Elizabeth Harman, a Princeton University philosophy professor, attempts to justify the morality of abortion by removing the moral equivalency of her fellow human beings.
In some of my work I defend a liberal position about early abortion. I defend the view that there is nothing morally bad about early abortion. So, a lot of people think, “Well it’s permissible to have an abortion, but something bad happens when the fetus dies.” And I think if a fetus hasn’t ever been conscious, it hasn’t ever had any experiences, and we aborted it at that stage actually nothing morally bad happens. And this view might seem unattractive because it might seem that it dictates a cold attitude towards all early fetuses.
But, what I think is actually among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings. So, James, when you were an early fetus, and Eliot, when you were an early fetus, all of us I think we already did have moral status then. But we had moral status in virtue of our futures. And future of fact that we were beginning stages of persons. But some early fetuses will die in early pregnancy due to abortion or miscarriage. And in my view, that is a very different kind of entity. That’s something that doesn’t have a future as a person and it doesn’t have moral status.
This liberal professor, who sadly has access to young minds, believes that her life had value prior to her birth because she is alive today. Using incomprehensible circular ‘logic’, she posits that the thousands of prenatal children slaughtered each day have no value simply because they were selected to be killed and therefore had no future.
Thinking like this is what has led to every human atrocity our world has ever known. When we attempt to rationalize the destruction of our fellow human beings, we destroy the very thing that makes us human.
Liberal Philosophical Lunacy
