In this episode Trent shares his “lost abortion debate” recorded about ten years ago.

Transcription:

Trent:

Hey guys, while I’m taking some time off, I thought you might enjoy this abortion debate I took part in about 10 years ago. I don’t even think the Atheist channel it was hosted on exists anymore, but I found this in my archives and I hope you find the discussion edifying. So check it out and God bless

Debate Host:

Johnny. You are welcome to go ahead and go first and I will start that timer. If you are ready to go,

Johnny:

Let’s make it happen. Thanks Chris. Thank you so much for organizing this debate. Chris, thank you for doing the welcoming and the intro and all that kind of stuff and putting this together. Thank you Trent for joining in and allowing me to share kind of a digital stage with you. I appreciate that. It’s a very exciting opportunity. This is a very interesting topic. It’s a very challenging topic I think It’s not one of those things that we take very lightly. There’s a lot of research and a lot of information out there and I definitely recommend everybody look into all those kinds of things before making any sort of decision on this, but from my understanding, pro-lifers are pro-life because they believe that every human being, no matter their race, age, sex, religion, sexual orientation or their functional abilities has equal basic rights principle. Amongst these is the right to live right to life acts as some sort of a Trump card in ace of spades against all other rights.

While I reluctantly accept the concept of right to life and some of the complications that it carries with it, I personally have difficulty drawing the line on what qualifies as human, but more importantly, what qualifies a human for the right to life. Pro-lifers typically operate under the blanket understanding that human DNA is the only qualification, so it would necessarily follow that a fetus would be protected under this criteria. Hence the moment of consumption argument. I’m personally not convinced that human DNA is the only qualification for right to life. Human DNA is a blueprint, genetic code information, a blueprint is not a building. Even a foundation or structural beams is not a building. At some point, a blueprint becomes a building, but not until that point is a building, a building. Tonight I am pro right to life and some may find my approach uniquely vague.

Some of you might be outraged and some intrigued, quote miners, don’t carry it away. I’m simply stating that right to life is a human right that I significantly value and do not take objections, exceptions and special circumstances to this right lightly. In fact, most of us are pro right to life whether we use this terminology or not. The point of contention is when under the blueprint analogy, certainly a blueprint doesn’t qualify as a building despite the similarities. Even a model building, while really cool to look at, it’s not a building in the classical sense. At some point we have to make that determination, science and even our own understanding of what it means to be human seems to lean more towards the building and while emotional arguments are convincing, we have to admit that there’s more to being human than just DNA to quote horn from a previous debate, and I hope you’ll be okay with me doing this.

We cannot justify killing one person to suit the lifestyle interest or the socio economic status of another born or unborn, and I would agree that’s why the key to defining personhood is extremely important. More often we hear lengthy discussions about such topics as viability, the ability for a fetus to survive outside of the womb and analgesia, the inability to feel pain and even more complex social discussions. I have yet to hear a convincing argument that fetus is qualify for right to life. It’s a point of contention that is clearly important and the very reason a blueprint’s rights do not trump building rights. I find it hard to equivocate a fetus with a woman and equalize the rights for a number of reasons. Perhaps we can explore more of those in the q and a arbitrarily deciding right to life as some sort of intrinsic value given to DNA code subjects.

Mr. Thorn and other pro DN AERs to an extensive list of very difficult questions. What responsibilities and legal consequences should pregnant women face jail? Should child protective services be able to step in If a pregnant woman does something that could potentially damage the fetus, like eat tuna or drink coffee or exercise heavily, what if a pregnant woman had a miscarriage and it could be linked to some behavior going skiing or flying or not eating properly? We already prosecute pregnant women when they use drugs during their pregnancies. If a pregnant woman otherwise does harm to her fetus, should she be prosecuted for child abuse on neglect? If she miscarries, can she be tried for homicide? If a person has attempted to murder their child, shouldn’t said child be removed from her custody immediately. Now what does that even look like? These among countless other concerns arise from simply taking the stance that a fetus has the right to life.

But I digress. There seems to be a clear distinction between what I am calling pro DERs and anti-abortion. Pro DERs claim that they’re, that their chief concern over abortion stems from the value of each and every human life. From the moment of conception fertilized egg people for a lack of a better term, there’s an eerie fixation on active abortion, but abortion rates pale in comparison to the rate of fertilized eggs that don’t implant and die by being naturally flushed out of the body. Yet there’s not a single pro-life organization at least that I can find dedicated to finding a solution to this widespread deadly epidemic. The death rate of unplanted fertilized egg persons almost certainly far exceeds the abortion rate in the death rate of AIDS combined. Why the silence? Why no mass protests or funding drives or pushes for research? Where is the concern for the fertilized egg people?

What about in vitro fertilization? Clearly, it would be wrong to destroy any fertilized eggs in vitro fertilization clinic since those eggs are people, but what are the fact that without being implanted in women’s bodies, those eggs would never develop? Is it morally acceptable to leave those egg people in a freezer for their whole lives or should we compel them, compel people to carry them to term? If a frozen embryo stays frozen for 18 years, should it be allowed to vote? It’s clear that the mainstream focus is abortion, hence this evening’s topic. So let’s get back on track if we start granting rights to this DNA code and for the life of me, I can’t understand why or how we even begin to equivocate this with a more objective definition of personhood, but wouldn’t this DNA code be subject to some of the same consequences as born people?

Most countries agree that it’s lawful for a citizen to repel violence with homicide to protect his orah or another’s life and limb or to prevent sexual assault. Some countries agree that it’s lawful for a sitting to resort to homicide to protect value. Property usually defined as one’s home A castle jock doctrine is a legal doctrine that designates a person’s abode in some states, any legal occupied place of vehicle or work as a place in which that person has certain protections and immunities permitting him or her to use deadly force to defend themselves against an intruder free from legal responsibility and prosecution for the consequences of the force used. Typical deadly force is considered justified when the individual reasonably fears imminent peril of death or bodily harm. Fetuses cannot be communicated with, communicated with or asked to leave. There’s no recourse or retreat, which is sometimes a requirement for the use of lethal force.

Then there’s stand your ground. In some states, one can use deadly force in any location. One is legally allowed to be without first attempting retreat. Some laws remove that requirement that the threat must occur on one owns dwelling. But what about the innocent? If you are in the process of lawfully defending yourself or your property from attack and by necessity you killed an innocent bystander, the common law would treat the bystander’s death as an excusable accidental killing so long as the reasonable grounds existed for your belief that lethal force was necessary for lethal self-defense. Essentially, it is very simple. In order to determine justifi ability for use of lethal force, the courts want to know you did everything that you could since had to or that you had to do this and had to as a subjective argument. It’s legally defined usually in the following way, and this is called an A OJP analysis.

The first part is ability. Your attacker must have the ability, the physical, practical ability to cause you harm. In this situation, the fetus does cause harm opportunity. The opportunity can be viewed kind of as a subset of ability, but this is an equally important criterion. The biggest consideration here is range or proximity and being inside of you is about as close as it gets jeopardy, and the most subjective factor of the A OJP is the jeopardy requirement, sometimes called imminent jeopardy. This criterion requires that in your specific situation, a reasonable and prudent person would have believed himself to be in immediate danger or in bodily harm, and I think we can all agree that there there’s a bodily harm that’s being taken place here and we can go back and forth on that. The last part is preclusion and the idea is that whatever the situation you were expected to use force only as a last resort.

That is only when the circumstances preclude all other options, you can say he tried to hit me, but then the police in courts will ask, why didn’t you blank? You must have no other options to fill in that blank. There must have been no other courses of actions that you could have taken to maintain your safety except the use of force. Otherwise you’re just fighting because you want to and that’s a crime. In conclusion, while right to life stands at the pinnacle of human rights, it does not act as a Trump card for human rights and the concepts that govern this, right, they’re not objectively unique to just guilty parties either. Simply put, no one should have to sacrifice any amount of physical harm or pain for the life of another. You wouldn’t be legally required to run into a burning building to save an innocent life.

Even if you set the fire, you wouldn’t be legally required to donate blood to save an innocent life, even if you stabbed them. You wouldn’t be legally required to donate a kidney to save another life even if that life was your kin. While these analogies are entertaining, they do strictly apply to personhood, which we haven’t even begun to get into. I want you to be wary of emotional terminology that you’ll likely hear tonight. I’m not going to put words in Mr. Horn’s mouth, but let’s all keep a keen ear to these things. Abortion is not pretty. You’ll probably hear Mr. Horn go into great length to some of the gruesome details, but removing an appendix is gruesome. Mr. Horn will probably say something along the lines of we do not tolerate the legal killing of innocent beings, and if you engage in sex, you are responsible for the child that nobody has a right to use their body to hurt another innocent body inside or outside of them, and I would agree to an extent this further necessitates the understanding of personhood. Even if Mr. Horn believes that personhood starts at conception and it’s generally wrong to kill an innocent human being, there are circumstances that exist in which an individual’s immediate physical pain would decriminalize the action. I am under the understanding that Mr. Horn makes a distinction between bodily harm and life-threatening circumstances. He rejects bodily harm as a ground for any lethal force while accepting the life-threatening aspect. If this is the case, it seems counterintuitive to his acceptance of personhood at conception, and I’ll be interested in hearing how he reconciles the two. Thank you.

Debate Host:

Well, thank you, Johnny. You still had 48 seconds left, so thank you very much, Johnny for your time. That was Johnny’s opening remark. We will now transition into Jeff’s. I just got to reset my timer here or Trent, I’m sorry. All right, Trent, the floor is yours.

Trent:

Alright, well, let me start by saying that I agree with Johnny that abortion is a difficult and emotional issue for many people. In fact, a lot of you listening probably don’t like abortion and you might even think that it’s wrong. You don’t say you’re pro-abortion, you say you’re pro-choice, but here’s my question for you. What’s wrong with being pro-abortion? I mean, if the thing being aborted is not a human being but mere tissue, then abortion is just a harmless surgery. But if the unborn are human beings with the same basic rights you and I possess, then abortion’s a serious injustice because abortion directly kills unborn human beings without proper justification. Here’s my argument against abortion. I want to present to you all tonight. Premise one. It is prima fai wrong to directly kill innocent human beings and such killing should be illegal. Number two, unborn humans are innocent human beings.

Number three, abortion directly kills unborn humans. Therefore, it is prima wrong to abort unborn humans and such killing should be illegal. Now let’s examine the evidence for each premise of my argument. First, it’s generally wrong, prisi wrong to kill innocent human beings directly kill them. I’m going to say that’s obvious. If anyone thinks it’s okay to go around and just kill innocent human beings, let me know because I’ve always wanted a prison pen pal and just ass illegal to kill a 2-year-old because you don’t want to take care of him. It should be illegal to kill an unborn human being for that same reason if they’re equally human. Which leads me to premise two. The unborn are innocent human beings. How do we know this? First, the unborn are growing so they must be alive. If they weren’t alive, you wouldn’t have to abort them.

Second, the unborn are human because they have human DNA and are the offspring of human parents. Finally, unlike sperm egg or cancer cells or skin cells, human fetuses and human embryos are complete organisms who have the capacity to grow and develop into adults unless something or someone kills them before they reach that point. The very words embryo and fetus can only be defined as particular stages of development in the life of an organism. So from a strictly biological standpoint, the statement the unborn are human beings is an indisputable fact. The standard medical text, human embryology and ology states, although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed. Now, some people say that the unborn are biologically human, but they aren’t persons or they don’t have a right to life.

Well, whoever makes that claim it better be able to give a coherent definition of what a person is unless we know what a person is. We can’t say certain humans like the unborn are not persons, but these alternate definitions of personhood don’t work. For example, if a person is anything that can feel pain, then disabled humans who can’t feel pain would not be persons. More importantly, any animal that could feel pain would be a person. If you ate a slice of pepperoni pizza, you’d be an accomplice to murder because obviously pepperonis are made of animals that can feel pain. What about the ability to have rational thought? Well, fetuses can’t do that, but neither can newborn infants. So if that’s your criteria for personhood, then unless you’re willing to say newborn babies have the same right to live as a squirrel or basically no right to live, you can’t use rational thought as a standard for personhood.

The other common definition of a person is viability or being able to survive outside of the uterus, but once again, lots of animals like squirrels and snakes can survive outside of a uterus. So viability isn’t relevant to personhood. Besides imagine that martians kidnapped us and put us on the surface of Mars where we’re not viable. Would they have the right to do that because we’re not viable and we’re not persons? Certainly not. Likewise, the fact that the unborn can’t survive outside of the uterus doesn’t give us the right to remove them from the place where they can survive and kill them in that fashion. To summarize, our human rights don’t come from what we can do such as think or survive on our own. They come from what we are and equal human rights can only be grounded in the one thing that is equal about all of us, our biological human nature, not our fleeting functional abilities.

This is the most equal and inclusive definition of human value, and so reasonable people should adopt it. What about premise three of my argument? Abortion directly kills the unborn. Some people say abortion isn’t really killing because the fetus has no right to use a woman’s body without her consent, and abortion just removes the fetus who then dies because he or she can’t survive outside of the uterus. But that’s like saying putting your one-year-old outside during a blizzard doesn’t kill him or violate his right to life. It merely removes him from a place he has no right to be. After all, you own your home, you have a right to let people live there or not, and the blizzard case you don’t kill the child, you just put him somewhere where he can’t survive, but that’s clearly absurd. As pro-choice philosopher Marianne Warren writes quote, the appeal to the right to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property right is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion.

Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property. Even the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade said, there is no absolute right to do whatever you want with your body. Justice Blackman said, the court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. If you engage in an activity that is ordered towards creating helpless children, then you have an obligation to provide for the children you create. If you are a man, then you have an obligation to provide child support even if you don’t want to because you have a responsibility towards those children that exist because of something you did. If you are a woman, then you have a responsibility to care for this child who in almost every case you are responsible for creating. Women certainly have a right to control their bodies, but nobody has the right to use their body to hurt another innocent human body that they have a responsibility to care for.

I agree, parents don’t have an obligation to donate organs like their kidneys to their children, but that’s because those organs are for sustaining their own bodies and any other use is extraordinary and therefore voluntary. Let’s see here, but what is the uterus for if not sustaining the life of an unborn child? Don’t the children we create through sexual union have a right to basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. Pregnancy provides this and so unborn children that we create who are fully human have a right to that ordinary care. Finally, abortion is not just a passive removal of life support. It’s the act of killing of a healthy child via dismemberment. To demonstrate that I have visual evidence of what abortion does to unborn humans, these photos come from the center for bioethical reform and have been authenticated by medical professionals. Some of you may object that graphic images of abortion are merely appeals to emotion, but consider the words of pro-choice advocate Naomi Wolf.

She writes, how can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish, vile and repulsive images if the images are real to insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. So once again, this is Naomi Wolfe, a pro-choice feminist who says These images help us make an important moral decision. So what does abortion do to unborn humans? Well, this is evidence from the first trimester. This would be a six week old embryo, and remember about 89% of abortions take place in the first trimester.

This would be an eight week old fetus, probably vacuumed through a suction tube dismembered in the process we have here a nine week old fetus. The dies is the dime is for size comparison. This would be a 10 week old fetus. Once again, what I’m showing you are first trimester abortions and the majority of abortions take place the first trimester, and finally, this would be a late term abortion at 22 weeks. About 10,000 abortions at this stage occur annually every year, and so I think it’s clear that abortion is not passive removal of life support. It is an active and violent dismemberment of a human being who has the same rights that you and I possess. Let’s see here. Alright, so in conclusion, the reason that I am pro-life is because I believe that every human being, no matter their race, their age, their sex, their religion, their functional ability, their sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant factor, every human being deserves to be protected under the law.

What it means the right to life or being pro right to life. That means you believe all human beings, no matter who they are, have a right to live and have that right protected by law to protect them from being directly killed by other people without due process. Just as it is wrong to say women shouldn’t have rights because they’re biologically different than or socially dependent on men, it is equally wrong to say unborn human beings shouldn’t have basic rights because they are biologically different than or physically dependent upon born people. In order to make his case Tonight, Johnny asked to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the unborn are not human beings worthy of basic rights. So I want you to watch that in his rebuttal and especially if he’s going to prove that he has to show the unborn are not human beings or that they’re not persons, or that they don’t deserve basic rights to food, water, and shelter through the ordinary use of a woman’s body in pregnancy.

And before I yield my time, I want to point out to everyone that in Johnny’s opening statement, he confidently said, we can’t say the unborn are human or the unborn are not persons. Notice he never defined those terms. He never said what a person was or what a human is. He never gave a definition. He gave a flawed analogy and I’ll reveal why it’s flawed in my rebuttal, but the fact of the matter is I hope that he’ll bring it up in his next speech or something else to tell us what is a human being, what is a person and why the unborn don’t qualify under those definitions and I’ll yield the rest of my time.

Debate Host:

Well, cool. Thank you very much Trent. Johnny, you are back up. Just let me reset my timer. We are now going into the rebuttal of his argument. So Johnny, you’ll be given eight minutes to have a rebuttal time. Alright, go ahead sir.

Johnny:

Mr Horn’s argument hinges on providing the right to life at conception, and I think that we agree upon that this seems a little arbitrary of a delegation of rights based on DNA. I mentioned in my opening statements that science and even our own understanding of what... Read more on Catholic.com