There are no good pro-abortion arguments. All arguments in favor of killing human children are horrendously illogical and demented. But this particular argument is the worst one of all, for reasons I will now explain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Welcome to the show, the CarCast, as I call it now. | |
| Everybody, thanks for listening. | |
| Now, I want to talk today about the worst, the worst pro-abortion argument And there are a great many to choose from, so this is a difficult—it's pretty difficult to decide. | |
| There's a whole buffet, a just smorgasbord of terrible, awful, illogical, anti-science arguments, because every pro-abortion argument is bad. | |
| Not just bad morally, but also just logically unsound. | |
| But the worst one, in my view, is, well, it's the one that you've heard a million times, you hear all the time, that the baby isn't a baby, it's a fetus, it's a clump of cells, and it's not a real person. | |
| It is rather a potential person. | |
| The baby is a potential person. | |
| Now, you're not surprised, of course, that I would cite this as the worst argument because it's so common, but you may not expect why it is, in my mind, the worst argument. | |
| There's one thing in particular that makes this line of reasoning really, really stupid. | |
| And I want to explain what that is. | |
| But first of all, we know and we should establish, again, that it's a bad argument first and foremost because it just isn't true. | |
| That's not what makes it the worst argument because, of course, every pro-abortion argument isn't true. | |
| But still, we should stipulate that it isn't at all true. | |
| There's no such thing as a merely potential human. | |
| Either you're a human or you're not. | |
| Okay? Either you're a person or you're not. | |
| A human is a human. A person is a person. | |
| An unborn child has the same inherent value as a born child because it must be Logically, scientifically, philosophically, it must have the same value. | |
| Do you know why? Because inherent value is inherent. | |
| And inherent means belonging to a thing by its nature. | |
| Which means that value, if our value is inherent as human beings, which is what most of us believe, it's what our country is built on. | |
| The doctrine of human rights is built on the notion that human rights are inherent. | |
| Belonging to a thing by its nature, which means that if something has inherent value, its value cannot be lost, it cannot be gained, you cannot acquire it over time by degrees, it cannot be reliant on circumstances, it cannot be conditional. | |
| Either you have inherent value or you don't. | |
| If our value is conditional, which is to say our value is conditional on how useful our life is to those around us, how desirable our life is to those around us, whether it's our mother or whoever else, If that's the case, then that means that human value is acquired over time by degrees. | |
| It's very conditional. | |
| It's dependent on how useful you are. | |
| And so then there's nothing necessarily wrong with slavery or genocide or anything else. | |
| The only real argument against those atrocities is that human beings have inherent dignity. | |
| If they don't, well then, okay. | |
| Enslave away, I guess. | |
| Let the strong survive. | |
| Dog-eat-dog world. If humans do not by nature possess an infinite inherent value, then it's reasonable to claim that certain human beings, even of the born variety, have less accrued value than others. | |
| That would mean, for instance, if I'm stronger and smarter than you, I'm more valuable. | |
| And it would be more of an injustice to kill me than to kill you. | |
| And probably I should have the right to kill you if I want. | |
| Because I'm the person with more value. | |
| And if I decided that your existence was inconvenient to me, well then as the person with more value, I should be able to kill you. | |
| Also, to say that you have more value now than you had in the womb is to say that you are, in essence, is to say that you are you now, but you were not you in the womb, even though you were you. | |
| Now, if that's the case, when did you start being you if you did not start being you at the moment you came into physical existence? | |
| If your you-ness is Did not appear the same moment that you appeared physically, then when did it appear? | |
| And what were you before you were you? | |
| This is how I try to explain it to people. | |
| This is kind of the image. | |
| I say, okay, so just take yourself in your current form, okay? | |
| Imagine yourself as you are right now. | |
| Now, rewind the tape back. | |
| To yesterday. Was that still you? | |
| Did you still have value? | |
| Okay. Now a year ago. | |
| Now go back 10 years. | |
| Now go back 15. | |
| Go back to kindergarten. Go back to when you were, you know, to your first birthday. | |
| Go back to when you were six months old. | |
| Keep following your own timeline all the way back, back, back, back, back. | |
| Rewind the tape and then stop there. | |
| Just right there. At the moment when you first emerged from the womb into the world. | |
| At that moment. Now that's still you, right? | |
| That's you. Okay. | |
| Now just rewind it one more second. | |
| Just one more second. | |
| Is it still you? | |
| If that's not you and you didn't have value then, what happened Now fast forward a second, just keep, rewind a second, fast forward. | |
| What's going on here in this one second time? | |
| What happened that gave you value and you-ness? | |
| But of course, it had to be you, even a second before. | |
| A second before you emerged. | |
| It couldn't have been anyone else, right? | |
| You were you, and therefore you had value. | |
| From the moment that you first physically existed. | |
| And if you did not have value at that first moment of existence, then you don't have value now. | |
| Again, that's how inherent value works. | |
| It must always belong to a thing in order for it to be inherent value. | |
| Didn't have it then, you don't have it now. | |
| So we see that by removing value from an unborn child, we remove it from all humanity. | |
| Because all of us were at one time an unborn human. | |
| So we think that we've taken it from everyone, just from the babies, we have taken it from ourselves at the same time. | |
| But let's just, okay, so that's why the argument is wrong. | |
| But that's not even the point. | |
| Or it's not the only point. | |
| Because here's the thing. | |
| Here's the really incredible thing. | |
| Even if I agreed that the fetus is merely a potential human, Which I most definitely, emphatically, irreversibly do not agree. | |
| But let's just say, for the sake of argument, let's just say I did. | |
| Let's just say I gave you that. | |
| Let's just say I gave you the pro-abort. | |
| What if I just said, okay, fine, they're not people, they're just potential people, they're not fully people, fine. | |
| Just for a moment, let's just run with that train of thought, just for a second. | |
| Okay, so it's not a person, it's a potential person. | |
| Wouldn't you still treat this potential person Like it's the most valuable thing on the planet? | |
| Wouldn't it still be a great injustice and travesty to kill this life or this potential life, however you want to put it? | |
| See, the pro-abortion position, in order to get to the pro-abortion position, you have to make two giant, impossible, fantastic leaps. | |
| And the first leap is to declare that an unborn person is not a person. | |
| That is an impossible leap to make. | |
| Scientifically, the science doesn't support it. | |
| But even if I gave you a trampoline and I said, fine, go ahead and make the jump. | |
| I'll set up like a zip line so you can somehow make that massive logical jump. | |
| Even if I did, when you land on the next platform, you're going to find you have a whole new jump to make. | |
| Because now you have to get from here, from it's not a person, to let's kill it. | |
| The two do not follow each other logically. | |
| They don't come hand in hand. | |
| Just because I agree, just for the moment, that it's not a person, doesn't mean I agree we should kill it. | |
| So that's, you've made it there, but you haven't made it all the way. | |
| Even by proving that an unborn baby is not a baby, which you can't prove, because it is a baby, But even in some science fiction world where you did prove it, you still haven't proven that abortion is okay. | |
| Here's an analogy. It's kind of a crude analogy. | |
| It doesn't work on every level, but it works on one level, at least when we're dealing with this issue of potential. | |
| So what if you won $50 million in the lottery? | |
| And you had your $50 million lottery ticket. | |
| Let's pretend... Here's my dry cleaning receipt. | |
| Okay, this is your $50 million lottery ticket. | |
| And by the way, can you believe how expensive dry cleaning is these days? | |
| I hadn't been to a dry cleaner in a long time. | |
| I just usually iron my own clothes. | |
| I didn't feel like it. It was like 50 bucks for just a few. | |
| Anyway, so you have your $50 million lottery ticket and you're on your way to the lottery office to cash it in. | |
| And imagine that on the way, I run in and I snatch the lottery ticket from you, and then I just like eat it, or I set it on fire right in front of you. | |
| Okay, like the Joker in the Dark Knight. | |
| I'm just burning it right in front of you. | |
| Now, that ticket was not $50 million. | |
| It's just a piece of paper. | |
| It's just a receipt. There's a million of them like this out there. | |
| That's all it is. It was moments away from being converted into $50 million, but at the moment, it's just a piece of paper. | |
| But how would you react? | |
| Would you react as though you just lost a piece of paper? | |
| Would you react like I'd react if you stole this from me? | |
| It'd be kind of inconvenient. | |
| I'd need to go and give them my name to pick up my dry cleaning, but still. | |
| Would you react like someone just took a piece of paper, Or would you react as though you had just lost $50 million? | |
| I think we know. You would mourn the loss of that ticket, not as a ticket, but as $50 million. | |
| Because you see, whether the ticket is $50 million or is merely the potentiality of $50 million, that's basically irrelevant. | |
| The value is still the same. | |
| And it would be the same to you if you had the ticket. | |
| It would be the same in the eyes of the law, I imagine. | |
| Or imagine I gave you some magical bean or something, because that's basically how pro-aborts view unborn life. | |
| They see it as a magical bean, like jack in a beanstalk, this magical thing that just upon emerging from the birth canal turns mysteriously into a human. | |
| So imagine that I actually gave you a magical bean and I said, okay, hold on to this. | |
| And water it once a day. | |
| And in nine months it will turn into a magic dragon that will grant wishes. | |
| Now how would you treat that bean? | |
| Would you treat it as just any old kidney bean? | |
| Throw it in a pot of chili? | |
| Have it for lunch? Or would you treat it like a magic dragon that can grant wishes? | |
| See, this is the incredible thing about the pro-abortion argument. | |
| It fails even on its own terms. | |
| Even if I agreed with how they framed the argument, which I don't, but even if I did, I would still see it as an act of just unspeakable wickedness to murder this potential human. | |
| Because even a potential child is still worth more than every animal on Earth, and it's more valuable than every object in the physical universe. | |
| And I don't even need to use analogies of lottery tickets and magical beans. | |
| How about this instead? | |
| Think about a bald eagle egg or an endangered sea turtle egg. | |
| Now, those are both protected by the law. | |
| It's illegal to do any harm to an eagle egg or a sea turtle egg. | |
| Although, in the scientific mind of a leftist, That eagle egg is not really an eagle, just a potential eagle. | |
| The sea turtle egg, not really a sea turtle, just a sea turtle, just a potential sea turtle. | |
| Yet, if a pro-abortion person stumbled upon me, if they were walking down the beach and they came upon me and I'm just like stomping a whole mound of endangered sea turtle eggs Or if they came into my kitchen and I said, hey, I'm just cooking up some bald eagle omelets. | |
| You want one? They would faint with just rage. | |
| And then when they woke up, they'd probably stone me to death. | |
| And then they'd call the police and I'd be arrested while dead for doing this horrible thing. | |
| So in the case of a sea turtle or an eagle, they have no problem seeing how even a potential sea turtle is worth as much as a sea turtle. | |
| Or a potential eagle as much as an eagle. | |
| Yet with a potential human, they say it's worthless, it's trash, throw it out. | |
| Doesn't make any sense. Even on their own illogical terms, it is still illogical. | |
| So there you go. All right, we'll leave it there. |