This is a clip from an episode of Life Report called “Does the Bible’s Silence Justify Abortion?“ In this clip, I asked Scott Klusendorf from Life Training Institute to respond to a common pro-choice argument made to pro-life Christians.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EAQ7BnmpZw&version=3&hl=en_US]
If you don’t want to watch the 3-minute video, you can read the full transcript below.
Transcript:
Josh Brahm: Some people, and I think this is another one of the easier things to refute, but this comes up probably about as often as these other arguments if not more. “God,” they would say, “is the greatest aborter in human history because 20 to 50 percent of embryos and fetuses do not survive throughout all of pregnancy. A bunch are miscarried; some are miscarried so young that no one even knows — the woman doesn’t even know — she’s pregnant. So God has aborted basically all these babies, and clearly you can’t say that these are full human beings because we don’t have funerals for them, usually, after miscarriages…” and it goes on and on and on. How do you respond?
SK: Well, if dying early rather than later means you’re a non-human, what do we do with children in third-world countries that live only a few weeks after birth? There are some provinces of India and Pakistan where children die by incredible numbers, before they reach the first month after birth. Does it follow that those children are not human because they die sooner rather than later?
But let’s go back to the key point here: we always want to ask the question, “How does this objection establish a right to elective abortion as a fundamental right?” So we’re going to see another non-sequitur here. How does the fact that nature, or let’s say God, accidentally causes, or directly causes, the death of an unborn human being that we may, therefore, deliberately kill an unborn human being? That’s always what we need to be asking here, before we do anything else.
And, clearly, it doesn’t follow. As we said a moment ago, in third-world countries, children don’t make it ’til their first month, out of the womb. It doesn’t follow we may go slit the throats of all children before they’re 30 days old.
Let’s look at nursing homes. The vast majority of nursing homes contain people who will never make it out of there alive. Does it mean we can deliberately kill them just because there’s a high mortality rate in nursing homes?
JB: Just because Hurricane Katrina happened doesn’t mean we got the right to nuke cities.
SK: Right. Does it follow that because nature kills people we may deliberately do so?
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Special thanks to Benjamin Baxter for the transcription.
