DAY 202
CHALLENGE
“Even if we grant that the unborn are living human beings, that doesn’t mean abortion is wrong. Why would it be?”
DEFENSE
A fundamental principle of morality is that you can never deliberately kill an innocent human being. It is a human universal that you cannot slay the innocent. If a society failed to recognize this principle—so its ordinary, innocent members could be killed at will—then that society would descend into anarchy and break apart.
The basic moral intuition that killing innocents is wrong is so strong that when genocides have killed large numbers of innocent people, the killers have had to argue one of two things:
- that the people they were slaughtering were not really innocent but guilty of some present or historical wrongdoing, or
- that they were not really human but somehow subhuman.Sometimes both have been argued, as when the Nazis killed millions of Jewish people, claiming that they were subverting German society and that they were racially inferior. The fact that they felt the need for such rationalizations pays tribute to the strength of the basic moral intuition that innocent human beings must not be killed.This is the fundamental insight that lies behind every society’s prohibition on murder.
To deny that we must respect the right to life of every innocent person is to violate a universal human moral norm. It is to embrace an inhuman and fundamentally immoral principle.
Of course, not every form of killing is murder. It is not murder to kill a plant or an animal. Similarly, it may not be murder to kill an aggressor in wartime, or someone who is trying to take your own life. Killing an aggressor in self-defense can be morally permissible.
Yet it is always wrong to deliberately take the life of an innocent human being, which raises the real question in the abortion debate: Do the unborn count as innocent human beings? It is clear that they are innocent. The unborn do not have the ability to harm anyone. Few things could be more innocent than an unborn baby in a mother’s womb.
The question thus comes down to the issue of whether the unborn are human beings. As we show elsewhere, the scientific evidence is unambiguous that they are (see Day 185).