By D.S. Cook for Apostoic Venn.
Dear readers, my partner Sam and I engage in a great deal of public discourse, debate, confrontation, and evangelism for the kingdom of God. This engagement wins us many enemies, a few friends, even some frenemies, though not one of those makes our list of reasons for doing so. In that engagement, there are few spectacles that are more instructive, more sarcastically enlightening, than when the premises of a person’s own argument damns their conclusion.
Such a moment unfolded recently on X, wherein an individual describing herself as non-religious, but very moderate, offered the following declaration.
Herein lies both candor and contradiction. The author rightly names the act for what it is: the killing of a baby. She perceives the moral stench and rot attending its normalization. Yet, in the same breath, she seeks refuge in the tempered language of restraint. “Rare. Difficult decision. Extreme circumstances. Moderate.” As though these qualifiers transmute murder into non-murder, but only sometimes. A mother commits murder when she slaughters her own children. But, it’s not murder when she premeditates the killings, and doesn’t kill very many.
I responded with a verbal force that is not my habit, giving this heinously illogical evasion the clarity it demanded.
I then Logic Slap’t the OP, to demonstrate the shameful illogic of a stance that at once calls abortion baby murder, while simultaneously advocating it on the basis of premeditation and rarity.
I followed up with another, presenting a valid syllogism for her poisoned mind to digest.
This is not rhetorical flourish, but deductive necessity. Another debate entirely might be had with those abortion advocates who deny that the thing being killed is a human being. But, once the biological and ontological status of the unborn is acknowledged as that of a living human being, the architecture of “moderate” abortion advocacy collapses under its own weight. There is no temperate via media (middle road) through the premeditated destruction of innocent children. I recall the most fundamental Aristotelian axioms of logic.
1. The law of identity: A is A
A thing is itself.
2. The law of non-contradiction: A is not both A and not-A
A thing is not not-itself.
3. The law of the excluded middle: A is either A or not-A.
There is no middle ground between a thing being itself or not being itself. Either it is true, or its negative is true. There is no mystical middle.
The Irreducible Logic of Human Equality
From the moment of fertilization, a new human organism comes into existence. It is in possession of its own distinct genome, directing its own continuous development, and belonging unequivocally to the species Homo Sapiens. It possesses DNA strands from both mother and father, but its own DNA is not identical to that of its mother’s body, as are her organs or her useless tissue. This is not yet a religious debate. It is a matter of empirical embryology. To intentionally snuff that developing being is to deliberately end a human life. The thing is itself, A is A.
The thing is not rendered not-itself by its location, just as a rock is still a rock whether you keep it inside or outside of your fishbowl. The thing is not rendered not-itself by its dependence upon its mother for sustenance, just as the leaf is not rendered not-a-leaf when it doesn’t rain. The thing is not rendered not-itself by its age or size, just as a small and newly formed pearl is just as much pearl as the old and large one.
Again, another debate is necessary to address those who reject these realities. But, to concede these realities, as @missmeeces does, and then to propose that such killings ought to be nevertheless permitted, albeit regretfully, rarely, and given enough forethought, is to embrace an irredeemably hideous category error. It is to assert that all humans are humans, but that there are certain low classes of humans whose right to live is predicated on the convenience or hardship of another, higher-class human.
History furnishes no shortage of precedents for such graduated humanity, each more horrifying than the last. And this is the most horrifying of all, having slaughtered more than all the combined wars of recorded history. The principle remains the same: once the equal dignity of all members of the human family is compromised, the threshold of protection becomes negotiable. And the victims of this negotiation are the most innocent, those of whom Christ said “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” (Luke 17:2) It will not be with a light hand that the returning King punishes this crime against his favorites, on the day of judgement.
The Stoics and the Scriptures
The Stoics, guardians of rational virtue and conformity to natural law, understood human life within the ordered cosmos governed by logos, the divine reason permeating all things. While they sometimes linked the soul to the functioning heart, which some liberal adherents to Stoicism may claim is an argument that “a thing is NOT itself until it is 5 weeks old” This is not their intention or their meaning. There is no historical Stoic philosopher that supported or endorsed abortion as a positive or virtuous practice. Justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage, the four cardinal virtues of stoicism, all cry aloud against the tragedy of purging the most vulnerable of our members. To hold these in an attitude of disposability is a blatant violation of reason and natural law, and can be practiced only if one first practices the deadening of conscience, and the rejection of moral authority. To illustrate, the later Stoic Musonius Rufus spoke about the Augustinian marriage laws in glowing terms, for their promotion of core families, their discouragement of selfish, childless living, and their punishment of abortion.
“Is it not true that the lawgivers, whose special function it was by careful search to discern what is good for the state and what is bad, what promotes and what is detrimental to the common good, all considered the increase of the homes of the citizens the most fortunate thing for the cities and the decrease of them the most shameful thing? And when the citizens had few or no children did they not regard it as a loss, but when they had children, yes, plenty of them, did they not regard it as a gain? So it was for this reason that they forbade women to suffer abortions and imposed a penalty upon those who disobeyed; for this reason they discouraged them from choosing childlessness and avoiding parenthood, and for this reason they gave to both husband and wife a reward for large families, and set a penalty upon childlessness.
How, then, can we avoid doing wrong and breaking the law if we do the opposite of the wish of the lawgivers, godlike men and dear to the gods, whom it is considered good and advantageous to follow?”
The same ethics that reject the murder of toddlers must also reject the murder of those still younger.
Unbeknown to the Stoics, the Logos that governs the universe is none other than Jesus Christ. In the sacred scriptures, which are all His Word, he affirms the personhood of infants in the womb unequivocally. David, inspired by that same Logos, writes: “For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” (Psalm 139:13-16). The same truth is expressed in Jeremiah 1:5. “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” And, already aware and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ cousin John leaps for joy in the womb of Elizabeth, when he hears the voice of the woman bearing the Savior of mankind.
The Illusion of Restraint
We have grown accustomed to a certain rhetorical excuse. “Safe, legal, and rare” as touted by Hillary Clinton and her ilk. But it is a slight of hand, wielded to great success in fooling the masses. It concedes that the conscience should falter if abortion is not rare, thereby revealing that there is an evil that is happening. Out of the other side of its mouth, it packs insulation around the killing of the innocent, provided that the killing is done “only a few times.”
In societies purporting this slogan, the veneer of restraint is simply never followed. Elective abortions are by far the predominant mode, and life-of-the-mother, rape, or incest cases make up an insignificant decimal of the murdering that goes on. This language of restraint does not perform long, but acts as an acid, slowly corroding the society’s recognition of the unborn life as a human life, and planting them firmly in the category of “too low class to be really human.” No abortion-permitting country has ever maintained “safe, legal, and rare,” nor would it matter if they did. The human is either a human, or it is not a human. There is no included middle in the logic of Aristotle, or the Logic of the divine.
Life Of The Mother, Rape, and Incest
Philosophical and policy debates persist regarding tragic edge cases, life-of-the-mother particularly, but also rape and incest. This is no more logical, and cracks its own head by simple definition. I shall demonstrate.
A is A. Murder is Murder.
A is not not-A. Murder is not not-murder.
A is either A or not-A. A thing is either murder or not-murder.
Very well then, what is murder?
It is the intentional and unjust killing of another human being.
Is the baby a human being?
The “moderate” has already conceded that point. The pro-choice advocate must reject reason itself, claiming that A = Not A. Yes. Aristotelian logic supplies the answer, any claim to Christianity demands it.
Ok, but it’s not murder if the woman’s life is at risk, right?
This valid logic slap verdict card is for you.
But it’s not murder if she was raped, or incestuously impregnated, right?
This valid Logic Slap verdict card is for you.
But that’s not fair! She didn’t choose it.
This Logic Slap is for you.
The Damning Conclusion
The exchanged that has been irreversibly preserved at the beginning of this article, in the subsequent Logic Slap reel I made for the exchange (see Logic Slap reels on our Facebook or Youtube pages), and in the annals of X, performs a valuable service for all readers with more than stuffing between their ears, and self-centeredness in their hearts. @missmeeces stands nearer to moral reality than many of her ideological allies precisely because she names the act. Yet naming it carries a life-altering obligation: to follow the Logos down the path of reason to where the thing actually stands. Where all illusion and rhetorical masking is stripped away. With biology as your babysitter, Aristotle as your tutor, the Stoics as your guidance counselors, and the Lord Jesus Christ as your King:
Stop justifying the mass culling of the innocent.
Vote for those who will limit this evil.
When it’s an option, vote for those who will stop it.
Stop being persuaded by illogical maxims.
Stop placing your own convenience and comfort above His most precious.
Stop claiming that wrong done to you by a second party is a valid reason to do the greatest wrong to a third.
Stop claiming that risk to yourself, at no fault of the person in your womb, is a valid reason to murder the person in your womb.
Stop out-competing Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
Stop aborting His dear ones.
Stop killing children.
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