The election is done, but I thought now is as good a time as
ever to share an argument against abortion that I heard from Greg Koukl. So this is a temporary break away from the
chain of classical arguments that I've been posting. However, the argument is still in deductive
form and which means that the conclusion relies on the truth of the premises.
It is simple:
#1 It is wrong to kill humans for the reasons that people
give for abortions.
#2 An abortion kills a human.
#3 Therefore, it is wrong to do an abortion.
As a reminder the argument is deductive and I think it is
also valid, meaning that the conclusion follows from the premises. The question
then is are the premises true? Premise
#1 should be obviously true. A few
reasons that are given for why abortions should be legal are:
- An individual's rights for personal and private choice in a free society
- Inability to support a child
- Genetic defects
- Rape or incest
- Unwanted pregnancies lead to ruined and unhappy lives for both the mother and the child
Now at this point I'm not talking about abortions yet. All I am saying is that none of these reasons
are good reasons for killing another human being. For instance, it does not
make sense to argue that my father can kill me because he has "rights for
personal and private choice in a free society" or because he has become
unable to "support a child."
It should be obvious that it is wrong for anyone to kill another human
for any of these reasons. Now consider
premise #2. If it is true that a fetus is a human being, then the conclusion
follows and abortion is wrong. In fact,
it is not just wrong, it is bona-fide murder. So what is the unborn? If the fetus is not a human being, then no
justification is necessary. Bernard
Nathanson, a medical doctor who co-founded the National Association for the
Repeal of Abortion Laws (but later became pro-life), states:"There is simply no doubt that even the early embryo is a human being. All its genetic coding and all its features are indisputably human. As to being, there is no doubt that it exists, is alive, is self-directed, and is not the same being as the mother–and is therefore a unified whole."
Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a pro-choice advocate, says:
"There is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being."
Jerome LeJeune, Professor of Genetics at University of
Descartes says:
"After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being. [It] is no longer a matter of taste or opinion...it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception."
Even if you think there's too much scientific speculation
for the average person to know for sure (which is not the case), we can still ponder the question of when life
begins. Is it at consciousness? Is it at
birth? Is it when the "thing" becomes self-dependent or fully
developed? All of these things seem
arbitrary. If it is consciousness, what
about unconscious babies? If it is at
birth, then what does a few feet of distance from inside to outside the womb
have to do with making you a person? If it is self-dependence or full
development, then no one becomes a person until their early twenties. No one argues that it is okay to terminate a living baby five minutes after it is born. But what is the defining difference about the same baby six minutes earlier, or six months earlier, that makes its termination permissible? The only defining moment of a person's life
that can be pointed to as their definite beginning of life is conception. But if that is correct then premise #2 is
true. If premise #2 is true, then the
conclusion follows and abortion is morally wrong.
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