More of the Same Fallacies From an Abortion-Choice Advocate

I was pointed to an article by Alan Levinowitz called "Why Do Pro-Life Advocates Only Seem to Care About Unborn Lives?" Of course, the real reason is because abortion-choice advocates are too lazy to do any real research into what people in the pro-life movement actually do. But that would make for a very short article.

Levinowitz starts off by saying he uses abortion as a case study in his comparative ethics course. Considering how rife with fallacy his article is, it actually does give me concern for his students. He is apparently drawing his students away from the pro-life argument not based on logic or reason (which is essential for coming to conclusions on ethical questions) but based on emotion and logical fallacies. There is a silver lining here -- Levinowitz does recognize that abortion-choice advocates can't take the "moral superiority" of their position as granted and should seek out challenging dialogue partners to discuss it further. So if Levinowitz happens across this article, please get in touch with me. I'd love to discuss this further with you. We could even set up a debate on this issue, if you'd be game for it.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Is Consent to Sex Consent to Pregnancy?

In her book Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent, sociologist Eileen McDonagh argued that pro-choice people should move the debate from being about choice to consent. In other words, instead of arguing a woman has a "right to choose" abortion, they should be arguing that an embryo only has the right to a woman's uterus if she grants consent to the uterus, and only if consent is ongoing. She argued that sex doesn't make a woman pregnant, sex only creates the embryo, and it's the embryo that makes the woman pregnant. Since the embryo occupies the woman's uterus against her will, the embryo is essentially a rapist, or a parasite (or perhaps one of the aliens from Alien). Since the embryo is essentially a rapist, the state has an obligation to protect her from this invader in the same way the state would use the police to protect her from an actual rapist.

That's the thesis of her book, essentially. McDonagh has succeeded to some degree in changing the abortion debate to be about consent. I don't encounter this argument when I'm talking to a pro-abortion-choice advocate in person. But I occasionally encounter this argument in on-line discussions. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and it's not an argument that is seriously defended by most pro-abortion-choice people. It's more of an argument pro-abortion-choice people keep in their quiver as a backup.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Is Philosophy Useless in the Pro-Life Argument?

Last week, LiveActionNews published an article from Olivier Lindor called "Four Non-Religious Reasons to be Pro-Life". In that article, Lindor made the claim that science is all you need for the pro-life argument. Philosophy is (presumably) unreliable as a source of truth. Science is the only reliable source of truth, so science should be the standard we turn to when we make public policy. He gave three other arguments, but my purpose for this article is to specifically respond to Lindor's first argument from science. To be clear, I enjoy LiveActionNews. This is not a diatribe against them, but merely my intention to respond, as a pro-life educator, to an idea that I find detrimental to the pro-life argument and worldview, in general.

Lindor is right that there is a significant non-religious portion of the pro-life movement. He is also right that we do not have to specifically present a religious argument to justify the pro-life stance. However, he does not have to throw philosophy under the bus to do so.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

A Note on Human Dignity

I came across a question over the internet. I'm not a user on Tumblr, but this came up on Google. Someone had asked this question: What's the main reason you think abortion is ok? The answer, which is indicated as the best one, is: "Because forcing someone to continue with a pregnancy against their will is awful and a violation to one's dignity."

The Importance of Making Distinctions

There are many important distinctions that need to be made in the abortion issue that are often overlooked. I don't know how our culture got to a point in which people are generally incapable of making basic distinctions, but it seems we've gotten to this point. Making distinctions is absolutely critical to clear thinking. Aside from the distinction I mentioned earlier, here are two more that need to be kept in mind in our discussions about abortion...

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Are Unborn Children Just Like Born Children?

I was reading a pro-choice blog in which the author had an experience with a pro-life woman. The author asked this woman if a child who dies in a car accident is just like a child who is aborted. Incredulous that the woman would believe this, the author says, "I them [sic] pointed to my boyfriend's aunt who lost her child in a car accident last her [sic] and told her to tell that woman that people that make the decision to have an abortion is [sic] on the same level of her losing the child she raised and loved for sixteen years."

What's in a Category?

If a pro-choice person you're talking to understands the distinction between the question of biological humanity and philosophical personhood, he/she will undoubtedly attempt to find some property/properties that persons must possess in order to be a person. Some common ones are consciousness, self-awareness, sentience (meaning the ability to sense and feel pain), and desires.

While the person is attempting to locate personhood grounded in these properties, they will usually support their criteria by arguing from analogy. Rocks are not conscious things, and it is not wrong to destroy rocks. The unborn are not conscious, so it is not wrong to destroy the unborn. This can be a common comparison, such as one being made by this individual whose article I came across. Even professional philosophers engage in these kinds of comparisons, although unlike those at the popular level they make a better comparison. They don't compare the unborn to inanimate objects like rocks, but will compare them to other living things, such as when Mary Anne Warren, in her essay On the Legal and Moral Status Of Abortion, argues that the unborn, in the relevant respects of consciousness, are less personlike than the average fish.

The problem with this argument is that it commits a lesser known logical fallacy called the category error fallacy (or category mistake). A category error is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category.[1] For example, the statement "the number seven smells like pine trees" is a category mistake because numbers are abstract objects and don't produce odors.

So what's the category error being made here? By comparing unborn human embryos/fetuses to objects like rocks or living things which do not possess consciousness in the relevant sense to have personhood attributed to them, these pro-choice people are attributing the category of non-consciousness to the unborn human embryo/fetus, when in fact the unborn are not non-conscious, they are pre-conscious. This is an important difference. It is not wrong to destroy rocks because they are not the kind of thing which has a serious right to life. Nor are fish the kind of thing that has a serious right to life (and if they were, it would be just as wrong to kill immature fish as it is to kill mature ones). Your intrinsic value and rights depend on the kind of thing that you are. Since the unborn belong to a conscious species and they are self-directed entities who will develop the present capacity for consciousness if not prevented from doing so, they are in a different category than rocks and guppies.

So whether or not the active potential to develop along the path of human development is morally relevant to the unborn human's intrinsic value (as I argue it is), comparing unborn human beings to non-conscious entities does not do the work of arguing against it.

[1] Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 58.

Regarding PZ Myers' Unsophisticated Diatribe on Kristan Hawkins

PZ Myers is at it again, this time ranting about pro-life apologist Kristan Hawkins, executive director of Students for Life of America. I've taken Myers to task before for his dishonest argumentation when he railed against Scott Klusendorf when Scott appeared on the Issues, Etc. podcast. Kristan gave a pro-life presentation at UMM College called "The Ugly Truth About Abortion: How it Does More than Just Kill Babies." Myers apparently attended the presentation, then decided to dismiss Kristan's entire case and write about it on his blog. You can view the article here. Let's take a look at Myers' response.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Responding to Philosophical Arguments Against the Pro-Life Position, Part IV

This will be the last in this series, as the author, Brandon Christen, has indicated this is his last part. He seems to have forgotten his desire to respond to the argument from ageism, but I guess we'll have to be content with this. You can find the first part in this series here, the second part here, and the third part here.

Christen's article, that I will be responding to, can be found at this link.

Christen does consider this to be the strongest non-religious argument against abortion. The problem is, he doesn't seem to understand the argument. He seems to assume it means that you were a human at all points in your life. That's part of it, but the argument states that you are *you* at all points in your life. You were human at all points, but the same *you* now is the same *you* then when you were a toddler, and when you were in the womb. Here's a more thorough exposition of the argument from identity.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Responding to Philosophical Arguments Against the Pro-Life Position, Part III

This is the third part in this five part series. For part one, go here. For part two, click here.

In blogger Brandon Christen's third part of his series, he responds to an argument from rights. The argument, as he outlines is, is that all human beings have right (such as the right to life), the unborn are human beings, therefore the unborn have rights (such as the right to life).

Christen begins by reiterating his position on personhood, but as I have argued previously (see part one), his position on personhood can be rejected because he is begging the question by dismissing the soul and he has not properly argued for why personhood is grounded in brain function. And in part two, I explained that appealing to the kind of things that are not persons (e.g. grass and rocks) is a false analogy because the unborn from fertilization and the kind of things that are persons. Grass and rocks will never be sentient, yet unborn human beings will be once they develop enough.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Responding to Philosophical Arguments Against the Pro-Life Position, Part II

Blogger Brandon Christen is presenting a case that secular arguments for the pro-life position fail. This is the second part in this series of five, and you can find the first part here.

For Christen's second part of his series, he responds to what he calls the Argument from Future Deprivation. I am taken to understand that Marquis calls this argument the Future of Value (FoV) argument, so that's how I'll be referring to it. For more information on Marquis' argument, follow this link.

I said in the first part of this series that it's refreshing to find a blogger making a reasoned case against the pro-life position, instead of just resorting to name-calling and fear-mongering. However, he is off to a less than stellar start. In fact, I'm not even sure he properly understands Marquis' argument.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

In Defense of the Womb Teleology Argument

Introduction

Stephanie Gray is a pro-life advocate who makes an argument regarding the purpose and function of the uterus and its effect on the abortion discussion. It is an argument that many atheistic pro-life advocates disdain because it appears to have religious overtones; however, I believe this objection to the argument to be mistaken. Because a position is compatible with religious thought does not make it a religious argument, anymore than arguing that the unborn are human beings is a religious argument. I would like to present a defense of the argument that secular people can use, and I certainly welcome discussion on the argument in the comments.

Responding to Philosophical Arguments Against the Pro-Life Position

Blogger Brandon Christen has written an introductory article, the first in a five-part series, responding to pro-life arguments. He is looking at the issue from an atheistic perspective. It's refreshing to find a pro-choice blogger who argues from logic and philosophy instead of the usual fare you get from sites like Salon or RH Reality Check. I would like to offer a response to his arguments and when he posts the other parts in his series, I will respond to those.

Read the rest at the Life Training Institute blog.

Another Aspect of Persuasive Dialogue

Oscar Wilde once said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." Wilde, of course, lived in the 19th century, born over a century before the internet was merely a gleam in Al Gore's eye. However, his statement is just as true now as it was back then. Internet anonymity allows people who would otherwise not be blatantly honest with people to show their true colors without having to look the person they're denigrating in the eye when they're saying it.

This article is a follow-up, of sorts, to my previous article about being persuasive in your conversations with pro-choice people. It was actually inspired by the recent tragedy regarding comedy legend Robin Williams taking his own life. It's bad enough that his family had to go through this situation, but Williams' daughter Zelda was forced off of social media because internet trolls posted fake pictures regarding her father. Thankfully many people have more sense than this, but if you want a true taste of human nature, just peruse the comments section on any YouTube video on blog article. There have been numerous accounts of teenagers pushed by internet bullies into committing suicide.

This, of course, also happens often in the abortion debate. People who are allegedly pro-life will attack pro-choice people verbally, even going so far as to make death threats against pro-choice people. Now right away, I know there are going to be people who are going to say that "it happens on both sides" (and I know there are going to be people who won't read the article so they won't see my prediction before making that statement). But that doesn't make it okay for us to do it. Yes, it's frustrating when things don't go our way. We're fighting an up-hill battle against our own government and the multi-billion dollar abortion giant Planned Parenthood. But if we really have truth on our side, and if we truly want to be persuasive, we have to stop acting as if we don't really believe our own arguments. If the unborn are human beings (P1), and all human beings are deserving of protection (P2), then the unborn are deserving of protection. This goes for pro-choice people, too. If pro-choice people aren't deserving of protection, then that invalidates our second premise and leaves the door open for arguing against the unborn deserving protection.

I have already written about being persuasive in our arguments by treating the other person with respect. Another aspect of persuasiveness is to let our actions match our words. If we argue one way and live another, on what grounds should pro-choice people accept our argument? Let's stop with the rhetoric and the name-calling; let's stop with the death threats made in frustration and anonymously over the internet. We need to become a movement that can truly be respected so that when a pro-choice person brings an accusation against us, we can honestly say that there may have been people like that in the past, but you'll be hard-pressed to find someone like that now.

The Key to Avoiding Red Herrings

I'm currently reading through a book by John S. Feinberg [1] on Modernism and Postmodernism, and he made a claim in his book that I thought would be excellent to share. It's also a point that I've been raising in my presentations on abortion.

Feinberg tells us that there are two reasons that you need to clarify any issue at hand, that you need to think through the logic of the case presented and that if you don't, the case that you are attacking may be only peripheral to the topic at hand. Many thinkers skip the first reason and proceed right to the second. An example of this would be someone who tries to argue against evolution by presenting a case for God, throwing out arguments for God's existence. But that's only a peripheral issue, because even if God exists Evolution could have still happened. So you must address the arguments presented by evolutionists. In their mind, they may be thinking that God's existence would disprove evolution because you don't need naturalistic explanations if God exists, but by throwing out the Cosmological, Teleological, and Moral Arguments, you aren't making the case you think you are.

The abortion issue is similar. In order to adequately argue your pro-life or pro-choice case, you have to present a positive case (that is, a case that supports your position) and possibly a negative case (that is, a case that responds to your opponent's arguments). Good pro-life arguments support the biological humanity and philosophical personhood of the unborn child. Good pro-choice arguments argue that the unborn are not persons or that a woman should not be legally compelled to remain plugged in to the unborn child. When we keep this in mind, it's easy to see how many arguments are peripheral issues (that is, side issues that are affected by the issue at large but by refuting you do not refute the actual position) and don't even respond to the case presented.

Let's take the pro-life position. If a pro-life person makes an argument that the unborn are fully human and fully persons, then arguments about difficult situations, such as poverty, or from personal rights, like the right to choose or privacy, are not an adequate argument for the pro-choice position. If pro-life people are right, and the unborn really are full human persons, then poverty would not justify killing them (as it would not justify killing a human child outside the womb), nor would the rights to choose or of privacy. Conversely, if the pro-choice position succeeds, and the unborn either are not persons or do not have the legal right to remain plugged in to the woman, then a woman can have an abortion for any reason, whether or not we find it indecent, which is, incidentally, a point that Thomson made in her essay A Defense of Abortion. If a pro-choice person is going to respond to a pro-life argument, they must directly attack the case that the unborn are biologically human and philosophically persons and show how they are not, in fact, human or persons.

Now let's take the pro-choice position. If a pro-choice person makes an argument that the unborn are not persons or that a human embryo or fetus does not have the right to be plugged in to a woman against her will, then arguments about how abortions hurt women or how they could adopt a child out will not respond to those arguments. If the unborn really are not persons or do not have the right to remain plugged in, then a woman could logically be allowed to have an abortion to save the pain of bonding with the child then letting him/her go. Also, all surgeries carry an element of risk, so if there is nothing morally wrong with killing the unborn child, then the fact that it hurts some women is not a response to their argument.

This will avoid frustrations in the pro-choice person, who may feel as if they're not being listened to because the pro-life person is responding to a peripheral argument, but not the one being presented. In our attempt to have good, intelligent discussions on the abortion issue, we need to keep in mind what our arguments for the pro-life position are and what arguments pro-choice people present, as well as how to adequately respond to their arguments.

[1] The book I'm reading through is Can You Believe it's True? Christian Apologetics in a Modern & Postmodern Era, but the principle that I'm espousing in this article is one that anyone, religious or non-religious, can benefit from.

The Hard Case of Rape, Revisited

I have written before on the rape exception, and I would like to do so again to take another crack at convincing my pro-life colleagues who hold to a rape exception that we should not allow legal abortions in the case of rape. Please see my previous article for more of my thoughts on the rape exception. I will not be re-hashing any of those thoughts in this article.

A Discussion of Capacities and Their Relation to Human Personhood

There has been some confusion on some of my articles as to what it means for humans to have an inherent nature as rational agents, so I'd like to take the time now to expound upon just what is meant by an inherent nature, as well as the concept of capacities and what they have to do with human personhood.

A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part V

I have spent four parts in this series responding to Warren's argument that the unborn cannot be considered persons. Warren wrote her essay in 1973 in a publication called The Monist, but in 1982 she re-published the essay with an added postscript. One of the objections she was receiving to her paper is that it would also justify infanticide as well as abortion. She sought to reply to this claim in her postscript.

A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part IV

In part one, I examined Warren's claim about humanity, in part two I examined Warren's qualifications for personhood and showed why the unborn qualify, and in part three I examined Warren's two questions about personhood and showed that her position fails to disqualify the unborn from personhood. In this article, I will examine her argument about potentiality.

Stretton Debunked: A Response to Dean Stretton on Frank Beckwith

In part one of this series, I responded to an article by Dean Stretton responding to an article by Peter Kreeft. In this article, I'll be responding to Dean Stretton's response to a series by Frank Beckwith, called Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights. Again, it would be best to read Beckwith's articles, then Stretton's article, then my article for the full discussion. You do not have to read all of Beckwith's articles. Stretton does not use the fallacious arguments that Beckwith outlines in the first two parts, so you can skip ahead to the third part (though the first two parts are definitely worth reading).