Ignorance of Pro-Choice
I had planned to write a post yesterday refuting two common Bible verses that pro-choice advocates cite to “prove” that the Bible is actually pro-choice. Of course, if the choicers understood the historical and cultural context of those verses, they’d be singing a different tune. Or at least not using them to undermine the Bible’s clear pro-life position.
For more, check the blog fellow apologist and brother in Christ, Dave Armstrong, who has listed numerous verses on why the Bible is pro-life.
If I had scheduled that post to appear today, that would have left me free to read and research on the scientific and philosophical reflections on what makes a life alive. That would have been posted tomorrow. And then I’d have the weekend free to finish my series on DaGoodS’s questions that Christians hope no one asks.
But I got unexpectedly busy yesterday, and that busyness continued through today, which means I wasn’t as active in “Ask Them What They Mean by Choice” Day, the pro-life countermeasure to Blog for Choice Day, as I wanted to be.
But I still wanted to do something for it, so I found @juliewashere, a Twitter user and founder the Golden Coat Hanger, a blog on feminist and abortion issues, and I decided to use her tweets to show how extraordinarily inconsistent her pro-choice position actually is. It’s inconsistent to the point of frightening. Let’s look.
Twitter user @KatyPundit (who is male and named David; so much for my uncanny ability to guess gender using forum aliases) told Julie “You gave consent when you spread em open.” Julie responded:
that’s consent to sex, and ONLY sex.
Which is a perfect example of why sex education in America is failing. Pregnancy results from sex. Not every time, but it is a looming possibility each and every time a man and a woman lay down together. So, if you have sex, you’d best be prepared for pregnancy.
David reminds her of this fact: “LOL, Sex makes babies. At least that’s how MY kids got here… U came by Stork?” And Julie responds with a disconnect between sex and pregnancy:
no, pregnancy makes babies, and it takes several months.
Nice, genius. What do you think makes a person pregnant? I think this line of reasoning comes from someone who wants to have sex with any given partner at any given time and not have to worry about a potential pregnancy. In other words, sex isn’t for intimacy and love; it has no spiritual dimension, nor should it always be connected with bringing new life into this world. Sex is purely for the enjoyment of the two people doing it.
Yet another instance of people wanting to give into the flesh and jettison anything to do with higher, spiritual decisions. It can’t be about self-control and discipline! Sex feels too good to be disciplined about it, right? I heard Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad argue that pre-marital sex was a right belonging to all human beings that has been co-opted by religion. I guess Julie would agree with that line of reasoning.
Jack Yoest (@JackYoest) said, “The mothers went in to get a dead baby,” of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s patients. Julie responded:
No, they went in to get rid of fetuses.
What does she think a fetus is? Not a person, as she tweets:
Fetuses are real, they just aren’t people. Learn to read.
And:
I was never a fetus just like I was never a sperm. There was simply no me yet.
First, notice that there was no “her” in either the sperm or the fetus. That will become important later. Now, look at this contradictory tweet:
Live doesn’t begin at conception, it was already present before that. You fail biology.
And Julie fails the argument. Abortion takes a human life unjustly, which is the textbook definition of murder. She just admitted that life was present before conception, therefore it follows life is also present during the pregnancy and development of the unborn child (she denies the existence of an “unborn child” in another tweet). However, if she denies that a fetus is a human life, she must explain when it becomes one.
Julie defines human life in this tweet:
children are sentient, sapient, non-parasitic human beings. Nothing magic about it. Welcome to reality.
Julie’s previous tweets show us that she understands (though she may not acknowledge it) that the mind and the brain are separate. This tweet essentially confirms that position. I’ve established in this post that the brain and major organs function in a fetus prior to 10 weeks. Julie explains that while in the womb, before and after conception, there was no “her.” She believes that it is the mind that makes a person a person. That is evidenced by the fact she has tweeted “Women are people. There is just no compromising that point” and “bio fact: fetuses are non-sentient.”
Yet the mind and the brain are inexorably connected. When the brain ceases to function, the mind loses its ties to this material existence. Without my Christian faith, I couldn’t answer for certain what happens then. The problem Julie has is that she must explain when the mind begins to exist in order to definitively argue that the act of abortion isn’t murder. She never does that; she is basing her pro-choice position, then, on the unproven assumption that the fetus has no mind. Yet it has a brain that functions.
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Posted on January 21, 2011, in Morality, Philosophy, Pro-Life Issues and tagged abortion, right to life, Worldview. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
Josiah Concept Ministries 
Right. “Her”, as a self, is an emergent property of the brain and body.
What does that contradict? A plant is alive. A fungus is alive. A zygote is alive. None of them have a “self”, and none of them are a person.
Julie is saying that the zygote is alive, but it’s not a person. The zygotes from the mother and father were both alive; the blastocyst was alive; the embryo was alive; all long before it was “her”. Can you really not see the distinction?
A plant is still a plant before it’s fully grown though, right? Humans have a self because they have conciousness. Do plants?
An acorn is not an oak tree, despite being constructed from oak tree cells. A blastocyst is not a human person, despite being constructed from human cells.
There’s no clear bright line separating an acorn from an oak tree; it’s a continuum, a gradual development. Likewise for a blastocyst to a human person.
For purposes of law we must, of course, make a distinction somewhere (and likewise, I suppose, for the oak tree). But that arbitrary distinction doesn’t have any sound basis in biology; it’s a human construct.
Your “continuum argument” lands you in serious trouble. You’re supporting my position, not your own.
The blastocyst is a human, not a “human person.” It (probably) lacks consciousness, but that doesn’t mean it lacks basic humanity, because to be human is to be much more than just a clump of cells constructing a biological machine. This basic humanity is present from the get-go, just like the basic “oak-tree-ness” is present from the get-go in the acorn. You say there’s no delineation between an acorn and an oak tree, the development proceeds along a continuum. Same with zygote to embryo to fetus, then a baby is born, who becomes a toddler, then a youngster to pre-pubescent to adolescent to young adult to adult to middle age to old age to senior citizen to corpse. In all cases, it’s still a human but in different stages of life. It’s still a crime to defile a corpse, right? Why not a zygote? Why not an embryo? Why not a fetus?
If you’re recognizing the basic humanity at all stages of life as they proceed across a continuum, then pro-choice is seriously inconsistent. And the purpose of this post was to show exactly that. You have done that for me in spades, and for that I thank you.
What does “a human” mean, if not a human person? Why draw that distinction?
By your argument in the statement above, that must mean “the acorn is an oak tree”. If you think that, I don’t see where there can be common ground in this argument.
If you don’t think that, then you’re making some distinction between acorn-to-oak-tree versus blastocyst-to-baby that isn’t evident.
It does proceed along a continuum. That doesn’t mean no delineation is possible; it does mean that any delineation we make is arbitrary and not due to any necessary property.
I was thinking the same myself (“But that arbitrary… human construct.”) Personally I think that reinforces the argument, but fair enough.