In the “Freethinker” discussion group of which I am a member, the subject of libertarianism/liberalism, and abortion, has arisen again. This is too complicated to spell out completely for now. But I responded to one of our discussants with the sequence of abbreviated arguments listed below, and am sharing them with visitors here.
Anyone interested in the full version of my philosophical and moral arguments against abortion can find them in a number of my books – especially in my last book, The Great Divide, where there is a whole chapter on this anguishing topic.
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The starting point for me is to get agreement from my opponents, in this order:
1) What a pregnant female human being is carrying is alive
2) It is a human life, and not the life of an animal like a turtle or a puppy. So if you are pro-abortion you have to admit you are in favour of killing human life at some stage
3) What gives modern pro-abortion thinkers (and especially libertarians) a presumed “right” to abort this life, is the conversion of this unborn human life into property ( via the so-called “born-alive” rule – supposing it is not “human” until it leaves the mother’s body).
4) but the conversion of what all must admit is life, into property, is just the old slavery-manouevre. It is exactly the same legal trick used to convert living black people (or greeks, or romans, or jews) into chattel slaves.
5) ergo: our modern liberal-democratic abortion regimes are therefore in fact slave-regimes of a new kind.
6) the modern paradox (“I once was blind, but now I see…”) is that most liberals and libertarians who utterly and even violently reject slavery of any kind, accept abortion on demand. Still blind.
All those who supported slavery were free….
… All those who defend abortion are alive.
The logic is clear, but most of the abortion apologetic have no logical thinking. Their brain a filled with (ill) passion, not reason.
Dear Mr. Gairdner
My name is Hans Buikema.
English is my second language and I am not a scientist.
I read with great interest your article about ‘sex differences’ in The Epoch Times news paper of January 25-31.
I went to your website and read your arguments against abortion.
I like your clear and logic reasoning with air tight axiomatic statements
I believe, that even before conception, human life (not a person of course) is present in the father as a living seed and in the mother as an living egg.
The smallest and irreducible complex entity of life is as I understand a living cell.
I learned that the amount of information contained in one cell is the equivalent of about 4000 books. This looks like design and seemed to be beyond coincidence.
I am a christian and look at life through the eyes of the bible, that is why I see taking human life as being wrong.
Thx for your kind words. An author’s only true reward in a lost world.