In our modern era we often delight in thinking of ourselves as being more refined and civilized than our ancestors. They were barbaric, violent, and crude, whereas we are refined, civilized, and cultured. But the recent news that the U.S. Supreme Court might alter or even overturn the Roe vs. Wade abortion decision and the backlash this has engendered from a large part of the American populace proves that our “refinement and civilization” are most pretension, hypocrisy, and delusion. The reality is that despite our conceit, the very opposite is true. Modern civilization is just as bloody, oppressive, and brutal as our ancient ancestors, if not moreso.
One of the areas that this truth is so obviously demonstrated is in the case of how we treat children, the issue of abortion. The ancient Greeks and Romans, considered the pinnacle of refinement and civilization in Western history, abandoned unwanted children in the wild to die from exposure or be eaten alive by animals; often they literally threw them in their city’s trash heap to die among the refuse and garbage. Today we think upon these horrific ancient practices with revulsion while continuing them under different names in our so-called civilized societies. Dr. Ron Paul, who has delivered between 4,000 and 5,000 babies, wrote in his book Liberty Defined, about an experience he had while training for medical school that echoes very clearly the barbarism of the ancient Greeks and Romans:
On one occasion in the 1960s when abortion was still illegal, I witnessed, while visiting a surgical suite as an OB/GYN resident, the abortion of a fetus that weighed approximately two pounds. It was placed in a bucket, crying and struggling to breathe, and the medical personnel pretended not to notice. Soon the crying stopped. This harrowing event forced me to think more seriously about this important issue. That same day in the OB suite, an early delivery occurred, and the infant born was only slightly larger than the one that was just aborted. But in this room, everybody did everything conceivable to save this child’s life. My conclusion that day was that we were overstepping the bounds of morality by picking and choosing who should live and who should die. These were human lives. There was no consistent moral basis to the value of life under these circumstances
Liberty Defined, pg. 12 of e-book. He tells a more in depth version of this story in this speech from 2011.
Abortion is one of those “hot topics” that shouldn’t be so “hot.” It should be obvious to everyone that an unborn human is just that – a human being. Therefore, as a human being, it should be given all the rights and protections provided to all other human lives – such as the right not to be killed. After all, human rights are inalienable, meaning they cannot justly be violated, taken away, or surrendered and all humans have the same equal rights , including the right to Life. Abortion is antithetical to human rights, human life, and human liberty. Yet, there are still those who argue against this position and not only insist that people should be allowed to kill unborn children but that, sickeningly enough, this is something that they should “shout” about, that they should be unashamedly proud of killing children in the womb and that believing that doing so is good should be normalized.
Often those who wish to defend the killing of children in abortions will try and argue that some form of science, ethical morality, or (more rarely from those on the political Left) religious tenet justifies their beliefs. Many of these people will yell at you that you should “believe experts” and “trust the science.” So the question then becomes, “What do experts/the science say about abortion and when human life begins?” Then, based on that, what should be the ethical and moral position of any decent human being be on the issue of abortion, regardless of their political party affiliations?
These questions I will answer below by looking at exactly what the scientific consensus is on when human life begins and then use this information to evaluate what the ethics of abortion. In this section on ethics I will discuss the issue of bodily autonomy, the concept of “personhood,” the argument concerning dangerous illegal abortions, cases of rape and incest, and medical necessity – the main arguments made for why abortions should be legal and socially accepted.
The Science
The Atlantic has a good article about the way that science has been used to promote or defend pro-abortion positions and how recent scientific discoveries have transformed the way many people understand abortion which is helping to empower the political pro-life movement. Among other interesting observations, the interview also record a comment from Georgetown University professor of biomedical ethics Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, where he explains that:
openly pro-life scholars may have a harder time getting their colleagues to take their work seriously. “If an article is written by somebody who … is affiliated with a pro-life group or has a known pro-life stand on it, that scientific evaluation is typically dismissed as advocacy,” he said. “Prevailing prejudices within academia and media” determine “what gets considered to be advocacy and what is considered to be scientifically valid.”
This in and of itself is a serious admission. Neither scientific development nor scientists themselves are neutral on the issue of abortion. The community is biased towards abortion and their prejudices often determine what is promoted as being scientifically valid and what is dismissed, not whether the work being done was done well and according to scientific procedures or not. That is probably why you get rants like this in Scientific American that demands scientists bend their work towards supporting pure Leftist political causes. Little to nothing of the disagreement has to do with science and everything to do with the political biases of the scientists in question using their perceived authority as scientific experts to promote a decidedly partisan political agenda.
All of which makes this study very interesting and very important. In August of 2018, Dr. Steven Andrew Jacobs of the University of Chicago published the results of a study he had been carrying out that evaluated over 5,000 biologists from across all religious, political, and social backgrounds a series of questions about when they believed human life began. The story of his research and the trials he underwent to get it approved by his dissertation committee is almost as astonishing as the conclusions themselves. When he first broached carrying out his study he was repeatedly told by other scientists in academia that because he is a white male that he should not be researching this topic. When he eventually decided to go ahead with his work he recounts how he was vehemently attacked and one professor even “accused me of nefarious intentions and threatened to sabotage my work by telling other biologists to not participate in my study.” Jacobs, even found himself having to defend himself before the university’s ethic board for carrying out a study that asked acknowledge biologists when they believed, based solely on their objective knowledge, when life began.
The attacks continued with Jacobs being told by credentialed and respected biologists that, “my survey seemed like it was developed by the Ku Klux Klan; I was told that my work could expedite the extinction of the human race,” all for asking about what their answers to his questions were based on their scientific knowledge. You would think that kind of insanity would not be present in a class of people who pride themselves on being rational observers of facts. Jacobs kept many of the emails sent to him, which he provided to the interviewers, and they contained such comments as:
“Abortion has been legal for over 40 years. It’s time for all the religious nuts to get over it.”
“This is some stupid right to life thing…YUCK I believe in RIGHT TO CHOICE!!!!!!!”
“As a scientist, I agree that life begins at fertilization. But, as a citizen of this democracy, I support a woman’s right to choose. From that perspective, I adopt the opinion that life begins at first heartbeat.”
Isn’t that last response just incredibly revealing? The scientist actually acknowledged that he or she actively knows that it is a scientific fact that human life begins at conception but ignores that fact in order to affirm his or her political opinions. All of this only goes to prove Dr. Sulmasy’s claim from above that the those in the scientific establishment determine what is and is not valid science based on their political prejudices and not scientific rigor. The scientific and academic establishments place their political biases on footing at least equal to, if not greater than, scientific fact when it comes to abortion. Then academic and scientific establishments promote scientific research that supports pro-abortion stances while attacking and actively suppressing any scientific research that they think might question their pro-abortion stances.
So, why was Dr. Jacobs’s work attacked so strongly by these scientists? Perhaps it is because so many of them were forced by it to admit the truth – that human life begins at conception, aka fertilization. Of the 5,500 biologists that he interviewed 5,212 of them said that it was a scientific fact that life began at fertilization, when the sperm cell enters the egg in the fallopian tube. Only 290 of them disagreed. In his study he used four separate questions that surveyed when the biologist believed human life began. Two of the questions were implicit, where he asked about when mammalian life began. The third was explicit, with him asking where does the biologist think science says human life begins. The fourth was simply open-ended, “When does a human life begin?” I have reproduced the charts of the answers he received below so that you can see the results for yourself. Note his usage of pro-choice to represent those who are pro-abortion.
That final chart is interesting all on its own. While you can see how being “pro-choice” or being “pro-life” can effect the ultimate conclusion the scientist gave to the open-ended question, it is remarkable that it is clear that the overwhelming majority of biologists who think of themselves as being “pro-choice” still acknowledge that science evinces that human life begins at fertilization. I think it equally remarkable that the neutral group, those with no feelings on the topic of abortion whatsoever, are so very close to the very pro-life group. This suggests the people whose political opinions are distorting their scientific acumen are not the pro-life or very pro-life people, an accusation that is replete in articles attacking pro-life positions. It is actually the pro-choice and very pro-choice people who are letting their political positions distorts their understanding of the scientific facts. In the end, the position most in according with scientific fact according to a vast majority of biologists, even to those that identify as being pro-choice, is that human life begins at fertilization. That is simply the science.
The Questions of Ethics
There are really about five major arguments used by pro-abortion advocates to try and defend their position. They argue that a woman owns her own body and therefore has a right to choose to have a child or not (this is sometimes referred to as bodily autonomy), that the unborn child is not a “person” even if he or she is a human and therefore has no rights, that making abortions illegal will only force women to get more dangerous illegal abortions and will not actually prevent most abortions, that in cases of rape or incest that women should be able to get abortions so that they have no connections to their abusers, and finally that medical necessity can demand that a woman has to get an abortion in order to save his or her life. Some of these have more depth to them than others, but we shall deal with each one in its turn and discover if they are convincing arguments for the pro-abortion position.
Bodily Autonomy
This issue sounds like a very convincing issue on the face of it. After all, even the most libertarian among us agrees that each person owns his or her her individual body and that only he or she is qualified to make decisions that effect his or her body. This is one major reason (among others) why libertarians and other voluntaryist types oppose laws that tell people what they can eat, drink, or wear. If you own your body then no one can tell you what to do with it. Those on the political Left (Leftists) and the political Right (Rightists) will often say they believe in bodily autonomy, but their policies put the truth to their lie. You cannot believe in bodily autonomy and then claim the authority to tell people what they can ingest, as Rightists do when they support the War on Drugs. And no matter how much Leftists declare their belief in bodily autonomy as a defense for abortion it becomes clear that they do not believe in bodily autonomy when they try and restrict what kinds of work you can do with your body, how long you can use your body to work, what kind of medical treatment you can or cannot get for your body, or what kinds of foods you can put into your body. It becomes clear that for Leftists the issue isn’t truly the defense of bodily autonomy which dictates defending abortion out of necessity, they have no problem telling you what you can or cannot do with your body. The reality is that they want to find everyway they can to defend abortion at all costs, even if it means trying to justify it using ideas they don’t truly believe in and thereby becoming contradictory and hypocritical.
Now, to the idea itself. Say you do believe in bodily autonomy and believe it supports abortion, arguing that a woman has the right to abort a child because the child is in her body and she can do whatever she wants with her body. This is fine as long as her actions don’t violate the rights of another person. You don’t have the right to violate another person’s rights. Thus, while I can eat, drink, or smoke whatever I want, the moment I hurt someone else then I have violated their rights and done something wrong. I can walk down a beach and collect coins I find lost in the sand, but the moment I take them from a woman’s purse by her towel I have exceeded my rights by violating hers – I have stolen her property. This idea has long been the basis for determining what should or should not be considered as an illegal act. If you violate the rights of another you have broken the natural law and are liable for your actions.
The concept of bodily autonomy is no different. A woman has the right to completely control her body until her actions violate the rights of another. Abortion is just such a violation. As described in the previous section, it is the overwhelming scientific consensus that human life begins at fertilization. As a human being the child in utero has basic human rights, the same as all people do. Human rights are based on your humanity, the fact that you are a member of the human race, not on your location. To say otherwise would be to suggest that all it takes to make rape, robbery, plunder, torture, and vicious murder legal would be to move people to a place where we simply all agree those things could take place. This of course is nonsense and no one would agree to it. The same is true for the child in utero. Just because he or she is in a special place doesn’t mean that he or she has lost his or her inalienable right to life and that it is therefore okay to kill him or her. The woman’s right to bodily autonomy ends when it requires the killing of another human being because that killing is a violation of the right to life of that human child in her womb.
The child in utero clearly has his or her own individual and unique physical form, i.e. a body. Therefore, the doctrine of bodily autonomy would dictate that the child’s body be protected from abortion as abortion would be a violation of the right of the child in the womb to have his or her rights to his or her body be protected from violence or violation. Abortion is violation of the bodily autonomy of the child in utero.
“Just a clump of cells.”
At this point I’m sure that the pro-abortionist argument would be that my assertion is crazy because at fertilization or right afterwards the child in question “is just a clump of cells.” This is both a silly and meaningless argument. All human bodies, from the moment of fertilization to the moment of death are “just a clump of cells.” To say one “clump of cells” has more rights than another “clump of cells” merely because one is more physically and mentally mature than the other is to argue that human rights are not inherent in our humanity but rather simply in our age or size. At that point you’ve effectively argued that it is okay to rape, torture, and murder people as long as they are below some arbitrary age or size limit you’ve chosen.
The more logical position is to argue that all humans, no matter what stage of physical or mental development they are in, have equal human rights that deserve protections by society, including those in the earliest stage of human maturity such as in utero children. Their bodies deserve just as much legal protections for their legal rights as anyone else. In fact, I find it quite puzzling that being pro-abortion is identified with feminism as feminism is supposed to be about defending the rights of every woman and yet at least half of all the victims of abortion are female children who have their life, their liberty, their happiness, and any and all contributions they could’ve made stolen away from them because they were slain in the womb. In that abortion takes away all of the rights of the woman being killed it is clearly anti-feminist in every way. No person who truly believes in protecting and promoting women’s rights could ever promote abortion, be pro-abortion, or call themselves “pro-choice” (itself a propaganda term as abortion is not about respecting choice but stealing the power to choose and every ability to choose away from the children being killed, making abortion about limiting and eliminating choice, not preserving it.) You’re either a feminist and are against abortion or you’re not a feminist.
Personhood
This insidious idea is often related to the “just a clump of cells” argument. The reasoning is that even if the child in utero is human it doesn’t matter because he or she is not a person and therefore doesn’t have any rights and anything can be done to him or her by the mother. Isn’t it interesting that every time someone is trying to say another human being isn’t really a person that it is always in the context of trying to rape, rob, or kill that person?
The solution is obvious. A human is a person. Maybe if we discover that aliens are real or if we truly invent artificial intelligence then we can have a meaningful debate over if you can be a person while also not being human but the argument is largely irrelevant in the extreme when it comes to abortion. Again, scientific evidence overwhelmingly concludes that human life begins at fertilization. As all humans are equal with the same inherent and inalienable rights, and children in utero from the moment of fertilization are living human beings, then they have the same rights as all other human beings. Whether they constitute “persons” under whatever inane idea of personhood an individual might hold is immaterial because human rights are not based on perceived personhood but actual humanity. You may not define a fetus as a person but it is a scientific fact that it is a human, and therefore as a human it has the same rights as all other humans.
Dangerous Illegal Abortions
While I am sorrowful when any human dies from anything other than joyfully in old age and surrounded by his or her loved ones, I have a hard time feeling like dangerous illegal abortions are an unmitigated tragedy. Think of it this way: If I told you that a shooter walked into a school, pulled out a gun, and shot a child, and then that gun blew up in the shooter’s hands killing him, how would you feel about the shooter’s death? Would you immediately demand that the US government pass laws making it easier for people to go into schools and murder children? Of course not. Such a thing would be preposterously stupid and immoral. So why should I feel any different that a woman who attempted to murder a child also died in the attempt? And why would I want to pass laws making it safer and easier for her to murder children? The whole line of thinking is fundamentally contradictory, irrational, and immoral. The logic is simple. Don’t try and murder children through abortions and you won’t ever run the risk of killing yourself in the process.
Plus, this argument ignores a simple fact. All abortions are dangerous. Even that so-called safe abortion kills a human being. At least two people walk into the abortion clinic. Only one walks out. The other leaves in a trash bag, or gets sold for parts. So this myth of the “safe abortion” that is in danger of being outlawed is an utter lie. Every abortion is violent, brutal, and dangerous. Every abortion kills a human being. Something that has a 100% kill rate is dangerous in the extreme, trying to spin it otherwise is mere apologetics in the service of slaughter.
Rape and Incest
The argument here is that rape is such a brutal and terrible violation that a woman should not be required to carry any child conceived by said rape to term because the link it creates between her and her rapist will be a constant source of suffering. That is a straightforward argument. It is also baffling nonsense. It is true that rape is a horrific crime and that it causes immense suffering in anyone who suffers it. But the commission of one crime does not justify another one. The fact that the father was a rapist does not justify the murder of the child who had nothing to do with the crime in question. The child in utero is, in every sense and meaning of the word, innocent – totally pure. To compound the first evil by committing as gross another evil does nothing to help anyone. It doesn’t spare the woman pain. It doesn’t harm the rapist. In fact it saves him from having to face even fuller repercussions for his actions and makes his life easier as it saves him from having to ever support said child. It is misdirected anger and rage that only increases the amount of evil and suffering on the planet.
In reality there are two victims when a rape occurs – the woman raped and the child conceived by said rape – and neither deserves to suffer more because of the evil actions of a third party. To argue otherwise is pure dehumanization. Former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, drawing upon his decades of experience as a medical professional, also wrote about the issue of abortion being justified by rape, saying:
Even if a child is conceived through rape, destroying it does not end the trauma. It does not deter the rapes. It does not blot out the women’s memory of the assault. It does not change her degradation in any way.
We must remember that half that baby belongs to her. It has part of her family no matter who the father was. The woman needs extraordinary care, but we should not add the guilt of killing her unborn child to all her other problems. Abortion is the same king of violence as was the rape. …Extraordinary relationships develop between the raped woman and her child when the pregnancy is carried to term.
Deception on Demand by Dr. Koop, reprinted here on pages 16 – 17.
On that topic, of the relationship between mother and child, Serrin M. Foster, President of Feminists for Life, writes:
When someone asks about exceptions for rape and incest, we must also consider how that makes those feel who were conceived through sexual assault. Well-meaning statements can hurt. As one UC-Berkeley grad student said to her pro-choice peers, “I have a right to be here.” They responded, “We didn’t mean you!” She asked, “Whom did you think you meant?” My mother told this story to a coworker who agreed and said, “People never think they are talking to an exception — like me.”
Could you look at someone conceived in violence and tell her that she never should have been born? What if it turned out to be your best friend — or a relative? Would that change the way you felt about her? Would you think less of her mother? Rebecca Kiessling, a young attorney and mother who was conceived through sexual assault, asks, “Did I deserve the death penalty?” Can you imagine if we ranked the value of people based on the circumstances of their conception?
Every human is valuable, every human is meaningful, every human is important and telling someone that they are subhuman, less human, inferior to you, not worthy of life because of who their parents may be? That kind of medieval idea should be left in our barbaric past, where it belongs. If there is any additional trauma in a rape victim carrying a child conceived in rape to term then the punishment for such trauma should fall solely on the shoulders of the the person responsible for such suffering – the rapist – not the innocent child.
I also find it interesting that people who so clearly understand that express consent is the difference between lovemaking and rape, and despise rape so completely because it violates the body of a woman by using it without her permission, have no problem perpetuating an equally violent violation of the body of the child in utero. Abortion, which literally penetrates the body of the fetus with medical instruments or rips it apart limb from limb, among other forms of abortion, are a brutal violation of the bodily autonomy of the child on a level greater than even rape. In rapes the women usually have the ability to continue their lives, possibly heal, and find true meaning again beyond their her trauma. In abortion there is no such chance. The body of the child is mangled, mutilated, and destroyed, before being thrown in the garbage or incinerator. Rape takes a part of a woman away that takes her decades to heal from, but she is still left with herself to be able to heal. Abortion takes away everything from the child and leaves him or her with nothing.
I’m not even sure what the argument with incest is other than an extension of the rape argument? After all, people willingly involved in incestual relationships will most likely not want to abort their children because of the incest itself. And in terms of rape, everything said above applies. A human life is a human life no matter the relationship of the parents. Perhaps the argument is that incestual relationships increase the likelihood that the child will have genetic developmental difficulties and might be born with a disability or deformity. If that is the case, if you think it is okay for you to kill people because they have a disability or deformity, as if by having a disability or deformity they have less of a right to life than children without disabilities or deformities, then not only are you repeating the barbaric arguments of the past but you are using the same reasoning that is the basis of the modern idea of eugenics.
Eugenics is the belief that humans should actively limit or prevent people with unwanted genetic qualities from reproducing or having children. Eugenicists saw their mission as one of mercy. By preventing the spread of “bad genes” they would not only “uplift” the “superior races” but they would save the “imbeciles” from a life of suffering and poverty before death. Therefore all mankind would be improved. How is it substantially different when a woman kills her child because she is afraid that the child’s bad genes will cause it to have a disability that will cause it to suffer in life, have a life of “low quality,” and then die? To decide whether someone should live or die based on their genetics and what it may or may determine about them is eugenics in its most primal form, whether you merely focus on how it will “uplift” your life or have the large goal to “uplift” mankind by your choice is merely a matter of scale not content. As Dr. Addrienne Asch et al. wrote concerning this issue:
Using prenatal tests to prevent the births of babies with disabilities seems to be self-evidently good to many people. But for many people with disabilities, the message implicit in the practice of abortion based on genetic characteristics is, ‘It is better not to exist than to have a disability. Your birth was a mistake. Your family and the world would be better off without you alive.’
The whole argument that one has the right to kill children in utero because of they may possibly or actually do have disabilities and deformities, no matter what the cause or origin of those deformities or disabilities, is dehumanizing and sickening. It is a belief unworthy of anyone who claims to believe all people are equal and have inherent worth and dignity that demands respect and acknowledgement. It is certainly unworthy of anyone who knows all others to be Children of God. And speaking of God, the idea that any human or group of people can judge the value of another person’s life, whether it last for 3 hours or 103 years, and decide that this other person’s life is worthy of continuing or should be extinguished is nothing but pure megalomania. No being but God alone could have access to all the knowledge necessary to make such a determination and no one but God would have the authority over the life of another to then decide to end it with or without that person’s permission. To claim that you can decide that another human’s life is of value or not and therefore whether you should be able to kill that other person or not is nothing but delusional arrogance, a god-complex masquerading as medical or social expertise.
Medical Necessity
If there is an argument for abortion, it is this one. The classical argument for when you can kill another person is when that person is actively trying to kill you. You can’t plan to go and just slit someone’s throat, that is murder. But if they try and slit yours and you stab them instead and they die it isn’t considered murder, that is self-defense as you have the right to defend your right to life. The same logic could be rationally applied to birth. Pregnancy is dangerous, but it isn’t always life threatening, so the mere fact that it could be life threatening isn’t enough to justify abortion just as you aren’t justified in blowing the brains out of every person you meet just because they could potentially do you harm. But what do you do when their is an active, proven threat to your life? It is extremely rare, about 1% of abortions are based on medical necessity according to this report from the the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute (see Table 2 on pg. 4). This is what led former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to remark:
Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years in pediatric surgery I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life. When a woman is pregnant , her obstetrician takes on the care of two patients – the mother to be and the unborn child. If, toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, he will take the child by inducing labor or performing a Caesarean section. His intention is still to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby will be premature and perhaps immature depending on the length of gestation. Because it has suddenly been taken out of the protective womb, it may encounter threats to its survival. The baby is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.
Deception on Demand by Dr. Koop, reprinted here on page 17.
In his book Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma, written by an abortionist to defend abortion, Dr. Don Sloan wrote on this subject say:
If a woman with a serious illness- heart disease, say, or diabetes- gets pregnant, the abortion procedure may be as dangerous for her as going through pregnancy … with diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis, even breast cancer, the chance that pregnancy will make the disease worse is no greater that the chance that the disease will either stay the same or improve. And medical technology has advanced to a point where even women with diabetes and kidney disease can be seen through a pregnancy safely by a doctor who knows what he’s doing. We’ve come a long way since my mother’s time….
The idea of abortion to save the mothers’ life is something that people cling to because it sounds noble and pure- but medically speaking, it probably doesn’t exist. It’s a real stretch of our thinking.
Choice, pages 45-46.
But, let us say for the sake of the argument that it does happen – a medical problem arises where it becomes impossible to care for both the mother and the child and the child cannot be removed by Caesarean and cared for by medical science until health and developed enough to survive on his or her own. If the growing child does not get aborted he or she will kill the mother and abortion is the only option? In that singular case, one that almost certainly is far lower than even the 1% of cases as reported above, what is the ethical choice? Well, from the natural rights philosophy I can see the argument that the mother may then be justified in killing the child to save her life. That is, after all, the only time that taking another human life could ever be justified. But it would only be so in an incredibly specific circumstance and if followed would eliminate over 99% of all abortions.
Final Thoughts
Not only has medical science made it clear that human life begins at fertilization but as you go through all the ideological and ethical arguments for abortion over 99% of all abortion cases are eliminated by applying even the most basic ethical and moral principles to the issue. All of this amounts to a singular fact. As long as our society continues to champion the slaughter of human beings using the anti-scientific, unethical, irrational, and immoral arguments evaluated here then there is little difference between our so-called “civilization” and the worst and most brutally violent human civilizations of the ancient past. As long as our society continues to promote and protect the murder of our own children it will be nothing but monstrous and none of its other horrific actions – such as its brutal wars – should surprise us. A society that can hate and destroy its own flesh and blood to such a startling degree will of course hate and destroy others.