I argue that personhood during pregnancy is a spectrum—a newborn is a person, but the single cell at the other end of the spectrum is not.*

My claim about personhood seems to be a simple and obvious point, but there are many who insist (1) that there is no meaningful difference and that the spectrum doesn’t exist and (2) their interpretation should be imposed on the rest of the country by law.

I got a rebuttal to my post by fellow Patheos blogger Tara Edelschick at the Homeschool Chronicles blog, and I’d like to go through Tara’s points. She begins with, “I’m an evangelical, homeschooling, anti-choice woman” and then adds, “I’m also a feminist who is against the death penalty, voted for Ralph Nader every time that was an option, and supported Obama in each of the last two elections.”

Looks like Tara doesn’t fit into the typical evangelical box—in fact, her post was titled “The Constraining Abortion Box.” Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Religious opinions have changed

She begins by responding to lists of American religious leaders in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade who supported it.

The fact that most evangelicals felt differently about abortion in the past is not relevant to whether or not it’s immoral.  After all, fifty years ago plenty of evangelicals also supported anti-miscegenation laws.

Those evangelicals used your Bible and Christian tradition to argue in favor of the pro-choice position. Let’s not dismiss them as fools or charge them with playing games. This makes it clear that the Christian position easily supports the pro-choice position.

When does life begin?

She responds to my saying that, as a father who has helped raise two children from babies to adults, I’m an expert on “babies” and reject that idea that a single invisible cell is one. She said:

Is he really claiming to be an expert on when life begins because he is a father?

Perhaps we’re talking past each other. First, I said that I’m an expert just on what a “baby” is, and something you need a microscope to see isn’t a baby. In other words, if you want to see both ends of the spectrum as a baby, that’s fine, but don’t impose that conclusion on the rest of us.

Second, when life begins was never the subject, but I doubt that we have much disagreement here. The new life with its unique DNA obviously begins at conception, though you could argue that, since fertilization isn’t abiogenesis, it isn’t a beginning but a continuation of life.

Freedom to choose

She said, “I want to hear the voice of God. I understand that many fellow citizens have no such desire. I respect that….” And I’m happy to reciprocate and respect that she wants to hear the voice of God. The United States Constitution establishes many important freedoms, and she has the right to that. Back to the topic, she can choose whether an abortion is right or wrong for her, and she can encourage her opinion on others. Where I object is when she wants to impose her conclusion that abortion is wrong on all of us. (I conclude that she wants Roe overturned because in her subsequent post she says, “In general, women should not be able to choose to end their pregnancies.”)

Back to the subject of what “baby” means, she says, “Even a clear scientific definition of what constitutes a baby will not bring us to consensus.” It may well be that nothing will bring us to consensus, but as for what “baby” means, the relevant Merriam-Webster definition is pretty straightforward: “an extremely young child; especially: infant.”

Given this definition, you can see why I object to the spectrum-collapsing approach of calling the single cell a baby.

Back to the spectrum argument

In my post, I listed a number of familiar before-and-after situations and culminated with “[and] a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.” Her response:

Yup. That’s true. And I don’t know a single person who disagrees.

She should read the comments at my blog to find a slice of Christianity that does indeed disagree. Accepting the significant differences between the two ends of the spectrum is impossible to most of my Christian commenters.

Acknowledging that there is a spectrum of meaning between zygote and college graduate does not mean, as Bob suggests, that one would need to be pro-choice.

Let me back up and note that the goal of my spectrum argument is modest. I simply want to attack the argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is wrong to kill a human life; therefore (3) abortion is wrong. We need to think of a word (“person,” for example) that can be applied to the newborn but can’t be applied to the single cell.

It sounds like Tara and I are on the same page, which is a point of agreement worth celebrating, and yet she still thinks that killing that single cell is wrong. Fair enough—that she consider my argument is all I can ask. What I have a problem with is her wanting to impose her conclusions on the rest of us by law.

So we agree on the spectrum—what’s next?

She moves on to the question of where pro-choicers would draw the line.

Is [the line] at birth? Why? Why not a day before birth? Or three months before birth? What about after birth but before the umbilical cord is cut? Why not a couple weeks after birth? What’s the difference? And who are you to decide?

I sense that Tara sees these questions as some sort of show stopper, but how does society decide any tough moral issue? For example: what should the prison term be for robbery? For attempted robbery where nothing was stolen? For robbery with a gun? For robbery with an injury? For robbery with a death? Is the death penalty a possibility? Are extenuating circumstances relevant and, if so, how are they factored in? And on and on.

These questions are also about people’s lives. Six months or six years makes a big difference in the life of the person sentenced.

We have law-making bodies at various levels through the country, and one hopes that the relevant laws are decided with expert input and measured deliberation. Law making does its imperfect best to answer questions like these about robbery and thousands more.

Indeed, Tara’s questions have already been answered many times. In each state, a combination of state law and federal law defines when an abortion is legal and the various exceptions that might apply.

Who’s to decide?

The most insightful comment I’ve gotten on my many posts in support of abortion was this one from Chuck Wolber:

Have no illusions, if abortion really were murder, it would come as an instinctive reaction from women. It would come with such force that men would be confused by the average woman’s revulsion towards abortion.

Here’s a parallel observation from the other side of the gender aisle:

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament (Florynce Kennedy).

In the same way that society trusts parents to raise their children properly, stepping in only when it’s clear that something has gone wrong, I want to trust the instincts of the pregnant woman. These instincts come from the front lines of the issue, from the person who understands both the importance of the potential person inside her as well as any reasons why a new life many not be a good idea.

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

* If you object to the word “person,” give me a substitute. It must replace “person” in the opening sentence, and so must be something that the newborn is while the single cell is not. With all the words we come up with for small distinctions in the first few years of life—infant, baby, newborn, child, toddler, kid, and so on—surely we can find a word to describe the transition during the nine months of gestation.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/24/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

“A shocking, award-winning documentary!” “Changing the heart of a nation.” “33 minutes that will rock your world.” Ray Comfort lavishes his work with superlatives, but does it hold up?

I watched “180” so that you won’t have to. Spoiler: didn’t rock my world.

It’s always fun to compare the other guy to Hitler

Motives are immediately suspect when the video opens with Hitler and Nazi rallies. Right out of the gate, Godwin’s Law is in force, and Comfort makes clear that you’re either on his side or you have an autographed photo of Hitler on your night table.

With that dichotomy clear, Comfort interviews people hanging out on a sunny day at some Los Angeles beach. He begins by asking, “Who was Hitler?” The snippets introducing us to the (typically) 20-somethings who we’ll see throughout the video all show them clueless in response. If it was unclear before, it’s now obvious that he cherry picked only those interviews that gave him what he wanted. This is a poor foundation on which to show us a half-dozen people at the end who are convinced by his message. One wonders how many candidates he had to discard to get these.

We connect the present with Hitler through a long interview with a young American neo-Nazi with a tall blue Mohawk and a dashed “Cut here” tattoo across his throat. And then, videos of concentration camp aftermath.

Comfort primes his interviewees with moral puzzles such as “Would you shoot Hitler if you could go back in time and do so?” or “Would you kill Jews if told that, if you didn’t, you would be killed and someone else would do the job?”

Abortion

About a third of the way in, the conversation finally turns to abortion. The use of Hitler and the Holocaust is justified when Comfort declares abortion to be the American holocaust, with killing fetuses equivalent to killing Jews. His arguments are nothing new to many of us, but they were to this crowd:

• Finish this sentence: “It’s okay to kill a baby in the womb when …”
• What if a construction worker was about to blow up a building but wasn’t sure if there was a person in there or not. If we’re not sure, we should always err on the side of life, right?
• What if someone had aborted you?

I’ve already discussed these and other arguments.

Next, he brings up the sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” In the first place, he’s done nothing to show that there is a god behind these commandments and that it has any more supernatural warrant than “Use the Force, Luke!” Additionally, the commandment is usually translated as “thou shalt notmurder.” If the correct word is “kill,” I need to see Comfort walking the walk by campaigning against capital punishment and war. And if it’s an undefined “murder,” what is murder? The commandment becomes a tautology: Thou shalt not do what is forbidden. Granted, but how is this helpful?

Our interviewees seem a little off balance with a camera in their faces and are apparently not that sharp to begin with given their widespread ignorance of Hitler. Ray picks snippets that give him what he wants to hear, that killing fetuses is equivalent to killing Jews.

The lesson is that you can make an effective emotional pro-life argument to people who haven’t thought much about the issue. But people who change their minds so easily (Comfort brags about how quickly they changed) aren’t well established in their new position. How many of these, after thinking about these ideas at leisure and discussing it with friends, are still in Comfort’s camp today?

There’s a fundamental confusion in his interviewees, and Comfort is not motivated to correct it. There’s a big difference between “Abortion is wrong for me” and “Abortion is wrong for everyone, and we must impose that on society.” People give him the former, but he hopes we’ll take away the latter.

The Famous 10 Commandments Challenge

We’re two thirds through the video now and are just hoping to get out with our sanity intact, but Comfort has saved the best for last. The anti-abortion argument is dropped, and he falls back to his old favorite, the Ten Commandments challenge. (One reviewer suggested that Comfort’s compulsive use of this argument is his personal form of Tourette’s.) This is where Comfort ticks off the commandments: Have you ever lied? Stolen? Looked on someone with lust?

His conclusion typically runs like this: “By your own admission, you’re a lying, thieving, blaspheming fornicator and must face God on Judgment Day™. How do you think God should judge you?” Again, of course, he ignores that we haven’t established the existence of God or the afterlife.

I did applaud one aspect of the movie, the text at the end that read, “We strongly condemn the use of any violence in connection with protesting abortion.” At least, I applauded this until I realized that this was probably a legal demand since Comfort had pushed his interviewees to consider shooting Hitler early in the documentary.

Turnabout is fair play

Given Ray Comfort’s easy success with emotional appeals, what if someone did a rebuttal video? It could open with stories of illegal and dangerous back-alley abortion clinics when abortion was illegal. Then talk about Americans rejecting oppressive government—“the land of the free,” “no taxation without representation,” and all that. Paint a picture of medieval Europe with the heavy hand of the church on every aspect of life for the poor peasant. Overlay some stirring patriotic music over eagles and waving flags.

The interviews would focus on intuitive arguments like those I’ve discussed in Five Intuitive Pro-Choice Arguments. For example:

• Suppose a building were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos. Which would you pick? If you picked the child, what does that say about the argument that equates embryos with babies?
• If you’ve seen anti-abortion videos or posters, you may have seen the bloody results of late-term abortions. Why do you suppose they show that rather than a woman taking an emergency contraceptive (“morning after”) pill? What does that say about their claim that it’s a “baby” all the way back to that single cell?
• Given that half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous natural abortion, do you suppose that God has much of a concern about abortion?
• A week-old human blastocyst has fewer cells than the brain of a fly. Does it make sense to equate that with a one trillion-cell newborn? The newborn has eyes, ears, legs, arms, a brain and a nervous system, a heart and a circulatory system—in fact, all the components of the human body that you do—while the blastocyst has just 100 undifferentiated cells. Can these be equal in every meaningful way?
• Who better to weigh the impact of a baby than the mother herself?

Do you think we’d get similar results with this video?

They believe life begins at conception
and ends at birth.
— Rep. Barney Frank, about pro-life legislators

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/13/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

It’s easy to assume that pro-life proponents are decent people who honestly want to see good done in the world. The problem is that their arguments are out of touch with reality, so let me make some suggestions that I think will make the discussion more effective for everyone.

It may be odd for a pro-choice advocate to offer suggestions to the pro-life movement, but I want them to be more in line with reality, and I can critique from a very different perspective than an insider can.

1. Don’t Deny the Spectrum; Embrace It.

When trying to shock someone with the downsides of abortion, would a pro-life advocate discuss the horrors of the “morning after” pill rather than talk about a late-term abortion procedure? Of course not. There is a spectrum of personhood from a single cell to a newborn baby, and pro-life advocates know it. Their “it’s a baby” claim for the fetus at every stage of development ignores the glaring fact of the spectrum.

If a pregnant woman sees her fetus as a baby or a gift from God, that’s fine. The problem is when that view is imposed on women who may have very different circumstances and good reason to see their pregnancy differently.

Today, the pro-life movement minimizes information and discourages all abortions. The result is that the abortions that happen are often delayed, resulting in the death of an older fetus. If the pro-life movement acknowledged the spectrum and worked with it, they would instead encourage early detection of pregnancy and a prompt discussion of next steps so that any abortion is done as early as possible. An early abortion is better than a later one from every angle. Of course, pro-lifers could put forward their argument against abortion, but making abortion a taboo subject delays addressing the problem and makes any abortion later than it needs to be. Instead of a naive zero-tolerance approach to abortion they would focus instead on minimizing the harm. (Let’s not pretend that overturning Roe v. Wade would end abortion. It would only allow states to regulate it themselves. Some would make it illegal, but even that would only end legal abortions in those states.)

Recognizing the spectrum would also free stem cell research from nonsensical constraints. (You’re delaying research into treatments that could improve public health because of a worry over the rights of cells?! Get serious.)

2. Embrace Allies.

While I’m pro-choice, I don’t like abortion. The pro-life advocate doesn’t like abortion. In fact, the scared teenage girl going to the clinic doesn’t even like abortion. No one ever said, “Gee, I’m feeling kinda gloomy today. I think an abortion would perk me up.” Some people see abortion as the greater of two evils and others see it as the lesser of two evils, but everyone sees it as a bad thing.

Why focus on the disagreement when both sides of the debate are actually in agreement? And here’s the really important agreement: no one likes the primary cause of abortion, unwanted pregnancy. Instead of the current conflict, all sides should be marching arm in arm toward a better way to minimize unwanted pregnancy.

3. Focus on Education.

Whatever we’re doing to discourage unwanted pregnancies in the U.S. isn’t working. Half of all pregnancies are unintended, and evangelical young adults are about as likely to have had sex as any other group. A no-sex-before-marriage attitude leads to early and less-viable marriages.

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the U.S., 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. Clearly, there’s tremendous room for improvement.

The goal of the pro-life movement has been to stop abortion. Instead of swimming against the current with this approach, they should work with the current by stopping the need for abortion.

Teen sex is a bit like teen drinking. When a kid gets to be 15 or 16, the parent warns their child against underage drinking. But the wise parent gives a part 2: “If you do drink, or the driver of your car has been drinking, call me. I’ll pick you up anytime, anywhere, with no questions asked. Your safety is the most important thing.” The lesson: underage drinking is bad, but getting hurt while drunk is really bad (and avoidable).

Likewise, if a parent wants to tell the kid that sex is bad before marriage, that’s fine. Just give the part 2: “If you do have sex, you need to know how to have sex safely and use a condom.”

The results show that abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work:

A 2007 Congressionally mandated report found that, on average, students who participated in abstinence-only education had sex at the same age as students who had comprehensive sex education. They also had similar rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and used birth control at similar rates as students who had comprehensive sex education.

As children grow into adulthood, they get adult bodies. Wishing it weren’t so doesn’t help. Why wouldn’t we want to give them the owner’s manual that goes along with those new bodies? It’s like kids having access to the car keys without being given driver’s education.

Don’t our children deserve the best training for minimizing unwanted pregnancy? Abstinence-only training has been given a shot, and it doesn’t work. If you oppose the frank teaching of how to not get pregnant in Health class, avoiding abortion must not be the critical issue you say it is.

4. A “Pro-Life” Movement Should Treat Threats to Life in Priority Order.

There are roughly one million necessary abortions per year in the U.S. But around the world there are ten million deaths per year of young children that are not necessary.You want to protect life? Then do so by focusing on this much larger number of children in the developing world who die of mostly preventable causes. Jesus said nothing about abortion, but he did talk about helping the poor and sick.

5. Tell Politicians to Leave You Alone.

Politicians buzz like flies around the pro-life cause, eager to solve the problem. At least they say they want to solve the problem, but they have little motivation to do so. A solved problem doesn’t get votes, and as long as it’s unsolved, the problem remains a vote getter. Politicians benefit from the controversy, not a resolution, and they would stand in the way of the pro-life movement working in harmony with pro-choice advocates.

The Christian can become a marionette to the politician who can say “If you’re truly a moral person, you must vote for me.” Christians should just say no.

There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot,
to suffer it like Christ’s Passion.
The world gains much from their suffering.
— Mother Teresa

Photo credit: macropoulos

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/4/12.)

Look at the pro-life lineup of speakers and authors, and you’ll see far more men than women. Doesn’t it seem unfair that the gender that isn’t personally inconvenienced by pregnancy is the one pushing the restrictions?

I’m not saying that men should be silent, but I would prefer to see participants in the conversation in proportion to how it impacts their lives directly. The woman who’s pregnant? Of course. The man who will help support and nurture the child? Yep. Some self-important blowhard in a pulpit or on a stage or behind a microphone a thousand miles away? Not so much.

The moral debate

I remember a podcast by a popular Christian apologist during which a woman caller asked this question. The apologist (a man) seemed annoyed. He said that murder was murder. (I disagree, but that’s a tangent.)

More to the point, he said that his moral opinion was relevant regardless of his gender. I’ll agree with that, as far as it goes. But I think that the woman had an important point that is rarely acknowledged, since only a woman can have an abortion.

Let me try to turn the tables. This apologist is of the age where he might have been in the draft pool during the Vietnam War. Let’s suppose it’s 1970, and this guy returns from a tour fighting in Vietnam. Readjusting to life in America is tough, and he has nightmares and other symptoms of what we now call PTSD. His wife is sympathetic and, after some prodding, he shares the problem with her.

“Oh, you should go see Dr. Franklin about that,” she says. “I’m part of a community of veterans’ wives, and I’ve heard all about that problem. He does wonders with returning soldiers, and he’ll fix you up in no time.”

Our hero hesitates, not comfortable discussing his demons with a stranger. “I don’t think so.”

“No, really. I’ve heard a lot about this, and that treatment should work for you.”

Tension increases as they go back and forth. Finally, he says, “Honey, I really appreciate your sympathy. I know you want to help. But you must understand that you will never, ever understand what I’ve been through. Put in 18 months in Vietnam and then we’ll have something to talk about. Until then, you don’t get it, and you never will.”

Similarly, our 60-something male apologist will never, ever completely understand what it’s like to be 15 and pregnant, faced with disapproving parents and ridicule from classmates, seeing her life plans crumbling around her, dealing with pro-lifers shouting “murder!” at the suggestion of an abortion, and wondering how she’s ever going to get her life back on track.

If the male apologist wants to comment on the topic, that’s fine, but a big dose of humility (and sympathy) would make his opinion easier to take.

The Portman Effect

About a year ago, I wrote about Republican Senator Rob Portman’s dramatic public reversal on the issue of same-sex marriage after his son came out as gay several years earlier. Bravo, Senator, for taking a politically difficult stand, but why did it take a gay son to bring about this turnaround? You couldn’t figure the issue out by thinking about other people’s gay children? You couldn’t get there by musing, “Gee … what if my son turned out to be gay?” Or even, “What if I’d been gay?”

As clever as humans are about imagining situations and learning from them, Sen. Portman’s experience says that sometimes it does take your own son being gay to make you get it.

Maybe the Portman Effect is what we’re seeing with male pro-lifers. They’re not going to get pregnant, so it’s easy to be pro-life. Any downsides from continuing an unwanted pregnancy don’t directly affect them. Like Portman, they can’t put themselves in the shoes of someone going through this unless it actually happens to them. As men, it never will.

Perhaps they would see things differently if their own 15-year-old daughter got pregnant. (That’d be a great study: look at pro-life parents of teen girls with an unwanted pregnancy and see how many insisted that the same rules applied to their kid vs. how many rationalized that an exception was necessary, just in this case.)

Until that happens, gentlemen, please show a little humility.

Related post: “20 Arguments Against Abortion, Rebutted”

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things:
One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in Hell.
The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth
and you should save it for someone you love.  
— Butch Hancock

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/12.)

This is the final part of a series of posts exploring pro-life arguments. Read Part 1 here.
16. If you’re so smart, where do you draw the line?
I don’t. I find that pro-life advocates quickly turn the conversation to the definition of the OK/not-OK line for abortion, hoping to find something to criticize. I avoid this, both because it diverts attention from the spectrum argument—the main point I want to make—and because I have no opinion about the line and am happy to leave it up to the experts.
Legislatures make these kinds of distinctions all the time. In fact, in the hundreds of jurisdictions around the world where abortion is regulated, they already have.
17. Imagine a woman seeing an ultrasound of her unborn baby. Sometimes the hands and feet are visible, and the baby is sometimes sucking its thumb. Why aren’t such images shown to women considering abortions as part of informed consent?
Let’s consider this proposal only after adding conditions to make it practical.
This should be an option rather than part of a mandatory gauntlet forced on women considering abortion.
This should not be the first time the woman has seen this information. That is, public education should teach about the stages of fetal development as part of comprehensive sex education that would minimize the chances of her having this unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
The woman’s choices should be made available as soon as possible. Putting obstacles in her way—by closing down nearby clinics, encouraging pharmacists to refuse to offer morning-after pills, and so on—increases the age of the fetus she must consider aborting. If an abortion is to happen, let’s make it early so that the woman doesn’t see a fetus sucking its thumb.
18. But the fetus is innocent, and we always protect the innocent.
Some things are on a spectrum of innocent/guilt (adults, say), but other things are not (squirrels, rocks). The squirrel may have shorted out the transformer, and the rock may have been used to whack someone on the head, but neither the squirrel nor the rock were guilty of what we interpret as bad. But you wouldn’t call them innocent either; it makes no sense to say they were even on that spectrum. A fetus is also not on that innocent/guilty spectrum. It doesn’t have the capacity to be in that spectrum.
One commenter observed that it’s a moral decision either way. If you choose life, you condemn that baby to his life. That is, you force life upon it, and every life has suffering. This may not be an easy choice, but who’s in a better position than the mother-to-be to decide?
19. Let’s suppose that we’re doubtful that the unborn child is a human being with human rights. Given this uncertainty, shouldn’t we err on the side of the child?
A fetus is not a person. Play games with the name all you want (“The fetus is a Homo sapiens, ‘human being’ is simply a synonym, and if a fetus is a human being, it must have human rights!”), but there’s no ambiguity here. Despite your word games, a newborn baby is still not the same thing as a single cell. There is a spectrum.
Worse, you pretend that there is no downside—as if carrying a pregnancy to term was a “What the heck?” kind of thing. Bringing a baby into the world where it is unwanted or won’t be cared for properly is a gargantuan downside. It’d be refreshing to hear a pro-lifer say, “Okay, an abortion would be a smart thing from the standpoint of your education, career, life, family, finances, happiness, and so on. I’ll grant you that. But it’s still morally wrong.”
I could look at a cow and think “hamburger,” while you could look at it and think “pet.” These are two different bins that are valid from two different standpoints. Similarly, one woman could think “baby” and the other “a clump of cells that is standing in the way of my life dreams.” If you want to see it as a baby from day one, that’s fine, just don’t impose that view on the rest of the country. Illegal abortion means forced pregnancy.
This is a bit like Sharia law. Hey, if you want to constrain yourself with Sharia law, go ahead. Just don’t do it to the rest of us.
20. Have you seen the cartoon where the cancer patient shakes his fist at God for giving him cancer? God replies, “I sent someone to cure cancer, but your society aborted him.”
The Atheist Pig has some nice rebuttals. Let’s imagine God instead saying, “I sent someone to cure cancer … but she died after being denied an abortion despite her high-risk pregnancy.”
Or: “… but he died, having been denied appropriate medical care because his parents insisted that only prayer was the response to illness.”
Or: “… but he killed himself as a teenager after being relentlessly bullied by Christians for being gay.”
Or: “… but she lost interest in science because her public school watered it down to satisfy Christian extremists.”
Let’s not imagine that the Christian path is always the best path.
Abortion and the Christian worldview
Many Christians with whom I’ve discussed abortion have a naive desire to have their cake and eat it too—no abortion and no premarital sex. In a primitive society where kids got married upon sexual maturity, that happened by itself. But when maturity happens earlier because of better nutrition and marriage happens later because of more education and social customs, we have a gap of a decade or more where young adults are sexually mature but not married. Wishful thinking won’t get us safely across. (I defend premarital sex here.)
Christians often point to embarrassing aspects of society during Old Testament times such as slavery or polygamy and say that that was simply a different culture. They operated by different rules. Okay, let’s accept that logic. Just extend the list of “things that made sense back then but don’t now” to include an abstinence-only approach to premarital sex.
Read part 1 here.

God does not regard the fetus as a soul,
no matter how far gestation has progressed.
The Law plainly exacts:
“If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17).
But according to Exodus 21:22–24,
the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense…
Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother,
the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
— Bruce Waltke (Dallas Theological Seminary) source

Answer to the puzzle: the middle embryo is the human one (at 5 weeks). More here.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 2/20/12.)
Photo credit: Devo ASU Blog, Mouse Embryo, UNSW Embryology

This is part 3 of a series of posts exploring pro-life arguments. Read Part 1 here.
11. But a fetus has a soul!
Does it? If the zygote has a soul and then it splits into twins, does each twin have half a soul or do they get another one as needed or did they get two to begin with? What happens if one of those twins is later absorbed? What about conjoined twins—do they share a single soul like a shared body part? What about babies with terrible birth defects that leave them with very little brain function? What about a person cloned from a skin cell—would they have a soul? And if the story for the soul has a happy ending for the 50% of pregnancies that end in spontaneous (natural) abortion, why not for an artificial abortion?
This mess vanishes if we don’t insist on a soul. As Daniel Dennett said, “What isn’t there doesn’t have to be explained.”
12. “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent.”
These are the words of an archbishop from Brazil. He was outraged at the abortion done on a nine-year-old girl, raped and impregnated by her stepfather. In response to the abortion, the church excommunicated the family of the girl and the doctors who performed the abortion.
Wow. Let’s leave this example of how religion makes you do crazy things and focus on the claim. First, a fetus is not a child. Second, the spectrum argument defeats this claim.
Variations on this argument are popular, and they all have pretty much the same response. Here are a few.
12a. Abortion kills a human life (at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy) to help with another human’s self-actualization (higher on the hierarchy). That’s the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work.
The two “human lives” are not comparable. This ignores the spectrum of development from single cell to trillion-cell newborn.
Killing a blastocyst with fewer cells than the brain of the fly troubles me less than killing a civilian in another country due to war or killing a criminal on death row.
12b. Don’t we normally go out of our way to defend the defenseless?
Again, this ignores the spectrum. Defenseless people are more important than defenseless cells.
12c. Haven’t we been through this with racial minorities? Declaring that single cells aren’t human is like declaring that African-Americans aren’t human.
Nice try. Spectrum argument.
12d. In response to your abortion clinic example: you argue that, if given a choice between saving a child and ten frozen embryos, you’d save the child. Okay, and if given the choice between your wife and a stranger, you’d save your wife, but that doesn’t mean that you can kill strangers.
Spectrum argument.
13. Haven’t you heard of adoption? That’s the answer to an unplanned pregnancy.
No, it’s clearly not the answer. Two percent of all births to unmarried women in the U.S. are placed for adoption. “Just have the baby and release it for adoption” is a pat on the head. It might make you feel good, but it doesn’t work.
Adoption can also be psychologically difficult, both for mother and child.
14. You say that a trillion cells is definitely a person. Okay, how about a trillion minus one—is that a person? And if so, how about a trillion minus two? And so on.
This is the sorites paradox: if you can take a grain of sand from a heap and it’s still a heap, can you continue to do so and get a “heap” of one grain?
This same game could be played with the blue/green spectrum. If this color is “green,” what about just a touch more blue—isn’t that green as well? We still can’t get around the fact that the two ends of the spectrum are very different—green is not blue! Similarly, a single cell is not a newborn with arms, legs, brain, and so on.
15. The woman who got pregnant knew what she was doing. Let’s encourage people to take responsibility for their actions.
Did she know what she was doing? Not necessarily. Sex education is so poor in the United States that many teens become sexually mature without understanding what causes what.
But let’s assume that the woman knew what she was doing and was careless or stupid. What do we do with this? When someone shoots himself accidentally, that was stupid, but we all pay for the medical and insurance system that puts them back together. Let’s educate people, demand responsibility, and have a harm-reduction approach where we find the best resolution of problem. For a woman whose life would be overturned with a pregnancy, that resolution might be abortion.
Having sex with imperfect contraception is no more a willingness to accept pregnancy than eating a sandwich is a willingness to accept choking. When someone is choking, we do our best to take care of the problem; let’s continue to do the same for an unwanted pregnancy.
Continue to Part 4

The self-proclaimed “pro-life” crowd is entirely too obsessive
about the imaginary people they claim to be concerned about.
They need to calm down,
switch off their circuit diagrams,
get out of their blueprints,
sit in the shade of their acorns,
listen to the pleasant songs of the eggs,
and stop to smell the pollen.
— Richard Russell

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/27/12.)
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