We Can Be Reasonably Confident that Abortion Entails the Killing of a Human Being

Thank you, Rasputin, for your prompt response. I think your cartoons are cute, and they certainly help communicate your view. (I don’t mean “cute” in a derogatory way.) Over the last nine years that I’ve been working full-time in the pro-life movement, I’ve probably spent a few hundred hours talking to pro-choice people. It’s one of the best parts of my job. I get to learn more about people who are different from me, and believe different things. Some pro-choice people have made some great points in these conversations, and caused me to change the way I think about this issue. As you can imagine, there are all types of pro-choice people out there. You have the really well-read pro-choice person who has read every word of Judith Jarvis-Thompson, David Boonin, Eileen McDonagh and Peter Singer. There’s the person in the middle who kind of landed on the pro-choice position by default, because after all, who’s against liberty? There’s the pro-choice person who’s angry that the subject is even being discussed. There’s the hurting person who has at least one abortion in his or her past. There’s the apathetic college student who doesn’t care about anything, and is bemused that I do. But there’s nothing worse than talking to the Perpetual Skeptic. It’s the laziest kind of debater. I can offer good argument after good argument, and he can simply smile and ask, “how do you know?” And round and round the circle of skepticism we go, until I get frustrated and walk away. Imagine Rasputin walking in on a group of historians trying to determine why the Titanic sank: Historian 1: The Titanic sank because the lookouts didn’t have the binoculars they usually use to spot icebergs, because they were lost before the ship left the harbor. Historian 2: Yes, but they probably wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. There was no moon that night, nor wind that would cause the water to splash against the iceberg. I think the reason the Titanic sank was the Captain had been pressured into going faster than he was comfortable with. Historian 3: All of that is moot. The reason the Titanic sank is their waterproof compartments didn’t go high enough to stop the water from spilling over into the others like an ice-cube tray. That’s what really doomed the Titanic. Rasputin: How do you know what an iceberg is? How might one be confident that he is holding the objectively true list of criteria that defines which constructs are icebergs? If Scientist 1 hands you his list, and Scientist 2 hands you a different list, how might you confidently select one? You can’t, unless God tells us what an iceberg is. You’re all wasting your time. Here, let me draw a cartoon that illustrates this. Historians: [Staring blankly at Rasputin] Really, dude? Get out of our meeting. I made an actual argument for my view. Rasputin responded, “meh, no one can really know what a human is.” Rasputin, you will have to do better than that. There are some really smart people on this website. I don’t agree with all of their views, but at least they have the courage to make an actual argument in the court of public opinion. They won’t be impressed with your non-argument, and neither am I. Remember my analogy about NASA vs. people that believe the earth is flat. We have some great evidence for the earth not being flat, so the opposing side must offer evidence for an alternative explanation. Simply responding with, “no one knows what an Earth is” won’t cut it. Rasputin: “Josh is going to write down the criteria that he considers important. And I'm going to write down mine.” This implies that maybe you’ll make an actual argument in the next round? Will you make a list of what criteria you think is important? Because if you do, I think we can begin having a good debate. I think the question will be whether reasonable people can actually compare two lists and find fault with either of them. You think they couldn’t, and I think they could. I think biologists have a great understanding of what kinds of things are biologically living. They can also test our DNA to show whether we’re human or not. We can literally draw the blood from a fetus can test her blood, and find that she is, in fact, a human. Conclusion: My arguments so far go uncontested. I would like to see a counter-argument or alternative theory, but I haven’t seen one yet.