Abortion, Nazis, and Carrots. What??
So long as embarrassing columns like this one keep masquerading as a reasoned argument, we’re never going to satisfactorily solve the abortion debate in this country.
How ridiculous is the column? Well, here’s one of the author’s big arguments:
Harvesting carrots, on a consistent pro-life hypothesis, would constitute something of a massacre.
Ooooooooookay.
If that were the only bit of confusion that existed in the piece, I’d probably let it pass. But Wills piece is like the hedge maze at the end of The Shining. No matter where you turn, the crazy guy is right around the corner.
The second paragraph is as good a place as any to start. Here’s Wills’ opening salvo:
But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were.
His proof to bolster the point is that evangelical Christians don’t favor making abortion a capital crime. So, if they don’t want to execute mothers who abort their babies, they must not think the babies are people, right?
Well, no. We’ll get to that in a minute, though. Let’s talk about the Nazis. Wills wants us to look at Nazi Germany as if those who were killing millions of Jews had our sensibilities. Obviously they didn’t, else that whole World War II think wouldn’t have happened. The very reason the Holocaust happened was because, to the Nazis, Jews were not people. In fact, their non-personhood was written into law. The Nazis had no problem at all seeing them as human beings, as the years of heinous medical experiments demonstrate.
Personhood, with all the rights and privileges that come with it, isn’t automatic, though. The Jews aren’t the only ones who can attest to that. Antebellum blacks in America could tell you the same thing.
Wills is right to say that we can’t demonstrate that killing a fetus is killing a person, but he’s wrong about who gets to make that determination. Wills believes that we should turn to “philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists” to make that decision for us. The only problem with that is that they aren’t any more entitled to decide than then you or I. The decision to grant someone personhood doesn’t belong to science. Indeed, science is completely incapable of telling you whether any human being should be considered a human being. All science can say is that living organism is a human being or not. On that subject, scientists have spoken decisively. A fetus is a human being, very nearly from the point of conception. If you’ll allow me an Al Gore moment, it’s safe to say that the debate on that is over.
What left is the debate on whether we consider these human beings to be people. That choice – and it is a choice – is up to each of us who have the blessing of personhood. It is a complicated decision and sophistry like Willis’ is not helping us any.
(via Ramesh Ponnuru, who very neatly disposes of Willis’ alleged arguments)
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Category: Huh? What??, The Social Issues
