Abortion: Because Society Says So!

Note: What follows is a discussion I'm having with a university atheist club president about a woman's right to legally murder her unborn child in the United States. Here's the meat of the interaction thus far. Notice the arbitrariness and inconsistencies prevalent in his attempted push-back. Ultimately, defending abortion on the basis of a right to life is equivalent to defending the murder of six million Jews in Nazi Germany. Don't buy that last line? Then read on.

I initially said,

The disagreement boils down to one issue: What is the unborn and who gets to decide? Here's my argument in syllogistic form:

P1 - If the unborn is a human person, then abortion is murder.

P2 - The unborn is a human person.

C - Therefore, abortion is murder.

You will challenge premise 2. So have at it my friend.

He responded,

"Well, depending on how you define "human" I would not disagree with the second premise (the fetus is alive for example, and it has DNA and such, which if you define DNA as being human, then it is human). I would actually take issue with the first premise. The real premise here is, if the fetus is a person deserving of rights equal to or greater than that of a woman, then perhaps abortion can be considered murder. But I don't think a fetus is deserving of rights that give it some sort of authority over the woman's body.

I think there is another issue also of where we default rights, and by what mechanisms do we default rights. I, by default say that women (and men) have rights to control their own bodies, and therefore you would have to provide the really compelling case that a fetus is entitled to rights over the woman."

I retorted,

"First, just because the unborn has human DNA doesn't make it a human person, it just makes it human tissue. Freckles and moles have human DNA but that doesn't make them human persons. Nobody is protesting dermatological clinics that regularly remove hundreds of skin tags from patients every day, so its obvious to everyone except the most willingly ignorant that there's more at stake here than mere "tissue". I think the reality of abortion speaks for itself: http://www.cbrinfo.org/index.php/blog/the_most_shocking_graphic_imagery_four-minute_abortion_debate_you_will_ever/

And if that was too far along in gestation for you, then have a look-see at these: http://www.abortionno.org/index.php/abortion_pictures/

Second, the claim: “The mother has a right to abort because she has a right to control her own body" is refuted by the fact that the unborn is not her body. Medical science has proven that the unborn has its own separate DNA, eye color, gender, etc. proving that it is a completely separate human being from the mother. Therefore, we don’t kill innocent people just because we think they are in the wrong place or because they inconvenience us in some way.

But assuming your societal-based morality, even though medical science has proven that the unborn is a human being, our society has determined that rights to person-hood are only given to born humans, not unborn humans. That is exactly what you are arguing. Thus, any medical argument from environment is moot to you since society determines what the criteria for person-hood is, not medical science, and certainly not a word from God.

However, the biblical pro-life answer is this: God says that the unborn is a fully human person from the moment of fertilization-conception (Psalm 51:5). Thus, if a person willfully takes the life of the unborn, such an act constitutes murder (Psalm 139:13-16; Romans 13:9). We are not justified in killing someone merely because society says that we can. We must obey God rather than people (Acts 5:29).

Thus, by rejecting God's word on the issue, our society has legitimized the systematic murder of a certain segment of the human population and given others in said population rights to do this via legal protection in sanitary conditions.

This move is essentially equivalent to what the German Supreme Court did in 1938 when it declared Jews to be "non-persons" and on that basis they legally exterminated 6 million of them. But you cry, "No, what Hitler did was wrong and twisted because it was done to adults" and then we're back again to society determining who gets to live and die and where they must be for it to legally occur and at what age it gets to occur. So if 25 week unborn persons can be murdered legally in the womb, why not at 25 weeks outside the womb? Why is the location of the baby significant to determining rights? Your answer: because society's law says that only born people have a right to life.

So now, what non-arbitrary standard can you provide me that's going to be palpably different than how the German Supreme court decided in 1938?

Thus, society gets to determine who has a right to live and die, not God, and certainly not the babies. Welcome to moral relativism.

My friend, this is what happens when you have an unregenerate mind and don't begin all of your thinking with the Law of Christ.

'Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil . . . woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.' Isaiah 5:20-21"