Since conservatives seem determined to get votes by making an issue out of abortion, I’d like to look at some of these arguments. At the Secular Pro-Life Perspectives blog, Clinton Wilcox rejected my spectrum argument supporting abortion. This is a particularly relevant response since he doesn’t use religious pro-life arguments.

The spectrum argument

My argument is more fully discussed in this post, but I’ll summarize it here briefly.

Consider the above figure of the blue-green spectrum. We can argue where blue ends and green begins, but it should be easy to agree that blue is not green. In other words, the two ends are quite different.

The same is true for a spectrum of personhood. Imagine a single fertilized egg cell at the left of the nine-month-long spectrum and a trillion-cell newborn on the right. The newborn is a person. And it’s far more than just 1,000,000,000,000 undifferentiated cells. These cells are organized and connected to make a person—it has arms and legs, eyes and ears, a brain and a nervous system, a stomach and digestive system, a heart and circulatory system, skin, liver, and so on.

The secular pro-life response

Wilcox begins by praising the argument as having substance rather than simply demonizing pro-life advocates, so we’re off to a good start.

His first concern:

The immediate problem with this argument is that he gives no attempt to argue at what point we actually do become persons.

Yes, it’s important to get the OK/not-OK dividing line for abortion right, but that’s not my interest here. Legislators deal with tough moral issues all the time. Take the issue of the appropriate prison sentence for robbery. Six months? Five years? What mitigating circumstances are relevant? Does it matter if a gun was involved? What if the gun was used as a threat but it wasn’t loaded? What if some other weapon was used? What if someone was hurt?

It’s a person’s life we’re talking about, so the sentence must be decided carefully, and yet penalties for this and a myriad other specific crimes have been wrestled with and resolved in 50 states and hundreds of countries.

The same is true for the cutoff for abortion—it’s a tough decision, but it’s been made many times.

My focus here is not on the cutoff line. I’ll leave that to medical experts and policy makers who have more expertise and interest than I do.

Potential

Back to Wilcox:

He resorts to the tired old arguments that an acorn is not an oak tree (no, but it is an immature oak tree) ….

Nope. An acorn is not a tree at all. It’s a potential tree, and it may become one in twenty years, but it’s not a tree right now.

Wilcox next responds to my comparison of a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron. I said that the single neuron doesn’t think 10^–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all.

It may be true that a brain with one neuron doesn’t think nearly as fast as a brain with 100 billion neurons, but he misses the point that it is still a brain. It is just an immature brain.

No, it is a potential brain.

Analogy to the personhood spectrum

Let’s consider the brain by first considering an analogous situation with water. A single molecule of water does not have the properties of wetness, fluidity, pH, salinity, or surface tension, but these and other properties emerge when trillions of trillions of water molecules come together.

Wetness is an emergent property—we see it only when enough water molecules get together. Similarly, thinking and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain. A single neuron doesn’t think slower; it doesn’t think at all. A “brain” that doesn’t think is not a brain—immature or otherwise.

It hasn’t had the chance to develop into a fully mature brain.

Bingo! That’s precisely the issue. Wilcox is making the Argument from Potential: the single neuron isn’t a brain now, but it will be. The single fertilized human egg cell isn’t a baby now, but it will be.

He’s right, of course—it will be a baby. But the point is that it isn’t now. A future baby is not a baby. It’ll be a baby in the future.

The vastness of the spectrum

The spectrum argument fails to adequately address the fact that there is a continuity of human development that begins at fertilization and doesn’t stop until after birth. Logically, that suggests that teenagers are “more of a person” than toddlers ….

I addressed this in the original argument, but let me illustrate the issue with a quick round of “One of these things is not like the others.” Our candidates today are an adult, a teenager, a newborn baby, and a single fertilized human egg cell. Okay, candidates, raise your hand if you have a brain. Now raise your hand if you have a pancreas. If you have skin. Eyes. Nose. Bones. Muscles.

Now raise your hand if you have hands.

The difference between newborns, teens, and adults is negligible compared to the single cell at the other end of the spectrum, which has nothing that we commonly think of as a trait of personhood. The commonality across the spectrum is that they all have eukaryotic cells with Homo sapiens DNA. That’s it. That’s not something that many of us get misty-eyed about. Very little sentimental poetry is written about the kind of DNA in the cells of one’s beloved.

What do we call the spectrum?

The unborn may be less developed at the single-cell stage than the 100 trillion cell stage, but it is still a human person at that stage.

Take the spectrum from single cell to newborn. Wilcox argues that it’s not a spectrum of humanness because a single cell and a newborn are both human. But it’s a spectrum of something. I call it a spectrum of personhood, but I’m flexible. You tell me: tell me what a newborn is that a single cell isn’t. I say that a newborn is a person and the single cell isn’t, but I’m open to better terms.

Wilcox wants to skirt the spectrum and say that it’s irrelevant or meaningless, but it’s everything to this discussion. A newborn is something that a single cell isn’t. Think of the many words we have for subtle distinctions after birth: newborn, baby, infant, toddler, and so on. Surely English has a label that Wilcox will find acceptable for capturing the difference between the cooing, crying, pooping, sleeping, eating newborn and the microscopic, insensate cell.

Be honest with the facts. Don’t try to pretend that this immense spectrum doesn’t exist.

Miscellaneous arguments

[Seidensticker’s] comparison of the pro-life argument to PETA’s slogan of “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” is simply a false analogy.

Sounds like Wilcox missed my point. PETA tries to collapse a spectrum with this slogan. They want to argue that, no, we shouldn’t put animals into bins along a spectrum (in this case: vermin, livestock, pet, and human). Animals are animals—all the same.

Does Wilcox accept this? If he rejects PETA’s attempt to collapse or ignore this spectrum, then perhaps he sees the problem with ignoring the vast difference between newborn and cell.

Seidensticker’s point about how evangelicals thirty years ago supported abortion is simply irrelevant.

Not to people who bring up Christian arguments! If it doesn’t apply to a secular perspective, fair enough, but I was addressing more people than just you.

I have . . . soundly refuted the “spectrum argument.”

Gotta disagree with you there. You’ve mischaracterized it and sidestepped the argument. If you want to address it squarely, I’ll consider responding to your reaction.

If my oven quits working in the middle of making a cake,
do I call the undercooked mess a cake?
— Nate Frein

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/24/14.)

Have you heard of Trinity Car Company? They’re new, and they claim to have a much more sensible approach to car buying. They’ve eliminated the showroom, and you go right to the factory. A friend of mine, whom I’ll call Frank, told me about his experience. For his college graduation present, Frank’s father made the down payment. Frank wasn’t sure that Trinity was the right car or that now was the right time, but he went along.

Frank was greeted in the lobby by the salesman, a clean-cut young man with a big smile.

“I’m amazed you’re so quick,” Frank said. “I just put my order in a week ago, and yet here I am.”

The salesman carried himself as if he had found his dream job. “We treat every car for the miracle it is,” he said. “‘Every Design has a Designer,’ after all.” He pointed up to the large plaque on the wall that carried the same motto. “Well, let’s go see your baby.” The salesman ushered Frank into a large room that appeared to be empty except for a car’s engine block on the floor. It lay on a fuzzy pink blanket. The pistons hadn’t been installed, and the six shiny cylinders were empty. “There you are,” he said. “You’ve made a nice choice. She’s a beaut! Five days ago, it was just a schematic.”

Frank looked around. “Where?”

“Right here.” The salesman took a step closer to the engine block and pointed.

“That’s not a car.”

“It is a car.” He put his hands on his hips and smiled, looking back and forth between Frank and the engine block. “Well, if we’re done here, let’s go wrap up the paperwork.”

“For what?” Frank said. “It’s not finished.”

“It will be.”

“Then get back to me when it is. I’m not paying $21,000 for that.”

The salesman cocked his head to the side like a perplexed puppy. “I must say, you seem to have a cramped definition of ‘car.’ Think about how fun it’ll be to drive.”

“But it’s not a car!”

“Of course it’s a car. What else would it be? It’s not a flower. It’s not a dinosaur. It’s a car. You’re just not familiar with the development process.” He walked over to the engine and pointed to the front of the block. “And take a look at this.”

Frank walked over and knelt next to him.

“See? It even has your VIN number—it’s unique.” The salesman ran his finger gently over the small engraved characters as he read out the number. “You can touch it if you want to.”

Frank stood and waved his hands. “Look, this is not what I wanted.”

The salesman said, “Getting a car is big step, I’ll grant you, but I’m sure you want to see this process through.”

“I do not.”

The salesman’s smile dissolved. “I can show you what it’ll look like next week and the week after that and so on. Let me show you the pictures.”

Frank held up his hands. “Hold on. Maybe this is my fault. To me, a ‘car’ is what it’ll be when it’s finished, but I don’t want to debate definitions. A car that won’t be finished for months simply won’t work for me. This isn’t a fit.” He took a step toward the door.

The salesman ran his hands through his hair compulsively, erasing the clean-cut façade. “You knew about this when you signed up.”

“What’s the big deal? Sell it to someone else.”

The salesman looked at Frank as if he’d vomited on himself. “That’s not the way it works here. You saw the VIN. This is your car! Do you know what happens if you don’t take it?” He paused to catch his breath. “Let me show you.” He took out a small packet of photos from his jacket pocket.

“No, that’s okay,” Frank said, stepping back.

“I insist.” The salesman stood between Frank and the door. “They come with a crane with sharp tongs. They pick it up. They drag it out.” He flipped through photos of these steps. “They put it in here.” This photo showed some sort of grinding machine with enormous teeth. “Is that what you want? Can you live with that?”

Frank feinted to one side, and the salesman blocked him. Frank dashed around the other side and ran to the door. He looked back as he yanked the door open.

The salesman was holding up the photos as if showing a cross to a vampire. “Murderer!” he said, his eyes glistening. “Murderer!”

I was not;
I was;
I am not;
I do not care.
— Epicurus’s observation on death

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/2/13.)

Image credit: Don O’Brien, flickr, CC

It starts small. Pro-life voters say that a fetus is a baby. When it’s at eight months and is viable on its own, it’s a baby. When it’s at five months and the mother can first feel the fetus moving, it’s a baby. When it’s at three months, with tiny eyes and fingers, it’s a baby.
When it’s a single fertilized human egg cell at day one, just 100 microns across, it’s not much of a baby, but who can begrudge a couple calling it whatever they want?
So let’s say it’s a “baby” right back to day one. Babies must be protected. Everyone has a right to safety, and babies are vulnerable and deserve particular attention. Our natural instincts to protect cute big-eyed things come into play—who could complain about that?
The simplest moral logic would demand that these babies be protected, and it isn’t surprising that millions of American voters are single issue voters, declaring that it’s a baby right back to day one. Does Donald Trump say that he’s going to fight to protect those lives and Hillary Clinton not? With Supreme Court appointments at stake, that makes it easy—you vote for Donald Trump, even if you must hold your nose to do so.
That first step is like a drop of rain falling at the crest of a mountain range that is carried downhill by a stream and then a river. If it falls a little this way, it flows westward. A little that way, and it flows eastward. A small change makes a big difference.
And the small change in our example of pregnancy is that definition of “baby.” You say that it’s a “baby” on day one, and you flow inevitably to cute, then vulnerable, then protective instincts, then society must protect it, then government must protect it, … and then voting for Trump.
But maybe you don’t need to start with that. Let’s make a small change. What if you said that as a newborn in your arms at the hospital, that’s a baby. The five-month-old fetus that begins to kick? It’s not really a baby if it hasn’t developed enough to be viable on its own. The three-month-old fetus with eyes and fingers? That’s even less of a baby—it’s just two inches long, not very baby-like, and nowhere near able to live on its own.

On the left is a three-month-old fetus. Think that that’s an adorable baby that must be protected by law? Guess again. On the right is a five-week-old embryo that’s less than half-an-inch long and looks like that thing from the Alien movies.
You see the progression. When you go back in time from a three-trillion-cell newborn to a single cell, it becomes less of a baby as you regress along that spectrum. When you go from a newborn with arms and legs, eyes and ears, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and all the rest back to where there isn’t even a single cell of any of these, it becomes less of a baby. (More here.)
Gestational development is a spectrum. It’s a baby when it’s done; it’s not a baby when it starts.
A pregnant woman can call her fetus anything she wants. The problem is when someone wants to apply their own definition of “baby” onto the rest of the country by law. You say the cell is a baby? You say you’d never have an abortion? That’s fine, just don’t impose that on the rest of us.
And consider the political consequences when you demand that a single cell is a “baby.”

I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion
that that makes you pro-life.
In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking …
if all you want is a child born but not a child fed,
not a child educated, not a child housed.
And why would I think that you don’t?
Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.
We need a much broader conversation
on what the morality of pro-life is.
— Sister Joan Chittister

Image credit: CollieSr, flickr, CC

This is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” addressed by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)
A future America with abortion illegal
Koukl has a simple—some might say childish—attitude toward abortion.

Pro-lifers would like to see abortion abolished, but the only way to really abolish abortion ultimately is to make it illegal, and then the incidence of abortion would shrink to virtually nothing. (@4:05)

With abortion being such an important topic to Koukl’s ministry, you’d think that he would be more educated about it. He’s completely wrong. Making abortions illegal simply means that abortions will be done, just illegally.
We know because America has already tried the experiment. From the Guttmacher Institute:

Before the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, data on abortion in the United States were scarce. In 1955, experts had estimated, on the basis of qualitative assumptions, that 200,000–1,200,000 illegal abortions were performed each year. Despite its wide range, this estimate remained the most reliable indicator of the magnitude of induced abortion for many years. In 1967, researchers confirmed this estimate by extrapolating data from a randomized-response survey conducted in North Carolina: They concluded that a total of 800,000 induced (mostly illegal) abortions were performed nationally each year.

Compare this with the abortion rate of 700,000 per year in the U.S. today, with twice the population of 1955.
A future America where abortion was illegal could simply switch to the simple medical (drug-induced) abortion in many cases. This is already the predominant procedure in many European countries.
We also have examples worldwide showing that making abortion illegal does little to reduce the rate. From CBS News:

Abortion rates are highest where the procedure is illegal, according to a new study. The study also found nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, with the vast majority of unsafe abortions occurring in developing countries.

The Guttmacher Institute says, “Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates” and notes that in Africa and Latin America, where “abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries,” the rate per capita is more than twice that in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Unsurprisingly, poorer safety correlates with abortion being illegal. The New York Times reported on a World Health Organization study: “About 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year [and] 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.” That’s a mortality rate of 1 for every 300. By comparison, the mortality rate in the U.S., with legal abortion, is 1 for every 170,000 (the mortality rate for women giving birth is 15 times worse).
Abortion providers are basically vultures, right?
Koukl next attacks the ethics of the abortion providers.

Without the [abortion] doctors, who are exploiting people’s difficult circumstances for money, you probably aren’t going to have the abortions. (@19:16)

I didn’t realize that abortion providers exploit people’s hardships. Is that true for other specialties? I suppose the greedy oncologist rubs his hands and smiles when he sees new names in his appointment calendar. The predatory geriatrician twists his mustache and cackles when another old man hobbles in. The rapacious pediatrician sees a crying kid with a broken arm and thinks, “There’s a month’s payment on Daddy’s Bentley!”
Apparently, I have my ignorance to thank for being able to look at doctors and see hard-working professionals who view their patients as more than piles of cash.
In contrast to Koukl’s contempt for abortion providers and his lack of concern for women with unwanted pregnancies, consider Dr. Willie Parker, who travels from his home in Chicago to Mississippi twice a month to be one of only two doctors providing abortions at Mississippi’s last abortion clinic. Women desperately need a medical procedure, and Dr. Parker provides it. He said, “I do abortions because I am a Christian.”
Remember Kermit Gosnell’s filthy abortion clinic? Pro-lifers were horrified, and yet those conditions are what they’re pushing for. Making abortion illegal doesn’t eliminate abortion, it just drives it underground to clinics that aren’t inspected. When organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide safe abortions are squeezed out by nuisance regulations or other regulatory hurdles, illegal operations will fill the vacuum. Similarly, when noisy abortion protesters create a gauntlet at safe clinics, women will be driven to ones that cut corners. One of Gosnell’s patients said about the closest Planned Parenthood clinic, “The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death.”
Coat hangers
Three years ago, I attended a celebration of the forty-year anniversary of the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal in the United States. Sarah Weddington was the lawyer on the winning side, and she spoke of her experience on a plane trip. She was wearing a button showing a coat hanger with a red “not” line through it (like this) as a symbol of the pre-Roe days that she was determined America would not revisit.
A female flight attendant walked past her several times until she finally said, “I’ve just got to ask you: what have you got against coat hangers?”
Weddington’s point was that this young woman had lived her entire life with abortion as a right. She didn’t know of a time before that right when coat hangers were the abortion method of last resort. More importantly, she didn’t realize how tenuous that right is. Millions of conservatives would make abortion illegal in an instant if they could. Complacency is not an option.
Continue to part 4: “Arguing the Pro-Life Case (Such as It Is)“

“Explain to me how making abortion illegal
wouldn’t lower abortion rates.”
Explain to me how making drugs illegal
didn’t lower drug use rates.
— commenter adam

Image credit: Pēteris, flickr, CC

Greg Koukl and Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason podcast recently responded to an issue raised in the U.S. Republican campaign, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?”
Here’s how they outline the dilemma for pro-life Christians. Christians declare that abortion is murder, but you can’t have a crime without the appropriate punishment. Both the abortion provider and the woman herself should be severely punished—this is murder, after all.
On the other hand, that paints Christians as callous and unfeeling, so maybe we shouldn’t impose a harsh penalty on the woman. Or maybe any penalty at all. But in that case, what happened to the “abortion = murder” claim? Was that just hyperbole? Does the Christian carrying the sign know that abortion isn’t really murder? If it’s just a little harmless exaggeration to make a point, how compelling is the pro-life case?
Though the boys tried mightily to extricate the average Christian from the punish-her-or-not dilemma, none of their attempts eliminated the problem.
Attempt 1: suicide analogy
If only the labeling of the crime (which the pro-lifers want) could be detached from the associated punishment (which they don’t want). They point to a recent article that gives an analogy they’d like to follow. From that article:

Until the late 1960s, suicide was illegal in the United States. Of course the successful suicide cannot be prosecuted. Still, given that the great majority of suicide attempts are unsuccessful, we could in principle prosecute large numbers of people for unjustified attempts on their own innocent lives. Why don’t we do this?

We don’t now because attempted suicide has been decriminalized. But in the 1960s, in some states it was a misdemeanor or even a felony. That is, it was a crime with a punishment. (Is there any other kind?)
Public opinion has since softened. The article continues:

In general, it doesn’t seem either prudent or constructive [to punish suicide attempts]. Suicidal people typically aren’t a public safety risk. Anyone who wants to end his own life probably needs support and care.

The parallel is that women who have abortions are also not public safety risks, which allows Christians to sidestep punishing those women.
What actually happened was that the hypocrisy of toothless laws against suicide led to it being decriminalized. Does the pro-life movement want to simply repeat that blunder and criminalize abortion with no threat of punishment? Is this just hyperbole, or is abortion actually murder? If so, demand the appropriate punishment.
This parallels the problem with many Christian anti-gay arguments. They point to the Bible to argue that homosexuality is wrong (it doesn’t say that—see here and here), but then they refuse to bring along the Old Testament’s punishment. With both abortion and homosexuality, there can be no crime without a punishment.
Attempt 2: drug use analogy
Drug use is another parallel. The drug user is the pregnant woman, and the drug dealer is the abortion provider. Punish only the latter, Koukl says.
The analogy argues that drug users only hurt themselves, like the person attempting suicide. Drug users do hurt society if their habit drives them to crime—robbery or burglary, for example—but of course when they commit those crimes, they get the regular punishment. When a woman asks for and then consumes a chemical abortifacient (the preferred approach up to about two months of gestation), she should logically receive the punishment due any crime she committed.
As with suicide, the trends aren’t going where Koukl wants them to. Attempted suicide was criminalized; now it’s not. Drug use was criminalized, but that’s being reduced. Crimes are punished consistently; it’s just that some things are no longer crimes. Koukl wants the unbalanced situation where abortion is a crime … without punishment for the central participant.
Attempt 3: fetal homicide laws
Koukl notes that 38 U.S. states have fetal homicide laws in place. These laws apply to “fetuses killed by violent acts against pregnant women.” There you go—killing a fetus is homicide.
There’s just one point that must be emphasized. It’s a small point. Indeed, it’s so trivial that I hesitate to muddy the water by mentioning it, but it must be made clear: sometimes the pregnant woman very much wants to keep the pregnancy and sometimes she very much doesn’t! These are two completely different situations, and fetal homicide laws are meant to protect the woman and fetus in the first situation only. For our discussion, this is a red herring.
Read the other posts in this series:

• “Pro-Life Advocates Running from the Consequences of their Actions“
• “When Abortion is Illegal in America“
• “Arguing the Pro-Life Case (Such as It Is)“
• “Do Pro-Life Advocates Want to Reduce Abortion? Sure Doesn’t Look Like It.“

If men struggle and strike a woman with child
so that she has a miscarriage,
yet there is no further injury,
he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him,
and he shall pay as the judges decide.
— Exodus 21:22–3

Image credit: Anna Levinzon, flickr, CC

I stumbled across an article on TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s entertainment and news network, claiming “Abortionists and Planned Parenthood Shooter Are Just Two Sides Of The Same Coin.” Matt Walsh is the author, and his goal is to show that it wasn’t the outrageous rhetoric of pro-life fanatics that pushed a gunman to shoot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood facility, killing three and injuring nine.

I’m not Walsh’s audience. He’s preaching to his choir, using terms like “pro-aborts” and “abortion fanatics” to refer to people like me, but the article gives an insight into the hostility of and rationalization by this community.

Violent talk has consequences. Walsh wants to walk away from any consequences of violent rhetoric from extreme quarters of the pro-life movement.

[Clues that he’s unlike the typical pro-life terrorist] has not prevented abortion enthusiasts on the left from gleefully spiking the football as if some point has been proven by the random violent outburst of a paranoid hermit.

The point is that speech can have consequences. Spin a story about how Planned Parenthood is an evil organization, and this kind of violence may be a consequence. If you don’t think it through, impressionable readers might not either. As the Bible says, you’ve sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.

As another example of speech having consequences, one mother tried to kill herself and her two daughters to avoid the Tribulation predicted by Harold Camping for May 21, 2011 (more here and here). Did Camping deserve no condemnation for saying that the world would end, knowing that some of his gullible flock might take him seriously?

Here’s an example of extreme anti-abortion speech from video evangelist Joshua Feuerstein:

I say, tonight, we punish Planned Parenthood. I think it’s time that abortion doctors should have to run and hide and be afraid for their life. (7/29/15)

That was in response to the anti-Planned Parenthood videos. After the Colorado shooting, pro-lifers tweeted about “babies” saved.

How pro-life is the pro-life movement?

Walsh says it goes without saying that he’s shocked by the shooter’s actions.

It goes without saying because, for one thing, we’re pro-life.

No, you’re pro-birth. How about being pro-health care? Or working to improve the society into which these babies are born? And isn’t it inconsistent when most of those who oppose abortions also accept the death penalty?

For another, there’s no logic in it.

Wrong. You went on and on about the deaths of “over 50 million babies.” That’s BS, of course—there’s a spectrum of personhood across the gestation period, and a single cell isn’t a baby, a human being, or a person—but it is quite logical to kill a few lives to save many. You can’t argue that abortion is murder but then claim that murder to reduce abortions is illogical.

The lives that were snuffed out in the front of the building weren’t any more or less human than the lives exterminated in the back. Our humanity does not exist on a spectrum.

Walsh imagines that Homo sapiens DNA is all that makes someone human, but with this he invents single-celled humans. Indeed, humanness does exist on a spectrum. A single cell isn’t very human, while the trillion-cell newborn nine months later is. (If you’d prefer, say that the single cell isn’t a person while the newborn is.)

Why shoehorn gestation into a binary situation? Drop the ridiculous idea that a single cell is a “baby” or “person.” Say that the single cell isn’t a person, the newborn is, and it’s a spectrum in between.

[A pro-choice advocate outraged at the vitriol is] like a Nazi standing up at Nuremberg and scolding society for hating him.

Nope. The Nazi was on trial for crimes against humanity. Planned Parenthood kills a fetus that isn’t yet a person. Walsh will predictably respond that it will be a person if given time, but this simply becomes the Argument from Potential—it isn’t inherently worth protecting now, but it will be. Which is no argument at all.

Apologies. Walsh rejects the shooter’s actions, but he chafes at this obligation.

We’re the ones who have to be seen condemning murder, as if there’s any reasonable question at all about where we stand on the subject? 

You demand that moderate Muslims apologize for Muslim violence, don’t you? If so, you can appreciate how we’d like some assurance from the pro-life community that they reject the shooter’s actions that they might have triggered, but there’s still an asymmetry. The Friendly Atheist notes the difference between how Muslims after the Paris attacks are treated and how anti-Planned Parenthood activists are treated.

Unlike the seemingly endless stream of demands and condemnations that followed the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, no one has suggested that churches in which Planned Parenthood are routinely depicted as the devil’s spawn be closed; no one has demanded that Evangelicals who believe performers of abortions are committing crimes against humanity should be issued with special identity cards; and no one has called for arresting or deporting the inciters who exploit such incidents to whip up hate (and garner more votes).

Dismissing murder. Walsh says that the shooter’s actions were bad, but. He can’t leave it at that. He can’t ignore a grandstanding opportunity to argue the other side of the issue, that the shared enemy, abortion providers, are the worst people imaginable.

George Tiller, the heinous late-term baby executioner who ruthlessly slaughtered thousands of viable and fully developed infants, is the only abortion worker to be killed by an abortion opponent this century. That’s it. One. And he was one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived.

You make it sound like working at a Planned Parenthood clinic is no more risky than being a librarian. Not so: “Between 1997 and 2012, there were seventy-three violent attacks at abortion clinics across the country” (source).

Go research why women went to Tiller to get abortions. Was it because they didn’t want to be so fat? Or was it a more substantial reason—birth defects, mother’s health, catastrophic changes in financial status, or something similar?

And let’s pause to listen to your rhetoric. Was Tiller seriously “one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived”? Few of us would morally object to going back in time to assassinate Joseph Mengele or Heinrich Himmler or Adolph Hitler. You’ve intentionally put Tiller with this company, so why do you object to the shooter’s actions?

This hypocrisy is the problem that Walsh can’t acknowledge. He wants to say that the shooter was a killer and Planned Parenthood kills, so they’re in the same boat. He’s cut from different cloth because he’s pro-life.

But the rage he reveals in this article gives just as strong an argument for a very different arrangement: now it’s the killer with Walsh in the same boat because of his venomous rhetoric that could easily provoke violent action. Planned Parenthood is the odd man out because it provides legal abortions before the fetus is a person.

As the article progresses, Walsh is on a roll, and the indignant “Of course we deplore violence—we’re pro-life!” attitude is gone. With no ear for irony, he repeats the line the killer is said to have used:

Planned Parenthood sells the parts of dead babies.

Wrong again. The mother can choose to donate the fetus for research, and Planned Parenthood can be reimbursed for their costs.

Planned Parenthood is a rotten, corrupt, depraved, vile, disgusting, brutal, murderous conglomerate of butchers and mercenaries.

And yet you wonder how anyone could possibly be incited to violence?

Abortion fanatics hate pro-lifers personally. They hate Christianity. They hate children. They hate life itself. Theirs is the sort of hatred that destroys the soul and dissolves the human conscience. We hate what is evil; they hate what is good.

And now it’s just a rant.

Improving society.

Why don’t you [Planned Parenthood] just shut up and work on not killing babies?

Are you? What are you doing to minimize unwanted pregnancies?

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the United States, the annual birth rate was 56 per 1000 women aged 15–19. Compare this to 8 in the Netherlands. The U.S. abortion rate for that group of women was 30 per 1000, while it was 4 in the Netherlands. What are we doing wrong (or what is the Netherlands doing right)? Clearly, there’s enormous room for improvement.

Is it better sex education? Is it easier access to contraception? Whatever it is, cutting the number of abortions in half in five years simply through more effective education and policy seems possible. Why are you approaching it the hard way? Instead of swimming upstream, you could work with pro-choice people who want the same thing. It almost sounds like you’re not really serious about this, and abortion isn’t the holocaust you claim it to be.

The trolley problem. Almost everyone has heard of this thought experiment, but let me give a brief summary. I think it’s relevant to this situation.

Imagine a trolley that’s heading toward five unsuspecting workers on the track. If it continues, it will kill them all. But there’s a switch, and you can reroute the trolley down another path with only one worker. Would you switch the trolley?

Most people say they would. But what if you’ve got the same trolley heading for the five workers, and you’re on a bridge over the tracks. The only way to stop the trolley is with a large weight in its path. You’re not big enough to stop it, but there’s a fat man on the bridge who is. Do you push him over?

Most people say they wouldn’t, but it’s the same calculation, five deaths vs. one.

The Colorado shooter has in effect pushed the fat man over. He’s taken the unthinkable but logical step—logical given Walsh’s own analysis. Walsh is left fuming about protocol—it’s one thing to label abortion providers as the most wicked scum on the earth, but in polite society one doesn’t actually act on it! He wants his rage but won’t accept the consequences.

But the consequence of using language like that, can be very dangerous.
I think candidates need to step back, take a deep breath, and understand …
we have a responsibility to use thoughtful and careful language.
— Wendy Davis, the former Texas state senator
who filibustered to block legislation that would restrict abortion

Image credit: Kit Clutch, flickr, CC