Have you read Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who? If you’re pro-life, you might have quoted its most famous line: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” But the story as a whole is…kind of intense. Horton the elephant is in the middle of a relaxing swim, when he hears a very soft voice calling for help. He looks around, but all he sees is a small speck of dust, and he realizes he’s actually hearing a microscopically tiny person (a Who, as it turns out) on the speck calling for his help. The speck is floating toward the water, and the tiny person is afraid he’ll drown. So Horton carefully picks up the speck and places it on a soft clover—because, as Horton says, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

A sour kangaroo wandering by hears Horton, and scoffs, “Why, that speck is as small as the head of a pin. A person on that? Why, there never has been!” Since her hearing isn’t as keen as the elephant’s, she can’t hear the voice on the speck. She starts a rumor that Horton’s gone crazy and is carrying around a speck and talking to it. Things escalate over the next couple days, and finally the kangaroo vows to stop all this nonsense. “Humpf!” she says.

“For almost two days you’ve run wild and insisted
On chatting with persons who’ve never existed.
Such carryings-on in our peaceable jungle!
We’ve had quite enough of your bellowing bungle!
And I’m here to state,” snapped the big kangaroo,
“That your silly nonsensical game is all through!
With the help of the [monkeys], whose help I’ve engaged,
You’re going to be roped! And you’re going to be caged!
And as for your dust speck…hah! That we shall boil
In a hot steaming kettle of Beezle-Nut oil!”

“Boil it?…” gasped Horton!
Oh, that you can’t do!
It’s all full of persons!
They’ll prove it to you!”

And he asks the Who mayor to gather everyone on the speck and make as much noise as they can so the kangaroo will hear them, know that they’re persons, and stop her plan to boil the speck they live on. The Whos yell as loud as they can, but the kangaroo still can’t hear them: “I heard no small voices. And you didn’t either,” she says. The monkeys attack Horton, tie him up with ropes, cage him, and take the clover from him to go dump the speck in boiling Beezle-Nut oil. The mayor frantically searches through the town and finds one little boy who missed the memo and wasn’t yelling. All the Whos yell together one last desperate time. And with that little boy’s one extra shout, the kangaroo finally hears the Whos.

And the elephant smiled. “Do you see what I mean?
They’ve proved they ARE persons, no matter how small.
And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of All!” 
“How true! Yes, how true,” said the big kangaroo. 
“And, from now on, you know what I’m planning to do? 
From now on, I’m going to protect them with you!”

And the Whos were not boiled in Beezle-Nut oil, and they all lived happily ever after. Long story, lots of genius rhymes, kind of intense for a kids’ book. Here’s my question: What crimes are the kangaroo and the monkeys guilty of? Obviously they assaulted and caged Horton, and that’s terrible. And they tried to dump the speck in boiling Beezle-Nut oil, which would have resulted in the deaths of all the Whos—and that’s terrible. But there’s an important difference between their actions with Horton and their actions with the Whos. Their actions with Horton were intended to harm him. They knew when they tied him up that they were tying up a person. They couldn’t not know—he was right in front of them, pleading with them, struggling to get away from them. 

But they didn’t intend to harm the Whos. They didn’t know that dumping the speck in Beezle-Nut oil would harm the Whos at all, because they didn’t know the Whos were people. Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine a friend comes to you one day, shows you a speck of dust, and says, “I can hear voices coming from this speck! There are tiny people down there!” But you don’t hear anything. Your friend says, “You don’t get it! I’ve always had really good hearing, and I can hear them clearly—there are people down there!” I hope you wouldn’t be cruel enough to your friend to dump the speck in boiling olive oil (or Beezle-nut oil, if you know where to get some), but I imagine you would be more concerned for your friend’s sanity than for the safety of the alleged tiny people.

So there are all sorts of inexcusable things about the kangaroo’s treatment of Horton, but her lack of knowledge that the Whos exist or are in danger is excusable—that’s a reasonable response to a friend telling her he’s hearing voices, since she’s never heard of people so small they can live on a speck. Even if she had successfully dunked the speck in boiling Beezle-Nut oil before she heard the Whos, she would not be guilty of murder. Not because the Whos aren’t persons—they are persons, they’re every bit as valuable as bigger persons, and their death would be every bit as tragic as if they were bigger. But because the kangaroo didn’t know they were persons, she would not be as culpable for their deaths as if she had known.

Our law has a category for this—it’s called mens rea, which is Latin for “guilty mind.” Basically, for an action to count as first-degree or second-degree murder, it has to not only be the case that the person killed someone (the guilty act), but also that they knew they were killing a person and intended to kill a person (the guilty mind). There are also lower levels of mens rea that are associated with different crimes: for instance, for something to count as criminally negligent homicide, the person doing it doesn’t have to know that they’re killing someone; it just has to be the case that a reasonable person in their shoes should have known that harm would occur.

But the kangaroo doesn’t meet the threshold for criminally negligent homicide either. A perfectly reasonable kangaroo wouldn’t have believed that there were persons on Horton’s speck, just like you wouldn’t believe that there were tiny people on your friend’s speck just because your friend says he has really good hearing.

Yeetus the Fetus

The analogue to the kangaroo in the abortion conversation is something like this. Imagine a woman doesn’t believe that fetuses are people, and she also thinks pro-lifers are ridiculous, hates them, and wants to hurt them. So she intentionally gets pregnant in order to have an abortion. Then she walks into a gathering where she knows her pro-life friends will be, gets their attention, and takes Mifepristone in front of them while flipping them off. To be clear, that’s horrible. She’s knowingly and intentionally hurting her pro-life friends. And assuming the pro-life view is right and fetuses are people, she’s also killing a person. But like the kangaroo, she doesn’t know that she’s killing a person, so she’s not guilty of murder. And in fact she reasonably doesn’t know that she’s killing a person. She’s been told for decades by people she should be able to trust, like governmental authorities, doctors, and people in her community, that there is no person in her uterus—that it’s just a speck.

Someone might reply that this woman must actually know that she’s killing a baby, she’s just being duplicitous when she says she doesn’t believe it’s a baby. I’ve heard a few people who oppose abortion say that all women who are pregnant really do know that what’s in their uterus is a baby, and know that abortion kills a person. But I think that’s demonstrably false. I personally have multiple passionately pro-life friends—including my colleague Emily—who have firsthand experience being pregnant without having some intuitive, bodily sense that there’s a baby or a person inside of them. They absolutely believed that there was—they knew and believed all the pro-life arguments. But being pregnant, especially in the first trimester, didn’t intuitively feel like having a baby inside them—it felt like being sick. 

When pro-life people change pro-choice people’s minds, it’s very often in large part because we gave them new evidence or arguments that they hadn’t seen or considered before. That wouldn’t be possible if all pro-choice people already just knew that fetuses are people, in the same way that we all already just know that infants are people. I’m not saying there’s never any willful blindness involved in people not looking further into pro-life evidence and arguments. I am saying that when pro-choice people—including pregnant people—say they don’t believe fetuses are people, they’re typically not lying. 

Some pro-choice people will say things like “Yeetus the fetus!” or share their abortion experience and sarcastically say “I killed my baby today!” in order to get a rise out of pro-lifers. (Sidenote—I encourage you not to let them get a rise out of you; it’s what they want. If you reply, don’t reply with a gasp because they’re bloodthirsty (they’re not); reply with an eyeroll because they’re trolling.) That’s analogous to the kangaroo sarcastically saying, “Horton, watch! I’m going to boil all your little Who friends!” It’s mean, but it’s not an indication that she actually believes there are people on the speck.

What if we change the story?

But the woman in that thought experiment isn’t real. I don’t know of any real women who have intentionally gotten pregnant so they could have an abortion to stick it to pro-lifers, like the kangaroo. At the very least, the vast, vast (vast!) majority of women who have abortions aren’t doing it to stick it to pro-lifers—they’re doing it because they’re desperate and they feel like they have no other choice. What if we change the Who story to make it more analogous to most abortions?

Imagine a country where, like ours, most people have never heard of Whos. But in this country, unlike ours, Whos are real—most people just don’t know it. They live on specks that float around in the air and tend to land on cultivated rosebushes. Even though they’re tiny, the Whos’ fur causes an extreme allergic reaction in some female humans. Some women only have mild discomfort, but others are nearly bedridden with fatigue, nausea and vomiting, intense pain, and other symptoms, for months. Then, after about nine months, the woman typically has several hours to over a day of extreme pain, and then finally her immune system acclimates to the presence of the Whos and her symptoms improve, and typically after a couple months’ recovery they’re gone entirely. But those nine months can be pretty miserable, and the day of intense pain is, absent medical intervention, one of the worst pains a human can experience.

Some researchers figure out that cultivated rosebushes are a common thread in most (but not all) of the allergy-sufferers’ environments, so they start investigating the rosebushes. They locate the specks, look at them under magnification, and to their shock see tiny, fur-covered people walking around in tiny cities! They’re extremely curious, so they bring in sensitive microphones, and they hear that the people are actually talking to each other! They do some testing and realize that it’s the Whos’ fur that’s causing the humans’ allergies.

Now the researchers have a choice to make. They learn that once a speck lands on a rosebush or other plant, it sticks to the plant in such a way that removing the speck from the plant or the plant from the ground would produce the equivalent of a 12.0 earthquake on the speck, leveling the Whos’ cities and killing the Whos. They know that there are a lot of humans suffering from Who-allergies, as well as a lot of money available to be made “curing” them. But they also know—with the obvious evidence of their own eyes and ears—that the Whos are clearly persons, even though they’re small.

Some of the researchers decide they don’t care. They advertise their services and go around to suffering women saying they can end their pain by applying gentle suction to their rosebushes to remove tiny specks—lying that it’s perfectly safe and doesn’t harm anyone. Many of the women they talk to don’t have a lot of financial security and are afraid they’ll lose their jobs if they keep being sick like this. Other women have toddlers and are really struggling to be able to give them the care they need while they’re feeling so sick. Sure, they could have done more to double-check the researchers’ claims, but why wouldn’t they trust them? It makes really good sense to them that it’s just specks, and it would be a really weird thought to them that there could be persons that tiny.

Maybe some humans do their own research and figure out that there are people on the specks and try to spread the word and convince people that vacuuming the specks is killing tiny people. But they sound crazy to a lot of people—it feels like a really weird claim. And after all, many, many trusted researchers, along with the law and governmental and community sources, are saying that what already feels intuitive is in fact true—they’re just specks, no tiny people involved. 

Now imagine that the pro-Who-life humans convince enough people that they manage to pass laws against speck-vacuuming, at least in some states. Who should those laws hold responsible? The suffering women don’t know that speck-vacuuming kills people; the researchers do. The women are being lied to; the researchers are lying. The women are in the middle of incredibly difficult circumstances and feeling desperate to end them; the researchers are deceiving them and turning a profit.

Someone might reply, “Well, why not hold both the women and the researchers responsible legally? Maybe the women aren’t guilty of murder, because they’re not knowingly killing people. But if you make a law against hiring someone to vacuum the specks off rosebushes, they’ll at least be guilty of something—they’ll be knowingly violating the law!” But here’s the thing. They would be knowingly violating a law that they reasonably believe to be deeply unjust, by doing something that they’re being told by people they should be able to trust doesn’t harm anyone, because they’re desperate to get out of genuinely desperate circumstances. 

Imagine if you were allergic to mosquito bites. (That’s actually a real thing that can happen, I looked it up.) When you get bitten by a mosquito, it swells up huge, you get hives, and you get a fever. Now imagine some fringe environmentalist group believes mosquitoes are people, and gets enough support that they manage to pass a law against intentionally killing a mosquito by any means—trapping, swatting, professional pest control, whatever. Someone who works in pest control comes to you and says, “Look. I know this is technically illegal, but the law is dumb—killing mosquitoes in your own house obviously doesn’t hurt anybody. And not being able to kill them is really, really harming you—you’re having intense symptoms, and it’s deeply impacting your life, to the degree that it’s threatening your ability to make a living. That’s not right. Let me take care of this for you.” Would you let her kill the mosquitoes in your house? Honestly, in those circumstances, I think I probably would.

Now imagine that (in this weird alternate universe) the pest control person knowingly lied to you, and the fringe environmentalist group is actually right: mosquitoes are people. Maybe the tiny mosquitoes we see are a really young stage of the life cycle of an organism that, in their adult stage, can talk and think and make moral decisions just like humans can. But the evidence you had when you paid the pest control person to exterminate them from your house was a whole bunch of authorities you should be able to trust saying that mosquitoes are absolutely not people, plus this one group you see as fringe and weird that thinks otherwise. Should you go to jail for that, even for a lower charge than manslaughter or murder? I think not. And I don’t want to charge you a fine either—that seems weirdly minimizing of the fact that what happened was the death of a person. I would rather charge the pest control person—the person who actually had all the information, wasn’t in the middle of desperate circumstances, intentionally deceived you, and knowingly killed people.

In the same way, given the cultural knowledge in the U.S. as it is today, I don’t believe it would be just to pass a law under which women could be prosecuted for having an abortion. Over time, I hope we will be able to continue to educate people, change minds, and change culture such that there will come a time in the future when it is obvious enough and broadly enough known that human fetuses are people that that will be just someday. But it would not be just today.

Even the kangaroo and the woman in the first example weren’t guilty of murder. But the vast, vast, vast majority of women who have abortions are in the rosebush category, not the kangaroo category. I’m not saying all women who have abortions have no culpability at all for them, or no level of willful blindness involved in not looking further into arguments and evidence about whether fetuses are people before they have abortions. I am saying that in the U.S. as it is today, the vast majority of women who have abortions don’t have the level of culpability or knowledge necessary to make it just to prosecute them for having abortions.

The post “Were Horton’s Friends Guilty of Attempted Murder?“ originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Rebecca Carlson (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Rebecca Carlson) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Were Horton’s Friends Guilty of Attempted Murder? appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

“I’m so sorry that they did that to you—that was super messed up, and if I’d known, I wouldn’t have let it happen. But now you’re kind of stuck. Because you see, if you unplug from the violinist, he’ll die. So it seems like that would be wrong. But don’t worry, if you lie here hooked up to him for nine months, you’ll both be able to unplug safely and go on your merry way.”

The Violinist Argument

If you haven’t heard that story before, it was created by a philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thomson in her 1971 paper “A Defense of Abortion.” She argues—and most pro-life and pro-choice people agree—that it should be legal to unplug from the violinist in her thought experiment scenario. And she uses that intuition to argue that abortion should be legal too. She says that having an abortion is like unplugging from the violinist: You stop using your body to help a person whom you never agreed to help in the first place, and as a result, they die. Since the two cases are similar in morally relevant respects, Thomson argues, abortion should be legal just like unplugging from the violinist should be legal.

Importantly, this is a bodily autonomy argument. It assumes, at least for the sake of argument, that human fetuses are people like you and me with an equal right to be protected from violence. It argues that abortion should still be legal, even if fetuses are people, because of the woman’s rights to her own body—in this case, particularly her right to refuse to use her body to help people. 

We at ERI have talked a lot about how to respond to the violinist argument in conversations with pro-choice people. But there’s another point related to it that I’ve heard both pro-life and pro-choice people make in different scenarios: the worry that it’s philosophically “cheating” to use an implausible thought experiment to support your point. Sometimes pro-lifers look at the violinist and say, “But that would never actually happen. There’s no disease where you’d need to be hooked up to one particular person for nine months—that’s ridiculous!” They feel like the fact that the thought experiment scenario could never actually happen means it’s not applicable in a dialogue about whether abortion should be legal, since it’s not even real. And I’ve heard some pro-choice people say exactly the same things about implausible pro-life thought experiments. (I think the weirdest thought experiment we use at ERI involves physiologically impenetrable uteruses.)

Why Thought Experiments are Kosher

We at ERI have often responded to people raising this concern by pointing out that their side (whether they’re pro-life or pro-choice) uses weird, implausible thought experiments too. We’ve also pointed out that it’s widely accepted for philosophers to use weird thought experiments to make arguments about any number of topics, not just abortion. Philosophers, pro-lifers, and pro-choice people all clearly operate as though weird and implausible thought experiments are fine to appeal to and need to be taken seriously as arguments. 

But I always wanted to be able to articulate to myself exactly why implausible thought experiments are kosher, not just appeal to authority (even legitimate authority!) to just declare them so. And I could never do it to my satisfaction. Until a couple weeks ago, when an awesome pro-life intern at a speaking gig I was at in Michigan asked me about thought experiments, and the answer finally clicked in my brain after literally years of wondering about it.

We were talking about the Equal Rights Argument and what makes us (and human fetuses) “persons”—entities with an equal right to be protected from violence. I said that being a biological human can’t be what makes us persons, because of Reepicheep. If you don’t know who Reepicheep is, he’s a valiant, chivalrous knight of Narnia, who happens to be a talking mouse. (Incidentally, if you don’t know who Reepicheep is, you really need to read (or reread) The Chronicles of Narnia.) Reepicheep isn’t a biological person, and yet clearly has the same equal right to be protected from violence that you and I have. So, I argued, being biologically human can’t be what gives us our equal rights.

A student pushed back and asked, “But why does that matter? Obviously Reepicheep’s not a person—he doesn’t exist!” She was pulling on the same thread that bugs people about the violinist (and many other pro-life and pro-choice thought experiments)—it feels really weird to draw conclusions about something in real life, like abortion, based on something that not only has never happened but definitely will never happen, like talking mice.

After a solid minute of stuttering and talking around it, I finally landed on the explanation I’d been looking for. I said, “Reepicheep doesn’t exist, so he’s not a person. But if we define that what gives us personhood is being biologically human, that wouldn’t just mean that Reepicheep isn’t a person (because he doesn’t exist). It would mean that Reepicheep wouldn’t be a person even if he did exist. And that’s not true—in the crazy alternate universe where Reepicheep really exists, intentionally killing him would be just as much a murder as killing a human, rather than pest control like killing an ordinary mouse.” So “Biological humanness is what defines personhood” implies something false—namely, “If Reepicheep existed, he wouldn’t be a person.” Claims that imply something false have to be false. So it’s false that biological humanness is what defines personhood.

Bringing it Back to the Violinist

In the same way, Thomson is arguing: “If you say that refusing to continue helping someone with your body (like by having an abortion) shouldn’t be legal, that means that if you ever actually were hooked up to the violinist, refusing to continue helping him with your body shouldn’t be legal either. But that’s false: If you ever were hooked up to the violinist, unplugging from him should be legal. So your pro-life claim implies something false. So your claim must be false.”

Now to be clear, I don’t think the violinist argument works—I think the obligation to not kill people argument is extremely successful against it. But I think the violinist argument is a philosophically kosher move for pro-choice people to make. I think it doesn’t ultimately work, but I think we have to prove that it doesn’t work by actually engaging with the details of the argument. We can’t successfully just dismiss it off the bat because it’s an implausible thought experiment. Implausible thought experiments can still prove things about real-world claims, because real-world claims have implications about what would be true if the thought experiment were real.

So if you ever need to convince a pro-choice person that it’s legitimate for pro-lifers to use weird thought experiments (or convince a pro-lifer that it’s legitimate for pro-choice people to use weird thought experiments), or if you’re wondering about it yourself, think about it this way: If a claim implies something false, then that claim must be false. And the claims we make about reality have implications not just about what is true, but about what would be true if a thought experiment were real. The claim “biological humanness is the thing that gives personhood: if you’re a biological human, you’re a person, and if you’re not a biological human, you aren’t a person” doesn’t technically have false implications about whether Reepicheep is a person—he’s not a person, because he doesn’t exist. But the claim does have false implications about whether Reepicheep would be a person if he did exist. And if a claim has any false implications, even false implications of the form “If x were real, y would happen,” that claim can’t be true. So it’s legitimate to use even a weird thought experiment about x to disprove a claim about reality.

The post Is This Pro-Choice Thought Experiment Cheating? originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Rebecca Carlson (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Rebecca Carlson) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Is This Pro-Choice Thought Experiment Cheating? appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Some Common Ground

If you don’t know who Abby Johnson is, she’s a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who’s now an anti-abortion advocate. Her story is told in the movie Unplanned. If you’re not familiar with it already, here’s the very short version: She had an abortion, volunteered for Planned Parenthood, and eventually worked at and even directed a clinic. Then one day, she was asked to assist during an actual abortion procedure by holding an ultrasound probe. As a result of seeing the abortion procedure happen in front of her, she quit her job at Planned Parenthood and joined the pro-life movement.

It took courage and integrity to leave, and Abby has done important work since then in exposing Planned Parenthood, advocating against abortion, and helping workers leave the abortion industry. And she’s right that it’s important for pro-lifers to articulate clearly that elective abortion isn’t just “not great”—it’s the unjust killing of an innocent person. It’s a human rights violation. So it’s not something we should be content to just reduce—we should want it to be illegal, and we should want it to never happen at all, just like we should want both of those things to be true of the unjust killing of toddlers, teenagers, and adults.

I get the pull toward saying we should prosecute women for having elective abortions. After all, if we really take seriously the fact that human fetuses have the exact same equal right to be protected from violence that human toddlers and adults have, someone might wonder if it’s inconsistent to prosecute people who pay someone to kill an adult, but not prosecute people who pay someone to kill a fetus. But I argue that there’s no real inconsistency: Even though an aborted fetus and a murdered adult have the same value, a person who pays for an abortion and a person who hires a hitman typically have very different levels of knowledge and culpability about the value of the life that is being ended. U.S. law frequently responds differently to people who have been involved with killing a person based on their level of knowledge and culpability, and doing so is also clearly a requirement of justice.

The Point of This Article

The rest of the article will explain ERI’s view about why we shouldn’t prosecute women for having abortions, and then argue for two very modest claims about that view:

1. That it’s psychologically possible for someone to hold that view and still care about ending abortion.
2. That it can be logically consistent for someone to hold that view and still care about ending abortion.

Most pro-life people already agree that we shouldn’t prosecute women for having abortions. But if you think we should, you can agree with everything I’m arguing for in this article and still hold that view. I’m not going to argue here that ERI is right and we shouldn’t prosecute women for having abortions. I’m just going to argue for the extremely modest claim that, pace Abby Johnson, it’s possible to simultaneously hold ERI’s view and really care about ending abortion.

One last preliminary note: Since this article is going to get into some pretty abstract moral and legal philosophy, I want to pause for a second and acknowledge that this is a really heavy topic that impacts real people, including some of you reading this article. You may have grieved the loss of a baby you know of who was killed by abortion, or you may yourself have survived a failed abortion attempt on your life, or you may have experienced other forms of deep injustice or dehumanization that lead you to have a lot of passion for affirming that all humans (born and unborn) have the same value. Or you may have had, participated in, or enabled an abortion, or known someone you care about who has, or been complicit in another form of harm, and that may also bring up emotion for you as you read this. Or you may have both types of experience. 

Whatever your story, as you read through the intellectual arguments, please also give some kind, curious attention to your heart and body, and pause if you need to.

ERI’s View

ERI’s view (which is also the majority view among pro-life organizations) is that we should pass laws that prosecute abortion providers if we can, but we should not pass laws that prosecute women who have abortions, even if we can. In other words, imagine I’m in a room with two magic buttons.

If I press Button #1: Congress immediately passes a well-written federal law against elective abortion under which abortion providers can be prosecuted for murder.

If I press Button #2: Congress immediately passes a well-written federal law against elective abortion under which women who have abortions can be prosecuted for murder.

If I could press Button #1, I would press it in a heartbeat. The only reason I support bills and laws that outlaw some but not all elective abortions, or outlaw elective abortions but with less severe penalties for abortion providers, is a pragmatic concession to current political realities about what laws it’s possible to pass right now: I would rather pass a law that gives prenatal humans some protection than leave them with no protection.

But even if I could press Button #2—if it were suddenly politically possible to pass a law like that—I wouldn’t. Because I don’t think it’s just.

An Extremely Modest Claim

In my next article, I’ll argue that I’m right, that it’s not just. But for today, I’m not even going to go there. To show that Abby Johnson is wrong, I don’t have to prove that my view is right. I just have to show you that it’s psychologically possible for a person to hold my (maybe incorrect!!) view and still care about ending elective abortion.

Someone who agrees with Abby might say, “Hang on—passing laws that could prosecute women for having abortions would be extremely effective at preventing abortions. How could you really care about ending abortion if you’re not willing to use something that would be so effective at it?” 

But the answer is really simple: The ends don’t justify the means. There are all kinds of things that would be really effective at accomplishing goals I really care about that I’m not willing to do, because they’re wrong. For instance, I care about people not dying from kidney disease, but I’m not willing to forcibly take kidneys from people who don’t consent to donating them. I believe that passing laws to prosecute women for having abortions would not be just. So I’m not willing to do it, even if it would be a very effective means of accomplishing a goal I really care about—ending abortion.

“But wait,” someone might say, “how can you think it’s unjust to prosecute women for having abortions? You think it’s just to prosecute people who pay someone to kill an adult! So if you think it’s not just to prosecute people who pay someone to kill a fetus, you must not really believe that fetuses and adults have equal value.”

This person is arguing that it’s not possible to believe all three of the following things:

1. It’s just to prosecute someone who pays a hitman to kill a human adult.
2. It’s not just to prosecute someone who pays an abortion provider to kill a human fetus.
3. Human adults and human fetuses have equal value.

But even if those three statements contradict each other—if it’s logically impossible for them to all be true—it’s still psychologically possible to believe them all. People believe contradictory things all the time, because they’re not fully cognizant of the implications of their views. I can just about guarantee that right now you hold some set of beliefs that’s self-contradictory, and that I do too. That doesn’t mean we’re stupid. It just means we haven’t thought through all the ramifications of absolutely everything we believe.

So my first extremely modest claim is that it’s psychologically possible to believe that fetuses and adults have equal value (and to care deeply about ending abortion) and also believe that women shouldn’t be prosecuted for having abortions—even if that’s self-contradictory. It’s psychologically possible to believe self-contradictory things. People do it all the time.

An Only Slightly Bolder Claim

But my second claim—only slightly bolder—is that it’s not self-contradictory to believe that fetuses and adults have equal value and also believe that women shouldn’t be prosecuted for having abortions. To be clear, right now I’m not arguing that both of those beliefs are true. I’m arguing for the much more modest claim that they at least don’t contradict each other.

Statements 1-3 above don’t directly contradict each other. To derive a contradiction, we have to add statement 4:

1. It’s just to prosecute someone who pays a hitman to kill a human adult.
2. It’s not just to prosecute someone who pays an abortion provider to kill a human fetus.
3. Human adults and human fetuses have equal value.
4. If two living things A and B have equal value, and someone pays a person to unjustly kill A and someone else pays a person to unjustly kill B, it’s always just to treat both payers the same way, regardless of any differences between the two circumstances.

I agree that that set of four statements would be self-contradictory. If someone believed all four of those statements, she would be contradicting herself. But I believe statement 4 is clearly false. I’ll explain my full reasons for thinking it’s false in my next article. For now I’ll just say that if we treated everyone who committed the same type of harm against equally valuable people exactly the same, then manslaughter would be punished the same as first-degree murder.

But even if I’m wrong—even if statement 4 is true—I’m still not contradicting myself. Statements 1-4 together are self–contradictory, but statements 1-3 without statement 4 are not. Since I only believe 1-3 and not 4, my beliefs don’t contradict each other—even if it turns out that some of them are wrong.

If everything I’ve argued for here is right, I could still be wrong that it’s unjust to prosecute women for having abortions. But I have argued that at least it’s both psychologically possible and logically consistent for me to believe that and still believe fetuses are just as valuable as adults, and still want to end abortion. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not contradicting myself.

Many of you reading this already agree with me that we shouldn’t prosecute people who have abortions. If that’s not you, I’ll give my arguments for that view in my next article, and I’ll be genuinely curious to hear your thoughts and pushback. But for now, I would invite us all to clarify that people on both sides of that question can care deeply about ending abortion, and to cultivate a more productive conversation by acknowledging the genuine common ground we have with each other and seeking to understand where we actually disagree.

¹_{By elective abortion, I mean any abortion that’s not medically necessary to save the life of the mother. The reason we need that qualifier is because there are cases—most commonly ectopic pregnancies—where procedures that are necessary to save the woman’s life, and that virtually all pro-lifers agree should be legal, are medically coded as types of abortions. But saying “elective abortion” every time is really cumbersome, so in the context of the rest of this article, when I say “abortion” I’m referring exclusively to elective abortion.ff.}

The post Yes, Abby Johnson, We Do Care About Ending Abortion originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Rebecca Carlson (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Rebecca Carlson) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Yes, Abby Johnson, We Do Care About Ending Abortion appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Let me back up.

I grew up Catholic, went to K-12 Catholic school, the whole nine-yards. I knew that I was supposed to be pro-life, and I was pro-life, but I had spent maybe five minutes of my entire life thinking deeply about abortion. So when I went off to college, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

I went to St. Olaf College, where in the fall of 2016, the students staged a massive protest against our local pro-life pregnancy center. The pregnancy center was hosting their annual fundraising banquet in the ballrooms of our student union, and when the students found out, they lined the hallways waving signs, trying to stop community members from entering and raising money to provide free resources to pregnant and parenting families.

Yeah, it took me about two seconds to realize that publicly identifying as pro-life was social suicide.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

And when I finally did identify myself and join the pro-life club (to be honest, mostly because I really wanted to be friends with this girl who asked me to go with her, definitely not because I had suddenly become passionate about abortion), I quickly realized that I was in over my head. I somehow wound up representing the club in an interview, and I was thrown multiple questions about abortion that I didn’t know how to answer. I remember frantically googling in the bathroom “What if a pregnant woman is dying? Is abortion necessary?” (answer: when you define abortion the medical way, then sometimes yes) and stumbling over my words as I tried to explain that a fetus has her own body separate from the mother’s body, so “not your body, not your choice!” (which I later learned is a horribly unpersuasive response because it completely straw mans the pro-choice view).

When I found Equal Rights Institute, my life and college pro-life club changed forever, and I’m now an internationally recognized pro-life advocate who teaches pro-lifers how to understand and respond to pro-choice people in order to actually change hearts and minds about abortion.

But I often wonder: what if I could have skipped all those steps in between? What if I could have entered college already passionate about abortion, confident in my pro-life views, and knowing how to respond to the hardest pro-choice questions? And on the other hand, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t stumbled across strong pro-life arguments in college. What about all the pro-life youth who don’t? I believe there are hundreds of thousands of pro-life youth out there like me—youth who learned that they were supposed to be pro-life, but whose belief wavered and even died completely when they were bombarded by our pro-choice culture.

That’s why I pitched Equipped for Life Academy in my job interview for ERI. Using my degree in education and experience in the classroom, I wanted to develop a curriculum for pro-life high school students to not only learn that they should be pro-life, but to know how to confidently defend and live the pro-life position throughout their lives. In a post-Roe America, there is literally no hiding from the abortion debate. I believe that it’s time to engage students in discussing abortion directly by facing the hardest pro-choice questions head-on.

Equipped for Life Academy is a unique pro-life curriculum for religious high school students like I was. Designed as a unit for any Christian school course, church youth group, homeschool class, or confirmation class, the interactive lesson plans promote engagement with the most popular pro-choice talking points of our day, giving students the tools to understand today’s abortion landscape while responding thoughtfully and compassionately to pro-choice people.

Even when those pro-choice people are in your class, too.

I see so many schools and churches that are afraid of discussing abortion for fear of alienating pro-choice students, and so many others that don’t take the time to deeply discuss abortion because they don’t think they have any pro-choice students. Even in the most conservative settings, it is common for a student or two to be secretly conflicted about abortion or outright pro-choice—but they are afraid to speak up about their views because they fear judgment. I’ve met so many students like Maria. Before I spoke at her school, her administrators told me, “Our school is 100% pro-life! There isn’t a single pro-choice student here.” But after my speech, Maria discreetly approached to thank me for demonstrating respect to pro-choice people and engaging with pro-choice arguments intelligently. She revealed that she is secretly pro-choice, but since she knows that that viewpoint isn’t accepted at her conservative school, she’d never spoken up or asked questions. But she had so many questions! And she’s seriously considering the pro-life position now that she’s heard my answers!

If we avoid discussing abortion entirely or proclaim a culture of life without fostering conversation about the issue, we miss crucial opportunities to change hearts and minds and develop confident pro-life convictions in youth who will shape the future of abortion in our world. That’s why our team has carefully crafted Equipped for Life Academy to engage students regardless of their current stance on abortion: “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” “I don’t know,” or “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’ve also been a high school teacher, which gave me tremendous empathy for how hard all the insane demands on teachers’ time and requirements on their curriculum could make it to incorporate the pro-life teaching teenage Emily needed into their classrooms. So I built Equipped For Life Academy to be as easy as possible to teach, and to fit state education standards. The lesson plans, activities, and assessments fit right into those requirements teachers are faced with today, and the Protestant edition of Equipped for Life Academy can be used across a variety of denominational contexts. Meanwhile, the Catholic edition of Equipped for Life Academy is written to fit the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (NSBECS) and The Cardinal Newman Society Catholic Curriculum Standards (CNSCCS).

If I had learned the why behind my pro-life views—the tools to actually understand the issue and explain my beliefs with conviction—freshman Emily wouldn’t have walked onto that college campus with her head down. I believe that we can teach our youth to be pro-life and stay pro-life even when faced with the toughest questions and the pressures of our culture, all while passionately spreading the truth about the dignity of life to their peers.

I believe Equipped for Life Academy is a game-changer for the religious education of today’s high school students. See for yourself at EquippedforLifeAcademy.com

The post The Pro-Life Message I Wish I’d Heard in High School originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Emily Geiger. (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Emily Geiger) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post The Pro-Life Message I Wish I’d Heard in High School appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Now, clearly this is irrational. Just because a defender is on your favorite team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him to commit pass interference, and just because a defender is on your rival team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him not to commit pass interference. But the irrationality isn’t a big deal. We do lots of really dogmatic and irrational things when it comes to sports, and it’s fun and exciting and not a big problem, because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t actually matter who wins a football game (sorry).

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

But now instead of a football game, imagine a political debate. You’re watching a friend’s reactions to what they see on the screen, and you realize they’re going to emphatically agree with everything that comes out of their party’s candidate’s mouth—no matter what it is—and emphatically disagree with everything that comes out of the other party’s candidate’s mouth—no matter what it is. They feel the same kind of loyalty toward their candidate, their party, or their “side” that football fans feel toward their team. Dr. Ian Church, a college mentor of mine, calls this phenomenon “team thinking.” And it is deadly.

Just like there’s no football team that has never committed pass interference, there’s no political team (or philosophical team or religious team) that never gets anything wrong. And there’s no team that never gets anything right, either. Every single person on the planet and every single group of people on the planet has some true beliefs and some false beliefs. So if you’re pro-life and whenever you listen to a pro-life speaker you feel like you have to side with them on everything because they’re pro-life, you’re inevitably going to end up agreeing with some false things. And likewise, if whenever you listen to a pro-choice speaker you feel like you have to side against them on everything because they’re pro-choice, you’re inevitably going to end up rejecting some true things. Same thing goes the other way if you’re pro-choice, and same thing goes for the “other side” of literally any issue you care about.

I think we all feel the pull of this kind of team loyalty to some degree. And it makes sense—the reason that we care about the issues we care about is that they matter. A lot. This applies to every side of every issue, but I’m going to use my view on abortion as an example. There were over one million abortions in the US last year. One million. So if my pro-life view is right, last year one million powerless, valuable, vulnerable people were violently killed, and their killings were legal and socially accepted. That’s horrific. And it can be really tempting to feel like my passion for stopping it should override every other consideration. So what if I end up uncritically swallowing a few false views, or uncritically dismissing some true ones? BABIES ARE BEING KILLED. Nothing else matters when I’m fighting that! Right?

No. Emphatically no. Having a good, important end doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to think carefully and pursue it with good means—good, important ends have been used to justify horrific means many, many times. In 1941, Japan’s military executed a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It killed over two thousand US service members, and terrified the country. Can you imagine if, today, a nation that didn’t like the US’s support for Ukraine or Israel bombed a military base in a US state with no warning and killed thousands of people? The US wanted to keep anything like that from happening again, and to protect its citizens and residents. Those are good, important goals. And it was the position of the US government that they were good enough and important enough to justify imprisoning over 100,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese descent in internment camps for months to years, based solely on their ethnicity. The US was wildly wrong, and it did unspeakable harm. Means matter, even when the ends are extremely good and important.

Hang on, you might think—that’s comparing breezes to tornados. Your uncritically accepting a few false beliefs because of your loyalty to the pro-life movement (or any other movement) isn’t the same as imprisoning 100,000 innocent people because of their ethnicity. The latter is a huge deal. The former isn’t—after all, we all have some false beliefs. But here’s the thing. I don’t care that you have some false beliefs. I care if the false beliefs you have are uncorrectable. To whatever degree your belief in some proposition P is based on feeling like you have to believe P to be loyal to your team or cause, it’s not based on evidence or truth. And to whatever degree your belief in P is based on something other than evidence and truth, it will be resistant to counterevidence. Having some false beliefs, on its own, isn’t a big deal. But having an approach that makes your false beliefs uncorrectable is a huge deal. It’s bad for your own mind and soul, it’s bad for your relationships and dialogues, and it compounds on itself in a way that pulls you into more and more significant (and still uncorrectable!) errors.

The other thing about team thinking is that it doesn’t actually help your cause—in fact, it hurts it. Truth can’t be incompatible with other truth. So if the pro-life view (or any other view) is true, other truths aren’t a threat to it—including that truth that sometimes pro-life people get stuff wrong. In fact, acknowledging the things that pro-life people get wrong will make you more persuasive, and therefore more effective at saving lives.

If your loyalty toward any human, any human institution, or any cause pressures you away from carefully discerning the truth—including the truth that your side sometimes gets stuff wrong—then it is a false loyalty, and you’re not doing your team or your cause any favors.

So, think of the person whose views you are most likely to reflexively align with, remind yourself that even they get some things wrong, and actively look for what those things are. Think of the person whose views you are most likely to reject out of hand, remind yourself that even they get some things right, and actively look for what those things are. Especially in an election year, your mind, your relationships, and your soul will be better for it.

The post Team Thinking: When Loyalty Goes Bad originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Rebecca Carlson (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Rebecca Carlson) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Team Thinking: When Loyalty Goes Bad appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.