A Pro-Life Atheist

John Wright recounts his experience from days gone by.  Excerpts:

...At the time, I was a thoroughgoing fan of Ayn Rand and an avowed Libertarian, so, to me, it was a simple matter of logic: One is not supposed to blank-out reality, elude, escape, or play pretend on this or any topic. It is self defeating to use reason to elude reason.

Merely redefining words to pretend that the baby in the womb is not a member of the species of his parents is beneath contempt, or pretending not to know when life begins: all textbooks on biology before Roe v Wade were unambiguous on the point, nor was their any controversy (nor, among honest folk, is there now). By definition, if it is not alive, one needs no medical procedure such as aborticide to kill it: by definition, if it is not a baby, you are not pregnant. Reality says that oaks make acorns, ducks make ducklings, humans make babies.

The most egregious example of this phenomena, where anti-abortionists talk biology while pro-abortionists talk gibberish, was at a science fiction panel. I asked a pro-abort that if an organism were growing in Mommy’s womb and had XX but not XY chromosomes, what it a female, yes or no? How indeed could this organism be female but not be homo sapiens? It was like saying one could have a living room without a room, or a house attic without a house. One cannot have an existing property without the object in which that property exists. Mr. Doublethink assured me that the organism was only POTENTIALLY and organism, and that having XX chromosomes did not put you into the class of objects “female” but rather meant you were POTENTIALLY female, which is the same as having no sex at all, and no properties, and ergo no object in which those properties inhere, and ergo no right to live.

And by merely calling the Jew an ‘untermensch’ we find, voila, he is no longer protected by the ancient laws of the Koenig and Kaiser of the Germanic Reich, because he is no longer legally a ‘person.’ And if you write the word ‘petrol’ on a can of tomato soup, you can pour it in your automobile fuel tank, and all will run smoothly. This is what they tell themselves is scientific thinking: and we who say water is wet and fire burns, we are merely superstitious bumpkins to them (even if we have degrees and doctorates they lack).

I listened with the same open-mouthed goggle-eyed awe one would listen to Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky, if Jabberwocky were serious rather than in play: it sounded like words, but it was not words. Twas brillig, and rather slithy at that. To that degree he was willing to prostitute his brain, and utter absurd lies and elliptical paradoxes, merely to defend the central and brain-warping evil of aborticide.

I came up with what I thought was a novel argument, which was, namely, that whether the baby was “human” or not, a parent has a duty to rear and protect the child, and that this duty exists from the first moment any act can tend to harm or tend to protect the child: for exactly this reason maidens are under a duty not to take drugs that might cause birth defects even in children not yet conceived.

Likewise, anyone concerned for the environment acknowledges a duty running to generations yet unborn. In law, a person does not need to exist, or be competent, or be known, to have a duty running to him: a tenant with a life estate in land may not ruin nor despoil the land, even if the heir of the property when the estate reverts is not yet born.

So I proposed that anyone claiming that laws should protect a child from abuse or neglect at the hands of his parents was acknowledging a parental duty of care; and that reality merely made it the case that there were chains of events one could set in motion before the child was born that could wound the child. Therefore the duty obtained from the first moment any act can be done that affects the eventual child; therefore the duty was prenatal. If maiming or lobotomizing the child prenatally was a violation of this duty, maiming it to the point of death a fortiori was a violation. And this was so whether the child was human or subhuman, alive or pre-alive, or however one characterized the condition of the child at the time of the act. The duty was not triggered by the existence of some quality, call it humanity, in the child, but only by the nature of parenthood and the nature of cause and effect.

And I found that no one would address my argument.

All I encountered were either ad hominem attacks against my character (made by people who did not know me, and were not in a position to assess my character) or the opposition would argue against Theism — and their programming of these robots of rhetoric was so strong that even after I told them I was an avowed and devout atheist, THEY SIMPLY REPEATED THEMSELVES...