In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Trent Horn to debate whether abortion is ever justified.
Transcript:
Caller: Yeah, I just think abortion is part of God’s plan to help the old population problem. Okay, well, I guess there’s. There’s three elements there, Randy. One, whether we have a problem with overpopulation. Two, whether abortion is ever okay as a solution overpopulation. And three, whether it’s part of God’s plan. Why do you think it’s God’s plan to. To overpopulation? How do you come to that conclusion? Well, the world’s population has gone from just under 2 billion to 7 and a half in just over 100 years. So, yeah, it’s got to be part of his plan. Well, how do you know it’s part of his plan and not just part of your plan? And what people like you think. How do you know God wants. Well, I really don’t know because I don’t know. You know, I don’t think there’s a God anyways here, so I kind of threw that in. Can’t. Can’t quite be his plan if he’s not there, right? There you go. Yeah. Yeah.
Trent Horn: Okay. So it’s. It’s your plan. All right. It’s your. This is your plan? Randy, you think we could. Do we need abortion to deal with overpopulation? Well, I guess here’s. All right, here’s my question then for you. So you think abortion will decrease overpopulation? Here’s my hypothetical. Let’s say not enough women choose to have abortions. Not enough women choose to have abortions. Would you be okay forcing women to have abortions and forcing women to use birth control so that the planet doesn’t get overpopulated?
Caller: I think it should be a woman’s choice there. Yeah, but what about overpopulation? So you would let people not have abortions? You’d be okay with that even if the world got overpopulated? Well, I think the natural course, you know, women will have abortions or contraception there. You know, like I said, the world’s population doubled in the last 60 years with abortion and contraception. Right. So. But. But if people thank goodness that we, you know, women have had access.
Trent Horn: But, Randy, abortion’s been legal all through that time, yet population levels still keep increasing. So my point is, do you agree that it’s wrong to force people to have abortions even if the world’s overpopulated?
Caller: Well, sure.
Trent Horn: Okay, so. And would you say it’s wrong to do that because it violates their rights?
Caller: Well, I think as a human species, we’ve got to be careful with the finite resources that the world has. Right, but does forcing a woman to have an abortion violate her rights? No, it does not. Wait, no. So. So it’s okay to force a woman to have an abortion? Well, again, she’s got to figure that out for herself. But Randy, just let’s be. I want to be very clear. Is it wrong to force a woman to have an abortion? No. Wow. Randy, do you call yourself pro choice? Sure. So you are pro choice, but it’s not wrong to force someone to have an abortion? You don’t see the massive contradiction there? No, because the way you’re putting it there, it sounds like that. But again, I said that a woman, you know, it should be a woman’s choice.
Trent Horn: Okay, so if it. See, Randy, you’re contradicting yourself here. You say it should be a woman’s choice. That would follow that you can’t force her to do it.
Caller: Sure. Okay. Okay. Oh, wow. I’m so relieved. Well, hopefully. Let’s just keep going. So you. Let’s try that again then. You should not force a woman to have an abortion. Is that your position? But you should have a right to have an abortion. Right. But you shouldn’t force her to do it. Sure.
Trent Horn: Okay, good. So here’s the thing. Here’s my argument then. If you can’t violate a woman’s rights to reduce overpopulation, if you can’t force a woman to have an abortion, then you shouldn’t force a child to be aborted for the same reason. That’d be my argument.
Caller: Okay, again, that’s your. That’s your prerogative. Yeah. All right.
Trent Horn: Do you. Do you think. Well, I guess I’ll put it this way, Andy, very bluntly. Do you think it’s okay to kill children if there are too many children in the world?
Caller: But we’re talking about children. We’re talking about having an abortion. What is abortion? Well, I’m just saying, you know, we’re talking about abortion, not. Not killing a child. Randy, what is abortion? It’s getting rid of a fetus. What is a fetus? It’s a pre born human. So it’s a very young human, but it’s not, you know, it can’t survive on its own. So it’s not a human in the full sense of the term there. Yeah.
Trent Horn: So you’re saying that because a human being is very, very dependent on his mother or her mother, it’s okay to kill that human being just because they’re really dependent on mom.
Cy Kellett: He hung up on us. Thanks. Randy. I gotta say, if I may. You do a Fine job, Trent. And a lot of times that involves accepting certain premises that the person gives you and say, okay, we’ll follow on that premise. But the premise that the world is overpopulated with humans or ever has been
Caller: overpopulated with humans, now that’s false. Is a false premise. Yes, that’s false.
Cy Kellett: And this is a pet peeve of my own. So I’m inflicting this on you a little bit.
Caller: That’s fine.
Cy Kellett: But this was when I was a kid. Walter Cronkite and other media elites pushed this idea of overpopulation. And what followed was brutal treatment of women in India and China and in other parts of the world, but primarily India and China. And it’s a horrible thing. And we have to stop with this idea that making babies is somehow bad.
Trent Horn: It’s simply not true. In fact, in many parts of the world, we’re experiencing a birth dearth, if you will, that we have a demographic winter. There are many areas of the world where we are not at replacement level. You will have an aging population without a younger population to care for them or to provide them with Social Security benefits, retirement benefits. That is the problem facing most of the world today. So we are not overpopulated. Researchers have shown there’s more than enough food to feed billions more people on Earth. We continue to revolutionize agriculture production, food production. Modern famines are not caused by too many people. They’re caused by corrupt governments that prevent food resources from being able to reach people. This claim was the product of environmental alarmists from the 1960s, like people like Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the book the Population Bomb.
Caller: Yeah, and if we all live like Paul Ehrlich, then there’s not enough resources.
Trent Horn: And he was fantastically wrong. He wrote his book in the 1960s and he predicted that there would be worldwide famines and hundreds of millions of people would die in the 1970s, that this is the beginning of the end. And he was, he said by the year 2000, the nation of England wouldn’t even exist anymore. And he was just wrong on all. By 1989, he bumped it to 2000.
Caller: Oh, did he?
Trent Horn: Yeah. And so, you know, when you have these kinds of alarmists, people jump forward and try to put forward these barbaric solutions that themselves create problems. You look at China and India, abortion that was used to curb so called overpopulation. What resulted in happening was it created a gender imbalance in China. You now have a skewed population where men outnumber women by a sizable margin. So that there’s large numbers of men who have no hope of finding someone to marry. When you have large numbers of men that can’t find stable careers and someone to marry, that’s not a great circumstance to be in. Leads to crime, can lead to terrorism, you know. So we should rather respect the dignity of the human person and always pursue good solutions to the problems that we face in this world. One not, not adopt, one should not adopt a solution that is worse than the problem at hand.
Cy Kellett: Amen, brother. Amen. And I’ll, I’ll tell you this too. I was looking on NBC News about 10 days ago, maybe two weeks ago, had an article on overpopulation and the photo that they chose was a photo of all 100% brown skinned people. And I thought the underlying racism implied in the whole overpopulation movement is really what they mean is there’s too many of those kind of people. It’s not a problem of there’s too many people like me.
Trent Horn: Well, Ignatius Press has a wonderful book out called Target Africa that talks about neocolonialism in Africa where you have on the one hand liberal progressives who say we have to respect other people’s cultures and we can’t impose our views on them so that missionary work is imperialistic and wrong. But on the other hand, they promote in these cultures the use of contraception and abortion. So they kind of talk out of both sides of their mouths in that respect.