Conference on Answering Abortion Arguments with Scott Klusendorf Dr Zeke Session 5

Kootenai Church

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A couple of things you need to know about me. Number one, I am an evangelical Christian. I sing the same songs at church you do.

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I believe the Bible is the infallible, inerrant word of God.

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I believe that Christians should engage moral issues in the culture.

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I am not the angry man I was in my twenties when I had hair down to here and I would engage you with fire.

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No, I've thought about this issue a lot more deeply than I used to. And I want you to know that I appreciate the fact that pro -lifers are presenting thoughtful, insightful contributions to this debate.

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What I want to do today is present to you five reasons why the pro -life position fails.

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And then I want to hear from you. And I want you to know that I'm going to avoid much of what you're used to hearing on the street.

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Much of what you hear from Planned Parenthood or the National Abortion Rights Action League.

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And I'm going to present a cumulative case where the weight of these individual arguments

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I'm going to make, taken together, that cumulative case presents,

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I believe, a powerful rebuttal to the pro -life position.

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And here, in summary, is what I'm going to argue. The pro -life position fails five ways.

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Number one, it fails the intuitions test. And I'll explain what that means.

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Number two, it fails, surprisingly you might find, the scientific test.

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Number three, it fails the philosophic test. Number four, again this will surprise you, it fails the theological test.

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What I would call the biblical test. The exegetical test. And finally, it fails the sociological test.

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The common good test. Let's talk about the intuitions test up front.

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Now intuitions, just to be clear what we're talking about. We're not talking about hunches. We're not talking about things we just have a gut feeling about.

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We're talking about moral truths that are immediately aware to us.

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We are aware of them without even having to put forward a syllogism to defend them. And I believe that the pro -life position fails that test.

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So let me give you an example right up front. You are in a burning research lab.

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In this corner over here are a thousand frozen embryos.

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In this corner over here is a six -year -old girl. The building is an inferno.

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You do not have the ability to say both. You can only pick thousand embryos, six -year -old girl.

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Where are we all going? How many of you are going for the six -year -old girl?

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Can I see your hands? All of you. What does that say about our intuitions?

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About embryonic life having the same value as that six -year -old? Nobody hesitated when

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I asked where we're going first. Everybody said right away, six -year -old. That tells us something that pro -lifers, even in their own behavior rather than just their rhetoric, don't really believe the embryo has equal value.

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Because if you did, you would certainly consider saving those thousand embryos. But you don't.

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You pick one six -year -old girl, over a thousand embryos that you claim are human, every bit as much human as that six -year -old.

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But you don't save the embryos. You save the six -year -old. That says something about our intuitions.

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Here's another example at the intuitional level. How many of you believe abortion is murder?

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Can I see your hands? Do you really believe that? If you were witnessing a neighbor preparing to murder his toddler in the front lawn in your neighborhood, and the only way you could stop him was to pick up a gun and use lethal force, would you shoot your neighbor to save the two -year -old?

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If so, let me see your hands. If you believe abortion is equivalent to killing that two -year -old, why have you not picked up a gun to stop abortion?

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Again, at the intuitional level, our behavior is defying our rhetoric.

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We don't really believe what we say about this. We say it, but we don't live it. Why wouldn't you pick up a gun?

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Here's another issue. Many of you claim to be pro -life, but are you truly pro -life in terms of all life?

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Do you have the same ethic for the homeless man, the refugee, the illegal immigrant, as you do an unborn human being?

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Are you really truly pro -life, or is it just that you're against abortion? Another intuitional test.

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God forbid, but imagine your own daughter is raped at age 14 and pregnant.

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Would you really force your own daughter to go through with a pregnancy that could psychologically destroy her if she were to continue with it?

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Would you really force her to do that? If your intuition says, wait a minute, I'm not quite sure, might that again suggest to us that there's a wide gap between what we say about the unborn and what we actually believe about the unborn?

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Another thing. Are you willing to prosecute consistently what you call murder?

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How many of you think someone who murders their 2 -year -old ought to be prosecuted legally?

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Can I see your hands? Most pro -lifers I talk to do not believe women who have abortions should be prosecuted the same way that we prosecute the doctors who perform those abortions.

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They want to give the woman a pass. In fact, every single lawmaker in Congress that identifies as pro -life is unwilling to prosecute any woman who has an abortion should

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Roe v. Wade be returned to the states. Unwilling to do it. What does that again say about our intuitions, about what we say about the unborn versus what we truly believe and behave about the unborn?

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I think there's a wide, wide discrepancy there. Secondly, pro -life fails the scientific test.

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The pro -life argument is that every time you have a union of sperm and egg, you have a distinct living and whole human being.

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Well, here's the problem with that argument. First of all, you can have a situation where we have a union of sperm and egg, an embryo is formed, but it morphs into a molar pregnancy.

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These are not embryos at that point. They become tumors. And the tumor material is evident.

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When the embryo is finally discharged, you don't have a complete organism.

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You actually have teeth, hair, bone material kind of in a scrambled egg thing altogether, but no living embryo.

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If it's really true that the union of sperm and egg automatically results in a living human being, how do you explain molar pregnancies where we don't have a human being?

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We've actually got a tumor that we're dealing with. In addition to this, there's the issue of twinning.

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An embryo can split into two up to 21 days after conception.

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How can we claim there's a distinct living whole human being when that embryo can split into two?

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Another problem with the pro -life position. They say the embryo is alive from the beginning. I got news for you.

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Every cell in your body right now is alive. Every cell in your body is alive. Sperm and egg are alive.

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Sperm and egg are alive. Life is a continuous process.

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It doesn't begin just when you begin. Life has been here for millions of years.

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It's a continuous process, and we are part of that stream of life. Then there's the issue that women don't grieve miscarriages the way that they grieve the deaths of newborns and older children.

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I know some of you have suffered miscarriage. I know some of you have felt that pain. But honestly, for the vast majority of women, the pain of losing a 2 -year -old is way different than losing an embryo.

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Again, that speaks something to us intuitionally. Philosophically, point 3, again, this is a cumulative case, there is a difference between biological life on one hand and biographical life on the other.

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A difference between human and a difference between persons. My argument is this.

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It is possible to be a human and not be a person with rights.

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For example, unlike some pro -choicers who say that you were just a blob of tissue back when you were an embryo,

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I don't say that. That was actually you back then. That was actually you. At the one -cell stage, that was you.

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You were not a blob of tissue, that was you. However, you can't assume that the you that existed as an embryo is equally valuable to the you that exists now as young adults and adults.

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And to give you an example of what I mean, I will bring my own son, Eli, into this equation.

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On my desk, where I have written my books in favor of abortion, there is a picture of my son,

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Eli. The first picture shows him about a year after birth.

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He is struggling to learn to stand up in his grandfather's backyard. The second picture shows

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Eli the day he came home from the hospital after being born. He's got a turban on his head, looks like a turban, a blanket that's keeping his body warm.

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The third photograph is an interesting one. I keep it in my drawer.

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It shows Eli at 24 weeks before birth. The sonogram image is murky, but it's unmistakable.

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There's a hand bent back toward the mouth, thumb in the mouth, and I say to you that Eli in that picture is identical to Eli a year after he was born.

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It's the same little boy. However, the thesis that I advance is that it's perfectly permissible to have killed him at that earlier state when he was in the womb.

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Because he did not have immediately exercisable desires. If you don't desire something,

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I'm not robbing you of anything valuable to you if you don't desire it. Fetuses, embryos, cannot desire anything until around week 32 at the earliest.

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After that point, we can have a debate. But up till that point, there are no desires present until week 32.

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Therefore, ending the life of that unborn human being, and I will call it a human being, is not the same as killing a person with immediately exercisable desires.

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There is a difference between a potential human and an actual person.

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For example, if you were to have a kitten serum at your disposal that would turn kittens from non -rational animals to rational beings, and you have that kitten serum in your hand, are you obligated to turn the potential rational being into an actual one?

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Well, the answer is no. You could refrain from doing that. You are not obligated to do that.

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And I would also argue that if you're not obligated to turn the non -rational being into a rational being, you're also not wrong if you decide to interrupt that process part of the way through.

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Abortion is such an interruption. The mother who has the abortion has not killed an actual person.

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She's killed a potential person. But even if I'm wrong about all this, even if desires aren't what gives you your right to life, which

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I'm arguing it does, even if I grant that the unborn are human, even if I grant that they're persons with a right to life, abortion is still justified.

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Here's why. No one can force you to use your body to sustain the life of another human being against your will.

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I want you to imagine, to borrow an example from philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson, that you wake up one morning and find yourself surgically connected to a world -famous violinist.

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He's been placed there by the Society of Music Lovers. While you slept, a database check was conducted worldwide, and it was determined you alone have the blood type that could save his life.

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So while you were sleeping, you were kidnapped, taken to the local hospital, and surgically connected to this world -famous violinist that had been flown in so that you could save his life.

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After nine months of being hooked up to you, he will be over his pathology, and he will be over his illness, and you'll be free to detach.

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And as you're waking up in the morning, the hospital staff says to you, listen, we're really sorry this happened to you, we're very sorry you're in this inconvenient position, but he's a human being with a right to life, and if he doesn't have your blood type, he's going to die.

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Therefore, though it's inconvenient for you to be hooked up, you must be hooked up, because after all, he's a person with a right to life, and if you detach, he will die.

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Question. It would certainly be nice if you allowed your body to be used that way, but must you?

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The law will not force you to use your own body to give a blood transfusion to your own child.

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How in the world do we force women who have not consented to pregnancy to be hooked up to children they do not want to raise?

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This is a thorny problem, and one that no pro -life apologist has adequately addressed.

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But finally, I want to point, or fourthly, I want to point out the theological problem with the pro -life view.

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How many of you hold the view that we should honor scripture and only say and teach what scripture says without reading into it our own views?

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How many of you would agree with that? How many of you agree that exegetically, we should go where the text leads, rather than reading our own views into the text?

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Can I see your hands? I agree. How many of you agree we should speak where the

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Bible speaks and be silent where the Bible is silent? Can I see your hands? Okay.

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Where in the Bible does the word abortion appear? Nowhere.

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Where in the Bible does it say, thou shalt not have an abortion? Nowhere. Where in the

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Bible does it explicitly teach the unborn are human? Nowhere.

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Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, wait a minute, Psalm 139. The psalmist says, you knit me together in my mother's womb,

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I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wait a minute. Can we examine our hermeneutic for a moment?

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Do you really want to take that passage literally? How do we interpret the

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Bible? Is there a difference between interpreting Psalms and interpreting, for example, Pauline epistles?

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Yes or no? Yeah, big differences. You interpret epistles different than you do poetry. Now, that doesn't mean the poetry is any less inspired.

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It doesn't mean it's any less the word of God. It doesn't mean it's any less authoritative. But it does mean the rules of hermeneutical approach are going to be different with an epistle than it will be with poetry.

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For example, if you want to learn about the doctrine of justification, are you going to go to Romans or are you going to go to Leviticus?

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Well, primarily you'd go to Romans because Leviticus is a historical book, a little different, little different rules of interpretation.

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So how does that apply to Psalm 139? In Psalm 139, the very passage where the psalmist says,

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You knit me together in my mother's womb. I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. And we're so tempted to take that as literal.

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A few verses later, the same psalmist talks about having communion with God at the bottom of the sea.

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Do you want to take that literally? Then there's the whole issue of Exodus 23. Two guys are duking it out.

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They're fighting. And while they're in the midst of fighting with each other, they collide with a woman who's pregnant, causing a miscarriage.

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Well, the passage teaches that if those two guys are duking it out and they collide with the mother and there's a miscarriage, the penalty for losing the miscarriage is different than the penalty of harming the mother.

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If you harm the mother, the lex talionis applies. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life.

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If you harm the fetus, a lesser penalty ensues. Only the paying of a fine.

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Again, doesn't that point to something about even the biblical writers recognizing our intuitional force of seeing a difference between an unborn human and one that is already born.

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There are social consequences too. I am not going to give the silly argument that many of you have heard.

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That the reason why we must keep abortion legal is that women will die from dangerous back alley abortions if we make it illegal.

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That is a silly argument. Murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting it.

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However, we do need to face a reality. Abortion has been legal in this country for nearly 50 years.

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Three generations have been raised with it being available as a right.

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Are we just going to reverse course on that and think there is not going to be societal impact that follows from this?

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What is going to happen if we do this to crime rates, for example?

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We now know from data that has been published that abortion has reduced crime.

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Not by a little, by a lot. Makes sense. Fewer unwanted kids, fewer crimes.

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They get raised in better homes. In addition to that, we have reduced child abuse.

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Child abuse rates and abandonment have dropped. More wanted kids, less unwanted ones.

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Makes sense. What's going to happen to this nation when we pull the rug out from underneath abortion rights?

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Do you know what happened to this country in the Civil War when we suddenly decided slavery had to end?

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I'm all for ending slavery. It needed to end. But how did it end when we just decided we're not going to allow it anymore?

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We had a civil war. Do we want that? Or is there a better way that says maybe, maybe, there are situations where leaving certain things to individual conscience is the better way to go societally, especially when the

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Bible nowhere condemns abortion. Nowhere directly teaches the unborn or human.

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In that case, we should speak where the Bible speaks and be silent where the

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Bible is silent. That's how we honor Scripture. That's how we honor our society.

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So just to review, my argument is that the pro -life view fails the intuitional test. Think the burning research lab.

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It fails the scientific test. Think molar pregnancies. Think twinning. Fails the philosophic test.

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Failing to distinguish between person and human. Fails the theological test.

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It attempts to speak where the Bible doesn't speak and it attempts to read into the

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Bible things that aren't there, which is a violation of respect for the Word of God. And finally, it fails to recognize the sociological test that there will be implications for making abortion illegal that will not be easy for our society to navigate.

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Alright, that's my case. I would love now to just take your questions. Anything you'd like to ask me about what

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I just said, I'll be happy to try to entertain your question and give the best answer

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I can to anything I said. So who would like to ask a question? By the way, you're free to disagree with me.

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You'll be wrong, but you're free to disagree with me if you wish. Yes, sir. Yeah.

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Right. Yeah. Sure.

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Right. Yeah. You're making a valid point, and that is that the laws of our country are wildly inconsistent.

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You're correct about that. But here's the thing. In many states today, a mother who kills her newborn escapes with no legal prosecution at all.

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So we need to be very careful that we don't build our case strictly on legal penalties in this case.

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We need to be very careful we look beyond that. So I understand the cognitive dissonance that can go with, hey, the law says, for example, that you can't kill a fetus in the womb if you're a drunk driver, but you can if you're an abortionist.

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I get how that feels weird to us, but our laws are full of holes like that, where there's weird implications of it.

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And killing newborns is one of those. Good question. Thank you. Who else would like to raise a question?

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Dr. Zeke is very friendly, so you do not need to worry that he's very tolerant. And you'll have to wave at me because I have got, yes, sir.

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Well, I totally agree the Scripture teaches thou shalt not commit murder, but murder is defined as the unjustified killing of human persons.

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The Bible doesn't teach all killing is wrong. It teaches that it's wrong to intentionally kill image bearers.

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Persons are image bearers. Mere human biological life is not an image bearer.

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Did you have a handout or was that a stretch? That was a stretch. Okay. Who else? This room is getting very quiet.

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Well, because Eli, my son, at 21 weeks, was a human being.

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He's identical to the boy he is now, post birth. Same being.

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However, just because he's the same being now as he was then, does not mean he had the same right to life then as he does now.

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And what defines a person with a right to life is having immediately exercisable desires.

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And the reason I landed on that is decisive. I can't wrong you if I take something you don't desire.

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If I go through your garbage and pull something out of it, something you don't want, I haven't wronged you.

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Where if I break into your house and steal your fine art, I have. So if Eli does not desire to go on living because he doesn't see himself existing over time, having an abortion does not rob him of anything substantial.

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Now, that doesn't mean I want people to have abortions. It's just saying it would not be a moral wrong to have ended his life at that point.

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No, he doesn't. He has instincts. To have desires, you have to have belief and judgment.

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You have to believe something is the case, and you have to make a judgment that you either affirm that current condition or you want something different.

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You can't have desires without belief and judgment. And fetal brains lack organized cortical brain function capable of supporting desires until at least week 32.

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I saw a hand down here somewhere. Over here? Yes. Yes, it has.

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It has. It has been proven that even newborns lack desires, that even one -year -olds lack desires.

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And I can point you to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine pointing out that organized cortical brain function does not come to fruition in a way that would present an apparatus for desires until at least a year after birth.

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Now, having said that, I'm going to concede something here. My position entails that killing newborns is okay.

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I don't like it, but I have to be consistent with my own logic. If desires give you a right to life, and you don't have them, my position says we haven't deprived you of anything you desire.

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So, killing newborns in my position. Now, I draw a line at week 32 because I believe, practically speaking, we don't want to encourage late -term abortion throughout our country.

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It's tough on the woman. It's psychologically tough on the staff doing these abortions. So, 32 is a reasonable drawing line point, but it's not because the child itself has intrinsic value at that point.

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It's just due to the consequences. Yes, follow -up. Go ahead. Well, the difference is a human you meet outside the womb once had desires in the past.

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That's different than them never having it to begin with. Well, if, like I said, if you don't desire something and we take it from you, you haven't been deprived of anything of value to you.

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Well, I'm not assuming it. I'm arguing, and I'm saying that if you don't have desires, you don't have anything of value to you.

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Therefore, if you don't value your own existence over time, we have not deprived you of it by having an abortion.

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I saw a hand back here. Yes. Yes. Well, obviously the former, and you and I completely agree.

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We just disagree on the fact of whether the unborn is, quote, one of us. That's what we disagree on.

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We're not disagreed on the moral principle there. Yes, sir. What do you mean by depraved?

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Oh, absolutely. We are not only, we not only do bad things, we are bad by nature. Yes. Well, David...

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Okay. Again, I want to caution you about building doctrines around things you read in the

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Psalms, in the historical books, even like Samuel and Kings. David also talked about when his son died, when

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Bathsheba, the child he had with Bathsheba, when they had that adulterous union, he claimed, he said, one day

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I will go be with him. People love to build a doctrine that that's proving that these children go to heaven that are aborted.

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David is simply saying, I'm going to die and one day, like he died. I think we need to be very careful that we not read complete doctrines into this, and especially when nowhere else in Scripture are you going to see it taught that the unborn are human.

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And we have express evidence from Exodus that there's a lesser fine for killing a fetus than killing its mother.

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I saw another hand here. Yes, ma 'am. We should not because we do need to be careful to draw distinctions between ideal desires and what we'll call occurrent desires.

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Let's say, for example, you have a glass of water in front of you. It's laced with arsenic. You don't know it, though.

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You want a drink. It's a hot day. And you're reaching for that glass thinking you're going to get a drink of cold water.

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You desire it. I come up behind you and knock the glass out of your hand. One could say

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I interrupted your desire for that water. You had an occurrent desire, one you thought was good, but actually it would have been very bad.

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You had a greater desire, though, an ideal desire to go on living that would override that occurrent desire for the drink.

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Do you follow my thinking on this? What I'm saying is the unborn have no ideal desires or occurrent desires whatsoever.

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So depriving them of their lives does not rob them of anything that they desire. One more.

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One or two more and then we'll go from there. Who has not raised a question that would like to? Yes, sir.

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Premise one. Humans have value and thus bear the image of God when they can commune with God.

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Premise two. Fetuses and newborns have no intellectual apparatus for communing with God or anyone else.

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Therefore, conclusion, fetuses and humans are not image bearers.

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Well, look in Scripture. What is it that connects humans with God? It's their ability to communicate with Him.

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It's their ability to know Him. That's throughout Scripture, Old and New Testament. So, I think that's a fair way to define the

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Imago Dei. Yes, sir. Yeah.

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Yeah. No, what it signifies is, and I'll concede this, any child that God supernaturally places in the womb the way

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John the Baptist was supernaturally placed in the womb, the way that Jesus was supernaturally placed in the womb, those children are indeed human beings and human persons.

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But the vast majority of us were not conceived that way. Those were special acts of creation that rival, or not rival, they mirror what

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God did in the Garden of Eden creating Adam and Eve out of the dirt. The Scripture talks about this by the way in Genesis 1.

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Genesis 1, it says God breathed into Adam the breath of lives.

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In other words, Adam becomes a living soul when he breathes. I think that would make more sense theologically than saying the unborn are human and have a right to life and bear the image of God in the womb.

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I think it would make more sense to say they have value when they breathe. That would be more biblically supported in my view.

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I'll take one more. Who has not asked one? Anybody that hasn't? Alright, I'll give you the last one.

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Yeah, but he was the first man. And I think the creation ordinance gives us instructions on that like it does many things.

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The creation ordinance is a lens through which we can look at reality. And I think it speaks pretty clearly that Adam became a living soul when he breathed.

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Alright, I'd like to thank all of you. Pastor Jim for letting me come and support my views and argue for them here.

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You were a very polite and friendly audience and I thank you for that tolerance that you exhibited to me.

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So before I take my leave, I'd like you all to stand up and just stretch your legs but don't leave the room.

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Just stand up for a moment. Stand up. Stretch. Alright, sit down.

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Pardon me. Alright, so what was your view of Dr.

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Zeke? Was he sort of persuasive? There should have been a few things he said that threw you back a little bit.

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Alright, how do you think you did responding to Dr. Zeke? Give yourself a grade.

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You didn't do too badly actually. Actually, you know what? The first thing you did that was very good, you did not let your emotions get the better of you.

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I have done this where people stormed out of the room knowing I was faking it.

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And one poor mom, I was doing this at a home school convention in Ohio. She was late to the session.

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She walks in and I'm watching her in the rear and nobody went to her and said, he's kidding.

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And I mean, she stormed out. It was full -blown theater. So I commend you for, first of all, modeling gracious engagement.

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You all did that. So that's a high mark for you on this one. Several of you were very close to plastering me to the wall and I deftly diverted things away from where you were nailing me.

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You were really problematic by the way, just to let you know. And you were coming very close to poking a hole in my balloon.

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But let me begin. Let's take a few minutes. What time is lunch, Pastor Jim? Twelve. Let's take between now and lunch and discuss where Zeke goes wrong.

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Okay? First of all, a note about arguments.

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Did Dr. Zeke even summarize the pro -life syllogism that he was allegedly going to refute?

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No! He just launched. So in essence, he refuted nothing of your case.

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Because he didn't even address your argument. He just launched with his own gig.

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What he should have done is summarize the pro -life syllogism, said where it goes wrong, and argued from there.

38:32

He did no such thing. He just plain launched. And that's a big deal because if you're going to frame an argument that you're going to refute, you need to at least summarize what that argument is.

38:43

Go ahead and summarize it and then show where it goes wrong. He needed to show that our conclusion did not follow from the premises or that one or more of our premises was false.

38:55

He did neither. He just launched. A second thing he did. Did you catch me using the word cumulative case?

39:04

Okay. What I was trying to convince you of is that even if you didn't buy one of my arguments, taken as a whole, my case was a sound one.

39:15

That doesn't work. Atheist Anthony Flew calls this the leaky bucket syndrome.

39:23

You can't string together a bunch of bad arguments and think they hold water.

39:29

If one chain fails, the whole thing's gone in a cumulative case. Now it doesn't mean each argument has to be sufficient to prove the point, but it can't be fallacious.

39:41

And I was stringing together a bunch of arguments hoping I could hoodwink you into accepting it as a whole when the individual parts of those arguments were a disaster in many cases.

39:53

Now, a note about intuitions. Did you catch me throwing out that word intuitions over and over again?

40:01

I misused what that is. The idea of intuitions philosophically is not something

40:08

Christians should be afraid of. Intuitions are beliefs you have that you do not need to justify.

40:17

For example, murder is wrong. Rape is wrong. Torturing toddlers for fun is wrong.

40:24

If somebody says to you, well, give me a syllogism to prove that. They don't need an argument.

40:30

They need a shrink. There's something wrong with them at that point. In other words, you immediately recognize these things as wrong if you have a functioning conscience.

40:39

You immediately recognize it. And believers and unbelievers alike can recognize certain foundational moral truths.

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Believers certainly can't recognize and connect with knowledge sufficient for salvation, but they can recognize certain moral truths like murder is wrong.

40:57

They can't ground them adequately, but they can recognize them. In this case, I was misusing intuitions.

41:03

I was trying to make you believe that because your feelings were conflicted about saving a six -year -old versus embryos, there was no moral truth to be found, and other than the embryos were somehow less valuable.

41:16

That's a misuse of what we mean by intuitions in that case. So those are just a couple of things up front.

41:22

Now let's talk about the Burning Research Lab. Where does that go wrong? Did anybody begin to since we now have done that, it's been a few minutes, can you sniff out some things wrong with that analogy?

41:32

I was presenting that analogy to prove that abortion was okay. Does that analogy prove abortion is okay?

41:41

Why not? Bingo!

41:49

What does the analogy I presented pose as a question?

41:56

Does it pose who we get to intentionally kill or who we ought to save first?

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Which? Who we ought to save? It tells us nothing about who we get to intentionally kill.

42:10

Let's say I choose to save the six -year -old girl. How does it follow that the ones

42:15

I leave behind are not fully human? Suppose this building were on fire.

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And I could save all of you or my wife Stephanie. Who is going to be toast?

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You're done. You're well done. But I won't shoot you on the way out.

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I'll save her first because I have duties to her as her husband I don't have to you.

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But it doesn't follow you're less human than she is because I save her first. By the way, will the

42:54

Secret Service take a bullet for the President? Will it take a bullet for you? No.

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Does it follow the President is more human than you are because they take a bullet for him? No. It just means the consequences of killing the

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President are greater than you being killed so they save him instead of you. By the way, the Secret Service will save the

43:14

President over an entire city of human beings. Does it follow that entire city is less human than the

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President? No. Not at all. Let's change this though a little bit to where our intuitions might line up with the embryos.

43:29

Suppose the choice were not a thousand embryos or a six year old girl. How about this?

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A thousand embryos or a hundred cancer patients in the final hour of life.

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They are dying. What then? Do your intuitions change a little bit?

43:50

Do you start to think maybe the embryos might be the better choice? Yeah. What if they're your embryos?

43:57

Does that change it a little bit? So this analogy doesn't prove at all that the unborn are not human or that we may intentionally kill them.

44:08

At best it would show we're inconsistent applying our ethic. It would not prove it's okay to intentionally kill innocent human beings.

44:16

By the way, why do we save the six year old over the embryo? Because she stands a better chance of survival.

44:22

Number one. Why do we save the thousand embryos over the hundred patients that are in the final hour of life?

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Because the embryos stand a better chance of survival. We do the greatest good we can given the situation confronting us in this case.

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I have good reasons for saving each of them without making a value judgment over which is more valuable.

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I'm not judging the cancer patients as being less valuable. I'm just saving the lives that have the best chance at survival.

44:47

By the way, isn't this called medical triage? We do this all the time in medicine. Nothing new here. Alright. Any questions on the burning research lab before I move on to Dr.

44:56

Zeke's other? How about the picking up the gun and shooting abortionists example?

45:03

Boy, I was really bringing it on thick with that one, right? Okay. What follows from your belief that abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being?

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What follows? A. That you will pick up a gun and go shoot abortionists.

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Or B. You will work to take out the machinery of death so unborn children are legally protected.

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Which of those two follows? B. B. By the way, this is nothing new.

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In World War II, the U .S., British, and Canadian paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines just prior to D -Day in 1944.

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These Allied soldiers looked German, smelled German, smoked German cigarettes.

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They had perfect German decor. Every one of those Allied troops believed what

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Hitler was doing was wrong. When they landed incognito behind enemy lines, did they begin immediately shooting individual

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Nazis? They were there to spy out the land. They knew the invasion was coming.

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They were there to lay the groundwork for it. It would have been an egregious wrong for them to just start shooting individual

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Nazis because it wouldn't have helped the cause. So even from a prudential point of view, I can point out that you are not obligated to simply pick up a gun and go shoot people.

46:39

I had a discussion with Dennis Prager once about this, too. Actually, it was the same discussion I had with him on the embryonic one.

46:46

He said to me, even this argument, he said, would you pick up a gun to go save a fetus? I didn't think of it at the time.

46:53

I wish I had. He had just said on his show that he thought the events going on in Kosovo at the time represented a

47:01

Holocaust. I should have said to him, didn't think of it at the time, but I should have said, Dennis, do you believe what's going on in Kosovo is a

47:08

Holocaust? Well, of course. Have you picked up a gun to stop it? How does it follow that because I don't behave a certain way, that A, the unborn aren't human, or B, we may intentionally kill them?

47:21

Could the unborn still be human even if I don't behave consistent with my beliefs? The answer is yes.

47:27

Go back to your syllogism. All Dr. Zeke did at that point is attack you personally. He did not refute your pro -life syllogism, which, by the way, he didn't even mention.

47:37

He also said, this guy was really interesting, this Dr. Zeke guy, he threw the whole life objection at you.

47:46

You're not really pro -life unless you take on all these other issues. I said something about this last night, and I'll just revisit it very quickly.

47:56

I believe the biggest threat internally to the pro -life movement right now is this belief that if we're going to be pro -life, we need to be whole life.

48:09

I'm not going to name names except to say that their initials are Evangelicals for Life.

48:16

They hold conferences where they bring in speakers who have no knowledge of the field on the abortion issue, they're not talking to students the way we are, who are telling the pro -life movement we need to diversify our efforts programmatically and take on the opiate crisis, take on poverty, take on refugees, take on immigration reform, all these things they bring up.

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As if somehow, because we oppose the intentional killing of an innocent human being, we have to take all that on, when all of our pro -life organizations are flat broke.

48:50

As I said last night, Frederick the Great put it real well, he who fights everywhere, fights nowhere.

48:56

So what's a pro -life group supposed to do? Let's put this in real life practice. On Monday, are we to fight abortion?

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Tuesday, we're to deal with immigration reform. Wednesday, we do refugee crisis.

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Thursday, we do respect for the environment. Friday, we do the opiate crisis. Do you see how crazy this gets?

49:14

I even asked this at a panel discussion when the gal said to me, well, your pro -life organization is too narrow and she was a pro -lifer.

49:21

I said, so what are you saying, Kelly? Are you telling me that when I give a pro -life talk at a Catholic high school,

49:26

I get to spend five minutes on abortion, then I got to spend equal time on all these other issues? This is nonsense.

49:33

Don't fall for it. And yet, people want to put a job description on you that is utterly back -breaking.

49:39

And it's not fair to the pro -life movement. They don't do this with any other cause, only pro -lifers. Dr. Zeke also said that your daughter, if your daughter were raped, would you really force her to give birth?

49:55

Anybody want to comment on what is wrong with that particular argument in terms of our syllogism?

50:04

What's wrong with it? Could our syllogism still be true even if I behave one way or the other?

50:16

How does my behavior change the truth of the argument? Suppose I do the wrong thing and I take my daughter to have an abortion.

50:25

Could my syllogism still be true even if I acted inconsistently with it? Of course.

50:31

This argument does not refute the pro -life position. All it does is attack you for alleged inconsistency.

50:39

That's all it does. It does not refute your syllogism. Remember our three words, syllogism, syllogism, syllogism.

50:47

Dr. Zeke also threw out the legal prosecution one. Oh, you believe abortion is murder? Are you willing to prosecute women who have them?

50:55

All right. Give me a handle on this. Where does this whole argument start to unravel?

51:00

Can you see a flaw in it right out of the gate? You're unwilling to prosecute women. Suppose I'm unwilling to prosecute women.

51:09

What follows? Is my syllogism still true? Yes. So you still haven't refuted the pro -life argument.

51:17

What have you done? Only prove the individual pro -lifer is inconsistent. That's the best you've done.

51:24

Now, I don't happen to think you are inconsistent, so let me address this issue. Suppose you are told, oh, you're pro -life?

51:31

You're willing to prosecute women who have abortions? If you make abortion illegal, you're going to prosecute them? You're going to put them in jail?

51:38

Here's your answer. And it will stop them dead in their tracks. When they say that, you look at them and say, yes, there should be consequences, but what those consequences will be will depend on whether there's been a meeting of the minds.

51:56

And they're going to look at you and go, what? What? What do you mean by that? Well, they're trying to prove co -conspiracy.

52:05

They're trying to say to you, if the woman contracts with the doctor, you've got co -conspiracy here, you should prosecute them both the same.

52:12

If you're truly consistent, that's what you should do. But to prove co -conspiracy, you have to prove a meeting of the minds.

52:20

That's a legal phrase for this. You have to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the mother's knowledge of the act matched the abortionist knowledge of the act.

52:34

Everybody with me so far? That standard is almost impossible to prove in a court of law.

52:43

And that's why pro -life legislators have not written equal penalties into their bills.

52:48

Not because they're inconsistent. They recognize they'll never get that through. It'll get thrown out.

52:56

You have to prove a meeting of the minds. So let's explain why there's not a meeting of the minds. There is a meeting of the minds that the doctor and the woman both agree to the abortion.

53:04

There is a meeting there. Beyond that, it breaks down. For example, Dr. Warren Hearn in his book,

53:10

Abortion Practice, talks about attaching a Doppler to measure fetal heartbeat during the abortion, but make sure that fetal

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Doppler is inaudible to the mother so she can't hear it. So she doesn't hear her child's heart speed up and then suddenly stop.

53:27

He talks about using ultrasound technology and turning the monitor so it's viewable to the operator, not the patient.

53:35

There's another breakdown of knowledge between the two. The abortionist has instruments that he's aware of that he uses to dismember the child.

53:44

He has the body parts he assembles on the table that she doesn't see. To prove a meeting of the minds would be near impossible in this case.

53:54

And by the way, to prosecute the doctor, who do you need as a primary witness?

54:00

The mother. You're not going to get it if you're prosecuting her the same way.

54:06

What is the goal of our legislation? To stop abortion or to simply punish people?

54:13

Well, pro -life legislators have decided it's better to end abortion. That's what we're up against.

54:18

So rather than build laws that have equal penalties for both woman and mother, they're going to go with, hey, let's do what we can do to stop abortion here.

54:26

Let's make that the goal. Another issue on this. When you look at the history of pro -life legislation,

54:36

I cannot point to any law even before Roe v. Wade where the mother was punished the way we punish the doctor.

54:43

And by the way, don't we do this with drug policy right now? Do we publish, or publish, do we punish drug users the same way we punish drug suppliers?

54:54

Who does the law go after primarily? The supplier. And nobody thinks that's bad or inconsistent.

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But with abortion, they come to you and say, ah, you're unwilling to punish the user the same as the supplier, you're inconsistent.

55:08

When our law does this all the time for the same reason. Because the law would rather get the drugs off the street by getting control away from the suppliers rather than the individual users.

55:19

So the punishments differ. Everybody clear on that consistency issue? Alright. A couple more before we break for lunch.

55:25

Dr. Zeke also said the twinning example.

55:31

Based on last night, what's a quick rejoinder to that? Anybody remember? The flatworm.

55:39

Cut a flatworm in half, what do you get? Two flatworms. Does it follow there was no flatworm prior to the split?

55:44

Exactly. Molar pregnancy. Did you catch Dr. Zeke talking about the molar pregnancy? I totally misstated the truth about molar pregnancies.

55:54

Molar pregnancies do not start off as embryos and morph into tumors.

56:01

Molar pregnancies are tumors from the beginning. How many of you know the alphabet song?

56:08

Can I see your hands? How many of you know Twinkle Twinkle Little Star? I like your hymnology at this church.

56:15

This is interesting. Now, well schooled. Are those the same songs?

56:24

Not quite. They sound the same in the first five measures but then they change. Are they the same song just because they appear to start the same way?

56:37

No, they're different songs from the beginning. In other words, embryos start off as embryos and stay embryos.

56:46

Molar pregnancies start off as molar pregnancies and end as molar pregnancies. They don't morph into each other.

56:53

This was a distortion of fetology and embryology that I was throwing at you.

56:59

Okay. Couple of more real quick. Dr. Zeke also talked about that your cells are alive.

57:05

Each of your cells are on your body. Based on what you heard me say last night, what's wrong with that objection? What was

57:11

I confusing? Parts and holes. Remember when I had you pinch yourself last night?

57:18

What are these cells on the back of your hand? They're part of a larger human being, you. When you were an embryo, you weren't part of another human being.

57:27

You were already a distinct whole living member of the human family. There's a difference between parts and holes.

57:33

If you take one of these cells off the back of your hand and throw it in the uterus, do you get a baby? No. These cells are merely parts of larger human beings.

57:42

I also said sperm and egg were alive. Did you catch that? What's the problem there? Sperm and egg are mere parts, just like these skin cells on the back of your hand.

57:51

It's only when you have the union of sperm and egg resulting in a human embryo that you can say you've got a distinct living human being that's alive in that sense.

58:01

Dr. Zeke also got real creative when he came to I'm going to jump to this one, theology.

58:09

Actually, let's do the bodily rights first. Did you catch that violinist analogy I gave you that Dr. Zeke threw at you from Judith Jarvis Thompson?

58:17

He said, even if the embryo is a person with a right to life, you cannot force the mother to use her body to sustain its life against her will if she wants to withhold that support.

58:29

And I gave the analogy where Judith Jarvis Thompson says, a woman being hooked up to her own child is equivalent to you being hooked up to that stranger violinist.

58:40

If those parallels held, I think that Thompson's case would have been unassailable. But do the parallels hold?

58:47

Is there a difference between you being hooked up to that stranger violinist and a mother being hooked up to her own child?

58:54

Can you think of any ways those parallels break down? How are they not the same?

59:07

Mother's moral responsibility. Yes. Do women generally wake up in the morning and just find themselves pregnant for no reason?

59:17

So if Thompson's argument works, it only works in the cases of rape where she didn't consent to be pregnant, nowhere else.

59:24

In fact, more than one pro -abortion philosopher has said, that whole argument falls apart. It only works in the case of rape, nowhere else.

59:33

What is it that allows us to detach from the violinist in Thompson's scenario?

59:39

It's that he's a stranger unnaturally hooked up to us. Is that true of the unborn child and its mother? No. If the child doesn't belong in her womb, where does it belong?

59:49

Thompson never says. Another problem. What is killing the violinist in that analogy?

59:55

What's killing him? His underlying pathology. What kills the child in abortion? We intentionally kill him.

01:00:05

There is a world of difference between withholding support and intentionally killing an innocent human being.

01:00:12

My colleague Frank Beckwith puts it well. He says, calling abortion merely the withholding of support is kind of like suffocating someone with a pillow and calling it the withdrawing of oxygen.

01:00:21

There's a whole lot more going on here than merely withholding support. It's one thing to say,

01:00:28

I don't have to give you my blood for a kidney transfusion. It's quite another to say,

01:00:35

I can slit your throat in the name of withholding support. And Thompson's argument is really about slitting throats, not withholding support.

01:00:43

I'll end with theology. I threw at you that the Bible is not it doesn't speak on this issue.

01:00:51

How many of you were ready to come out of your seats when I went to theology? What's a flaw with my argument that the

01:00:58

Bible nowhere teaches that the unborn are human? Even without saying, well

01:01:04

I know scriptures where it does. Let's pretend there are none. That's not what I was that's not my position necessarily, but let's say that were the case.

01:01:10

What's a flaw with saying nowhere does the Bible say the unborn are human?

01:01:16

Does the Bible say anywhere that Americans are human? Does it say Canadians are human?

01:01:23

Does it say the French are human? Some of you are going, wait a minute on that one. No. What does it teach?

01:01:32

Premise one, all humans have value because they bear the image of God. Premise two, because humans bear the image of God, the shedding of innocent blood is strictly forbidden.

01:01:44

Exodus 23 7, Proverbs 6, 16 to 19, Matthew 5, 21 to name a few. What's the only question now we need to ask?

01:01:53

Are the unborn human? If they are human, the same commands against the shedding of innocent blood apply to them as they do everyone else.

01:02:04

I don't need the Bible to tell me the unborn are human to know the Bible is pro -life because the Bible says all humans bear the image of God.

01:02:11

And we've already established that the unborn are distinct living and whole human beings. Oh, and I just love it when they say to me, well, the

01:02:20

Bible nowhere condemns abortion. Here's your Columbo question. Are you saying that whatever the

01:02:26

Bible does not expressly condemn it allows? Does the

01:02:32

Bible anywhere say thou shalt not use neighbor for shark bait? It doesn't.

01:02:40

Can you do it? No. We know better. All right. I'm going to stop there. In your notes that you're going to get, you'll get full refutation of Dr.

01:02:48

Zeke along with a summary of his case. You guys should all go out and buy sunglasses and cool shirts and pull

01:02:55

Dr. Zeke on some people. We're going to break for lunch and I think what we're going to do, if I understand correctly, after about 15 minutes, we're going to morph into a

01:03:05

Q &A session after we get our chili and is it cinnamon buns you said?

01:03:10

Cinnamon rolls, yep. Cinnamon rolls and chili. This is going to be good. All right, so I'll give it to you.