Meditations on

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Why the pro-choice movement is logically bankrupt

With the aid of their partners in the media, planned parenthood has managed to keep 70% of Americans from exposure to the recent string of films made detailing how Planned Parenthood has been committing a variety of federal crimes, most notably harvesting aborted babies for organs that were then sold for profit and delivering whole alive babies to make this process simpler.

Democrats have rallied around planned parenthood in these troubling times for the "non-profit" organization and conspired with cynical Republicans in Washington to prevent PP from losing federal funds. Planned Parenthood bankrolls Democrats for this reason and Republicans love using the abortion issue to get it's voters up in a frenzy to go elect them into office...they're not eager to actually end the evil when it is so useful to them for staying in power.

However, while the videos have been useful for showing the nasty underbelly of an exploitative industry and framing the abortion issue in a way that makes it difficult (nearly impossible really) for the pro-choice movement to hold the rhetorical high ground, they still don't do the work of undercutting the logic of the pro-choice movement. The logic that abortion itself, whether the babies are harvested for profit or simply tossed aside, is morally ok.

That's okay, it's not that difficult to do.

The pro-choice movement has philosophers across the world working on how to justify the murder of infants, I'm sure it must frustrate them at times that they have to do so at all as they all could have been born (ironic) in other times in human history when child sacrifice was allowed, but alas.

I've identified two main arguments that have come out of all that hard, intellectual work that are typically used to justify abortion on demand.

1. The fetus is not a human person, therefore it doesn't have rights.


And,

2. The fetus is a human, but it doesn't have the right to use the mother's body to sustain itself.


While no. 2 rightfully seems absurd even from the outset, it's actually somewhat tricky, so we'll start with no. 1 which is more common because it's an easier rhetorical pill to swallow and thus used more commonly.

The fetus is not a person, therefore it doesn't have rights.


To deny that the fetus is a human life is frankly untenable. What else could it be? It's clearly alive and it's preposterous to frame it as a different species of animal. Pro-choice arguments rarely go down that path, but they will embrace this argument which is virtually the same but deals with abstractions.

The idea is that the fetus is not a human person because it's not fully developed yet or because it doesn't meet some other requirements for personhood. What those requirements are is unclear and largely inconsistent. That inconsistency reveals why this whole argument is a giant crock of ****.

You see, much like how there is no reason to dub the fetus a different species of animal there is zero reason to invent a sub-set of human beings which are "non-persons." Actually there's one reason that is always present when people declare other humans to be "non-persons," they simply want a justification for killing them or treating them poorly.

Indeed, can you think of a single reason why it would be useful or necessary to try and invent a category of humans that don't qualify as persons? No other reason exists other than to justify denying them rights that we don't want to offer them, such as the right to life. You start counting a fetus, a woman, or a black man as person with equal rights and then you start having to go through all this trouble to protect and secure those rights.

One of planned parenthood's founders, Margaret Sanger, was a feminist who determined that securing equal rights for women was going to be very difficult unless feminists could also find a way to deny rights to the "non-persons" she perceived as their main competition: black Americans. She pushed abortion to help "cleanse" the American population of black people and her abhorrent mission is largely being carried out today by Planned Parenthood.

This whole argument reeks of the gulag and the third reich, there simply isn't any reason to accept the notion that we should categorize people into groups so we can justify killing them...unless we really want to be able to kill them. It may be the simpler path to rhetorical success but it's also clearly and excessively evil.

The fetus is a person, but it doesn't have the right to use its mother's body to sustain itself.


I find this argument is growing in popularity, probably because argument no. 1 is so ludicrous and can clearly be demonstrated to mimic arguments made by evil totalitarians of the past or to be applied to other groups of people that a majority of Americans aren't willing to be convinced are eligible for murder, such as babies who have escaped the womb, the sick/mentally disabled, or the elderly.

So you'll find this argument come up, often amongst the more intellectual pro-choice person who is undoubtedly in a state of cognitive dissonance about argument no. 1.

The idea here is that just because the fetus is a human baby with a right to life doesn't mean it has the right to demand the use of the mother's body in order to secure it.

Now this argument is fairly silly from the outset, it's often framed as if the baby had made a random or unfair choice about which woman it was going to inflict itself on. It also is a very unheroic hill to plant your flag on, "defending the rights of people who don't want to be Good Samaritans." In light of the rest of the progressive agenda, which is all about forcing people to do the right thing to help the oppressed, it's a pretty ironic argument.

All that said, it's often used with a degree of rhetorical skill.

One example pro-choice debaters will use is that pregnancy is like this; you've stumbled upon a person who was drowning and you know that if you dive into the waters there's a good chance that you could die yourself. They say, "well if you want to dive in and try to save them, bully for you, but you can't put a legal expectation on the rest of us to do the same."

Fairly tidy, no? Here's the problem.

Virtually none of these people have any compunction whatsoever about demanding that parents be accountable for their children. You want to make laws that require that mothers and fathers take care of their own children, to house, feed, and protect them? Very few of these pro-choice people will argue the point, most will be in full agreement.

So why are mothers not also accountable to the fetus inside of them?

"She was raped!" This is rarely the case, but what if we granted an exception for women who were raped?

"No! Uh...well, the fetus is not a person anyways! No one should be obligated to care for it!"

But of course...back to no. 1 we go.

Much of the culturally marxist (politically correct) modern liberal movement is, in essence, an open rebellion against nature. 

-People should enjoy the procreative and complementarian act of sex with whomever they wish! Even if the partner isn't complementary! You need to approve of this and call it good!

-Men should be allowed to consider themselves as women!

-Mothers shouldn't have a moral obligation to their pre-born children!

Sometimes this school of thought is described as "trans-human" with the idea that this is the stage in evolution where humans evolve into something more free and more grand. Personally I doubt it as most of these arguments seem to favor the interest of the individual over that of the species. More likely, these are all just the temper tantrums of a spoiled generation and not evolutionarily adaptive behaviors, but I digress.

The pro-choice movement has no good arguments, they are logically bankrupt, and they rely on one key fact: the unborn are unseen and unheard.

Simply put, they picked an easy victim. They're bullies who wanted lunch money for twinkies and found the smallest kid in a hallway with no one around them.

This is why everyone needs to see the films made by The Center for Medical Progress about what's going on at Planned Parenthood. If everyone could see them beating up the tiny kid in the hallway, and then giving them an extra kick to the face before taking their lunch money to buy the twinkie, none of these ridiculous arguments would carry much weight any more.

1 comment:

  1. Another great article!👨‍👩‍👧

    -A

    ReplyDelete