Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are going to begin a new discussion, a new series on the issue of abortion. And whereas what we've discussed so far in consequentialism, just coming off of that, has focused a lot more on the conservative brand of Christianity. As we get into the topic of abortion, this is going to focus more on a problem that we find on the left side or the liberal side of Christianity. And while the issue of abortion doesn't exactly relate to nonviolence in the way most people think nonviolence is, in that we're talking about aggressors and wars and those sorts of things, what you do find is that in the early Christian literature when they do talk about violence, it doesn't just include things like self defense and war, but it also includes things like abortion, capital punishment, and that sort of thing.

What we're going to see with abortion is that, of course, it is doing violence to an individual, and it relates back to something that we continue to talk about, which is at the core of the issue of nonviolence is this idea that you refuse to objectify somebody else, even your enemy, even those who might be some sort of impediment to you, and that's just not part of the Christian ethic. Well, abortion, I'm gonna argue that one of the reasons we are okay doing violence to fetuses is not because they're an enemy, but because they are an impediment and we objectify them and the result's the same. We end up killing human beings because of our willingness to do violence and to redefine groups so that we can discard those who we deem unworthy of life or unimportant enough. Beyond the tie to nonviolence and the core beliefs behind what makes nonviolence go, This is a really important topic in our culture. I know that people hold to pacifism and nonviolence for different reasons, and so while I've taken a lot of time to discuss the problems on the right, I do want to discuss the problems on the left and abortion being one of the big problems there.

So our first few episodes will just focus on the basic case. We're going to start from the ground level and work our way up and then after a few episodes making the case, we are going to have rebuttals, similar to season one with the case for non violence. I'm going to try to make the case for or against abortion. So let's jump right in. I'm going to begin the discussion with one of my favorite apologists who I think, even when I disagree with him, he ends up talking through issues and thinking through issues very clearly and laying things out very simply but very deeply.

So I'm going to start with Greg Kochel here. Greg Kochel, when he deals with issue of abortion, is he really gets down to the fundamental question. He tells a story and he says, Okay, imagine a child, it comes to you and says, Mommy or Daddy, and says, Can I kill it? Well, you don't just tell your child yes and you don't just tell your child no either. I mean, I can imagine if, you know, if I'm in Australia and you've got, like all these venomous creatures and there's a spider crawling towards your kid, a funnel web spider, and your kid says, can I kill it?

Well, you want him to be able to kill that pretty quickly so that funnel web spider doesn't bite him. So your answer would be yes. But it could also be no. If it's your child's little brother or sister, then of course, no, you can't kill it. And and that leads us to the vital question is, What is it?

What are we killing? So ultimately, question in abortion, Coco will argue, does not at all it doesn't relate to what rights does the mother have, how how intelligent is the fetus, how much pain is the mother in. That's that's really irrelevant. The question is, when you go to kill something, what is it that you are going to kill? And of course we will talk about some other factors that might come into play later on.

We'll talk about revisit ectopic pregnancies, although you already know where I stand on that. But we'll get into some of those other issues and what justifies killing and what doesn't. Nevertheless, in general, for the majority of people having abortions, at least here in the West, Abortions are I don't want to use this word lightly, a convenience. And I do understand that we're not saying a pleasurable convenience here, because I know that having a child could significantly alter somebody's life, their career, those sorts of things, but in general, a woman's life and well-being is not in danger, in great enough measure to warrant the murdering of somebody else. In general, we're going to say that abortion in the West is a convenience, and so saying, Can I kill it?

Is rarely, if ever, justified, if that it is a human being. So let's talk about it, alright, the fetus, the embryo. What is it? Because some people historically have said, Well, it's not really human yet, right? It's a living human being yet.

So let's talk about what the embryo and fetus is to help us think a little bit more clearly. First, the fetus and the embryo is a unique human with unique DNA. I believe Scott Kluesendorf says this pretty well in some of his videos that I'll try to link below. But essentially, when the father contributes a sperm cell, that's part of the child's DNA. When a mother contributes the egg, that is part of the child's DNA.

But a sperm and an egg are not their own things. It's not a complete set of unique DNA that is self sufficient, that is that is going to grow with purpose into a human being. So the first thing we need to know is that when you have that embryo and that fetus, that is a unique set of DNA that is not the father or the mother, but it is a it's own unique set. Number two, it is alive. The fetus and the embryo are alive by definition, by biological definition.

There's cell division, there's growth, everything that you need to show that there's life is there. The embryo and fetus is alive. Now this is different because the in the sense that the the sperm or the egg, we can say, are alive because they are they are living cells, but they do not have that unique DNA. They are part of the father or part of the mother. And third, the embryo or the fetus is a complete human in a particular sense.

So, when we have the embryo, we've got a totipotent cell, that's how we start, we start as a totipotent cell, and what that means is that this cell has all power, in the sense that it will start to divide and it can differentiate and become anything. So whereas my skin cell, you know, sometimes pro choicers will disparagingly talk about how you know, their skin cells, oh, well, you know, don't you think my skin cells are valuable? Like, can I kill my skin? It's just it's, you know, meant to disparage. But what what they fail to understand there is that, okay, your skin cells become skin cells.

Your liver cells become liver cells. You don't have cells in your body that will differentiate and grow a human being. So when you are a totipotent cell, not only do you have unique DNA, not only are you alive, but that totipotent cell forms, will divide and differentiate to form eyes and ears and liver and everything. Its goal is the formation of you, and that is you in a sense. Because we don't we don't say that, you know, embryo formed us eventually, we say, We once were the embryo.

We once were the fetus. And that's something that we don't say about the sperm or the egg. We don't say, I once was the sperm or I once was the egg, because as the sperm or the egg, that was not my identity, but when those fused together, and became a totipotent cell, that end was the creation, the formation of me, then yeah, I once was that embryo, I once was that fetus. So, in summary, a fetus and embryo are unique humans with unique DNA, they're alive, and they're complete humans in the sense that they are a totipotent cell, they've got all the information and they've got all the purposing to create, to form you, or to form an individual. That's something that's not true of a sperm, it's not true of an egg, it's not true of a liver cell, it's not true of a skin cell.

But despite being a living unique human, many do try to distinguish at least four areas of problems with the pro life argument here. Is the Scott Kluesendorf has the sled argument against this, right? Because some people will say, for S, embryos are smaller or their size is different. Because embryos are so small, therefore they must not be valuable human beings. But that doesn't make sense because we recognize that smaller people aren't less valuable, or else my wife is less valuable than me, and she would not like to hear that.

In fact, most women are are less valuable than most men. Most feminists don't wanna hear that. The logic doesn't make any sense to argue that because something is smaller, it is therefore less valuable. The value is not based on on the size. That just doesn't make sense, at least not for a human being.

Next we have L in the sled argument, and that is going to stand for level of development. So embryos are less developed physically, mentally, socially, etcetera. Pretty much any way you can think of, embryos are less developed. But at the same time, we don't believe that the mentally ill, the autistic, or infants hold less human value. I mean, how much better off is a newborn than a fetus at 20?

Okay, it's certainly more developed, but as far as its capabilities, it's still not much more developed. Physically, okay, maybe a bit, but are we going to say that level of development really is going to determine somebody's value. And if we are, we've got some problems because now why can't we have infanticide since infants are so underdeveloped? And what about the mentally ill, etcetera? I mean, it's just, it becomes arbitrary where we're going to say somebody has enough value that we can't kill them.

Next we get to the E in the sled argument, and that is environment. Embryos are inside the womb, connected to the mother, we are not. And so some people are going say that because the embryos are inside the womb, we can kill them. And you see this when they had partial birth abortions, I mean, long as you you kept the the fetus' head inside the mother, you could kill it even at at, like, nine months. That doesn't make any sense that just because it's head I mean, it's like we're playing football here.

It's like that, you know, so that it just doesn't make sense when you're talking about human value that there's some line which all of a sudden you cross and become valuable, but as you can manipulate to keep somebody valueless. That doesn't make make sense that the environment would change somebody's value. And if the environment does change somebody's value, then, you know, how do you get to decide which environments make somebody valuable and which ones don't? We know that location does not affect human value and dignity, and we have lots of problems if we're going to go down that route. Then we get to the last point, the D in the sled argument, and that is that since fetuses are dependent on the mother's body and care, therefore they can be killed because, if they're dependent on somebody, therefore, they must not be they're not fully functioning and therefore they can they can be killed.

And once again, that doesn't make sense because, when when do kids really stop being dependent? Okay. Maybe they're directly dependent on the mother because they're attached to the umbilical cord, when they're inside of the mom, But infants and newborns and toddlers are very dependent. You know, if I left my two year old inside the house, he might be able to scrounge some food maybe, but he's gonna die pretty quickly of starvation or or lack of thirst or I'm sorry. Or thirst or, you know, he'll he'll be in his urine and feces, and he's he's not gonna last super long.

And he he's very dependent. So dependency seems like a a really bad metric to figure out if somebody has value. So in summary, it seems painfully clear that the unborn are unique living human beings and that human beings are valuable because of what they are, not because of their fulfilling of a certain set of requirements. Humanity confers value. It's not size or level of development, environment or dependency.

If you're going to disagree, then you're going to run into the problem that you're going to have a really difficult time arguing human rights, equality, and altruism since human value is contingent not upon being human, but upon something else, some outside factor, which we'll talk about later. And you're going to have a really difficult time also refusing to align with some of the abhorrent aspects of things like Eugenics or Infanticide, things that we've seen just in the past hundred years as being extremely terrible. So that's the start of our case. We're talking about what is it that we're killing? And it's probably the most important question, but the question that's usually least asked because we're focused on everybody else's rights, who has a voice, and who we think are important, and we're good with redefining a group that we view as an impediment to accomplishing those rights.

And, you know, I do empathize with that as far as women's rights go. I think we still have a long way to go in that area. Nevertheless, it seems very problematic for me to try to advance one groups rights at the cost of another group. And that's exactly what we're doing with abortion. We're redefining what it is that we're killing so that we can feel good killing it and so that we can advance one groups set of rights at the expense of another.

And that's a problem. Well, that's all for now. So peace. Since I'm a pacifist and I say I mean it.