Audio only:
In this episode Trent answers five questions Destiny asked in a post-debate de-brief that he says Trent refused to answer in their original debate. Trent shows how he did answer the questions and adds some additional thoughts to his original answers on issues related to miscarriage, persistent vegetative states, and prosecuting women who choose abortion.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. In today’s episode, I’ll be responding to comments that Destiny made in his follow-up thoughts on our abortion debate. I won’t be making any further replies after this video, but I’d be happy to have another dialogue with Destiny on an important ethical or a theological issue. Also, I discussed some of these issues on Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd last week, but I’m hoping in this episode to go more in depth on the issues and address Destiny’s reply to the debate that I only became aware of after the Pints interview.
But before I share those thoughts, please be sure to like this video, subscribe to our channel and definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com. Subscribing is really helpful because having more subscribers helps us to get on larger podcasts, like the Whatever Podcast, it helps them to notice our work. So that would be great if you could subscribe to help us to reach more people. All right, so Destiny and his followers have claimed that in our debate I refuse to engage questions of hypotheticals Destiny made that are apparently good arguments against the pro-life position, although Destiny engaged all of my hypotheticals. Here’s how Destiny put it.
Destiny:
And I managed to think of five or six that I thought were absolutely catastrophic. I can’t believe he wouldn’t answer any of my hypotheticals. With him not answering my… He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Then he was like, “Well, you didn’t answer my question.” He’s like, “I’m watching you check mark the questions.” And then I asked him after that because I was really upset that he said that. He was like, “You didn’t answer my hypotheticals.” Which of these hypotheticals on the piece of paper did I not answer because I answered every single question you gave me, and he didn’t answer any of mine. He didn’t answer a single one of mine.
Trent Horn:
I will admit that in a live back and forth dialogue for three hours, you’re not going to give the best answers you could in every situation. So I hope in today’s episode I can show where I clearly did engage the hypotheticals Destiny accused me of not engaging and then offer some more thoughts to flesh out the answers I gave to him on the podcast. So let’s jump into those examples now. Here’s the first one.
Destiny:
I remember the other one. Oh, hold on, hold on. Would you mandate keeping 64 cell organisms alive for as long as possible in a Petri dish? That was one.
Trent Horn:
It can be wrong to kill someone but not be obligatory that you do everything to save the person’s life. I gave the example of a two-year-old being put in cryogenic suspension so that a doctor in the future could cure him. It is wrong to kill the two-year-old, but you don’t have to do everything possible to keep him alive.
Destiny:
So we had the technology to deliver that, and the care was quite simple, you just water the dish and maybe put a couple of nutrients in the dish and you could keep that alive for five to 10 years. You’d be just as morally obligated to keep that alive in a Petri dish than you would for a child that might be born a little bit unhealthy keeping that alive.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know if we’re morally obligated to sustain the life of a human being by putting them essentially in a freezer.
Destiny:
Not a freezer, it would be a Petri dish. You could play music for it if you want.
Trent Horn:
Probably wouldn’t do very much good at that stage, the music, I would say.
Destiny:
Sure, but your position, because you are relying on human intuition a lot. You’re trying to say that it’s so obvious that there’s a life. But now when I’ve challenged you to putting that thing in a Petri dish and watering it, if I were to ask you the same question about, let’s say, a child is born and it’s only going to live to be six months to one year old, I’m a parent. You’re a parent, both of us would probably say, “Yeah, do everything you can for it. You can’t just kill it, even if it’s going to died an early age.” Now I’m asking you for the 64 cell organism, we have the same obligation for that in a Petri dish.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, but you could have all these examples where we don’t know what to do. What if they said, “Hey, Destiny for your child, we don’t know if we can save them, but if you put them in this cryo tank, in 200 years, we think they’ll come up with a cure.”
Destiny:
I agree. It would be hard, but that’s why to quote you earlier, it’s just a hypothetical. So earlier you asked if you had a child born with missing parts of its brain that we could inject a drug to give it more of a brain in the future, that’s a pretty crazy hypothetical. So I’m asking you an equally crazy hypothetical, a 64 cell organism is born, do we have an obligation to keep it alive in a Petri dish infinitely?
Trent Horn:
Because some hypotheticals are going to be closer to reality than others. Brain transplants and swaps are pretty far away. Cryogenetics is closer, but still not quite there. Like the example I gave, it’s just is it wrong to take a healthy fetus and cause them to be permanently unconscious? We lobotomize born people. It’s not that far out of the realm-
Destiny:
Lobotomies do not mean a loss of consciousness. And when you say healthy fetus, it implies healthy functioning brain function, so again, we’re using a lot of words-
Trent Horn:
But if it’s before 20 weeks, there’s no person there. You could destroy the brain, the developing brain.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
There’s no problem.
Destiny:
Yeah, but in your world, if a 64 cell thing was born, it needs to be kept alive in a Petri dish until natural metabolic function cease.
Trent Horn:
No. We should provide medical care for human beings prior to birth. We might disagree about what kind of care that is. When I said no, I was rejecting Destiny’s assertion that we were obligated to keep that child alive in a Petri dish. So that would be my answer to the hypothetical. We are not obligated to provide extraordinary or disproportionate medical care to any human being, but we might disagree about what kind of medical care is ordinary or proportionate for unborn children given their unique anatomy. However, if I could go back, I would’ve pointed out that Destiny’s example is under described. I would’ve asked him, “Why does the child at 64 cells in the Petri dish not grow any larger? Why does it stay at that size?” I first assumed Destiny was talking about cryo-preservation, which uses extraordinary technology to keep embryos alive outside of the womb in a kind of frozen stasis.
But just as we don’t have an obligation to keep a two-year-old from dying by freezing him, we would not be obligated to do the same for a human embryo. This would be extraordinary care that is not owed to a human being, whereas food or water are ordinary ways to care for someone. However, it seemed that in Destiny’s example, there is no extraordinary care being offered. For some inexplicable reason, the human embryo can survive on drops of nutrient water, but it does not continue to grow. Strangely, it does all of this in an environment where it would normally die, a room temperature Petri dish. Normally, if a complex organism like a mammal stops exhibiting cellular growth, that means the organism is dead, and so there would be no obligation to care for a dead human being in such a condition.
One essential property of human beings is that they’re animals. They are beings that are naturally capable of multicellular growth and development. If a human embryo stopped having that property, then it would not be a human being anymore. It would be more like a brain-dead adult who is living tissue but has lost the ability to coordinate its parts to grow and develop as a whole being. So just as we would not be obligated to keep a brain-dead person’s tissue alive, we would not be obligated to keep the equivalent case or a developmentally dead 64 cell human being’s tissue alive either.
When I said some hypotheticals are further than others, that would certainly apply in this case. In the hypotheticals I gave Destiny, the impossibility was rooted in technology, which can in principle change, like in fetal brain manipulation. But an embryo that for some natural reason does not grow, but can be kept alive in a Petri dish with drops of water, is not a technological impossibility. It is a biological impossibility. In the example he’s given, you’re not talking about a human being anymore. It’d be like asking if we had to protect an infant who became calcified and turned into stone, but was still conscious. Just because you can imagine a scenario, it doesn’t mean it’s actually possible or worth taking seriously.
So putting all this together, I would reaffirm my answer that no, we don’t have to keep this 64 cell organism alive. In such a case, this would either be an embryo kept alive extraordinarily in cryo tanks, or it’s just a weird non-growing piece of human tissue that is the equivalent of a brain-dead adult who lacks organic unity so we don’t have to keep it alive. Now, as I said at the end of my response we might disagree about which kind of future technological advances would constitute ordinary and this obligatory care for unborn children, but our disagreement about what unknown future treatments we can or must give to unborn children, that’s based on uninvented technology, has absolutely no bearing on whether it’s wrong to kill unborn children right now. Now Destiny’s next question is a bit more grounded though because it talks about the duty to keep a particular known set of human beings alive.
Destiny:
Would you keep persistent vegetative state people alive forever? Oh, yeah. A 20-year old who will never wake up on a feeding tube for his 55 years, he said yes to that. That’s true.
Trent Horn:
Now Destiny admits right here that I did answer his hypothetical. I said, “Yes, they should be kept alive,” though I qualified that by saying we should give them the ordinary means of life, like food and water. We don’t need to keep people alive by extraordinary means in this case, like heart, lung machines, ventilators, dialysis, or even CPR. In this clip, I even say some intervention may not be helpful for someone in a persistent vegetative state, and it’s those kinds of interventions to which I’m referring. So let’s show the clip and then I’ll talk about it.
Destiny:
Do you think that people in persistent vegetative states, assuming you know they’re never going to wake up, should they be kept alive indefinitely as well?
Trent Horn:
I think that they should be given food, water. They should be given comfort care.
Destiny:
So kept alive indefinitely.
Trent Horn:
No, not necessarily kept alive indefinitely because there might be interventions that aren’t as helpful for them. I think that we should never dehydrate anyone to death.
Destiny:
Sure. So a person who was 22 years old, persistent vegetative state, they could live to 75. They’re always going to be in bed. Should that person be cared for for the remainder of their life?
Trent Horn:
Well, we don’t know that they’ll live to 75.
Destiny:
Let’s say we could, that’s why hypothetical.
Trent Horn:
Well, no, you shut down a lot of my hypotheticals.
Destiny:
I didn’t. I answered every single hypothetical.
Trent Horn:
No, you complained about a lot of them.
Destiny:
I did complain. No, no, I complained because they’re intuition pumps, but tell me one of those I didn’t answer.
Trent Horn:
No, you-
Destiny:
No, no, no. Tell me one of those hypotheticals I-
Trent Horn:
You complained about-
Destiny:
I watched you put a check mark next to every single one I answered. I saw you you do it, so I know I answered.
Trent Horn:
You complained about a toddler, for example.
Destiny:
I did complain, but I answered it.
Trent Horn:
He actually didn’t answer it. Here’s that exchange earlier in our dialogue. Just to recap, it’s permissible to kill infants who’ve not been conscious yet, to kill toddlers. Oh, yeah, what if toddler loses all of his memories and they’re not going to come back, he’s at the same stage as a 19-week fetus.
Destiny:
It’s impossible. That’s like asking me, “Are you killed when you teleport on Star Trek?” I don’t think I have an answer for that. It’s a very difficult hypothetical. I think it challenges the concept of identity, but I don’t know if that gets into a human life or not a human life. We’re talking about deleting somebody’s memory and resetting their brain to 19 weeks.
Trent Horn:
But why does it? Because I guess here is… I should have followed up and pressed Destiny on his refusal to answer my hypothetical, but I decided to try to get to the root of Destiny’s position instead. But notice that Destiny never said whether it was right or wrong to kill a toddler with total amnesia. He just said, “We have no idea if they were truly dead after losing their memories,” and so he couldn’t answer the hypothetical. Now, back to the question about persistent vegetative states.
Destiny:
So you can complain about mine, but you have to answer it. A 20-year-old can be kept alive until 75. Do we have a moral obligation to keep feeding them for 55 years in a hospital bed? And you can complain about it, but you should answer the question.
Trent Horn:
There’s two ways that I could respond to this. One, would be my view and two, would be another pro-life view.
Destiny:
I want to know your view because I’m talking to you.
Trent Horn:
Well, someone could defend a position might say, you know what-
Destiny:
I don’t care about someone. I want Trent’s answer.
Trent Horn:
Because I want people to be pro-life, even if they don’t agree with everything I believe.
Destiny:
Okay, but I’m asking you right now.
Trent Horn:
That’s fine.
Destiny:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
I think we should not starve somebody to death. I think that in some cases, food will not help someone because they can’t digest it anymore.
Destiny:
We’re not talking about those cases. I’m just saying if we could keep somebody alive from 25 to 75, 50 years in a bed if we feed them and water them.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I don’t think we should starve disabled people to death. That’s my answer to that. But number two, if you don’t agree with that intuition, you could just have the view that I laid out earlier, which is that you are no longer a person if it is impossible for you to be conscious in the future. So that means you are a person whenever it is possible for you to be conscious in the future, and that would apply for nearly all unborn human beings for fertilization onward. So even if someone didn’t agree with me about PVS, they could still agree with you about withholding care for PVS, but it’s different because there’s a difference between someone who will never again be conscious and someone who will be conscious at some point. There’s a difference there.
Destiny:
True.
Trent Horn:
So I answered the hypothetical and even offered an alternative position for those who don’t share my beliefs about the wrongness of dehydrating disabled people to death, but who also want to be against abortion. We also have to remember that hypotheticals only take us so far. We need to make medical judgements based on facts associated with the real world. So for example, a pro-life Muslim physician, Dr. Javad Hashmi, notes in his review of destiny on Twitter, he cites an article from the Harvard Medical School called Revisiting the Vegetative State: A Disability Rights Law Analysis. It notes that the term persistent vegetative state has now been replaced with the term chronic vegetative state to account for the many people who become conscious again while in these states.
It says the following, “The condition was thought to be irreversible. However, the American Academy of Neurology replaced the terminology of permanence with CVS to reflect the frequency of recovery of consciousness after these points in time. The features of minimal conscious states include sleep-wake cycles and minimal but definite evidence of a awareness, simple command following, answering yes/no questions and other intelligible and purposeful behaviors like smiling, crying in response to emotional stimuli. Since these disorders exist on a spectrum, a patient’s transition from a vegetative state to MCS can go undetected. Even the assumption that accurately classified vegetative state patients have no inner life has been called into question. A series of studies revealed a phenomenon called covert consciousness in the vegetative state.
In a 2006 study, Owen et al. found that a woman in a vegetative state was able to respond to commands through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals. The results were published in an article titled “Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State.” When the research subject was asked to imagine playing tennis or to walk through rooms in her house, activity was observed in corresponding areas of her brain. These observations on fMRI were indistinguishable from the activity patterns of healthy individuals while performing these tasks.”
So if someone cares about consciousness, then we shouldn’t kill people in PVS states because they very well may be conscious. So under Destiny’s view, someone who is minimally conscious and can only communicate if someone can read their brain scan would have a right to life and we’d have to keep them alive for decades, even though many people may not agree with that. Now, Destiny might say that’s true unless the person in this state wants us to kill him. But Destiny can’t say that either because in our debate, Destiny said assisted suicide should only be given to people with terminal illnesses, not people with chronic disabilities. That brings us to his next question.
Destiny:
Three, would you make it illegal in all forms to commit suicide?
Trent Horn:
Destiny never directly asked me if all forms of suicide should be illegal. He asked me if people should be allowed to kill themselves, and I said, “No.” I clearly answered his question. Here’s the full clip, then I’ll offer some more thoughts. We make judgments there about you’re giving me a good reason and you’re not. I think that’s a dangerous road to go down to decide whose reason is good enough to help them out of suicide and whose reason is good enough to help them into it.
Destiny:
Okay. I would disagree. I would say it’s a really dangerous road to compel people to live for the happiness of others around them.
Trent Horn:
I don’t we should compel people… I think-
Destiny:
That’s what you’re saying is compelling somebody to live. If you’re saying that you’re not allowed to take your life, you’re depriving them of arguably one of the most fundamental negative rights we might have.
Trent Horn:
I’m saying doctors shouldn’t be killers.
Destiny:
Sure. Should a person be allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
They should be allowed to refuse disproportionate care for-
Destiny:
Should they be allowed to jump off a building or a bridge?
Trent Horn:
No.
Destiny:
So they shouldn’t be allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
No. Do you think people should be allowed to kill themselves?
Destiny:
Yeah, I think depending on the circumstances, yes.
Trent Horn:
Should they be allowed to kill themselves for any reason?
Destiny:
For any reason?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, they don’t want to live.
Destiny:
Probably not.
Trent Horn:
Why?
Destiny:
Because I think that oftentimes the desire to kill yourself without a good stated reason is probably more evidence of some sort of mental problem that should probably be alleviated before the person can make that decision. So it’d be an issue of, we would argue from an informed consent perspective that you’re not capable of making this decision because in a mentally compromised state. But if you take somebody who’s 75, they’ve got stage four lung cancer, they’ve got six to 12 months ahead of them, they know it’s going to be an excruciating experience and they don’t have any desire to live anymore, do you think that person should be deprived of the right to kill themselves, jump off a building, jump off a bridge? Because in your world, they would have to do that because the doctors-
Trent Horn:
I don’t make judgments that, oh yeah, you have a good reason to kill yourself because then what about the quadriplegic who says, “You’re a 75-year-old with cancer, what about the 20-year-old who will never move their arms and legs again and says, I can’t live like this for my whole life?” Should they just be allowed to roll themselves into the pool?
Destiny:
I think that there is plenty of research that shows that people that are even quadriplegics live healthy, happy lives.
Trent Horn:
What if they say, screw your research. I don’t want to live this way.
Destiny:
Then I think it’s more likely that there’s something unhealthy with them, so they shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
Trent Horn:
Can’t we say that for the 75-year-old?
Destiny:
Because I think that for 75 year olds, we do know the prognosis with stage four lung cancer at certain stages, and we could say it is going to be bad and you are going to die in six to 12 months.
Trent Horn:
Right, but if anything, so you’re saying that-
Destiny:
I’m saying that a person who’s 75 with that cancer-
Trent Horn:
Someone should be allowed to kill themselves so they don’t have to go through six months of agony, but a quadriplegic who might go through 60 years of agony, no go.
Destiny:
Because at the end of the day, I’m making an empirical reference. I can say if we look at the pool of people that are quadriplegic at this age, 99% of them live and have decently happy, fulfilling lives.
Trent Horn:
So you’re saying people don’t really have a right to make autonomous medical choices, they only have the right to do what you think the research says?
Destiny:
No, they have the right to make a decision, but whether or not the decision is informed or not is important, just like we would say 12-year-old doesn’t have the right to make certain decisions because we don’t think their consent is informed.
Trent Horn:
I wanted to give a longer answer because Destiny was conflating two things in his question, then interrupting me while I was separating the two concepts, prohibiting suicide and compelling someone to live. They’re not the same thing, depending on the meaning of the phrase, compelling someone to live. They could be the same if compelling someone to live only means making it illegal to commit suicide. But if that’s true, then Destiny also believes we should compel people to live because he says a suicidal person who is not terminally ill does not have the ability to consent to suicide. So it should be illegal for them to do that. But this undermines his claim that prohibiting suicide undermines one of the most fundamental rights we have. However, compelling someone to live can mean requiring them to use anything to stay alive, even painful, expensive medical procedures that only provide a small amount of uncomfortable life.
Opponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide agree people have the right to refuse disproportionate medical treatment, but nobody has the right to kill themselves and Destiny agrees that’s true for almost everyone because he thinks only terminally ill people in chronic pain should be allowed to kill themselves. But Destiny’s position is untenable because it makes no sense to say under his mindset that only those people who are terminally ill do not have lives worth living. He might say, “Well, I have empirical studies that show you can have a good quality of life even if you’re quadriplegic or have other disabilities.” But that’s completely unfounded on his part. Medical associations around the world that once allowed assisted suicide for only terminally ill people now claim the research shows suicide can be a rational treatment for someone who’s not terminally ill. This can even include people who are only mentally ill and are physically healthy. Here’s some examples.
Speaker 4:
Canada first introduced medical assistance in dying or made where medics can help people end their life in 2016. At the time, it was only open to those whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable, for example, patients with terminal cancer. Five years later, the law was extended to adults who had a serious incurable illness or disability, if they were in an advanced state of decline and endured intolerable physical or psychological suffering. It was, however, not open to those with only a mental illness. That restriction was planned to be lifted in March this year, but yesterday the Canadian government put forward a bill to delay it for another year.
Speaker 5:
Dr. Van Hoey is a general practitioner and president of one of the leading Right to Die organizations in Belgium. He’s helped shape the country’s policy towards euthanasia, which can be requested by patients who meet two basic conditions, they’re experiencing constant and unbearable suffering, either mental or physical, and their condition is incurable. And then patients must put the request in writing.
Speaker 6:
Only thing you have to write down is your name, the date, and I want euthanasia and signature.
Trent Horn:
All right, let’s go to the next one. Number four, dealing with miscarriages.
Destiny:
I remember four. Four was, would you mandate a criminal, it has to be, a criminal investigation for every single miscarriage? That was such a good question.
Trent Horn:
The answer I initially gave was that I don’t support mandatory investigations of miscarriages because we don’t do that every time a born person dies. So I did answer the question. Destiny, however, claimed I was inconsistent in saying this. So I modified my answer to continue the conversation by pointing out that another reason pro-lifers wouldn’t do this is because we don’t have the technology to investigate the cause of most embryonic or fetal deaths. If I could go back, however, I would’ve doubled down on my first answer in spite of Destiny’s protests. So here’s our exchange and then I’ll offer some more thoughts.
Destiny:
You would agree that every single miscarriage should probably demand an investigation for a potential homicide, correct?
Trent Horn:
No, dude, we don’t do that even for born children, a lot of children-
Destiny:
You absolutely do. If a born child dies, you don’t think CPS or investigators are automatically involved in that?
Trent Horn:
Not necessarily.
Destiny:
A one-year-old child dies in a house? Of course.
Trent Horn:
Well, here’s the problem here. When a child dies, we have the technology to take a newborn and do an autopsy to determine what happened to that human being. When it comes to a first trimester miscarriage, we don’t do those investigations because we don’t have the technology for that.
Destiny:
You absolutely can do those investigations.
Trent Horn:
How?
Destiny:
A woman comes into the hospital and she miscarries, right?
Trent Horn:
You mean she is miscarrying or she has miscarried?
Destiny:
She’s miscarrying, in the process of miscarrying. She has intense stomach pain. She goes to the hospital.
Trent Horn:
Sure. She goes there, wants progesterone, wants someone save the baby.
Destiny:
First thing we should do is we should pull some tubes of blood. We need to check for blood alcohol content, make sure she’s not drinking at all. Could probably send somebody to the house to check for, I don’t know, any type of thing she might have there, any sort of evidence of foul play. It could be hangers, it could be whatever else she might be using. But this is an investigation that needs to be done every single time somebody is miscarrying. So you would subject every single woman that’s having a miscarriage to a full on police investigation the same way we would for… You mentioned that, well, for a one-year-old child we would get an autopsy. An autopsy is an investigation. We’re having an investigation to figure out cause of death. I think that would be a harm that would exist in your world that I think you should fully acknowledge.
Trent Horn:
But here’s the thing, prior when abortion was illegal, and even now in cases where it is illegal, we don’t do those things. Most people don’t share that intuition that we need to do that in order to protect unborn human beings.
Destiny:
But you should want that though, shouldn’t you?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I think that that’s fine, but you can’t determine-
Destiny:
No, no, no, not fine. You’re weaseling out it. It’s not that it would be fine. If somebody said, “Do you think we should investigate when two-year-old children are killed or when two-year-old children are dead?” My answer, and I don’t think your answer would be, “Yeah, that’d be fine.” You would say, “Absolutely.” I would want that to happen, right? But your moral standard needs to be the exact same for the six-week fetus.
Trent Horn:
But here’s the other problem. We would have to make sure that in our zeal to look for crime, we don’t over prosecute parents. So for example, when prosecutors will investigate SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, or shaken baby syndrome, a lot of times they’ll get those things wrong, for example. So we would have to put the burden very high so as to not falsely accuse people of manslaughter because you’re familiar with people-
Destiny:
Yeah, but nothing you just said preclude… You should still investigate shaken baby syndrome, right?
Trent Horn:
I agree, but do not have the… Maybe as a future hypothetical, yeah, sure, fine, but we don’t have that now. We have the body of a-
Destiny:
Well, everything I just said you can totally do right now. If a woman is miscarrying and goes to the hospital, you pull a tube of blood to check her blood alcohol content.
Trent Horn:
If she’s intoxicated, that doesn’t prove that caused the miscarriage though. Many people are intoxicated and they give birth to babies and many people miscarry who are not intoxicated, so that doesn’t prove anything.
Destiny:
Sure, but you could look at it as a-
Trent Horn:
It wouldn’t pass an court of law where you need beyond a reasonable doubt.
Destiny:
If you have a child at home and you’re neglecting the child, it might be hard to say for one way or another what caused the death of the child, but at the very least, you can start getting up to manslaughter charges if you’ve neglected a child. But how do you tell what part of neglect actually killed them? Was it the lack of water, the lack of medical care, the lack of-
Trent Horn:
Well, you could just say you have a seven-year-old that weighs 28 pounds, and you then give testimony why do they weigh 28 pounds. Well, because we feed them once every four days. There you have your evidence. You don’t have anything similar for the wanton destruction of human embryos or things like that.
Now, I’ll add a few more comments. First, there is a difference between doing an autopsy and doing a criminal investigation. Almost every criminal investigation of a death includes an autopsy, but most autopsies are not done as part of criminal investigations. On the website of the Colorado Children’s Hospital, it says the following, “An autopsy is a procedure in which a trained specialist will carefully examine your child’s body to help determine the cause of death. There may be important information to learn about your child’s death that may be helpful to you or to other children who have the same illness or condition. Parents may be able to choose an autopsy or not. However, in certain situations, a coroner is involved and there must be an autopsy.”
For most deaths even of children, unless there are signs of foul play, a criminal investigation is not performed. It’s not even true that an autopsy is always performed, as we can see in this statement from the hospital. In fact, here’s what the National Vital Statistics Report says about recent autopsy rates. The autopsy rate was 31.6% for those under one year, 55.4% for those age one to four and 46.8% for those age five to 14. The autopsy rate was highest for those age 15 to 24, 62.6%, falling to 56.1% for those aged 25 to 34 and decreasing further with each successively older age group. The largest drop was observed from 35 to 44 to 45 to 54, 41% and 22.1% respectively. For those aged 65 to 74, the autopsy rate was 3.9% and by 85 and over was 0.6%.
So Destiny is incorrect. Even among young children, autopsies are often not performed and criminal investigations aren’t automatically performed just because a child died. There needs to be evidence of foul play beyond just the fact that a child has died because most young children die in accidents or from illnesses related to underlying genetic conditions. Autopsies usually aren’t performed if doctors believe the death was due to natural causes. This is why among people at the very end of life, 99% of them are not given an autopsy. That means we probably wouldn’t do autopsies on people at the very beginning of life, even if we had the technology to be able to, because most of those deaths are due to natural causes. Indeed, as many as 25% of all pregnancies end in natural miscarriage.
Just because the unborn are persons does not mean we would do a criminal investigation into every miscarriage. We might do it for some pregnancies, such as someone who miscarries and there’s evidence they’ve been smoking crack cocaine for their entire pregnancy. But just because someone has alcohol in their system during miscarriage, that doesn’t mean that this caused the child’s death. So you see, I directly engaged in Destiny’s hypothetical and showed that the pro-life view does not entail criminally investigating every death of an unborn child. To make a comparison, the death of some 90 year olds will have suspicious elements and warrant criminal investigation, but most of those deaths would not. And the same would be true of the deaths of a 90-day-old child in the womb. But what if there is solid evidence a woman intentionally killed her unborn child even very early into pregnancy? That leads us to Destiny’s final question.
Destiny:
Charge a woman with double homicide if she avoided twins.
Trent Horn:
The question of what laws we should have or what punishment the law requires are often complex. They vary widely. Here’s my reply to Destiny in the conversation, and then I’ll offer some more thoughts on the issue.
Destiny:
Do you think it’d be fair to give a woman the death penalty if she had an abortion for twins?
Trent Horn:
Well, I don’t believe in the death penalty in general.
Destiny:
Do you think it’d be fair to put her in jail for life?
Trent Horn:
Maybe. It depends. I guess I might say maybe the penalty we give for an abortion… Well, for example, there was a woman in Nebraska a few weeks ago. She got an abortion at 29 weeks and she texted her mom one of the reasons she did it was because she was really excited to be able to fit back into her jeans again. So do you think she should be legally punished?
Destiny:
29 weeks?
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
How much?
Destiny:
Whatever infanticide the punishment would be.
Trent Horn:
I would say the same.
Destiny:
But you would say the same for one week?
Trent Horn:
Well, I would say that the punishments that we give at one week, we can’t even get an abortion at one week.
Destiny:
Five weeks.
Trent Horn:
I would say that the law and how we apply it, it’s going to be different based on like in that example, that woman seemed very callous, very uncaring. Another woman, in another case, she might respond differently.
Destiny:
Sure. I’m talking strictly in the case of murder, not a… Well, give me the other example. I’m curious because whatever… No, go ahead. What was the other example you were going to give?
Trent Horn:
I wasn’t giving an example. I’m just saying there’s going to be a lot of different cases.
Destiny:
But in any of these cases, would we excuse the murder of a one-year-old child?
Trent Horn:
No, we wouldn’t. But I would say that we do end up giving different punishments. I know that people who kill five-year-olds or 10 year olds, sometimes the punishment there is different than a newborn infant, for example. So I don’t know exactly what it should be, but I do think that we should treat the deliberate killing of human beings before birth that can be established even early on, let’s say, five or six weeks, we should treat it with serious gravity, even on par with 20, 25 weeks.
Destiny:
Not with serious gravity. I’m asking if it should be the same as a five-week-old abortion, I think should be treated the same in your view as a five-year-old child murder.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think that they should both be treated the same, yeah. I think people should abandon their schizophrenic view and pick one of our consistent views, and I think mine is more humane.
Destiny:
Sure. And I don’t like the one where a woman that has an abortion of whatever that was or takes Plan B might be charged with first degree murder.
Trent Horn:
Fine. Charge her with something else.
Destiny:
But it would be first degree murder.
Trent Horn:
Why not? We live in-
Destiny:
Because I think that if a woman, if she determines that she wants to go and murder her one-year-old, I think she should be charged with first degree murder. I don’t think they should be the same penalty-
Trent Horn:
Sure. After the Civil War, all of the Confederate soldiers could have been thrown in prison for treason or hung.
Destiny:
We’re not talking about after the Civil War or even analogies. It’s very basic. Lots of people think of Plan B. It’s a simple thing.
Trent Horn:
It’s not simple because-
Destiny:
It’s so simple. It’s simple in your view. If a person has an abortion, they’re murdering. That’s a really simple thing.
Trent Horn:
But we live in a society that has a widespread disagreement about that, and so to come to a national consensus about how we treat the unborn, we’re going to have to do that in compromised legal ways, just like America had to do in reconstruction after the Civil War when there were massive disagreements in our country. I think we’re at a similar crossroad.
Destiny:
That’s fine. We can argue that, but that’s like a sophisticated political legal argument.
Trent Horn:
I agree.
Destiny:
Your moral argument, your ideal political legal world is one in which a woman who has an abortion, twins at 14 weeks is charged with double homicide, double first degree murder.
Trent Horn:
The reason this is a hard question is because legal punishments often reflect social attitudes more than strict logic. Consider the crime of rape. Should the punishment for rape change based on the marital status of the victim? You’d probably say no. If a man rapes a woman, it shouldn’t matter if she’s married to some other man or not. In the past, raping a married woman who is not your spouse, key point, was probably considered worse than raping an unmarried woman who did not belong to anyone, but that’s wrong. The crime is the same either way. All right, well, should the punishment be different if the rapist is married to the victim? Again, you think, no, the crime’s the same, but our society has undergone a huge change in understanding the wrongness of marital rape. It was not until 1993 that every state made marital rape a crime, but even today, it’s treated differently than other kinds of rape.
Here’s a legal article on that question. Some states punish marital rape less harshly than other rape crimes. For instance, South Carolina imposes a maximum 10-year sentence for spousal sexual battery accomplished by aggravated force. However, the same crime committed by a non-spouse, criminal sexual conduct, carries up to 30 years in prison. The law even prevents prosecutors from charging a spouse with the harsher crime of criminal sexual conduct. Also in South Carolina, a prosecution for spousal sexual battery may not proceed unless the offending spouse’s conduct was reported to law enforcement within 30 days of the event. One reason behind these different punishments is that marital rape is more difficult to prove than other kinds of rape where there is no cultural expectation of sex between the people involved. Also, many people might think that while all rape is wrong, the rape of a spouse isn’t as bad as the rape of a stranger, and so it shouldn’t be punished as harshly.
That’s one example of how punishments for a crime can be less if a culture is undergoing a change in moral thinking about the crime. The punishment can also be less if the crime causes less harm because of the nature of the victims. For example, most people agree it should be illegal to kill a dementia patient without their consent, but they don’t think that’s as wrong as killing someone who can still have conscious experiences and doesn’t want to die. So it’s equally illegal to kill a 95-year-old with dementia, a five-year-old child, a five-month-old fetus, which Destiny agrees should be illegal, and a five-week fetus. But there are different harms with each killing. The five-year-old has fear and a desire to live, as well as a longer life to deprive from him. The five-month-old and the 95-year-old are only minimally conscious, and the 95-year-old has very little future years that killing would deprive, and the five-week-old won’t feel anything at all. The five-week-old and the 95-year-old might also have less malicious motives for their killings, like fear over pregnancy or concern about dementia, and they don’t involve hatred for the victim like other murders.
All these cases of killing harm the dead person in the same way, they take away his future. But because some of the killings cause additional harms than others, the punishment for the killings is going to be different. For example, Jack Kevorkian was convicted of second degree murder for euthanizing a man with ALS, but he ended up only serving eight years in prison when he could have done 25 years and other second degree murders can involve life imprisonment. Anyone who thinks any killing of a human being, even planned killings, incurs automatically the same legal punishment doesn’t understand the legal system.
In the state of Texas first degree murder, the punishment ranges from five years to 99 years. Currently, in Mississippi, the maximum punishment for performing an abortion is 10 years in prison. That’s the maximum. As I noted in our debate, we live in a society undergoing massive moral change. So we don’t hold women or even medical doctors as responsible for killing the unborn as we would for killing born children. A person is very blameworthy for killing a born child because basically everyone agrees that it’s wrong. The murderer is without excuse. But a woman obtaining an abortion may have always lived with it being legal, still sees massive elements of society saying there’s nothing wrong with it. She may never have seen her onboard child or ever felt his presence and implicitly trusted doctors or pharmacists who performed the procedure or give her a pill like Plan B. And as I noted in the debate, Plan B would be harder to prove as a form of homicide.
In fact, in 2022, the FDA updated its guidance on Plan B, and an article on cnn.com says the following, “The emergency contraceptive pill sold as Plan B One-Step does not prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb and does not cause an abortion, the US Food and Drug Administration said Friday. The agency said it is updating the information included on the leaflet provided with the drug.” This was something I noted in our debate that we don’t know how Plan B works, so it’d be hard to charge someone with a crime of abortion since the pill doesn’t necessarily work that way. One would have to prove the pill prevented implantation and not a myriad of other natural factors that can cause the same thing to happen in a woman’s body, including breastfeeding, which can thin the lining of the uterus.
In addition, as I said, on Pints with Aquinas, you can punish some aspects of crimes but not others. For example, one can consistently say prostitution harms society and it should be illegal, but only prosecute those who buy sex, not the women who sell it because the women are often victims of coercion or circumstance. So notice how the question should we prosecute women for having abortions and what should the punishment be are very complicated. They can’t be answered with a simple yes or no.
Destiny dismissed all of this as a legal, political issue, but that’s exactly what punishment for abortion or any crime entails. It’s a legal, political and cultural question. In fact, Destiny has no grounds to say pro-lifers are doing something wrong if they convince society the social contract should prohibit abortion but not have as harsh penalties as other homicides. After all, Destiny’s view of morality says that morality is just an opinion. So if society collectively has this opinion, he has no objective way to say society is wrong about the issue. And my moral system isn’t inconsistent either because there is no moral fact about what specific punishment the state has to meet out for every crime. This is something the legal system manages on a case by case basis given circumstances of the crime and the prevailing attitudes in society toward the crime.
So to summarize, I did not avoid this hypothetical, and my answer now is basically the same as it was before. There ought to be legal consequences for anyone who cooperates with the killing of a human being before or after birth. However, not all individual crimes merit the same punishment, even if they all break the same law and there’s nothing inconsistent in pro-lifers wanting to protect the unborn, but advocating for less harsh punishments for abortion than for other homicides because we’re in a situation where our culture is changing and there’s still a lot of moral disagreement over the issue, and so people don’t have as deep an understanding that this is wrong, and also the fact that the harms involved in the killing in an abortion is different than the harms that are involved in killing other born people, so there’s nothing inconsistent in that position.
On another note, Destiny claimed that in future debates on abortion, he’s going to call out people for being Catholic or having preexisting views and saying that they can’t change their mind on something like abortion because of their religion. He says he should have done this to me in our debate.
Destiny:
The audience should acknowledge that I believe this thing because this is where my thought process has led me to. However, for you, even if you saw the best pro-choice argument of the world, you’re Catholic, you’re not going to change your mind. You can’t. You’re mandated from the ground up to be pro-life. Your organization would cast you aside. Your family would probably cast you aside, your whole community, everything you’ve built, your name is literally the Counsel of Trent, okay?
Trent Horn:
First, there are lots of pro-choice Catholics who, unfortunately, have not been cast aside by the church. Second, my family is not Catholic and they wouldn’t care because I’m a convert. I became Catholic 20 years ago, partly because Catholicism cohered with my previous view that abortion is wrong. Third, this is the genetic fallacy. You can’t say a belief is wrong just because the person came to it or still holds it for emotional reasons. That would be like a Holocaust denier saying the president of the National Holocaust Museum cannot change his mind on the issue, so you should be suspicious because he might lose his job and be a social pariah. The factual question related to the Holocaust has nothing to do with the personal motives of those who defend that it happened.
I’d strongly urge Destiny to just stick to the arguments. Don’t engage in fallacies to try to discredit your opponents. Just show where the argument is right or wrong. Finally, at one point in the review, Destiny admitted where his argument was weakest and needed to be improved, specifically on the nature of consciousness and what gives us moral value, what makes human consciousness unique and thus deserving of special protection.
Destiny:
There’s one thing that’s really hard to explain. We went back and forth on it for a while. I need a snappier analogy for it. I’m trying to think of what it was. Oh, I remember what it is, the lesser forms of conscious that babies have, I guess. It’s something that I need to figure out a way to tighten that up.
Trent Horn:
I then noticed under the video, one of his commenters brilliantly summarized the fatal weakness in Destiny’s argument. He writes, “I think the lack of clarity on what exactly makes human consciousness different is the weakest part of your position because it puts you in a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, if you spell out the specific differences of human consciousness in detail, i.e., level of self-awareness, level of intelligence, problem solving, ability, memory, et cetera, then your opponent can quickly point out that many animals have higher levels of these things than even infants do. If that were the case, then the consciousness argument entails that adult pigs are more worthy of protection than very young human children, which strikes most folks as absurd. On the other hand, if you simply say that it’s merely the fact that it’s a human consciousness that gives it rights, then it seems like you’re endowing some sort of essence to what it means to be human, which makes that conscious experience worthy of protection.
In this scenario, it doesn’t seem like it’s consciousness that’s doing the moral work, since that does nothing to create animal rights. It seems like it’s humanness that is doing the work, but if it’s humanness that endows rights, then the pro-lifers are right, that such rights would logically begin at the beginning of the life of that human organism. I’m not sure that you need a new analogy. It may be that this is just a fundamental weakness in your position. Either human beings are innately special, or consciousness is innately special, or both are special. If the former is true, then pro-lifers are right. If the second option is true, then Peter Singer’s pro infanticide position is right. If both are true, then abortion is definitely wrong, as is eating meat. I don’t know that a middle position like what you hold is really a viable option.” I agree, which is why I said of all the pro-choice views out there, Destiny’s is one of the least logically coherent, though he tries very hard to be coherent.
Now, he did say that at worst, his view would just be modified to include infanticide, but if it came to that, I think many people will reject his view on abortion because nearly everyone agrees infanticide is gravely evil, so they would reject the moral view that leads to infanticide. All right, well, I hope this is helpful for you all, and as I said, I’ll leave the debate as it is. I just wanted to address Destiny’s review questions because they’re really important in a three-hour conversation where subjects can change often and the dialogue isn’t always the best way to address them. And if Destiny wants to debate another topic, I’d be happy to do that in the future. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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