On Thursday, February 21, the University of North Carolina-Wilmington hosted a debate on abortion which featured "Christian abortio...
During the hour and a half-long debate, Adams made numerous salient points, but four stood out among the rest.
The three critical ideas expressed by Adams are detailed below with time stamps provided.
Viability (20:30)
Adams asked the crowd to join him in a thought experiment regarding the ridiculousness of the notion of fetal "viability" as an argument for abortion:
Imagine that a woman is pregnant in New York City and she has a viable fetus. She is 22 weeks pregnant. If she gets on a plane and she flies to Bangladesh – guess what? That human fetus is no longer viable because viability in Bangladesh doesn't occur until about 35 weeks. So let's just assume she's hanging out in Bangladesh, she doesn't like it very much, so she decides that she's going to come back to New York City. Are we actually going to suggest that she had a person there in her uterus in New York City, a non-person in Bangladesh, who, when returning the United States of America, became a person for the second time? It is absolutely absurd...
Legal Versus Moral (48:22)
Adams provides an example of a time when something that was clearly immoral was legal in the United States in order to show that legality does not equal morality:
Let me remind you this evening, it is not about whether or not abortion is legal, it is about whether or not abortion is moral – and there is a profound difference between that which is legal and that which is moral. If you want to come up with an example – for example, Doctor Parker says you cannot murder a fetus, you can only murder a person. That's a legalistic argument. But if you want to come up with an example in this country of something that was legal but immoral, think about the 1927 case of Buck versus Bell in which the state of Virginia was forcing women to be sterilized simply because they were mentally deficient. And in affirming that law in the state of Virginia, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said this, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." I want you to think about that for just a second – and that came back to bite us as that phrase was used against us in the Nuremberg trials a few years later. There is a distinction between the legal and the moral.
Laws For Crimes (1:28:26)
Lastly, Adams responded to an audience member during the Q&A session who asked about the tradeoff between abortion being legal and allegedly safe or illegal, resulting in dangerous back alley abortions:
The idea that just because something will happen anyway that there's no use in having a law is fallacious reasoning. We have laws against murder and laws against rape, and they still happen. So, we don't say, "Because the crimes still happen, therefore make it legal," okay? What we have learned very clearly from the experiment of Roe versus Wade – we don't know exactly how many more abortions are a result of Roe versus Wade; we know it's in the hundreds of thousands. So, you wanna talk about tradeoffs? I say it's a very bad tradeoff to intentionally kill hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings just to save hundreds who would have died in back alley abortions...
the only right a woman has to her own body regarding abortion, is the right to have sex when she wants to.
ReplyDeleteAfter conception, a new entity begins. It is not HER body anymore. If having another human in 9 months is not another "body" , I don"t know what is. Conception is like the splitting of the atom to create a nuclear bomb; once it's split, it's a bomb.