My Pro-Life Defense on Reddit - My Stance

As you may have seen on my Facebook, I posted in on reddit in response to the question/prompt: 

Okay conservatives, post your rational arguments that we constantly bury here. I won't downvote any of them. Hopefully others will follow suit.

[Here's the link] of my response and the literally hundreds of follow-up comments. In this post, I'm going to outline some of the basics of my stance on abortion, and will continue to clarify my position further in future posts.

Introduction
As I began responding to the hundreds of responses I got, my stance on abortion became increasingly clear to me. Believe it or not, I was largely unconvinced that abortion was wrong until only a few months ago. To me, the Biblical support that the soul begins at conception is shaky and unconvincing. Not only that, I objected to the idea that abortion is murder and that those who have abortion are murderers, because to me, a genuine belief in this morally justified things like the bombing of abortion clinics or the murder of doctors who perform abortions. Also, if abortion truly was murder, why don't the anti-abortion conservative evangelicals care more about the issue? I just didn't believe that the pro-life rhetoric that abortion is murder was genuinely reflected in their belief systems or in their actions. All this paired with the lack of any sort of emotional attachment to "clumps of cells", I could not bring myself to accept the pro-life side.

So as I began writing back to my millions of fans around the world, my stance became solidified. To me, these stances are coherent and internally consistent, and it seemed like many of the pro-choice people were satisfied with many of my answers. That said, some of my beliefs are non-traditional, especially for an evangelical Christian. I haven't really run these arguments by many Christians, so tell me what you think.

Abortion is a violation of human rights.
The following is the response that I submitted, to which I got over a 1,500 upvotes and hundreds of responses. This line of thought came to me as I was reading about William Wilberforce in the book Amazing Grace (thanks, Knox!). I thought to myself, "How could they not see Africans as people too? Shouldn't it be so obvious?" I've actually never heard someone give the following argument, and from some of the responses I got (which I will post later), it seems like it's the first time that others may have heard it as well.

"I think abortion is a violation of human rights. I'm actually a little surprised that most progressives are so adamantly pro-abortion, as I think it's actually the next human rights hurdle that needs to be overcome. In Roman times, infantacide was common, because children were perceived to be property of their parents, without rights for themselves. Now, we recognize the personhood of children, and killing children is universally accepted as morally wrong. Two hundred years ago, slaves were considered as the property of their owners, and had no human rights. Killing a slave was merely just destroying something that you owned. Now, it's nearly universally accepted that those slaves were persons, and deserved their own human rights.
Which brings us to today. I understand the argument that a woman should be able to do what she wants with her body and I agree with it, so long as it does not infringe on the basic human right of life of someone else. I know that all (if not most) pro-choice people out there do not consider a fetus as a human life, deserving of human rights (if so, I don't think you would be pro-choice!). However, 200 years ago, slave owners viewed slaves as sub-human, as did parents to children even longer before that. Slave owners would have objected that they should have the right to do what they wanted to their property. 

Yes, I understand that infantacide, slavery, and abortion are all different issues, with different societal implications and cultural nuances. However, the point is that we see in history that society has progressed to recognize various "peoples/groups" to be persons deserving of human rights, and I think/hope that the same will be true for unborn babies. These changes come not only with legislation, but with a general shift in thinking. It goes much deeper than just politics to general worldview. 

Progressives have led us in the fight for human rights in so many different areas, and it is a little surprising to me (and a little sad) that for the most part, they aren't also fighting for human rights in the realm of abortion. 

Edit: sorry for using "pro-abortion". It is a poor choice of words, and should be "pro-choice" instead."

A baby's personhood begins at conception
This is the underlying assumption I hold. I will elaborate more on this in the next post, but I just wanted to make this clear.

The moral heinousness of aborting a baby and murdering an adult are NOT the same.
I do not believe that aborting an unborn baby is of the same moral weight as murdering an adult or even of the same weight as murdering a born baby. So while it could technically fit the dictionary definition of murder, I think that the word "murder" is too loaded and has moral implications that I do not think necessarily apply to abortion. You may object that if it is essentially the same action of ending the life of a person, it should carry the same moral weight. Here's an argument against this that I posted -

I think that two identical actions with two different subjects/victims can hold different moral weight. For example - adult rape is morally wrong, but in my mind, raping a 2-year old (and it does happen), is indescribably worse. Another example would be robbing the house of a rich person and stealing $1000 of cash seems "less wrong" than knowingly stealing $1000 from a poor family. From many perspectives, the crime is the same, and both are morally wrong (taking this at face value), but one seems to carry more moral weight than the other. 

This of course does not add to the idea that abortion is less morally weighty than murder of a toddler, but it feels that way, and that's the best I can give you at the moment. I need to give it a little more thought, but I hope this kind of gives you some of my premises and framework of thought.

As I mentioned above, I have a real problem with the implications of considering abortion as morally equal to the murder of an adult. Would it be morally justifiable to murder an abortion doctor, who may have "technically" murdered hundreds of people? Would it be morally justifiable to treat those who have abortions as true murderers? In my opinion, no. However, most pro-choice people don't consider it any sort of moral transgression if a baby is aborted before the third trimester, and I've found this observation of different moral "weights" is a reasonable, appealing one. The abortion has been framed in such a polarizing way, where abortion is either murder, and mass genocide is happening, or there hasn't been any moral transgression at all. I find this to be unnecessarily polarizing, and I believe there is a middle ground.

Should abortion be criminalized in the US? 
As in all things, I believe that Christians should not put hope in any legislation to be the solution, and I really don't believe that an all-out ban on abortion is the solution, at least right now. I don't actually think that the legislation is the root problem at all. If we ask ourselves, "Why are people having abortions? What is the root cause?", I don't think it's possible to just point at Roe v Wade and say, "If that law wasn't passed, no one would be having abortions right now." There are various root causes, ranging from poverty to inadequate sex education to a disregard for the unborn. All of these need to be addressed.

That said, do I believe that abortion should be criminalized? First of all, I don't think it ever will. I don't believe that Roe v. Wade will ever be overturned, so I think it is somewhat futile framing the debate in such all-or-nothing terms. That said, given a choice, I don't think that the US is ready for a ban of abortion, especially in how people in the country view abortion. It was brought up multiple times that abortion rates go down in countries that legalize it fully, and that abortions remain common in countries that criminalize it. Until abortion is widely seen as more of a last resort, I don't think banning abortion will necessarily have the desired effects that so many pro-life people hope for. In addition, I feel like there are just too many special cases that may make abortion morally justifiable, which makes legislation even more difficult to write and pass.

However, passing legislation to curb abortions is still beneficial, as it does help shape the culture. A great example of this is the ban of third-trimester abortions, where tons of the liberals that responded agreed that this was a necessary restriction on abortion. So just in summary, I believe that legislation is one answer, but not the answer, and the pro-life movement needs to bring answers to some of the other root problems that cause abortion.

The pro-life should be truly pro-life, not just anti-abortion.
You will not believe how many people asked about my stance on universal healthcare,
war, and capital punishment. While my stances on those issues does not have a real bearing on the validity of my arguments, people just wanted to make sure that I was holding an internally consistent worldview.

I think it's very important for pro-life people to be pro-life, not just pro-unborn-life. One of the major complaints that I read over and over is how the same conservatives who claimed a regard for the unborn showed no regard for the lives of the poor or the lives of soldiers. While I think all of these issues are more nuanced than simply being pro-everything, we really need to think about whether or not we display a sufficient care for the poor, the elderly, and people in other areas of the world where we are invading.

Below is one of my responses to a question about the pro-life movement.

I totally agree with you that we need to address why unplanned pregnancies happen. The pro-life movement has yet to show an appropriate concern to these issues along with an appropriate concern for those who are stuck making the difficult decision of whether or not to keep their baby. 

That said, I don't think it's an either-or thing w.r.t more restrictive legislation. I believe that it's a both-and thing. But yeah. The pro-life movement (along with all of us citizens of the world) needs to pay more attention to the root cause.

So this concludes my first post. What are your thoughts? Do you have objections? I hope some of you do. Because I've been thinking through the holes and perceived holes in my arguments and have tried to formulate counterarguments for them.

Coming up next - When does personhood begin?

Then after that - Answering the tough questions of rape, mother's safety, and other objections.

My Life in Fort Wayne - Fridays

It's kind of hard to believe, but I've already lived in Fort Wayne for 6 whole months. As with living anywhere else, I've developed a certain rhythm of life, and because most of you have no idea what I actually do in Fort Wayne, I thought it would be a good idea to do some short posts of what I actually do every day. So every day this week, I'm going to be posting a short blurb of what that day normally looks like.

Friday - 9/80 Day

Because yesterday's post was a day late, I'm afraid the last few of these posts may be a day late as well.

8:00am - 5:00am - Work (every other Friday)

There really isn't much to talk about for Fridays, other than that I get every other Friday off. I work a 9/80 schedule, which means I work 9 hours a day every day and get every other Friday off. [Actually, on the Friday that I do work, I only need to work for 8 hours.] As you can probably already see, my work days are ridiculously long. May days basically end at 6 every day, which is later than most people stay. I've gotten used to it though, and having every other Friday off is absolutely fantastic. The difference between a four day work week and a five day work week is huge. Because I don't really have anything else to talk about in this post, here's a list of reasons why 9/80 rocks.

Why the 9/80 schedule rocks:

• That "holy crap it's only Wednesday and I have two more days of work after this" feeling no longer exists.
• Holidays extend the weekend to four day weekends.
• I can switch to take two Fridays off in a row for vacations. Last month, I took three days off on July 4th weekend and had a 10 day vacation!
• I can run errands to places that are only open on weekdays (or that I just wouldn't want to spend time going to on weekends).

10:00am - 5:00pm - Play Age of Emperors, run some errands, take a nap

Free Fridays are probably my favorite day of the week. I have literally nothing I need to do. I usually play a good amount of Age of Empires during the day, because my internet gets kind of weird at night, so I don't get many opportunities to play on the other days. If there are any of you out there that still plays Age of Empires, tell me, and we can play together!! I play on Voobly, where I'm considered a noob. But it's okay. I'm getting better (I think). 

Fridays are great for running errands, which is also what I did yesterday. I went to go to an optometrist for the first time this year to get my vision checked and to order some new contact lenses. When I was at the desk going to pay, I was surprised at how much money needed to come out of my pocket. I asked to the lady and asked her why it was so much. After she listed out all the different silly fees that I needed to pay, I told her, "Sorry, I just moved out of home, and this is my first time doing this by myself. Being an adult is so expensive." After I said this, all the people around me started laughing and saying stuff like, "You have no idea, kid." Fun experience. After seeing the eye doctor, I went to Comcast to get my modem replaced. The door was out the line. I heard a lady remark "It's August 3rd. The beginning of the month. All the people on Social Security are here." I'm not positive why exactly they would be at Comcast (to pay the bills, maybe?), but yeah. There were a lot of poorer people there. 

8:00pm - 1:00am - Watch movies/TV shows

I was bored last night and started watching the Tudors because I heard that it was a good show. It's a Showtime show, so there's a lot of nudity and stuff, so it's not really good for my soul. But it's such a great show! The story has me totally intrigued. Why must all the best TV shows be HBO/Showtime/Starz shows with a lot of nudity?! Boo. 

Sorry this post sucked. Me doing nothing isn't really post-worthy, even if it is enjoyable to me.Hopefully tomorrow's post will be more interesting to you. 

My Life in Fort Wayne - Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays

My Life in Fort Wayne - Thursdays

It's kind of hard to believe, but I've already lived in Fort Wayne for 6 whole months. As with living anywhere else, I've developed a certain rhythm of life, and because most of you have no idea what I actually do in Fort Wayne, I thought it would be a good idea to do some short posts of what I actually do every day. So every day this week, I'm going to be posting a short blurb of what that day normally looks like.

Thursday - Small Group Day

Sorry for posting this late. As I'll describe below, Thursdays are often my absolutely craziest days. I'm going to do this post a little bit differently - Because this post is going to revolve around the small group, I'm going to give an overview of the small group here and the details will come later. As you can see, Thursday nights are small group nights, and we try to rotate around different people's homes, so it's not too much of a burden on anyone to host every week, which also includes feeding everyone. However, the "default" location is still my apartment, and I would say that we've met in my apartment for around half of our meetings. Our group is pretty small, with around 12 total members, and we've had meetings with as few as 4 people and as many as 10 people.

8:00pm - 5:00pm - Work

5:0pm - 6:00pm - Cook like a madman. Smoke up the apartment so much that my eyes are watering and I can barely breathe. Open up the door and windows to try and get rid of the smoke before people arrive. Frantically clean up the living room.

Dinner is basically the responsibility of whoever is hosting that week. Small group originally was only at my apartment, but it's been awesome seeing everyone take ownership of the group, and we've been at a lot of different homes, making it not so stressful on me. But around every other week, including yesterday, it's up to me to host. Dinner starts at 6, which means I need to leave work earlier than normal, to rush home and cook whatever I plan on making. Not only do I need to cook, I need to clean up my super messy apartment and throw everything into my room. Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially hospitable, I even do a quick vacuum of the living room area.

Anyways, cooking for the group has been super fun. I try to cook decent food instead of the peasant food that I normally eat. If you know me in my college days, you may know that I hated using recipes, because I saw it as week and unadventurous, which lead to my very well-known culinary disasters. However, I've found out recently just how fun and satisfying cooking from a recipe can be. I still get to make my own modifications and stuff if I so choose, but recipes give me a general baseline to follow. Also, it helps me to make food that is actually edible for other people to enjoy. I've had a lot of fun making food for the group. So far, I've made meatloaf, spaghetti and meatballs (homemade meatballs though!), steak/chicken tacos (with homemade pico de gallo!), and yesterday I made wings! So many exclamation points! But yeah. I like cooking.

Rice Krispie Treats!

Half-eaten meatloaf!

Guacamole!

Nothing really out of the ordinary here. We just grab food, sit around, eat, and talk. I guess I can talk a little bit about the group. We range in age from 20-30, with must of us being between 20 and 25. We have a total of 4 girls, 3 of which are nurses. The girls tend to rotate weeks, so we average probably two girls a week. Other than me, the 30-year old lawyer is the only one not from the area, and only one other guy (the church's youth pastor) besides us two has attended a "big-name", higher-tier university (he went to Purdue). Around half of our group was home-schooled growing up. Everyone but me is white. Everyone but me and the lawyer still lives with their parents/family. As you can tell, the culture is just very different. Life is extremely family-oriented, and most of them, especially those that haven't ever left home, haven't experienced any real sort of peer small group community that we experience in college ministries.

Something interesting is that even before I arrived, the people in the group for the most part didn't really know each other well. This made it pretty easy fitting in, simply because they didn't know each other much better than I knew them. As mentioned before, their idea of community is pretty different from what I think of it as. And the church seems pretty disjointed in this sense as well.

7:15pm - 7:45pm - Play a game or sing some songs

I really love playing games. Most of you know that. Unfortunately, because a bunch of the members in our group either need to get up really early for a weird shift at the hospital or to get up to work the next day, we needed to cut our meetings a little shorter, so we haven't gotten real opportunities to play games recently. Which makes me sad. Because I think games are an awesome way to get to know each other and just to make people comfortable with each other.

7:45pm - 9:00pm - Study the book of Mark

So after a few weeks of meeting and derping around during our meetings, it was decided that we should actually do a set Bible study. I forget how exactly we got to this point, but we all agreed to studying Mark together. Just like the hosting, we try to rotate leaders every week to reduce the singular burden of leading. Also, it's nice to be able to experience the leadership of different people every week instead of being subjected to one style every week. Something interesting that happened when we were talking about rotating leaders is that one of the girls piped up and said that she prefers that only guys lead, because it's better that way and we get practice for marriage and all that. Talk about conservative. So yeah. It's been all dudes leading.

I've gotten to lead a few times, and I chose to lead inductively. Believe it or not, before this small group, I've never actually lead an inductive Bible study before. I never actually got a chance to do it at any point in my 4.5 years in AIV. Maybe it's because I've always been considered for Core and not for small group leaders. Who knows. But anyways, no one else in the group has done inductive before I introduced it to them, which makes things doubly interesting. After leading it for the first time, I have a whole new level of respect for my past (and the current) AIV small group leaders. Man! Leading inductive is hard! It's much more difficult than the free-for-all, everyone-wants-to-contribute idea of inductive Bible study that I had envisioned. So to all my previous small group leaders, thanks! It was much harder than I had imagined. Also, I also feel the difficulty of many people not wanting to touch their papers or mark anything up, and with them looking at you as if you were stupid for underlining so many things. So yeah. It's been a fun experience.

My Life in Fort Wayne - Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays

My Life in Fort Wayne - Wednesdays

It's kind of hard to believe, but I've already lived in Fort Wayne for 6 whole months. As with living anywhere else, I've developed a certain rhythm of life, and because most of you have no idea what I actually do in Fort Wayne, I thought it would be a good idea to do some short posts of what I actually do every day. So every day this week, I'm going to be posting a short blurb of what that day normally looks like.

Wednesday - Prayer Meeting Day

6:45am - 8:00am - Crawl out of bed, moan that it's only Wednesday, get ready, and go to work

8:30am - 6:30pm - Work

Since I haven't talked much about my job, I guess I can spend some time doing that now. I've been at my job here for six months now, and I've gotten a chance to really start to contribute to the team. Even though I was hired on as a software engineer, I actually haven't done much coding in my time here. Though I was kind of frustrated in the beginning with the lack of coding, I'm happy I got a chance to spend a good amount of time testing and messing with the product so that I know how it works. Not only has this been pretty fun, knowing how the product works makes understanding the thousands of lines of code easier to understand.

Today was actually a really special day. For the first time ever, we got to see our product in its fully integrated system. In other words, we got to see and touch the plane that our product goes into. The plane was freaking awesome!!! What surprised me the most was the physical feel of the wings of the plane. One of the guys told us that it was made of layers of polycarbonate. I don't know how better to describe it, but the wings just felt "soft". As one of my coworkers said, it felt like a toy. A military aircraft worth tens of millions of dollars - feel like a toy? It's crazy, but yet. That describes it perfectly.

Best day of work ever!

At this event, a lot of people brought their families. Sometimes, when you work with other people professionally, it's easy to forget that they are people with lives, passions, loved ones, etc. I absolutely love it when coworkers stop being coworkers momentarily and just become friends. It's amazing how when we converse in a group about personal stuff, people who have worked together for years seem to know as little about each other as I do about them. Anyways, it was good today to put a face to many names - well, not names, but "my wife" and "my kids". It was really fun and heartwarming playing with a 6-month old baby and incredibly funny seeing my coworker's 3-year old daugher bounce off the walls while her exasperated parents try to control her. All of a sudden I understand that look of dread and exhaustion in my coworker's eye when he shakes his head and explains to me how he needs to play with his kids when he goes home. It's just nice being able to chill together and not need to talk just about work stuff. Also, babies are funny. It's funny watching grown men playing with a baby and making funny noises and faces trying to get the baby to laugh. Okay. Enough rambling. Next topic.

7:00 - 8:00 - Church Prayer Meeting

I've already written about prayer meetings at Northpark and things haven't changed much, so please go and read it if you haven't already. It should give you a better understanding of where I'm coming from in this next section. (Aside: actually, I got one of the young adults to go with me to prayer meeting today. Could this be the beginning of a culture change?!) Instead, I guess I'll just mention some observations about the prayer culture I've seen around me, and how it's so different from what I'm used to.

How the majority of "prayer" happens in the groups I've been in is as follows. There's usually a "leader" who goes around, asking for people's prayer requests. And so we all go around, talking about random stuff. Sometimes it's more serious, sometimes there's a lot of joking around. Sometimes the prayer requests are deeply personal, and sometimes they are for other people (usually sickness or travel). Rarely are prayer requests for the unsaved. And because the prayer requests are only personal, anything outside of personal or church life is usually out of scope of the prayer session (as mentioned in the post about the prayer meetings). This sharing process usually takes around 20-30 minutes, and after everyone has shared, the leader usually just prays for the whole group. And it's done. Half an hour of sharing for five minutes of solo prayer.

It's not necessarily good or bad, but it's just a style of prayer that I haven't been able to really get used to. To me, there just doesn't seem to be much participation in it. I don't feel like I've prayed because, other than saying "Amen" in agreement, I haven't. But instead of complaining about it, I hope that I can bring something different to the table and be couragous enough to offer suggestions for prayer meetings and prayer in general.

8:00pm - Bedtime - Derp around. Prep food to cook for tomorrow, if needed.

If you are also in this current state of derping as I am, here is an awesome video of what it's like for a plane to take off and land onto an aircraft carrier. Here's a video of a landing at night. Absolutely insane. I learned so much about military planes today! Awesome.

My Life in Fort Wayne - Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays