A YouTuber named Craig sent me a PM regarding my video on abortion. His comments and my responses were too large for the YouTube video comment section:

Craig: And you also may be missing the point a bit. Consider the fact that if the overdue baby (who, again, is healthier, more developed, and far more capable of independence outside the womb) has a scissors jammed into the back of his head and his brain sucked out, the law is silent. However, if that 23 week old baby on life-support had the same procedure done, the perpetrator would be tried with murder...EVEN IF the mother had requested it (in which case she'd be charged as well).

How is it obvious to you that the absence of having drawn oxygen into his lungs somehow makes this morally and legally sensible?

Me: There is nothing obvious about any of this, especially late term abortion as you describe. In the case of the baby still in utero (late term abortion) the reason must have to do with the safety of the mother. The killing of an already delivered baby in an incubator, as you describe, is not a fair analogue, nor would it happen.

I also am horrified by the idea of late term abortion. But I have to repeat, I don't know what the cause might be for performing one. I can't believe that any doctor would undertake such an action lightly. If I were a husband faced with a choice of wife or baby, I think I'd choose to save the wife. I am way past that now, but I would hope that you never are faced with such a choice.

Craig: Admittedly, they ARE both an "interference" in what would have happen if nature just ran its course. But to equate an interference that sustains life with an interference that destroys life is a logical disaster. Would you equate "feeding a quadriplegic" with "starving a paraplegic"? In both instances, we are "interfering" in what would normally happen if nature were left to her own devices. Of course not. There is simply no comparison with an "intervention" that sustains life and an "intervention" that destroys it. By this logic, we could equate Dr. J. Mengele with Dr. W. Mayo...both were just "interferers".

Me: I think your comparisons here are extreme. Mengele and Mayo? Mengele experimented on people against their will, while Mayo tried to aid them in recovery. Intent has a lot to do with it. Intervention isn't always the same. I'm sure that's your point, but your approach is an appeal to emotion, which was my objection to the so-called pro life movement in the first place.

Feeding a person who wants to live and can't feed himself is perhaps an intervention, but who starves a paraplegic? Can you cite me a case? If you bring up a case like Terri Schaivo you will be equating paraplegia with persistent vegetative state, which is not analogous at all.

Craig: We can agree that abortion is a complex issue; but I don't see how complex issues justify inconsistent thinking. It seems to me that some consistent thinking and some fundamental commitments are precisely what we need to think our way through complex matters.

Me: It would be great if in this life we could always be consistent. But circumstances are not consistent. The case of a fetus killed (think Sharon Tate) when the killing was done in malice and to a fetus whose arrival was anticipated with joy is not the same as aborting the fetus produced through rape or incest, or one which would endanger the life of the mother. A certain inconsistency is required in life. We are not machines.

Craig: The way I see it, Largo, is that there is an atrocity in our midst...an absolute blood bath right on our front doorsteps. 53 Million abortions in North America in the last 40+ years. And this blood bath is being justified and euphemized by misleading rhetoric and admittedly inconsistent thinking.

ME: I can agree that there are far too many abortions, and for reasons of convenience or laziness in birth control. But think of the alternative. Abortions were performed when they were illegal, too, but frequently under unsanitary conditions and by practitioners who were unqualified and may have killed the mother. To outlaw abortions would never end them. But it would make them more dangerous.

The rest of your letter seems to rest on your belief that the unborn have the same rights as the born. I already explained that a blastocyst is not a baby, and calling a fetus a baby as if it had a personality is rhetoric on your part, designed to evoke emotion and a visceral rather than an intellectual response.

I agree with you that abortion generally is a bad idea, because, as I said, most abortions are probably done because people didn't take precautions against pregnancy in the first place and are not ready to deal with the consequences. But I am not ready to call it murder. On this we simply do not agree.

The "breath of life" argument, by the way, was from the bible. I'm not a believer myself, but many of the "pro life" faction are, and I referred them to scriptures saying that Adam, for example wasn't born with a living soul, but became one when the breath of life was breathed into his nostrils (and thence, one would suppose, into his lungs).

I have tried here and in my video to present a civil argument without rancor. I hope that can be maintained, even as we disagree.

Re: Issues of Philosophy

Craig: It was not an appeal to emotion. I was not suggesting something was true or false on the basis of how it makes you feel. I was deducing very logically what the implications would be if we took the philosophy undergirding that comment and applied it beyond the abortion issue. 

Me: I don't think so. Your Mengele/Mayo comparison was not to the point, unless appeal to emotion was your intent. No one thinks Mengele was justified in experimenting on human beings against their will. But many people see abortion as a necessary, if distasteful procedure in some cases. Applying an example like that in comparison to an abortion doctor is disingenuous. You could hardly have expected other than an emotional reaction.

Craig: As hypothetical as the example is, its sole purpose is to illustrate the impropriety of indiscriminately lumping life-sustaining (Mayo) and life-destroying (Mengele) "interferences" into the same category. 

Me: I did not group life sustaining interferences with life destroying ones, you did with your Mengele/Mayo comparison. Again I ask you to cite a case where anyone denied food to a paraplegic. That would be a fair analogue. And again, I caution you not to use Terri Schaivo, since all that could be called personhood was already absent from her body before the support was removed.

Crig: Many late term abortions are done for the same reasons early term abortions are done. The mother does not want the child. 

Me: If you can document this, I might take you seriously. But to me it sounds like posturing in the absence of an argument. What doctor would do such a procedure with "I don't want this kid" as the reason? If there are doctors who would do so, they are bereft of any ethical values. But, as I said, I think doctors only perform late term abortions for very compelling reasons. Prove me wrong, and I will agree with you. Your unsupported assertion that this is so is not enough.

Craig: Then why is that your position? Perhaps "obvious" was too strong a word. Perhaps I should reword it to simply say, why is that a compelling enough line in the sand for you to hold that as the point of legal protection as opposed to another point (like conception)?

Me: I explained that MOST people who oppose abortion do so for religious reasons, and I pointed out scripture about the "breath of life." Obviously that did not resonate with you. I am not willing to say conception is the beginning of any more than a process, which may be interrupted, either naturally or extranaturally at any point. I pointed out in the video that a great many abortions occur spontaneously (naturally) for various reasons. 

With regard to scripture, you should note also that in the bible (Hosea 13:16 for example) not only does the lord order infants already born to be "dashed in pieces," but "women with child ripped open." How's that for a late-term abortion, and at the command of god!

Check out also Isaiah 13:18 "...they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes shall not spare children."

If your argument is purely secular you haven't made your point.

Craig: It is also a strawman to suggest that the entire pro-life movement can be labeled and thus dismissed as an appeal to emotion.

Me: Perhaps some individuals don't appeal only to emotion. But what do you call the signs protesters carry of partial birth abortions and fetuses in the womb? I have seen them. They are highly emotional. Add to that the "pro-life" label, the obvious opposite of which is "anti-life" and you have nothing BUT an appeal to emotion. Perhaps not everyone in the movement deems personhood to begin at conception. But most do. Why else would stem cell research be such a hot button issue?

Craig: I agree that some late term abortions are done to protect the life of the mother (an exception that I am inclined to defend legally; I can also respect an exception in the case of incest and rape). 

Me: I'm glad you can see at least some exceptions. 

Craig: The objection is obvious. The victim has inalienable rights. No man should ever have the right to hit his wife, and no adult should ever have the right to have sex with a child.

Me: Then why do you even propose that? In practically the next sentence you say that that is MY philosophy extrapolated. That is simply not true. My thoughts on abortion apply only to that narrow subject. To accuse me of holding that spousal abuse and child rape could ever under any circumstance be acceptable is false and repugnant. You have no way of knowing what I think beyond what I told you. To say that you know my unexpressed "philosophy" is beyond hubris.

You yourself admit to making an exception in the case of incest or rape or danger to the life of the mother. Yet you expect some kind of superhuman consistency of me. You say you "draw the line" at conception. If that is true and absolute, how can you have any exceptions at all? It is as I said, inconsistency is a necessary part of life. Circumstances change. That is not a tautology. We merely have a difference of opinion. 

Aldous Huxley famously said that the only consistent people are the dead. I agree. If you must have consistency, you need to stop debating, because you will never achieve it, either from your opponent or from yourself.

Thanks for the stimulating discourse. I appreciate that, unlike some in that comment section, you haven't lost your temper or damned me to hell. (Or was that in some other comment section? I get that a lot.)

Best regards,

Larry