do not take objections, exceptions and special circumstances to this right lightly. In fact, most of us are pro right to life whether we use this terminology or not. The point of contention is when under the blueprint analogy, certainly a blueprint doesn’t qualify as a building despite the similarities. Even a model building, while really cool to look at, it’s not a building in the classical sense. At some point we have to make that determination, science and even our own understanding of what it means to be human seems to lean more towards the building and while emotional arguments are convincing, we have to admit that there’s more to being human than just DNA to quote horn from a previous debate, and I hope you’ll be okay with me doing this.
We cannot justify killing one person to suit the lifestyle interest or the socio economic status of another born or unborn, and I would agree that’s why the key to defining personhood is extremely important. More often we hear lengthy discussions about such topics as viability, the ability for a fetus to survive outside of the womb and analgesia, the inability to feel pain and even more complex social discussions. I have yet to hear a convincing argument that fetus is qualify for right to life. It’s a point of contention that is clearly important and the very reason a blueprint’s rights do not trump building rights. I find it hard to equivocate a fetus with a woman and equalize the rights for a number of reasons. Perhaps we can explore more of those in the q and a arbitrarily deciding right to life as some sort of intrinsic value given to DNA code subjects.
Mr. Thorn and other pro DN AERs to an extensive list of very difficult questions. What responsibilities and legal consequences should pregnant women face jail? Should child protective services be able to step in If a pregnant woman does something that could potentially damage the fetus, like eat tuna or drink coffee or exercise heavily, what if a pregnant woman had a miscarriage and it could be linked to some behavior going skiing or flying or not eating properly? We already prosecute pregnant women when they use drugs during their pregnancies. If a pregnant woman otherwise does harm to her fetus, should she be prosecuted for child abuse on neglect? If she miscarries, can she be tried for homicide? If a person has attempted to murder their child, shouldn’t said child be removed from her custody immediately. Now what does that even look like? These among countless other concerns arise from simply taking the stance that a fetus has the right to life.
But I digress. There seems to be a clear distinction between what I am calling pro DERs and anti-abortion. Pro DERs claim that they’re, that their chief concern over abortion stems from the value of each and every human life. From the moment of conception fertilized egg people for a lack of a better term, there’s an eerie fixation on active abortion, but abortion rates pale in comparison to the rate of fertilized eggs that don’t implant and die by being naturally flushed out of the body. Yet there’s not a single pro-life organization at least that I can find dedicated to finding a solution to this widespread deadly epidemic. The death rate of unplanted fertilized egg persons almost certainly far exceeds the abortion rate in the death rate of AIDS combined. Why the silence? Why no mass protests or funding drives or pushes for research? Where is the concern for the fertilized egg people?
What about in vitro fertilization? Clearly, it would be wrong to destroy any fertilized eggs in vitro fertilization clinic since those eggs are people, but what are the fact that without being implanted in women’s bodies, those eggs would never develop? Is it morally acceptable to leave those egg people in a freezer for their whole lives or should we compel them, compel people to carry them to term? If a frozen embryo stays frozen for 18 years, should it be allowed to vote? It’s clear that the mainstream focus is abortion, hence this evening’s topic. So let’s get back on track if we start granting rights to this DNA code and for the life of me, I can’t understand why or how we even begin to equivocate this with a more objective definition of personhood, but wouldn’t this DNA code be subject to some of the same consequences as born people?
Most countries agree that it’s lawful for a citizen to repel violence with homicide to protect his orah or another’s life and limb or to prevent sexual assault. Some countries agree that it’s lawful for a sitting to resort to homicide to protect value. Property usually defined as one’s home A castle jock doctrine is a legal doctrine that designates a person’s abode in some states, any legal occupied place of vehicle or work as a place in which that person has certain protections and immunities permitting him or her to use deadly force to defend themselves against an intruder free from legal responsibility and prosecution for the consequences of the force used. Typical deadly force is considered justified when the individual reasonably fears imminent peril of death or bodily harm. Fetuses cannot be communicated with, communicated with or asked to leave. There’s no recourse or retreat, which is sometimes a requirement for the use of lethal force.
Then there’s stand your ground. In some states, one can use deadly force in any location. One is legally allowed to be without first attempting retreat. Some laws remove that requirement that the threat must occur on one owns dwelling. But what about the innocent? If you are in the process of lawfully defending yourself or your property from attack and by necessity you killed an innocent bystander, the common law would treat the bystander’s death as an excusable accidental killing so long as the reasonable grounds existed for your belief that lethal force was necessary for lethal self-defense. Essentially, it is very simple. In order to determine justifi ability for use of lethal force, the courts want to know you did everything that you could since had to or that you had to do this and had to as a subjective argument. It’s legally defined usually in the following way, and this is called an A OJP analysis.
The first part is ability. Your attacker must have the ability, the physical, practical ability to cause you harm. In this situation, the fetus does cause harm opportunity. The opportunity can be viewed kind of as a subset of ability, but this is an equally important criterion. The biggest consideration here is range or proximity and being inside of you is about as close as it gets jeopardy, and the most subjective factor of the A OJP is the jeopardy requirement, sometimes called imminent jeopardy. This criterion requires that in your specific situation, a reasonable and prudent person would have believed himself to be in immediate danger or in bodily harm, and I think we can all agree that there there’s a bodily harm that’s being taken place here and we can go back and forth on that. The last part is preclusion and the idea is that whatever the situation you were expected to use force only as a last resort.
That is only when the circumstances preclude all other options, you can say he tried to hit me, but then the police in courts will ask, why didn’t you blank? You must have no other options to fill in that blank. There must have been no other courses of actions that you could have taken to maintain your safety except the use of force. Otherwise you’re just fighting because you want to and that’s a crime. In conclusion, while right to life stands at the pinnacle of human rights, it does not act as a Trump card for human rights and the concepts that govern this, right, they’re not objectively unique to just guilty parties either. Simply put, no one should have to sacrifice any amount of physical harm or pain for the life of another. You wouldn’t be legally required to run into a burning building to save an innocent life.
Even if you set the fire, you wouldn’t be legally required to donate blood to save an innocent life, even if you stabbed them. You wouldn’t be legally required to donate a kidney to save another life even if that life was your kin. While these analogies are entertaining, they do strictly apply to personhood, which we haven’t even begun to get into. I want you to be wary of emotional terminology that you’ll likely hear tonight. I’m not going to put words in Mr. Horn’s mouth, but let’s all keep a keen ear to these things. Abortion is not pretty. You’ll probably hear Mr. Horn go into great length to some of the gruesome details, but removing an appendix is gruesome. Mr. Horn will probably say something along the lines of we do not tolerate the legal killing of innocent beings, and if you engage in sex, you are responsible for the child that nobody has a right to use their body to hurt another innocent body inside or outside of them, and I would agree to an extent this further necessitates the understanding of personhood. Even if Mr. Horn believes that personhood starts at conception and it’s generally wrong to kill an innocent human being, there are circumstances that exist in which an individual’s immediate physical pain would decriminalize the action. I am under the understanding that Mr. Horn makes a distinction between bodily harm and life-threatening circumstances. He rejects bodily harm as a ground for any lethal force while accepting the life-threatening aspect. If this is the case, it seems counterintuitive to his acceptance of personhood at conception, and I’ll be interested in hearing how he reconciles the two. Thank you.
Debate Host:
Well, thank you, Johnny. You still had 48 seconds left, so thank you very much, Johnny for your time. That was Johnny’s opening remark. We will now transition into Jeff’s. I just got to reset my timer here or Trent, I’m sorry. All right, Trent, the floor is yours.
Trent:
Alright, well, let me start by saying that I agree with Johnny that abortion is a difficult and emotional issue for many people. In fact, a lot of you listening probably don’t like abortion and you might even think that it’s wrong. You don’t say you’re pro-abortion, you say you’re pro-choice, but here’s my question for you. What’s wrong with being pro-abortion? I mean, if the thing being aborted is not a human being but mere tissue, then abortion is just a harmless surgery. But if the unborn are human beings with the same basic rights you and I possess, then abortion’s a serious injustice because abortion directly kills unborn human beings without proper justification. Here’s my argument against abortion. I want to present to you all tonight. Premise one. It is prima fai wrong to directly kill innocent human beings and such killing should be illegal. Number two, unborn humans are innocent human beings.
Number three, abortion directly kills unborn humans. Therefore, it is prima wrong to abort unborn humans and such killing should be illegal. Now let’s examine the evidence for each premise of my argument. First, it’s generally wrong, prisi wrong to kill innocent human beings directly kill them. I’m going to say that’s obvious. If anyone thinks it’s okay to go around and just kill innocent human beings, let me know because I’ve always wanted a prison pen pal and just ass illegal to kill a 2-year-old because you don’t want to take care of him. It should be illegal to kill an unborn human being for that same reason if they’re equally human. Which leads me to premise two. The unborn are innocent human beings. How do we know this? First, the unborn are growing so they must be alive. If they weren’t alive, you wouldn’t have to abort them.
Second, the unborn are human because they have human DNA and are the offspring of human parents. Finally, unlike sperm egg or cancer cells or skin cells, human fetuses and human embryos are complete organisms who have the capacity to grow and develop into adults unless something or someone kills them before they reach that point. The very words embryo and fetus can only be defined as particular stages of development in the life of an organism. So from a strictly biological standpoint, the statement the unborn are human beings is an indisputable fact. The standard medical text, human embryology and ology states, although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed. Now, some people say that the unborn are biologically human, but they aren’t persons or they don’t have a right to life.
Well, whoever makes that claim it better be able to give a coherent definition of what a person is unless we know what a person is. We can’t say certain humans like the unborn are not persons, but these alternate definitions of personhood don’t work. For example, if a person is anything that can feel pain, then disabled humans who can’t feel pain would not be persons. More importantly, any animal that could feel pain would be a person. If you ate a slice of pepperoni pizza, you’d be an accomplice to murder because obviously pepperonis are made of animals that can feel pain. What about the ability to have rational thought? Well, fetuses can’t do that, but neither can newborn infants. So if that’s your criteria for personhood, then unless you’re willing to say newborn babies have the same right to live as a squirrel or basically no right to live, you can’t use rational thought as a standard for personhood.
The other common definition of a person is viability or being able to survive outside of the uterus, but once again, lots of animals like squirrels and snakes can survive outside of a uterus. So viability isn’t relevant to personhood. Besides imagine that martians kidnapped us and put us on the surface of Mars where we’re not viable. Would they have the right to do that because we’re not viable and we’re not persons? Certainly not. Likewise, the fact that the unborn can’t survive outside of the uterus doesn’t give us the right to remove them from the place where they can survive and kill them in that fashion. To summarize, our human rights don’t come from what we can do such as think or survive on our own. They come from what we are and equal human rights can only be grounded in the one thing that is equal about all of us, our biological human nature, not our fleeting functional abilities.
This is the most equal and inclusive definition of human value, and so reasonable people should adopt it. What about premise three of my argument? Abortion directly kills the unborn. Some people say abortion isn’t really killing because the fetus has no right to use a woman’s body without her consent, and abortion just removes the fetus who then dies because he or she can’t survive outside of the uterus. But that’s like saying putting your one-year-old outside during a blizzard doesn’t kill him or violate his right to life. It merely removes him from a place he has no right to be. After all, you own your home, you have a right to let people live there or not, and the blizzard case you don’t kill the child, you just put him somewhere where he can’t survive, but that’s clearly absurd. As pro-choice philosopher Marianne Warren writes quote, the appeal to the right to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property right is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion.
Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property. Even the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade said, there is no absolute right to do whatever you want with your body. Justice Blackman said, the court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. If you engage in an activity that is ordered towards creating helpless children, then you have an obligation to provide for the children you create. If you are a man, then you have an obligation to provide child support even if you don’t want to because you have a responsibility towards those children that exist because of something you did. If you are a woman, then you have a responsibility to care for this child who in almost every case you are responsible for creating. Women certainly have a right to control their bodies, but nobody has the right to use their body to hurt another innocent human body that they have a responsibility to care for.
I agree, parents don’t have an obligation to donate organs like their kidneys to their children, but that’s because those organs are for sustaining their own bodies and any other use is extraordinary and therefore voluntary. Let’s see here, but what is the uterus for if not sustaining the life of an unborn child? Don’t the children we create through sexual union have a right to basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. Pregnancy provides this and so unborn children that we create who are fully human have a right to that ordinary care. Finally, abortion is not just a passive removal of life support. It’s the act of killing of a healthy child via dismemberment. To demonstrate that I have visual evidence of what abortion does to unborn humans, these photos come from the center for bioethical reform and have been authenticated by medical professionals. Some of you may object that graphic images of abortion are merely appeals to emotion, but consider the words of pro-choice advocate Naomi Wolf.
She writes, how can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish, vile and repulsive images if the images are real to insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. So once again, this is Naomi Wolfe, a pro-choice feminist who says These images help us make an important moral decision. So what does abortion do to unborn humans? Well, this is evidence from the first trimester. This would be a six week old embryo, and remember about 89% of abortions take place in the first trimester.
This would be an eight week old fetus, probably vacuumed through a suction tube dismembered in the process we have here a nine week old fetus. The dies is the dime is for size comparison. This would be a 10 week old fetus. Once again, what I’m showing you are first trimester abortions and the majority of abortions take place the first trimester, and finally, this would be a late term abortion at 22 weeks. About 10,000 abortions at this stage occur annually every year, and so I think it’s clear that abortion is not passive removal of life support. It is an active and violent dismemberment of a human being who has the same rights that you and I possess. Let’s see here. Alright, so in conclusion, the reason that I am pro-life is because I believe that every human being, no matter their race, their age, their sex, their religion, their functional ability, their sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant factor, every human being deserves to be protected under the law.
What it means the right to life or being pro right to life. That means you believe all human beings, no matter who they are, have a right to live and have that right protected by law to protect them from being directly killed by other people without due process. Just as it is wrong to say women shouldn’t have rights because they’re biologically different than or socially dependent on men, it is equally wrong to say unborn human beings shouldn’t have basic rights because they are biologically different than or physically dependent upon born people. In order to make his case Tonight, Johnny asked to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the unborn are not human beings worthy of basic rights. So I want you to watch that in his rebuttal and especially if he’s going to prove that he has to show the unborn are not human beings or that they’re not persons, or that they don’t deserve basic rights to food, water, and shelter through the ordinary use of a woman’s body in pregnancy.
And before I yield my time, I want to point out to everyone that in Johnny’s opening statement, he confidently said, we can’t say the unborn are human or the unborn are not persons. Notice he never defined those terms. He never said what a person was or what a human is. He never gave a definition. He gave a flawed analogy and I’ll reveal why it’s flawed in my rebuttal, but the fact of the matter is I hope that he’ll bring it up in his next speech or something else to tell us what is a human being, what is a person and why the unborn don’t qualify under those definitions and I’ll yield the rest of my time.
Debate Host:
Well, cool. Thank you very much Trent. Johnny, you are back up. Just let me reset my timer. We are now going into the rebuttal of his argument. So Johnny, you’ll be given eight minutes to have a rebuttal time. Alright, go ahead sir.
Johnny:
Mr Horn’s argument hinges on providing the right to life at conception, and I think that we agree upon that this seems a little arbitrary of a delegation of rights based on DNA. I mentioned in my opening statements that science and even our own understanding of what it means to be human understanding that there’s more to being human personhood than just DNA. Mr. Horn failed to meet his burden of proof required for even introducing his argument, but I want to take a deeper dive from purely in objective standpoint into his argument and I’ll do my best not to not misrepresent your argument here, Mr. Horn. The first part is it’s generally wrong to kill innocent human beings prima fastly and it should be illegal. I think I agreed with this first point of contention, but I also provided in circumstances in which an individual’s immediate physical pain would decriminalize the action.
Number two, the unborn or are innocent human beings, sure definitionally, but what qualifies a human being for right to life is based on personhood. Again, not just some arbitrary intrinsic value that we assign to DNA. Number three is abortion kills the unborn. This is definitional as well. I think this is here just sort of a filler to understand his reasoning to make the argument no contention there. His conclusion, however, is somewhat correct in regards to, and I think right now why abortions are more prior to viability. There’s another problem here that often goes overlooked. We already entitled viable fetuses to use a woman’s body to sustain its own life once it becomes viable, should we begin researching other ways for humans to share bodily functions? It could save lives after all. If say my kidneys fail and there’s a way that my mother and I can be physically attached for about a year, could I then use her body to clean out my own?
It’d be nice for me. Sure. It will mean that she’ll be less physically mobile. It’ll require her to take time off work. It’ll be significantly altering her health and getting me off of her when I’m ready will require her to go through a long and expensive process, which redefines the meaning of pain. But if a fetus has those rights, why shouldn’t I? The idea of using somebody else’s body is a dreadful concept for thinking conscious beings by actively protesting an attempt to not only demoralize an individual for wanting to avoid this grotesque physical and emotional pain, but to make them legally obligated to endure this from a developing clump of DNA is morally reprehensible. This is the danger in an arbitrary equivocation with no justification. The working definition of a biological human person fails to meet the subjective criterion for practical application. Anti-abortion is typically focused on the gruesome details of a late term abortion.
Why don’t they get focused on a woman swallowing an emergency contraceptive pill or a drug induced abortion, which is the most common procedure for first trimester abortions. Often we see anti-abortion activists carrying signs with a photo of an eight month old fetus. Why not use life-sized drawings of a hundred cell human blast assist? Well, for one, the sign would appear blank. The pro-life story is entirely an appeal to emotion. The older the fetus, the more aggressive that appeal. Let’s role play. Suppose a building was on fire and you could save either a five-year-old child or 10 frozen embryos, which would you pick? Of course, everyone would save the child, but now imagine the same situation. Two years later, the 10 embryos have become 1-year-old babies and the child that was five is now seven years old. Which would you save? Obviously the 10 babies note that the decision in the second instance is much tougher.
In the first we lose 10 incense embryos, but in the second it’s a child, no one equates a newborn or a child with a developing clump of DNA, which would be more horrible to watch a woman swelling a pill of plan B or a chicken de beaker and a blender grinding chickens into your favorite happy meal. The chickens can experience fear and pain while the single cell can experience neither the developing clump of DNA claim superiority is to be a person. Imagine that in five years we’re able to clone a human from a single skin cell. Would you never scratch your skin to avoid killing a potential human being like the Jane who wears mesh over his face to avoid accidentally breathing in a flying insect? And if not, if potential human being is very difficult, or excuse me, is very different in your mind from actual human being, then why not see that same difference between a single cell and a newborn baby? If a clump of DNA is a person, would you give up your life for it? You might risk your life to save a stranger, but is the same true for a stranger’s clump of DNA?
Trent mentions that to fulfill my burden of proof, I have to provide an alternative explanation for the allocation of the right to life. And I don’t think that’s a very challenging task for both of us to do. I think both decisions are almost somewhat arbitrary, but I think I’m very interested to see how our question and answer session goes as we’re exploring this topic a little bit further. But I don’t think you can just necessarily exclude certain circumstances and then conclude that this is the only option basis for allocating right to life. But I think we’ll explore that a little bit more and I’ll forfeit the rest of my time.
Debate Host:
Alright, thank you Johnny. Next up we have Trent’s rebuttal and you got to unmute yourself, Trent. So whenever you are ready, you are welcome to go ahead.
Trent:
Okay, well thank you Johnny for that rebuttal. But notice what happened that Johnny’s made the argument, well, we know the unborn are not persons. I haven’t said what a person is, but we know they’re not persons. We should be very suspicious of an argument like that. So I’m just going to quickly go through the points you brought up. First, would I give up my life for an embryo? Well, yeah, I might. For example, if someone was going to kill my son, Matthew, who currently lives within my wife’s womb, no matter how big or small he was, I would do whatever I could to protect him. So it doesn’t matter how young he is, value throughout their whole life. Second, the talk about skin cells that doesn’t work, saying that they’re potential human beings, they’re not a human organism. I showed in my opening statement the unborn human organisms is not just that they have human DNA, but that their body parts coordinate and organize to grow and develop.
A human embryo from its earliest stages can develop into an adult human being just like you and I can develop. It just needs the same things, time, nutrition in the proper environment. And my position is simply that all human organisms have the right to live. Now, Johnny said, well, people don’t have emotional attachments to embryos. That’s a terrible argument. I mean, 150 years ago, whites didn’t have emotional attachments to African slaves, but that didn’t prove that they weren’t human. It just proved people’s emotional attachments were wrong. What about the fire in the embryo lab? Are you going to save five embryos or one child? All this proves is that sometimes we don’t choose to save certain human beings. That doesn’t prove we have the right to kill them. For example, if my wife was in that burning lab and there were five strangers, I’m sorry, I’m going to save my wife.
Does that mean I would go and slit the stranger’s throats? Absolutely not. I give you another example. Suppose there was a burning building. There are five women in one wing and five pregnant women in another wing. Who would you save? Many people would choose the pregnant women, but why? What’s the difference? Well, knowing they have little human beings inside of them, and that makes all the difference. Johnny’s also continually made this analogy saying that just as we have the right to not allow another person to use our organs in order to live, therefore a pregnant woman has the right not to let an unborn child use her body. And that analogy simply doesn’t work at all. Number one, unlike in the organ case, if a friend of mine is dying from kidney failure, I’m not the reason that they’re dying. I’m not the reason they’re sick.
I might fail to save their life if I don’t give them a kidney, but I’m not killing them. They’re kidney diseases. But in abortion, abortion is not failing to save because the unborn child is perfectly healthy. Rather, it’s an act of violence separating them from the organ that’s designed to keep them alive. I mean, Johnny said, well, if you have a right to life, except if you cause somebody physical pain and you’re in their personal space, think of the terrible consequences that could come from that. Imagine if I invited a sick person onto my boat here in San Diego. We went out to sea and I’m worried about getting contagious from him, worried about catching his illness that’ll cause me harm. Do I have the right to throw him overboard? No, certainly not. I’m the reason he’s in dependent on me in the first place.
And so this argument simply doesn’t work. We’re not talking about the extraordinary use of an organ. We’re talking about the ordinary use of a woman’s body to sustain the life of a child that 99% of the time she has done something to create. And now this helpless human being needs her and his father to live. Let’s look at a few other points that were raised up human, DNA and blueprints. Yes, I agree. A blueprint isn’t a house, but we’re not talking about objects that are constructed. An unborn child isn’t constructed in the womb. It’s not like they’re put together like Legos, rather they develop and just because they go through a time of development, lemme give you an analogy from law Professor Richard Stiff. He says, let’s imagine you were out with a friend and you took a picture of something with a Polaroid camera, the really old Polaroid cameras that print out the film.
Let’s say it was the president going by in a motorcade. You snap the picture, you take out the Polaroid. What’s it going to look like? It won’t look like the president. It’ll look like a brown smudge. Suppose your friend tore that photograph up. You would be mad. What if you said, well, that’s not a picture of the president. It’s just a brown smudge. You would say, well, no, it is a picture of the president. You can’t see it. It needs to develop more much the same way a human embryo or human fetus is a human being. It doesn’t look like an adult or a newborn, but it is a human being that simply hasn’t developed much like the Polaroid photo. And so I’m not saying it’s a straw man of my position to say that anything with human DNA has a right to live. That’s not my position.
My position is simply that anything with any human organism, any member of a rational kind, so in this case, human organisms or human beings are members of rational kinds. If we went to another planet and found aliens that had different DNA, but they were members of a rational kind, they had moral awareness like you and I do, then I would say all members of their kind, no matter how young would’ve a right to live. So the unborn, it’s not just having human DNA, it’s being a human organism, and that is simply not disputed in the medical community. In fact, look up the definition of a human embryo or a human fetus. The definition of those terms is a human organism. In the embryos case from conception until the seventh week of life, and in the Fetus’s case from the eighth week of life until birth, Johnny also said, well, he gave a lot of examples where we’re not sure what to do.
Things seem counterintuitive, but they really aren’t. If the unborn, if embryos are human, if a mother doesn’t take her vitamins, do we call CPS? No, no more than we would call CPS for a mother who doesn’t feed vegetables to her three-year-old. The fact of the matter is we can trust ’em. And I believe in trusting them. I just believe that those who are committed towards ending the life of unborn children, like abortion providers should be put out of business. Their work should be made illegal. What about miscarriage? What if someone does something and a miscarriage happens? Well, people die naturally all the time in our homes and no one goes to jail. But think about this. If a woman truly had the right to do whatever she wanted with her body, should she be allowed to take the drug thalidomide, it eases nausea during pregnancy.
It reduces harm in pregnancy, which Johnny is very concerned about, but it also causes harm to the unborn child. They’ll be born without arms or legs if she takes thalidomide. So if you believe, no, it would be wrong to take that drug to reduce harm in pregnancy because of what it does to the child, then I would submit that abortion is worse because abortion causes a greater harm. It deprives this human being of their life. Johnny also brought up a point, what about embryos that die natural deaths? What about all the embryos that don’t implant? Remember, the right to life is about stopping humans from taking other humans beings lives, not about necessarily preventing all natural deaths. I mean, let’s say it was legal to kill anyone over the age of 75 in our country. And someone said to me, and I wanted to stop that, and they said, well, Trent, you don’t care about people over the age of 75. What are you doing to help people at that age not die from heart attacks? And I would say, well, there’s a difference between that natural cause of death and stopping the injustice of killing someone who’s too old, much the same way I believe it’s an injustice to kill someone just because they’re too young and just because they’re dependent on adult’s body to live. When we engaged in an action that made them dependent on us, and so they deserve the ordinary use of our bodies to sustain their lives. So thank you very much.
Debate Host:
Thank you very much, Trent. We’ll go ahead and we’ll start the question and answer time. So Johnny.
Johnny:
Yeah. So Trent, I have a couple questions and some of these are just general questions. I found my research for this particular debate very exciting. I found a lot of information out there. There’s been a few things that I haven’t understood as well, and I’d love to run ’em by you. Should there be laws about the proper disposal of dead egg bodies, the way that there are laws regulating the disposal of born human bodies under this pro-life concept, and what does that look like?
Trent:
Well, if the unborn are human being, if the unborn are not human beings, then you would be correct. That doesn’t really matter. If the unborn are human beings, then the law should reflect what is most practical when it comes to treating their bodies with a certain amount of respect due to their small size. Sometimes we may not know if they’re lost in pregnancy, but just because we may not be able to afford a human being the respect they deserve from that, it doesn’t show they’re not human. For example, in a disaster or a war, we may have to bury people in mass graves that’s undignified, but they’re still human beings. So we should have rules related to what’s most practical for bearing or disposing of these human remains. Yes.
Johnny:
Okay. And then I made a joke earlier about social security numbers and sometimes we talk about accounting population and things like that. What are your thoughts on how that would aggregate into consensuses and things like that?
Trent:
Well, the point of the census is to determine population of course. And unfortunately because the unborn child is hidden from view, it can be difficult to count ’em. But just because someone is not counted in a census or doesn’t have a social security card, once again, that does not prove they’re not a human being. Many children don’t receive their social security cards for a few weeks after birth, but that wouldn’t justify infanticide or they’re not counted in a census much the same way. Undocumented workers, about 11 million of them in this country aren’t counted by the state in many ways, but they’re still human beings. So I would say the prolife position, there’s no problem here. The unborn are human beings, and what I’m arguing for is they don’t have to have the same exact rights you and I have. I mean, I’m not going to give a fetus a Chevy truck or something, but I’m saying they should have the same basic rights, including the basic right to live the right to not be tortured and dismembered. That’s what the prolife position restaurants. So I don’t see any problems.
Johnny:
You mentioned the obligations that men have for born children. What obligations do men have to the eggs that they fertilize when it’s through the development process and things like that?
Trent:
Are you saying what obligation do men have as the unborn human develops more in the pregnancy?
Johnny:
Yeah, I think that would be the right answer. Yes. What I’m trying to ask,
Trent:
Yeah, I would say that men have the obligation to provide for that child, and the primary way they provide for that child is to provide for the woman who is carrying that child who is their son or daughter. So they would provide financial and emotional support. Though the law can’t compel someone to provide emotional support, but it can provide financial support, it can compel a man to have his wages docked to care for this mother and her child. And my argument says that if the right state can force men to use their bodies to go to work to provide for a child they may not want to, for then the state can compel women to provide for these children as well by not permitting them to abort these human beings.
Johnny:
Okay, and my understanding is that, and help me with this, that right now first term and second term, abortions are generally legal, but third term abortions are illegal. Is that correct?
Trent:
No, that’s not correct. What Roe versus Wade says is that first and second trimester abortions up until the point of viability cannot be made illegal. It does say that after viability in the third trimester, sorry, after viability in the third trimester, abortion can be made illegal. It can be, it doesn’t have to be. But if a state outlaws abortion, it must provide an exception for a woman’s health. Now in Roe versus Wade’s companion case, DOE versus Bolton, the court ruled that health refers to anything physical, emotional, psychological, familial, or age related. So you could find anything, even if it relates to a woman’s family health or her emotional health could qualify as a health exception. So essentially abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, provided there are doctors who are willing to perform it, but it is legal for all nine months. It’s more common in the first trimester in late term, that’s only about 1%. But remember, there’s 1.06 million abortions that happen every year. So 1%, if that’s late term, that’s about 10,000. Only about 8,500 people are killed by guns every year in this country. So that late term photo I showed you, more humans die from that kind of abortion than are killed by guns.
Johnny:
And help me understand why that and not the reason, the purpose reason, if that makes sense. But why are there considerably more abortions in the first and second trimester as opposed to the third in this? Why do you think that is?
Trent:
Typically, probably because pregnancy is detected early, though the abortions in the first and second trimester are also less expensive. They’re easier to undergo as the procedure in the third trimester. Essentially what you’re doing when you call it an abortion, it’s just killing the child in the womb and then giving birth to a dead human being. There’s not really that much of a difference between birth and abortion at that point, but the first and second trimester, that’s probably why it’s done what I was saying. Two minutes, we got two minutes left for John. That’s how I would answer that question.
Johnny:
Another question that I had was, in your first premise, you used the term generally when you’re introducing that premise, I’m just curious as to what you believe the exception is there. You’re not making a definitive point, and I’m just curious as to why there is a layer of exception in there, and maybe if you could fill in what is that exception in your mind?
Trent:
Yeah, I said generally, but I also used the Latin word prima fassy, which means on the face of it, so all other things being equal, which is another Latin term, it is generally wrong to kill innocent human beings. Now, there may be cases where if one person’s life is in danger from another human being, we can take an action to prevent the person who’s going to be killed and we don’t intend to but foresee another human might die. I’ll give you an example. If an airplane’s going to fly into a skyscraper, those people are all going to die on that plane. But we have the right to shoot that plane down in order to save the people in the skyscraper, much the same way in an ectopic pregnancy, the child cannot survive it implants outside of the uterus. So we can remove the damage section of the fallopian tube. We can do one moral act to save one life rather than do nothing and let two die much the same. In the skyscraper case, we can intervene and save some rather than do nothing and lose all. So that’s what I mean in those cases. But the majority of abortions your listeners should keep in mind are not done. The vast majority, over 95% are done not because of women’s life is in danger, but because a particular lifestyle is in danger for social or economic reasons.
Johnny:
Very cool. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time, and I hope I didn’t waste, so to speak. I thank you. Did we lose Chris there? There we go.
Trent:
I’ll let you reset that.
Debate Host:
Alright. Trent will get the exact same thing. He gets eight minutes for a cross-examination of Johnny.
Trent:
Okay, John, let me start at the ground floor. You say you agree with the right to life, so would you agree that all human beings or human organisms have a right to live? That may not be universal. Like I gave the skyscraper case, sometimes people might still be killed, but in general, human organisms, human beings have a right to live.
Johnny:
I think the operative word there that brings a little contention is organisms. I have difficulty and you’re going to get a real honest rebuttal out of me, and I hope that I, I represent myself well and not so much as an overall position because a lot of people would probably disagree with my understanding or how I kind of look at this. So I don’t understand personally how just the DNA aspect or the human organism aspect of it qualifies it for right to life. I understand how that qualifies it as a biological, definitional human being, but the right to life is something that I just can’t get the intrinsic connection between the two. Does that make sense?
Trent:
Right. Let me try another example. Do you think that squirrels or rats or pigeons, their organisms, they’re aware, their sentient. Do you think they have the same right to life that human beings possess?
Johnny:
That’s a very interesting question. Should we build holes and snakes and things like that?
Trent:
Right? If you kill a rat or whatever in your house, should you go to jail just as if you had killed your neighbor walking over or something? Have the same right to life human beings possess.
Johnny:
I don’t think that you should face jail time for killing a rat, but if you kill a stranger out on the street or something like that.
Trent:
Okay, so your answer would be they don’t have the same right to life.
Johnny:
What’s that? A human and a rat.
Trent:
Yeah, a rat or a snake or a pigeon does not have the same right to life you and I possess.
Johnny:
I wouldn’t think so, and that made me a moral monster to some degree or whatever. I don’t know. I
Trent:
Would agree.
Johnny:
I personally value the human species more than other species. Okay.
Trent:
Don’t kill
Johnny:
Me. Janice,
Trent:
Do you eat meat? Do you eat cheeseburgers? I love cheeseburgers ever, ever.
Johnny:
I personally struggle with it to some degree. I don’t know. I do, but part of me is slightly leans on the end of, maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s not. I don’t really know. That’s something I’ve been personally wrestling with to be honest.
Trent:
Okay, but you might chow down on a burger while you’re trying to mull it over.
Johnny:
Oh, absolutely.
Trent:
Okay. Then here’s my question for you. A human infant, we would agree they have a right to live. I would imagine. My question is why does a human infant, and this will get back to your question as to why I connected to being a human being. Why does a human infant have a right to live just like you and I have a right to live while cows or rats or mice that may be smarter than an infant, more cognitively functioning at a higher level. Why does an infant have a right to life like you and I have? But those animals don’t. What about the infant? This human infant says that it should have a right to live.
Johnny:
Yeah, interesting enough, if they had the capacity to communicate with us or they had a capacity to battle with us, maybe they wouldn’t agree with us on that particular thing. But the law and the giving away of the right to life or assigning that to somebody is a right that’s granted and protected by kind of like user base of humans, if that makes sense. We are making that decision. I don’t think it’s something that’s just intrinsically from the moment we became human there. I think it’s something that we’ve decided or we’ve subjectively made the opinion to make this available, if that makes sense. And we’ve made qualifiers for it and the qualifiers for it have essentially been based on a couple of different things, and they’re usually everybody 18 and up at some point in time and things like that. I mean, those are the people that are voting and making these decisions.
Trent:
So you’re saying the reason a human infant has a right to live while a cow or a rat doesn’t is simply because we have all decided they do
Johnny:
Say that. Say that last part again. I’m sorry.
Trent:
The reason human infants have a right to live while rats or cows do not is only because they only have that. Right? Because the rest of us have decided they should have that, right?
Johnny:
Yeah. I think most people would disagree with me on that, but personally I think that’s a decision that we’ve decided.
Trent:
Okay. Here’s my second question then. If we as a community took a vote again, and we collectively, it may not be universal, but the vast majority of us decided that unborn humans should have that right to live, would that be wrong to do that if we all decided, if we all decided to do that?
Johnny:
It comes into an interesting question because you have two things, and you’re probably familiar with objective and subjective moral morality and things like that. I don’t know. I have, I’m leaning more towards nihilism personally, so I have a difficult understanding of whether that would actually be right or wrong. I dunno. Does that make sense?
Trent:
Well, no. My point is your qualification for why infants get to have the right to live is just because we all decided. But I think that that’s a very dangerous slope if can imagine. I dunno if that’s true
Johnny:
Or not. Large numbers.
Trent:
If what’s true,
Johnny:
Sorry, and I apologize. I did not mean to interrupt. I don’t know if that’s actually how they earned the right to life. I am making an assumption that maybe that’s how that happened, but I would assume that in situations where there’s not a democracy, there’s still some sort of right to life for infants and things like that, and maybe I’m wrong.
Trent:
Well, what I’m saying is my position is that the reason infants, human infants that don’t differ from animals in morally relevant ways have a right to live is because they are human organisms and members of the humankind deserve special care. Since that explains the right to life to infants and fetuses and embryos are also human organisms that would explain their right to life, your reason, just that the infant has a right, I find to be very dangerous, that it’s just because we all decided so we could all collectively decide to take away other born people’s rights. What would you make of that case? Don’t you think that’s a very dangerous criteria if human rights depend on majority opinion?
Johnny:
No. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the opinion that consensus decides on that, but nor do I think that our DNA difference between us and say a monkey is what provides us the kind of host of rights and protections that fall uniquely to human. I personally don’t think that’s a DNA barrier that was decided just because of DNA.
Debate Host:
All right. Well, our time is up for the cross-examination answer and question time. So what we’ve got to do is we’re going to go into some audience questions. I actually do have some audience questions for both of you. If you guys have not submitted your audience questions, please get them to me, ASAP as I have a list that is growing. I just want to make sure we get as many of them as we can. And once I run out of questions, we’ll go ahead and what we’ll do is we’ll throw it right into letting you guys have a rebuttal time if there’s any time left. So let me reset my timer. I believe we hit 12 minutes set up for this. I, all right, so let’s go into it. The first question that has come from Facebook is question towards Trent. The individual asked if abortion became illegal again. What would you do to help prevent women from using or from going to have abortions illegally? I mean, because we all know they used to happen before it was legal. What would you do to help prevent to make sure if they’re going to continue to do it, why make that whole thing illegal?
Trent:
We should make abortion illegal because abortion unjustly ends the life of a human being and injustice should be illegal. Crime will always happen regardless of what the law is. I mean, 150 years ago, it was legal to abuse and rape your spouse. Then we made it illegal. It may still happen. We should just use law enforcement to prosecute those who would hurt any human beings, any children. So whether those children are toddlers or infants or unborn humans, we should let the law function now as to how would it work out in practice. We may not know exactly, but I would just say this prior to Roe versus Wade, abortion was illegal and women weren’t sent to jail or anything like that. Abortion providers were. My point is just this, if you kill a human being, you should be held legally accountable. I’ll just quick wrap up. Well, I’ll leave it there, I guess.
Debate Host:
Alright, thank you. The next question’s for Johnny, and it’s a real short one. It says, Johnny, if that fetus is you, if you were that fetus that was being aborted, would you still be for abortion?
Johnny:
If I was that fetus, I don’t think I would have a cognitive ability to have an opinion on that. Am I simplifying the question too much or simplifying my response? I mean,
Debate Host:
No, the response that works for me. Alright, so the next one is, this one’s towards Trent. If you outlaw abortion, what would happen in the case of rape?
Trent:
Well, I think that that pregnancy in the case of rape is terrible and not just because of the rape in the pregnancy, but oftentimes the victim of rape. She’s not believed or she’s blamed in some countries she’s killed, and that’s just barbaric. I mean, in this country, we don’t kill the woman who’s a victim of rape. We can’t even execute the rapist that’s against the law, but we execute the child who didn’t do anything. So if abortion were made illegal and someone was a victim of rape, I would simply say that we should provide nonviolent support for the mother and everything she’s going through and for the child who didn’t ask to be conceived this way, and we should punish the rapist and punish much more than we do now. I feel that we live in a rape culture that oftentimes let’s rapists away with their crimes and that needs to be remedied. But remember, the real criminal here is the rapist, not the woman or the child who is conceived in rape.
Debate Host:
All right, thank you. The next question has been asked to be directed to both of you. So I’ll go ahead Johnny, if you want to answer first and then Trent, if you want to answer second. The question is why do men feel that they have a right to talk about abortion rights? They can’t carry babies. Why should they be graded permission in the public spirit to exchange ideas about a woman’s body? God, you should have let this one. Nope, go ahead Johnny.
Trent:
Alright, one, am I going first
Johnny:
Actually, yeah. Trent, if you don’t mind, I’ll let you go first.
Trent:
Okay. A few points to that. If men should not have a public say on abortion, then Roe versus Wade should be overturned because it was decided by nine male Supreme Court justices. Number two, I think that rational human beings can have opinions on moral issues that don’t affect them. I think women can have an opinion on whether the military draft is right even though women will not be drafted. Or I can have an opinion on child abuse and the wrongness of child abuse, even though I will never be a child myself or be a victim of it. So rational human beings can see when other humans are being victimized, even if it doesn’t affect them, they should stand up for those other humans and advocate for their legal rights, especially in the case of the unborn who are voiceless and need someone else to stand up for them.
Johnny:
And for the most part, I think Trent’s got a fantastic answer or a fantastic response to this. And when it comes to the topic of abortion, I think that it’s one of those things that has significant consequences in either direction. So understanding, having these forum and having these discussions as much as possible and getting a lot of people doing the work. I mean if something that affects you and you can have other people doing some of the work for you to do the research and bring this information to the table, I think it helps out a lot. But this is a very difficult topic and a very difficult decision to make. And anytime you have, we have consequences.
Debate Host:
All right. Thank you. Thank you very much Johnny. So the next question I have is for you Johnny. Johnny, what would be your compromise for you if you wanted to keep abortion legal but had to compromise with Trent on something, what would be your actual compromise in that situation?
Johnny:
That’s a great question, man. I don’t know. It really hinges on us accurately defining what qualifies for the right to life. And I think there’s almost a clear cut issue that has to be resolved there. Trent seems like a smart guy, seems like a nice guy. I go and hang out with him. I think we could probably find some things that we agree on and argue about together as a tag team, but it, it’s a tough situation. I think some of the things that he posed to me in question and answer time are definitely some things that would be worth looking into and doing a little bit deeper dive into. And I think there can be some concessions made on some of those things possibly.
Debate Host:
Alright, thank you. So Trent, the next one that we have is how do you define an embryo as a human? And I think you’ve covered this, but if you want to go ahead and review it real quickly, that would be awesome.
Trent:
Sure. Well, embryo, the word just refers to the stage of development in the life of any organism. You can go to medicine net.com and look up the definition of embryo. This is what it says there, embryo and organism in the early stages of growth and differentiation in humans, this occurs from fertilization to the beginning of the third month. So there’s lots of different embryos, there are cat embryos, dog embryos. What makes an embryo human, biologically human is that. So it’s an embryo that’s developing and it has human DNA. It’s not like a skin cell though, it’s an embryo. It’s growing, it’s developing, it’s an organism. It has human DNA and it was the offspring of two human parents. Two human parents come together in sexual union. The only kind of embryo they can create is a human embryo. Human beings don’t mate and produce dogs or cats or chickens or anything like that. Humans beget humans and the embryo has human DNA, which makes it different than a cat or a dog or a rat embryo.
Debate Host:
Alright, I actually do have three more questions. They keep coming in. So I Trent, this one is to you again. How do you justify the fetus having the same rights as the woman? And why does a woman’s bodily autonomy not trump the fetus’s rights?
Trent:
Well, I think that that’s clear, and I referenced a few quotes in my opening statement from pro-choice philosophers who agree that the right to bodily autonomy, it doesn’t seem to be absolute that you can’t use your own body to hurt other human beings. I could also give another example to show why I think the right to life trumps the right to bodily autonomy. Suppose for example, you had a premature baby that was born, they’re 21 weeks old and they’re in an incubator in a hospital, in a NICU unit, I think we would all agree it would be wrong, it would be murder to kill that baby in the NICU unit. They have a right to live. But suppose we took that baby and put them back into a woman’s uterus and sewed it up again. And in that process, the baby became dependent on the mother, where before it was dependent on the NICU unit would suddenly her right to bodily autonomy, let her kill the baby in her womb that we 10 minutes ago could not kill in a NICU unit. I think that just shows that my position, that what you are being human, being a member of the humankind matters more and determines your value more than where you are or who you’re dependent on.
Debate Host:
All right, thank you. We have another question for you. Do you believe a vasectomy, since it’s a reversal? Not not. Okay, let me rephrase it. Do you believe a vasectomy as a reversal could be the answer to preventing unwanted pregnancies and even if it would or would not risk the health of the woman? And do you believe that that should be mandated to help as a preventive measure from the woman getting pregnant?
Trent:
Do I believe in mandated vasectomies? No. Yes. And that’s one as a man I can speak on with a certain amount of authority. No, this does bring a good point that yes, we do have a right to bodily autonomy. People shouldn’t invade my body to take my blood for the blood bank or give me a vasectomy worrying I’m going to get somebody pregnant. I agree with all of that. But where bodily autonomy ends is when another human being’s body begins. My mom used to always say, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of your sister’s nose. So a woman’s right to bodily autonomy ends where the unborn child’s body begins. And so I think that’s different that forcing someone to have a vasectomy, we should have laws that keep people out of my vast deference or whatnot, but the law should be able to protect humans no matter where they live, even if they live in the womb.
Debate Host:
Alright, the last question I have will actually go to Johnny. The question, Johnny, is if a fetus head writes, what would they look like? When would they begin and how would we determine them?
Johnny:
Yeah, and that’s a question I’ve always had difficulty understanding. And I think it’s one of those things that’s a portion or a part of the ongoing discussion. Personally, I have yet to be able to come up with a cohesive definition of or where the right to life really begins. I’ve mentioned multiple times that I believe it’s arbitrary to just define it from DNA to me it just doesn’t compute, it doesn’t make sense. But it seems that the general consensus out there revolves around several different factors regarding things like analgesia, the ability to feel pain, viability, the ability to live outside of the womb, and several other factors with development of the neocortex and consciousness, things like that. There’s a lot of different things that get put into this from a scientific perspective and isolating. You’ve got different methods to which you can make a truth claim on this. And I haven’t been able to make a clear cut decision on when that point is yet.
Debate Host:
Okay. Alright, well that concludes our question and answer Ty and Trent, I’m just going to ask a quick question just because it kind of got brought up in the chat and I got a couple of messages since you guys have forfeited some of the time. Would you guys each like to take another short cross-examination between the two of you? Is that something you have time for? Would you just like to run right into closing arguments?
Trent:
I think we’ve covered a lot of what we would discuss. I don’t know, Johnny, what you think.
Johnny:
It’s entirely up to you. I think we’ve been able to, I don’t really see us finding any more points of contention unless I don’t know. It’s up to you.
Trent:
Why don’t we just go into closing statements then probably. I think we’ve both said a lot. We’ll just do that and that’ll be that.
Debate Host:
Okay. Well cool. Well thank everybody for their time. We’re going to hit closing statements right now. Don’t forget to stick around afterwards because afterwards we’re going to go over a few announcements. We get to thank Trent for coming on and I just want to make sure everybody gets to hear what we have coming up. So Trent, if you want to go ahead. Oops, lemme reset that. Trent, if you want to go ahead, I’ll start your time as soon as you start talking.
Trent:
Okay. I really want to thank Atheist analysis for having me on to debate this issue and for Johnny being willing to step up to the plate to talk about it. Surprisingly, when I contact representatives from pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood, they refuse to debate the issue. They refuse to debate it in public. And that’s not good because this is an issue that really divides a lot of people. We need to have this debate and we need to have this conversation. So I’m really grateful you guys put on this show and for both of us to rationally and with heads, share our different arguments. And I would encourage your listeners to go and dive deeper into the arguments. You guys can post your resources. I can make a shameless plug on my own. I actually have a whole book on this subject called Persuasive Pro-Life, how to talk about our Culture’s toughest issue.
And if you want to see my position defended in a more in-depth level, you can pick up that book on Amazon or at its website, persuasive pro-life dot com. But let me just resummarize my argument. My argument is all human beings, and I define a human being, is a biological human organism. They all have equal rights in virtue of the fact that they are human. So a newborn baby has more rights than a rat or a cow because it’s a member of the humankind, not because it can think at a certain level, can’t think better than those animals, but because it’s a member of our human community and the unborn human embryos and human fetuses, remember those terms refer to stages of development in the life of a human. Those humans are just younger. Why can’t they have the same basic right to live the right to life?
Now, I’ll agree abortion, most of us can agree. Oddly enough, abortion is a tough issue. If a woman is pregnant and her husband or boyfriend walks out on her, she has three kids socially, psychologically, what she’s supposed to do, that’s going to be really hard. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. Or someone, God forbid, is a victim of rape. Those are awful situations psychologically and socially to work through. But while they’re psychologically and socially complex, morally, morally, they’re simple and we can run by this simple moral rule in life. We don’t kill innocent human beings just to solve difficult life problems. And that should apply to humans of any age. And I’ve shown there’s no morally relevant difference between all of us and the unborn. And we as human beings, as moms and dads that have sex and create these humans, we have responsibilities towards them.
As a man, if I was to cause a woman to become pregnant, in this case, it’s my wife. I have an obligation to her and to the child I’ve created whose name is Matthew. I have a duty to support them because I’m the reason this little guy exists in the world. He’s totally helpless. He needs me and he needs my wife. He didn’t ask to be brought in this way and we have a duty to care for him. He’s not using my wife’s body against her will right now. He’s just living, eating, breathing, normally using an organ for him. I mean, hearts are for beating blood, lungs are for breathing. What is the uterus for, if not for sustaining this child? It’s an ordinary act of care. So just as I have a duty to help Matthew, my unborn child in any way I can, by supporting his mother, Laura has a duty to support him.
And I think all men and women, when they create human beings, they have a duty to support them. But even if a child were conceived in something awful like rape, they’re still a human being. They still have a mom and a dad. And that mom and dad have a duty to care for that human who’s been brought into existence in such a terrible way. Once again, I would encourage you all to read more about this issue. Pick up my book, read any resources that atheist analysis offers and make up your own mind. And don’t be afraid to take a side view on this issue. There’s an atheist pro-life group that was actually on this show a few months ago called Secular Pro-Life. So if you’re an atheist and you wrestle with this issue, I’m going to say don’t be afraid to take the pro-life view. Don’t be afraid to take the marginal view and stand up for justice and equality, even if it’s the minority position. Because if there’s one group that’s good at hanging onto a minority position, even if a whole culture tells them it’s wrong, it’s atheists. So that would be my advice for all of you.
Debate Host:
Alright, Trent, and again, we want to thank you for coming on. It was a pleasure to have you on. Johnny, your time is going to start.
Johnny:
Trent, I thank you again for the opportunity to share a digital stage with you and Chris for putting everything together. This is an extremely complex topic and it’s been a lot of fun to kind of explore a lot of the different arguments and different thought processes that are involved in this right to life and in this decision making and the consequences on both sides. The emotions that are felt from both sides of the fence. It’s a lot of fun to look at. You got some points with women. It is hard for us to make a decision or to argue about something that applies to women in their bodies. And I really do have a hard time discussing a topic that doesn’t necessarily apply to me and not necessarily have an authority to do so. I struggle with arbitrarily giving right to life away at DNA.
I don’t think that our minds process that generally. I don’t think that we value a human being based on their genetic differences or what gives them that from DNA. It just seems arbitrary when you go to a funeral, you don’t talk about the DNA that that person had. You talk about their life and their experience or specific factors that we incorporate into it in which we value them as having personhood. But it’s been interesting to discuss this and I definitely, like I said, there’s tons of resources out there that you can look at from both sides of this. You can understand a lot about why people feel certain ways about certain things. You can even look into situations of why people place the value on DNA or why they place it on things like viability or consciousness. There’s a lot of science and a lot of information out there. So I definitely recommend checking it out. And again, I thank you guys for the opportunity to discuss this with you. Trent Horn. Thank you.
Debate Host:
Well, alright, thank you Johnny. And that will start our debate. We have a couple quick announcements and a couple quick things to go over to you. We want to give Trent one real quick. Go ahead, Trent and plug where we can find you at. Is there a Twitter we can follow you at? Is there websites? I know we have a couple in the link, but is there anything else that we could do where we could find more information for you?
Trent:
Sure. I have a personal website, trent horn.com. Trent Horn with the space in between Trent Horn, that’s my Twitter handle on Facebook. You can find my public Facebook page, Trent Horn Catholic apologist, and you can visit the website catholic.com. And if you search for me, you can find some things I’ve written there and also radio shows I’ve done, including radio shows on this particular topic. So my website, trent horn.com, catholic.com, or on Facebook or Twitter. It shouldn’t be that hard to find me.