In this clip, Cy Kellett and Trent Horn talk with an extreme pro-choice caller.
Transcript:
Trent: So you’re saying it’d be okay to kill a 2-year-old?
Caller: I wouldn’t say kill them. I would say, you know, peacefully send them to heaven, you know, with the morphine and, you know.
Trent: Right, but no, but Alex, you’re talking about they’re alive and we make them dead. What’s that called?
—–
Cy: Hi, Alex, you’re on the air. Why are you pro-choice?
Caller: Well, I think it’s a good avenue to take for women who have no other options to go through. Because the thing I think something that people don’t talk about in the argument is the fact that it costs, you know, a good few thousand dollars to have a child. You know, even if you put it up for adoption, you still have to pay the hospital, you know, several thousand dollars just to have the child as opposed to, you know, a smaller fee for the abortion. I think it would be, you know, much, much easier option on a family who probably couldn’t afford to raise the child themselves.
Trent: Okay, so Alex, your defense of legal abortion is you’re saying that abortion ought to be legal because choosing to not have an abortion entails financial costs like paying to place a child for adoption or taking care of a child, raising them, even placing them for adoption. There are some costs that are involved, though. I would say the costs involved for placing a child for adoption are incurred primarily, if not absolutely, by the couple who is adopting the child, not the birth mother who is placing the child. But even if you were correct, I don’t think that works with abortion.
What’s hard for me is because what I hear with the argument, because when you say things like a woman shouldn’t be forced to have a child, you know, I agree with that. I agree that nobody should be forced to become pregnant, nobody should be raped. Because for me, the phrase “have a child” refers to conception. But my thing is if you are pregnant, you already have a child, so you can’t say, well, I’m allowed to end my child’s life because if I were to let this child continue living, it would cost me money. I would say parents have an obligation to take care of their children and not directly end their lives.
So that’s the crux for me, which is hard. I agree with you. No one should be forced to become pregnant. But just as you can’t kill a 2-year-old just because you don’t want to go through everything involved with placing them for adoption or raising them, I don’t think you should do the same to an unborn child. They’re just younger and smaller. And we should treat them the same. Does that make sense? Do you see where I’m at least coming from?
Caller: I see your reasoning. What do you say to, you know, the crackhead who couldn’t raise a child and probably doesn’t know how to put a child up for adoption and would probably, you know, give the child some brain damage and it wouldn’t be able to live a full life anyway? What would you say to that?
Trent: Well, Alex, let me respond to that hypothetical with another one. Now, I grew up in the southwest and there’s a lot of meth labs, stuff like that. And I’ve heard stories of parents being arrested who run meth labs, who have kids there, like toddlers that are already addicted to methamphetamines or already been poisoned by it. So let’s take your person who is addicted to crack cocaine or a meth addict. What if they had a toddler and, and imagine that toddler’s already addicted to crack cocaine? A toddler’s already addicted to meth. A toddler’s not going to get adopted. They’re going to be in community foster care for years and years and years till they go out on the streets and probably end up doing drugs.
And I know this will sound like a ridiculous proposal, but just humor me here. What do you think if people said, look, this toddler, this 2-year-old child of this crack addict or this meth head, this 2-year-old child’s got no future ahead of him. Maybe we should just pump him full of morphine, let him die, send him to God, that’s that. Do you think it’d be wrong to kill a 2-year-old child of like a crack addict or a meth head for that reason?
Caller: Well, I think to send them to heaven would be a good thing. You know, if they’re not going to have a good time here on earth, let’s.
Trent: Well, Alex, let’s rewind a bit. So you’re saying it’d be okay to kill a 2-year-old who is in an abusive situation?
Caller: I wouldn’t say kill them. I would say, you know, peacefully send them to heaven, you know, with the morphine and, you know, make it peaceful for them. Right, but have a good, you know.
Trent: No, but Alex, let me hear what you just said. So if they’re alive, you’re talking about, they’re alive and we make them dead. What’s that called?
Caller: Well, that’s called murder. But I wouldn’t be murdering them. It would be sending them to heaven into the afterlife where they would be, you know, received by God and, you know, forgiven for their sin.
Caller: And that would be a much better thing instead.
Trent: Well, but the way they get there.
Cy: Is you have to murder them first. Yeah, that seems pretty clear. Like you can’t send a person to heaven without murdering them.
Trent: Alex, would you agree we shouldn’t kill born people to send them to heaven? I think you’re. You agree, right? Like people like you or me.
Caller: Sure, but I mean, they would still, you know, go to. They would still go to heaven and their life in heaven would be eternal and, you know, far better than their life.
Trent: Well, let me give you an example. I mean, Cy Kellett here is a super holy guy. I’m sure if somebody walked in and killed him, he would probably go to heaven. Cy is my co-host here, sitting right next to me, right straight there. Cy would probably go straight there. He’s a super holy guy. No problem. But it’d be wrong for someone to kill Cy. Hello. Right. Yes, it would.
Cy: Yes, it would.
Trent: Yeah, so, so I guess what I, what I would say there and we might, we’ll have to move on here, Alex. Just as it’d be wrong to kill Cy or me or a 2-year-old, we get into a really, really, really dangerous situation when we say it’s okay to kill people if they’re suffering or they’re having a difficult life. Because then when that’s the case, there’s nowhere to stop on that slippery slope.
That was the mentality behind the Nazi Holocaust. It started that way with the euthanization and killing of disabled people. Other holocausts and brutalities throughout history have started with, well, we think this is. It’s okay to kill people. When you start with that mindset and you see it just doesn’t stay with abortion. That’s why when I talk to people about this, who bring up these pragmatic arguments for abortion, such as children who are in abusive situations, the logic naturally flows to the born.
And so you either have to honestly accept it or come up with ad hoc rationale to partition off born children from unborn children. My response is to say we ought to treat them equally.
Cy: I realize there are callers on the line. I just wanted to engage in that conversation a little bit for Alex’s benefit. Because Alex, we appreciate the call. Even though we disagree about sending little babies to heaven with morphine, we do appreciate the call.
Trent: We are against injecting kids with poison and murdering them, as I think most of our callers also are. But that doesn’t mean it’s all how you describe it. It’s all about the language we’ve seen.
Cy: I mean, I don’t want to pick on our last caller, but it does seem to me eliding certain basic moral facts to say, well, we’re not murdering the child, we’re just sending the child to heaven. Just like we’re glossing over an important step here. I always felt like that was the case in the embryonic research debate, was like, we’re going to use these cells. Well, yeah, but you’re using the cells of what? Well, of a human embryo. Well, how are you getting those cells? We’re just gathering the cells. Well, no, you’re not saying the thing that you’re doing right. You have to kill the embryonic human being before you can use the cells. You have to say, and not saying one of the steps is.
Trent: This is what we call double speak, also called. It’s derived from Newspeak of George Orwell’s book 1984. It’s a perfect example of this. Notice what our previous caller had to do and other callers do and other people do when they defend legal abortion is they have to twist the English language into such pretzels that you have to send the dictionary to a chiropractor that it’s completely just bent out of shape of what it means in order to get to sound right.
Orwell wrote an article about this a long time ago and in it he was chastising Western journalists for using these kinds of euphemisms to cover up what the Soviet Union was doing. Because a lot of Western journalists were totally infatuated with Soviet-style communism, especially in the 1930s through the 1950s before the system really started collapsing. They thought, this is great, we have to really support this. And they glossed over the gross human rights abuses.
This is what Orwell wrote: “Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry. This is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps. This is called elimination of unreliable elements.”
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. So that is what happens with abortion. Here that even people don’t want to say, well, it’s not killing, it’s quote unquote sending to heaven. Which would be, which in the case of a baptized 2-year-old child, yes, they would be going to heaven, that is true. But they would be utterly deprived of their life, of the life that God intended for them.
Yeah, and I’m sure that child would mourn the sin you had committed to send them to heaven. That our life is a gift from God and we do not have. He is the one who has authority over human life. We don’t.