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.” 

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