Tomi Lahren Begs the Question on Abortion

Opposing unwelcome government intrusion into our daily lives includes supporting legal abortion, according to conservative spokeswoman Tomi Lahren.

Never a stranger to controversy, her recent comments defending her views about Roe vs. Wade and the legality of abortion in the United States on Fox and Friends do deserve an adequate response, as opposed to much of the name calling and personal attacks that are all too typical of political or social discourse today.

In a piece for her Fox News Column, “Final Thoughts”, Tomi Lahren states the following:

“I’m saying this as someone who would personally choose life, but also feels it’s not the government’s place to dictate. This isn’t a black and white issue and I would never judge anyone in that position. I believe the way to encourage someone to choose life is to treat her with compassion, understanding and love, not government regulation. Let’s be honest - the federal government does few things well, and I believe regulating social issues is an area where it fails. Let the churches, the non-profits, and the community groups step in, not almighty Uncle Sam.”

Many may remember the brief firestorm she created among pro-life conservatives after she asserted her pro-choice position during an appearance on the American talk show, “The View” in Spring 2017 to the glowing endorsement of the pro-choice Left, saying:

“You know what? I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well,” Lahren said.”

And I absolutely agree with her. We shouldn’t push for government to intrude in people’s decisions. We should leave individual families alone to deal with making the decision to choose an abortion. We should keep the government from interfering with a woman’s body.
I agree completely, if: The unborn are not human. If it so happens that the unborn are not human, then abortion is morally no big deal any more than plastic surgery is. Go ahead and have it.
However, if the unborn are in fact human beings, then we shouldn’t simply excuse the intentional killing of them in our laws any more than we would the killing of a newborn or even a toddler. This is where Ms. Lahren makes her mistake. She simply bypasses the question, “What are the unborn?” and proceeds directly to talking points that can fit into a short sentence.

For instance, would she say the same thing if the law allowed the killing of born children? Imagine a law was passed several decades ago that allowed parents to kill their unwanted children up to two years of age, and a Supreme Court Justice was nominated who expressly wanted to overturn such a law. Would Ms. Lahren object to this as well, saying that the question should be “left to the churches, community groups, and non-profits instead of the Almighty Uncle Sam”? I would hope that she had the moral clarity to say “no”.

For another example, if her neighbors were planning to kill one of their toddlers, would Ms. Lahren feel compelled to call on government authorities in the form of law enforcement and Child Protective Services to stop the killing? Or would she leave it up to the churches and non-profits, because “Government does few things well”. I think everyone, politically Right or Left, would consider this horrendous, not to mention absurd.

This raises a question: Then why not protect the unborn from being intentionally killed? Some might respond by saying that there is a significant difference, but ah! That is the question. What difference is there that makes them less worthy of our protection? She never offers an explanation, which means she has done what pro-life philosopher Francis Beckwith calls “Begging the Question”; that is, assuming one’s position is true while trying to prove it. She doesn’t offer any arguments for her statements that the government should leave her alone when considering abortion, or the more broad assertion that the government cannot legislate effectively on moral issues. Most people who make this claim have no problem with the government banning murder, or sexual violence, or spousal abuse. They only make this claim about abortion because they simply assume that the unborn are not human, when that is precisely the question that must be resolved in the abortion debate.

If the unborn are human, just like the toddlers and newborns in the examples above, then they are just as worthy of protection from being intentionally killed as the toddler is. The question now becomes what relevant difference sets them apart from being protected in our society and legal system? As philosopher Stephen Schwarz points out in his book The Moral Question of Abortion, all of the differences between the born and the unborn fall into four categories that can be remembered with the "SLED" acronym:

• Size: It’s true, the unborn are much smaller than the newborns or toddlers I mentioned in my hypothetical cases. But so what? How big does one have to be before they deserve to be protected from harm? As an adult man, I am bigger in my body size than many women, including Ms. Lahren, but it is odd to say that this grants me special protections from harm. If anything, it seems the smaller someone is, the more effort we should put towards protecting them.
• Level of Development: Yes, the unborn are not as developed as the born are, and can’t do everything a born person can. But why does that determine whether we can kill someone or not? As another hypothetical, imagine I have two sisters, aged 6 and 18. They do have differences in their development. The older sister is more developed mentally, is more developed physically(she may play a college level sport) and is mature sexually. Her six year old sister possesses none of that, but it would be insane to assert that she is less deserving of our efforts to keep her safe. If level of development between two born humans doesn’t matter, why should it matter when protecting unborn humans?
• Environment: During her appearance on “The View”, Tomi stated that the government needs to “stay out of her body”. This can be fairly reasonable; after all, who wants a nosy bureaucrat from Washington performing exploratory surgery against one’s will? However, this misses the point. Given that the unborn is located inside one’s body, does this really matter as to whether they can be killed whenever it suits our immediate needs? How does one's current environment determine the most basic protections from harm they are entitled to?
• Degree of Dependency: Yes, it is true. The unborn are far more dependent on their mothers for their very lives before birth. Again, what exactly does this prove? Why should anyone accept that those who have reached a certain degree of physical independence from their mothers are the only ones deserving of legal protections from being killed? This raises another question: What degree of independence should we go with in attributing protections? As the Roe court ruled, before fetal viability(The time when an unborn human can live outside the womb) the government has no interests in protecting prenatal life. This may seem reasonable to some, but why is viability the marker of who can be protected or not? Why didn't the court rule that babies who need additional medical care after birth don't merit a "state interest"? Or how about children who can't walk without any assistance yet? Or children who cannot ride their bikes without "training wheels"? They are still remotely dependent on adult support, so why isn't that the degree of who deserves protection? It seems that dependency is a poor way of determining who gets to live and die.

Tomi Lahren's assuming of the unborn not being human needs to be called out, clearly and concisely. By asserting that conservatives need to move on past Roe vs. Wade so that the nation won't shift Left in it's politics, she is saying that millions of lives simply don't matter enough to warrant our protection. The American conservative wishes to protect the values that were put in place when the United States was being founded, not shift away from them when votes are on the line.
That means the unborn are worth every ounce of our efforts to protect them in law, and conserve what the American founders saw as “...truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

Responding to Back Alley Logic Butchers

We are living through a zombie apocalypse of sorts, rhetorically speaking. Old arguments that should have died long ago in light of solid responses keep finding new life in the "blogosphere" and on social media, especially with abortion finding its way back into the public dialogue due to recent events in Ireland and the United States.

Common among these arguments is the claim that pro-life legislation will lead to scores of dead women. From "back alley butcher" statements to feminists protesters waving coat hangers at rallies, to claims that thousands of women will die if abortion is made illegal, the argument is, like a horror movie zombie, still coming around. Even some college professors(Who really ought to know better) have repeated these sound bites.

Ironically absent these cries of supposed fear is any real rebuttal to the pro-life argument:

Premise 1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

Premise 2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.

Conclusion: Therefore, abortion is wrong.

As philosopher Chris Kaczor points out, questions about women's health and abortion are indeed important, but they still fail to settle the question of the moral admissibility of the act of abortion itself. Do we have any obligations to protect innocent human beings before birth in society and our law? Or can we dispose of them whenever their existence becomes a burden upon us? Philosopher Mary Anne Warren, herself an advocate of abortion, is in agreement; highlighting that murder is wrong regardless of the social consequences of prohibiting it.

This raises a question: Should the law protect the innocent from being intentionally harmed, even though some may be unintentionally killed as a result? Consider that some have been killed accidentally by unsuspecting family members when entering their own residence late at night, being mistaken for a burglar. This is undoubtedly a major tragedy, especially for the family. But does it logically follow that the moral position a society should take is to legalize armed burglary so that no one accidentally dies in this manner?

For another example, should armed robbery(stealing items off a person directly) be made legal so that no one gets accidentally shot by an overly nervous, trigger happy pedestrian walking through a high crime part of town? This is also a tragedy, but it is going to be really hard to argue that this is grounds for abolishing laws against robbery.

Aside from the logical mistakes, there is an honesty question that needs to be asked of our critics: If pro-lifers were to propose a law that restricted abortion but also made sure that no woman had to seek out a "back alley butcher", would our critics then join us in opposing abortion? Some may say yes, but many will still retort that "Abortion is a fundamental right." Ah, but that is the question at hand. Abortion is only a fundamental right if it is a moral act, and it is only a moral act if the unborn are not human. That needs to be argued for, and not simply asserted. This goes for everyone, on Twitter and in the academy.

One last point on the topic, those who raise the concern of women dying from illegal abortions do have some explaining to do. By what basis do we know that "[abolishing abortion] will be a death sentence for thousands of women", as the Women's March responded to the nomination of a pro-life Supreme Court Justice recently? Very often there is little to no support provided for the claim. As the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson(a former abortionist) points out, there is very little support to back up the claim:

"How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L., we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always "5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year." I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the "morality" of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible." (Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Aborting America (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1979), 193)

While more can be said about the actual data on the number of deaths from illegal abortions in the pre-Roe years( Abort73 has a good list of sources, which can be found at http://www.abort73.com/end_abortion/what_about_illegal_abortions/. Also see Erika Bachiochi's The Cost of Choice: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion)

The purpose of the objection itself needs to be questioned. Are those who raise it doing so out of an emphasis on truth, or as a means of fear-mongering in an already tense political climate? With women dying even during the era of legal abortion in the United States at the hands of men like Kermit Gosnell, it should be obvious that those who truly care for the needs of American women would be willing to consider all the implications of legal abortion today, not just the immediate emotions that all too often drive cultural debates.

The Definition That Just Won't Die

They are onto us. We've finally been made. People who oppose the intentional killing of innocent human beings in the womb are mean, nasty, rich, and don't give a rip about starving or homeless children. We aren't pro-life unless we feed starving kids or give them shelter.

How do I know? Because a meme like this one said so.

Question for Ms. Isabel: And the problem is what exactly? Let's suppose pro-life people are mean, nasty, fetus freaks who don't give a rip about starving kids like pictured above. How does that entail that the unborn are not human, and we may do with them as we please, including intentionally kill them?

It doesn't follow logically at all. The pro-life movement is arguing that it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion does that. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

An honesty question is in order when the assertion that pro-lifers only care about the unborn is made: If pro-lifers were to devote an equal amount of time to feeding and housing born children in a bad circumstance, would our opponents join us in opposing abortion? If they say no, then they have simply trotted out suffering children in order to score rhetorical points against their opponents. Chances are, if those opposed to abortion were to take responsibility for ending every social evil under the sun before focusing on abortion, our opponents would find another reason to excuse it.

Setting aside the fact that pro-lifers do actually care about the born and the unborn, which becomes obvious if one is willing to take an honest look, the humanity of the unborn is a question that has to be resolved regardless of how nice pro-lifers are. Even if pro-life people were the meanest, cruelest, most fanatical people on the planet, it still would not follow that we could justifiably end the life of an unborn child. That has to be argued for, and not merely asserted.

 Saying that pro-lifers need to do more in order to be taken seriously is dishonest and a foolish attempt to change the subject. Until our opponents use the science of embryology to show that the unborn are not human, or moral reasoning to show that we have no duty as a society to value them, then nothing has been accomplished by pointing to other issues that are arguably not as urgent in scope or in nature.