James Franco Face & Abortion

Welcome back, guys. Welcome back. Something amazing happened this week, absolutely amazing. The Internet gave us James Franco making this face. That's the face you have when you walk into a church service and the pastor surprises everyone with a foot washing.

Awkward, right? That's the face you have when you start watching a show with your family and it goes downhill real quick, also known as Game of Thrones. Actually, that's the face I made when I heard that Hillary Clinton wanted to become a minister.

James Franco's Reaction to the Abortion Argument

James Franco was interviewing Liz Harmon, and she's a professor from Princeton University, a historic Christian university. And so what would have happened that caused the Franco face during an educated conversation?

In some of my work, I defend a liberal position about early abortion, so I defend the view that there's nothing morally bad about early abortion. So a lot of people think, well, it's permissible to have an abortion, but something bad happens when the fetus dies.

And I think if a fetus hasn't ever been conscious, it hasn't ever had any experiences, and we aborted at that stage, that actually nothing morally bad happens.

And this And that's the face. That's the face. James is actually thinking the same thing that we are, right? Like, what? What are you talking about? How do you even come to that conclusion? Why do you think

You know, that's way too much. Just, look, put up the face again. Let's do the face one more time. The Franco face. Look, she's saying if you kill a fetus, it's not morally bad. And, well, actually, fetus is a Latin term, and it means the offspring, the newborn offspring of a creature.

So, like, with reference to a human, it's a baby or a young child. So if you kill a young child or a baby, yeah, that's morally bad. And all she's doing is changing a word to make it seem less harmful.

It's obfuscation via euphemism, right? So, for instance, if you say you had Italian for lunch, but all you did was heat up Chef Boyardee, you're still gonna have heartburn. And she's saying if a young child hasn't had any experiences, it's okay to kill them.

A lot of people haven't had any experiences. That's why we have interns. But we're actually not allowed to kill our interns. HR said no.

So what you're saying is if the fetus is never destined to become a person, it doesn't have moral status. If a woman decides to have an abortion with an early fetus, just that act or that intention negates the moral status of that early fetus?

Just because if she goes out and has an abortion, she's pretty certain that it's not gonna become a person.

Right, so it might look like, on my view, abortion is permissible because you had the abortion, but that abortion wouldn't have been permissible if you didn't have the abortion. Well, that's not quite the view for, I think, two different reasons.

So one reason is that...

There's that face again. And this time, it's the best. It's with coffee. And so we've got a Franco Frappe. Which, by the way, is actually our new blend of the week. The Franco Frappe. The perfect sip when you don't understand how someone managed to even walk out of their house, much less be a professor.

Franco Frappe.

So my view isn't that if you do abort, abortion is okay, but if you don't abort, abortion would have been wrong. But what it turns out is that it's a contingent matter that you have moral status. You actually have moral status, but you might not have counted morally at all if you had been aborted.

You would have existed, but you just would have had this really very short existence in which you wouldn't have mattered morally.

Princeton, Personhood, and the Moral Status of the Unborn

James was in the movie 127 Hours. Do you see it? Do you guys see that? Excellent, right? It's a movie in which he cut off his own arm to escape the situation he was in. I now understand why someone would do that.

This is a professor at a university. I mean, Princeton University, which historically was a Christian university, started by Christians for the glory of God, Christian university. But now their slogan is, oh yeah, but like not Christian anymore.

And that's not what I'm trying to say, but that is what I'm trying to say. I mean, look, I wouldn't want her to die, but one day when she does, what then? I mean, according to her, if you die, nothing morally bad happens.

And I can tell you one thing for sure, this conversation is something bad that happened.

Closing Commentary and Show Sign-Off

Next week with Jeff Durbin, the late night show with the unpopular opinion. Tuesday, only on Facebook Live.