Audio only:
In this episode, Trent reviews Charlie Kirk’s interactions with woke college students on the issue of abortion.
Transcription:
Trent:
Recently conservative commenter Charlie Kirk took on 25 woke college students on a variety of topics including abortion. A lot of you have asked me to comment on this video, so I’ll give you my thoughts, but I want to be clear that overall I think Charlie Kirk did a very good job. Abortion is just one issue among many that he addresses and he handled it well. There’s only a few points that he could have been sharper. I’m often hesitant to do video reviews like this because it’s easy for people to say, oh, you should have said this, or you should have said that. Indeed, it’s easy to say that when you’ve never been in the hot seat. I have been in the hot seat in dialogues and debates, and I’ll tell you, there’s always cases where later you think to yourself, I wish I had said X instead of Y. So let’s show people grace when we give this kind of commentary. And with that being said, I’m not going to cover everything that was said in the discussion, but I want to check out a few highlights from it. So without further ado, let’s look at Charlie Kirk in the hot seat on the issue of abortion.
CLIP:
Okay. What’s your name?
Naima. Nice.
Nice to meet you.
Okay. Can I just ask, at how many weeks do you think that a fetus is viable?
Well, viability and moral worth are two different things.
No, but I’m asking you at how many weeks do you think a
Fetus
Is viable? Well, about
Viable at about 20 weeks, a baby can survive outside of utero.
So it’s actually 24 to 26 weeks. Well,
It’s 20. The youngest ever in a NICU unit actually happened in San Diego, not far from here and survived at 20 weeks.
Trent:
This shows why the viability standard cannot be used to determine moral worth, because viability doesn’t reflect moral worth. It reflects technology in poor parts of the world. Today, 26 week old unborn children are not viable because there aren’t machines and hospitals there to keep those children alive. I would say similar to what Kirk said is that a child is viable the moment he is conceived because he’s a human being living in his natural environment like you or me. And later that child can survive outside of his natural environment with assistance as early as 20 weeks of age.
CLIP:
So under Roe v Wade, 93% of abortions happened in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. That’s 93% of the abortions happened well before. A fetus is technically viable as a form
Of life. Let’s go into viability. So what is it about, let’s say a six week baby that has a heartbeat? It’s own DNA fingerprint brainwaves that is less moral worth than an 88-year-old right now with dementia in a home down the street, that person requires assistance, requires help. Why is it that the six week baby is of less moral worth?
Well, first of all, it’s not a baby, it’s a fetus.
What does fetus mean?
A fetus is in utero.
What does fetus mean in Latin?
What the fuck? I’m sorry. Is this a
Language card? It means little human being.
This smile is very
Creepy.
Okay,
Smiling is creepy.
No, your smile specifically. Got it. But let’s go back.
Trent:
This is typical bluster. When you can’t prove the other person is wrong, just attack them directly. If Kirk had said a person making a good point against him was creepy, he would’ve been torn apart by that crowd. But yes, this is a good point. Stay on. What are the unborn? If you say it’s a fetus, ask. Well, what is a fetus? Can you define that term? Fetus is just a stage of development in the life of a human being. So you don’t even have to get into the etymology of the word or the words meaning stay focused on the question. If the unborn are human beings, then why don’t we treat them humanely?
CLIP:
What species is the fetus?
The fetus is not a species yet. It’s technically classified as a parasite until it is viable.
Now I want to talk to you about something very quickly. Hold. I can’t lead get past that. Are you saying a baby is a disease or a
Tumor? A parasite is not a disease in a tumor. Those are not the same thing. A parasite is defined as something that cannot survive outside of its host a baby before it’s viable cannot survive outside of a woman’s wo.
Got it. So let’s extrapolate that
It is not a living organism.
Are old people with Alzheimer’s and dementia that are being assisted every day? Are they parasites?
No, they’re not parasites. They’re human beings who are on the brink of death.
Got it. So my,
They’re not going to be able
To survive my four month old that requires mom’s breast milk and requires daily changes and feedings cannot survive without its own. Is my four month old the parasites?
Your baby can breathe on its own. Your baby can drink water from its mouth to its stomach,
But it cannot. Your
Baby can eat
Food. Can it gather? Can it reason?
But that’s not what qualifies something as being a
Living organism. Let’s get, being a living organism
Simply means can you survive outside of a womb, outside of your host?
Got it. So I just want to make sure I’m clear.
Trent:
Charlie Kirk is onto good points about how being dependent does not change your value, but it’d also be very easy to tear up the bad science in the argument he’s facing. This woman said A fetus is not a living organism because it is a parasite, and so it doesn’t belong to a species. This displays spectacular levels of ignorance. A parasite is by definition an organism of one species that lives inside or attached to an organism of another species and causes it harm. A parasite by definition is a kind of organism, and so it belongs to a species. If we establish that, then we can point out that she’s engaged in bigotry. We could ask her, have people ever said born human beings are parasites and use that as a justification to harm them? And the answer is yes. For example, in Nazi Germany, Jews were called world parasites and this dehumanization helped contribute to the state being able to systematically murder them. So while it’s a fair point to bring up other dependent born humans, we don’t call parasites. We need to make sure that someone who denies unborn children are biological human organisms is held to account for their ignorance.
CLIP:
So I just want to make sure I’m clear. Why does that then equate to moral viability?
It equates to scientific viability.
Why? Under what standard?
Because it is not alive and you are advocating for the rights of something that is not technically a life
It. So what is something that
Has Well, sacrificing the needs of the human woman who is alive.
Got it. But a mom can survive without the baby in her, right?
Yes.
The baby cannot survive without the mom, but a mom cannot survive without her lungs. So it’s not her body, it’s in her body. It’s not her DNA. So it’s not her choice. So
It actually is directly her DNA. It is 100%. It’s 50% of her NA half her DNA.
Trent:
Wait a minute. There’s a big difference between 100% DNA, which would be a clone, and 50% children are not just copies of half their mom and half their dad. It’s not like they grow up with the left side of their body being a copy of their mom and the right side of their body being a copy of their dad. When the genes in their parents gametes, sperm and egg recombine, they form a brand new individual, a person who has never existed in the past and will never exist in the future when it comes to being alive. This reminds me of one time when I was involved in a formal debate on abortion at uc. Santa Barbara, one of the audience attendees said to me during q and a that the fetus is not alive. So I asked him in response, what does abortion do to the fetus? And he answered, it makes the fetus go away. I said, where? Cleveland? He did not want to say it killed the fetus because you can only kill something if it is alive in the first place. I bring that up because this is a quick way to shut down the claim that the unborn are not alive. If they weren’t alive, then you don’t need abortion.
CLIP:
So you define murder is like intentionally killing a human being. I think that’s a very poor way to define murder because if someone were to break into my home and point a gun at the heads of me and everybody I love, and I intentionally kill them to prevent them from unli, from killing my family, I don’t think I murdered them. So I would define murder as the unjustified termination of a human life.
You’re making a good point. Let me further clarify that. So self-defense is very warranted.
Exactly. Right.
But I can see where you’re going to go with how that has to go with abortion, but we can go down that journey in a second.
Yeah. So I mean, I kind of do want to give you my argument in so far as why I think it’s justified, but first, think that your position is quite absurd, right?
Trent:
There are people who try to argue that abortion is killing and self-defense, which is absurd. Here’s an analogy. If I own a boat at a dock and a man climbs into my boat, I remove him because he’s trespassing. But imagine I hang up a sign that says, free boat rides and a group of children get into my boat. I then pull out into the lake and dump them overboard, which kills them, and I say, I have the right to do that because they have no right to be in my boat without my permission. That’s murder. I invited them into the boat and now I can’t just dump them. Now, some people might say having sex isn’t an invitation to children being in the womb. A person could want to have sex without wanting to have children, and I can want to eat chocolate cake every night and not gain weight, but it’s still going to happen.
It’s a natural consequence of my actions. The point is that sex is naturally ordered towards creating helpless human beings. And so this means those human beings have a corresponding natural right to assistance from the man and woman who engaged in the act that brought them into existence. Though I do agree with him that you need to be very clear on your definition of murder. The common law definition of murder is killing another human being with malice a forethought. This means you kill someone because you wanted to kill him. In self-defense, the reason you kill the person is because you don’t want him to kill you. If he survived your attack made in self-defense, you should be happy because ideally you didn’t want to kill him. You just wanted to stop him. In order for an act to be murder, there must be premeditated malice. I prefer to say abortion is homicide, which is just the killing of a human being. And then we can ask, well, what kind of homicide is it? And clearly there is no justification for this homicide of very tiny human beings.
CLIP:
Okay, whenever I’m talking about this discussion, I always go to the question of what about in the case of the mother when her life is in danger? Because I’m a big believer. I don’t know, I’m still iffy on if I think or if it’s murder or not. But even so, I mean, I don’t want to say murder is justified. Guys, wait, lemme just get this one point and then you can vote me out. Give me one second. Say the mother gets pregnant and she knows that if she gives birth, she’s going to die. She has some kind of health complication. Then what do you do in that case section? I dunno what that means.
It’s a c-section. They do an insert.
Guys, wait, hold on, just give me one second, one second.
Go. Right, they go right below the belly button and they deliver the baby. And that doesn’t have to give birth. It’s technically birth, but it’s much safer. So that’s actually safer than an abortion procedure.
Trent:
When people ask, what if the mother’s life is in danger? We should focus on the fact that we need to answer the question, what are the unborn first? If the unborn or not human beings, then it doesn’t matter. Do whatever you want. Have an abortion for that reason or any reason. But if the unborn are human beings, then we have to ask this question, what do we do if there are two human beings in danger and one may be threatening the life of the other. So for example, if there are two drowning people and one is panicking and about to kill the other, you might only be able to save one person as a lifeguard, but you wouldn’t push one of these people under the water and purposely use them as a flotation device to save the other person. Sometimes you can only save one of two people in distress, but you cannot directly kill one person in order to save the life of another person, at least according to Catholic moral theology.
If two people are in a seeking lifeboat, one cannot kill the other just to keep the boat from not sinking. A principle of common law is that necessity is not a defense for murder. Now, I think Charlie Kirk answered this well, to clarify, I’d say that early in pregnancy we can kill the threat to the mother like uterine cancer. Even if that treatment causes a child’s death unintentionally, like through chemotherapy and later in pregnancy, it’s faster and safer to do an emergency c-section than a late term abortion. Then we can round it out by saying nearly all abortions are done to protect lifestyles, not lives. And that every state in the us, even those that ban abortion have an exception of the mother’s life is in danger. So for the person who believes in abortion for that case, would they be willing to grant that abortion should be illegal in all other cases?
CLIP:
So if you had a daughter and she was 10 and she got and she was going to give birth and she would know, oh, and she was going to give birth and she was going to live, would you want her to go through that and carry her
Baby? That’s awfully graphic
Answer. No, but it’s a real life scenario. Calm that happens to many people. The
Answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
Oh, okay, great. So that’s insane.
But lemme tell you why. No, hold on. Lemme ask you a question. There’s two ultrasounds I have. One is a baby conceived in, one is a baby conceived by a loving couple. Which one is which person? Your daughter was
Probably person hopefully
Conceived by a person, somewhat loving person, conceived by tell me which one was conceived by you don’t know exactly because it’s all human rights and it’s all human beings.
That doesn’t matter. But it’s about your daughter who’s passed to give birth to it and it’s going to be tortured by that second for the rest of her life
That’s
Going to take away every freedom she’s ever going to have that’s going to ruin her life. She’s going to grow up and she’s going to be
Attached to another thing. Crime. The point is how you were conceived is irrelevant to what human rights you get.
Trent:
Abortions done for the cases of rape and incest are already very difficult to talk about. And the environment that Charlie Kirk is in doesn’t make it easier. One approach is to expose the objection. As a smokescreen, you could say, if I agree to allow abortions in cases of rape or if the life of the mother is in danger, will you agree to outlaw all the other abortions that are done? Just because the child is unwanted, the answer is almost always going to be no. You could say, well, why did you bring up the issue of rape in the first place? Then that’s not your main issue. I do think pointing out that there could be people in that room conceived in rape was very powerful, which shows you are human no matter how you were conceived. I think even in that fast-paced environment, you could still say something like rape is wrong because as an act of evil and many women are victimized by society through victim blaming afterwards.
In some societies where, so-called honor killing is practiced. You can be executed if you are the victim of rape. But if it’s evil to execute a victim of rape, and in this country we don’t even execute rapists. How is it fair that we execute the unborn child created in this act to which this woman said it’s not a child? And that gets us back to the main question, what are the unborn? Finally, you could ask something like, is there any way to make someone unwrap? The answer is no. Rape is a trauma that rape victims live with. The question is, and Charlie made a good point here, do you want to add the further trauma of being an accomplice to the killing of your own child? And the woman’s flippant response that they wouldn’t even know is rebutted by the thousands of women who have given post-abortive testimonies saying abortion was one of the worst decisions they ever made.
CLIP:
I’m talking about the person who is dealing with the pregnancy. I am not talking about the cells. I don’t the cells, listen, the fetus, the whatever, I don’t care about that right now until it is formed. Does that come formed? If there is a five-year-old child who is pregnant and the baby is two weeks in, five old can’t get pregnant, actually they have and they have given birth. Five year olds have given pregnant, I stand correct. There is one recorded case of a five-year-old girl who gave birth.
Is is that common?
Yes. Not it’s common. Five-year-olds get sometimes, and if they get pregnant, I think they should, should be able to have medical access to something that could save not only just their life but their livelihood.
How many, I’m curious how
Many, I hope your daughter lives a very happy life and gets away from you.
Trent:
I really don’t like setups like this because lies are easy to spout and truths they take time to explain. That’s just how it works. So when a rhetorical grenade gets thrown out there, like what about a five-year-old pregnant victim of rape, which is extremely, extremely rare, only less than a handful of cases in the world, but it has happened, it becomes a tough situation to diffuse. The best you can do at that point is just pull the emergency stop and say, look, that’s absolutely terrible. That’s a monstrous thing. And it sounds like you want to do whatever you can to help this girl, but would you agree? We don’t do anything to help victims of rape, for example, many victims of rape would feel better if their rapists were executed, but in the United States, we do not treat rape as a capital offense. Once again, if we don’t execute rapists, why would we think it’s okay to execute the children created through rape?
But as I said, in environments like this one, it’s tough to have this conversation. So it’s best to lead with empathy and circle back to bedrock moral principles and then show that the other side is the one that leads to extreme views like abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy or even after birth. Because there is no ontological difference between a late third trimester fetus and a prematurely born infant. In many cases, they’re the same being. But if you want to learn more about how to talk about this subject, definitely check out the second edition of my book, persuasive Pro-Life listed in the description below. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.