Peter Singer

This is my second post on thoughts of abortion.

The Pro-Life movement owes a debt of gratitude, surprisingly enough, to the philosopher Peter Singer. You might recognize him as the ethicist (and I use that term loosely) who gave the case for infanticide. My saying this will cause a lot of castigation from most of the Pro-Life community but hear me out.

Singer is Pro-Choice atheist who has admitted that a fetus is a human life, and he has taken the Pro-Choice liberals to task for attempting to draw the line as to when it is acceptable to abort a child. He says that such a line is arbitrary since the moment of conception is the start of life. He goes on to argue that since abortion is the destruction of human life, we might as well be willing to end life after birth. He does go on to say that this should be only in limited cases where the child has a birth defect, and only within a few months of birth. He also argues, quite rightly, that our prohibition on killing infants comes from Christian values, and historically many societies, including the ancient Greeks and Romans, practice infanticide.

All Singer has done is push the abortion argument to the next step of its logical conclusion. And that conclusion is that there is no difference between killing the child outside the womb or inside. He has yet to go to the final step and allow infanticide in all cases and not just for birth defects. Given time, he, or someone else will make that final step.

This is why Pro-Life owes him gratitude. By pushing the abortion argument to its logical conclusion, he has made it repugnant. In fact, there are those who were Pro-Choice who became Pro-Life because his argument was so rationally and logically compelling, they couldn’t find a flaw. However, they couldn’t accept it morally or emotionally.

#Abortion, #Pro-Life, #Pro-Choice, #Peter Singer