Over at the Unreasonable Faith blog, Daniel Florien posts a YouTube video in which anti-abortionists are asked a very simple (and fair) question: If they want abortion to be a crime, what penalty do they propose? One after another, they flounder, unable to give an answer that is even coherent in most cases. One young woman has a few more-or-less coherent remarks that lead her down an uncomfortable path of claiming that maybe it should be life imprisonment, depending on whether the woman understood what she was doing. The rest of them make no sense at all. In all cases, they are embarrassed by the question and unable to discuss it with any confidence.
As Florien comments, they are not able to take their beliefs to their logical conclusion because they know it would be absurd and unfair.
By and large, people who want abortion to be illegal are simply idiots who have a view that is unworthy of your respect (though they have every right to express it of course). The video provides nice evidence of this, just in case you needed it.
About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
3 comments:
By and large, people who want abortion to be illegal are simply idiots who have a view that is unworthy of your respect (though they have every right to express it of course). And then there's the evil bastards like Ratzinger, et al. who want it to be illegal so they can control the gullible idiots you mention.
It's a great question. If abortion is murder, then a women who has an abortion has committed or been a party to murder (which is the same thing I think) so she must be tried and convicted for murder given the evidence. I think this is a great refutation of the abortion kills a child argument.
Brian wrote:
"I think this is a great refutation of the abortion kills a child argument."
Until you ask those same protesters that if there were only two choices, 1, legal abortion, or 2, illegal abortion with the penalty being the same as for murder, which would you choose?
It's not exactly a refutation, but a call for them to think a little bit more about what they're doing and the effects it will have.
I wish Obama had been smart enough to ask that question of Rick Warren at that Saddleback Civic Forum on the presidency.
Of course, we wouldn't be terribly impressed with them if they said "Oh, life in prison, for sure", either. So it's kind of a no-win for the protesters.
I just find it interesting how incredibly poorly-thought-out their position is; like, they haven't even considered this stuff, or the implications of the words they're using. Their whole mental arsenal consists of "Fetuses are babies, abortion kills babies, abortion is murder, God does not approve of murder." And that's it. They couldn't even come up with some obvious, simple response, like "Just punish doctors who perform abortions".
I also enjoyed the lady at the end, abruptly pushing him off and fervently crossing herself, as though to ward off the approach of critical thinking.
Post a Comment