Abortion – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

No Voice for Men in Abortion Debate? Do Arguments Have Testicles?

Michael in Russia writes,

Got a question for you. I am a pro-abortion man (or even more generally a pro-death man since I support capital punishment too). You strongly oppose the former. I'm not going to repeat all familiar pros and cons. Rather, I've got one peculiar premise which I have never met in discussion of the issue and which I take to be the first step in dealing with it—namely, I hold that we, men, should have no voice at all in this business. Since no man has ever known what it is (like to be a bat) to conceive, to bear, and to give birth, and it appears that no one is going to, I maintain that this issue must be decided on strictly by women whatever the outcome. It's utterly undemocratic, but I'm not a fan of egalitarian democracy. So, what do you think of this: no voice for men in abortion debate, that's strictly women's business?

Thank you for reading, Michael, and thank you for writing.

It warms my heart to hear that you are pro-death – – when it comes to capital punishment. You are probably aware of my arguments for the latter's moral justifiability in some cases and in some venues. (In a place where the justice system is unfair, I would be inclined to support a moratorium on the death penalty.) I also maintain, pace the late, great Nat Hentoff, that it is logically consistent to be for capital punishment and against abortion.

My view in one clean sentence: Abortion is morally prohibited in most cases while capital punishment is morally required in some cases.

Now on to your question: Ought men have a say in the abortion debate? Here is my short answer:

Arguments don't have testicles!

But that bumper sticker wants unpacking.

An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument. And similarly for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime. The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers and consumers.

Here is an argument. "Infanticide is morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion; therefore, abortion is morally wrong." The soundness/unsoundness of the argument cannot pivot on the sex of the producers or consumers of the argument.

Suppose someone argues that repeat-offending rapists should be be chemically or in some other way castrated by the state. Would the fact that men and men alone would bear the burden of the punishment be any reason to maintain that women have no right to a say in the matter? No.

It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man. Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection.

"You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!"

What's it like to be a pregnant woman?

In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' made famous by Thomas Nagel is not relevant. One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative. I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.

What's more, we white men can have a sort of knowledge by analogy of what women and cats and blacks feel. For example, men and women both urinate and defecate, and typically a certain pleasure accompanies these activities. I know by analogy what it is like for a woman to micturate and feel relief and a modicum of pleasure even though my modus micturiendi is somewhat different.

Defecation triggers orgasm in some women. I have never experienced that, but I can imagine it. Similarly with menstrual cramps, morning sickness, and other miseries of pregnancy. I am a sympathetic and sensitive guy as everyone knows. To be honest, I am a bit womanish in this regard, and I don't intend 'womanish' as a term of derogation.

I don't know what it is like to be a bat, and I will grant that bat qualia are beyond our ken even analogically; but I have some sense of what it is like to be a cat inasmuch as cats manifestly feel analogs of such human emotions as fear, surprise, annoyance, etc.

I have no idea, however, what my cat Max Black feels when he retromingently takes a leak.

Do I know what it is like to be black? Well, I know what it is like to disrespected. So I know what it is like to feel the hurt and the rage of a black motorist who is stopped by a cop merely for 'driving while black.'

But do I know what it is like to be a slave? About as well as contemporary blacks do in the West none of whom are or have ever been slaves.

"But you have never faced the prejudice blacks experience." Not that particular prejudice, but plenty of other kinds.

At this point tribalism enters the discussion. The more we tribalize, the more we shrink the space of objectivity, reason, and argument. The more we tribalize, the more we reduce ourselves to mere tokens of racial, ethnic, and other types. The more we do that, the more we miss the person, the free agent, the rational being.

There are blacks who would say to me, "You have no idea what it is like to be black!" I say, "Bullshit! You have incarcerated yourself in your tribal identity." Same with women who feel (that's exactly the right word) that abortion is a women's issue exclusively. Well, it is not. It is an objective issue that affects both males and females. Stop feeling and start thinking.

That should be obvious. Among those aborted are males and females. So abortion cannot be solely a concern of women.

So let us set our tribalism aside and approach the question as rational beings on the plane of reason and argument where no testicles are to be found.

California and Abortion

The first is becoming as morally repugnant as the second. Here:

California has long promoted abortion on demand, and even forces taxpayers to pay for elective abortions through its state Medicaid program. But one of their latest efforts is really beyond the pale. Abortion advocates in the state recently became alarmed that the burgeoning number of pro-life Pregnancy Care Centers (they now outnumber abortion facilities nationally 5 to 1) neither offer abortions to their clients, nor refer women for them. To do so would be antithetical to their mission. But in response, groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood convinced California to pass AB 775, which requires pregnancy centers to post signs on the walls of their waiting rooms (or by other means) informing clients that California offers “immediate free or low-cost access” to abortion, along with the phone number of the county social services office. In other words, this requirement would force pro-life doctors, nurses, and staff to advertise for free abortions, plain and simple.

More proof that leftists are morally obtuse.

The Left’s Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

Among the leftists who profess deep concern over the effect on children of the President's salty talk are leftists who endorse the killing of disabled unborn children. I call that misplaced moral enthusiasm. Which is worse: mocking a disabled reporter as Trump is alleged to have done, or the late-term abortion of the disabled unborn?

The hypocrisy is unbearable. Leftists who have worked tirelessly to normalize crudity and wanton self-expression well beyond the bounds of social responsibility now have the chutzpah to complain that POTUS is crude, obnoxious, and lacking in gravitas?

Leftists are moral idiots.

And you are still a Democrat?

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence. Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail. Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media – combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right? Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer. But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot.

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo.

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves.

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

The Sad State of Public Discourse in an Age of Ideology

The inability to follow an argument and respond reasonably and civilly to what an author actually maintains is a mark of the present miserable state of public discourse. Even prominent conservative commentators display this inability. A recent example is the Never-Trumper and NRO contributor David French's febrile flailing at Tully Borland. Professor Borland ignited a firestorm of controversy when he presented an argument why Alabamans ought to vote for Roy Moore. Chad McIntosh, in a fine defense of Borland, accurately restates Borland's main argument:

Comparing Moore to opponent Doug Jones, Borland argues that a Moore victory would be the lesser of the two evils in a binary election in which these are the only two viable options. Why? Well, even if Moore is guilty of sexual assault and seeking sexual relationships with girls as young as 14 some 40 years ago, as accused, that is very unlikely to have policy ramifications today, whereas Jones supports a policy of unrestricted abortion today.

Don’t be misled here: Jones supports killing a fetus up to the moment of crowning, the moment a baby exits his mother during birth. That isn’t your typical pro-choice position. That’s almost as extreme as they come. So, as Borland sees it, “either Jones knows exactly what he’s doing in supporting killing babies in utero but doesn’t care, in which case he’s a moral monster, or his moral compass is in such need of calibration that one should never trust his judgment in moral matters.” Borland therefore concludes that one is morally justified in voting for Moore, whose win would result in lesser evil.

This is a very strong argument. You will not appreciate its strength, however, unless you appreciate the grave moral evil of unrestricted abortion, abortion at any stage of fetal development, for any reason. Unless you are morally obtuse you will understand that the intentional killing of innocent human beings is morally wrong and that the pre- and almost-natal human beings in question are human individuals in their own right, not globs of tissue or parts of their mothers.

McIntosh again:

The closest French comes to a substantive response to Borland is in the following:

"Of course we’re always choosing between imperfect men, but there are profound differences between conventional politicians and a man who tried to rape a teenager when he was a D.A. Believe it or not, the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore, whose pasts are far less checkered. I don’t even have to get to the difficult process of line-drawing to have confidence in declaring that Christians should not vote to put a credibly-accused child abuser in the Senate."

But this is misdirection. That the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore is beside the point, since they aren’t running against Moore. It’s Jones running against Moore, so that is the only comparison that matters.

That's right. It's Jones against Moore, and exactly one of these two will be elected. Not both and not neither.

It is also important to note that while character matters, policies, programs, and ideas matter even more. People of the 'Never X' mentality seem not to understand this. French apparently thinks two terms of Hillary and all her damage to conservatism would be a fair price to pay for keeping Trump out of the White House with all the good he has already done in less than one year in office.

But suppose you are not convinced by the Borland-McIntosh argument. Then you should at least have the decency to admit that it is a reasonable argument. But that is not what French does. He heaps abuse on Borland. See McIntosh piece for documentation.

Why Alabamans Should Vote for Roy Moore

Tully Borland makes the case in The Federalist.

In so doing he has provoked a crap storm of controversy. See here and here. The quality of the Twitter jabs of an army of thoughtless twits justifies my talk of a crap storm.

It is depressing to realize how few people today are able calmly to follow an argument and evaluate it as opposed to heaping abuse upon its producer.

(I have noted the same thing in popular opposition to the work of David Benatar.)

Politics is almost always about choosing between the better and the worse. Both Moore and his opponent, Doug Jones, are flawed character-wise. But character is only one consideration. Equally if not more important are the policies the candidates support. Now Jones is for unrestricted abortion which, as Professor Borland points out, is tantamount to infanticide. Unrestricted abortion is a grave moral evil. So if you refuse to vote for Moore because of his (alleged) sins of 40 years ago, then you indirectly lend support to a pro-abortion candidate. I should think that the gravity of the evil of future abortions far outweighs one man's (alleged) evil sexual excesses of 40 years ago.

According to David French, "There’s no defensible argument for choosing the 'lesser of two evils' in Alabama." But I just gave one!

As Borland points out, if one had a policy of voting only for the morally perfect, one would have to abstain from politics entirely.

……………………..

UPDATE (12/1). The controversy continues. I won't link to any of it due to its low quality. Much of its rests on the assumption that an argument is good if and only if it leads to a conclusion that the consumer of the argument antecedently accepts. Otherwise it is bad and one is free to mock and malign the producer of the argument.

Trump Nixes Outrageous Obamacare Birth Control Mandate

Here.

Prominent Catholics such as Robert P. George and George Weigel who refused to vote for Trump made a massive error in judgment. I was right to lay into them in Catholics Must Support Trump.

Are ‘Progressives’ Now Entirely Devoid of Moral Sense?

From an article by A. N. Wilson:

Not believing in abortion, like not believing in gay marriage, is now, unquestionably, a thought crime. It was hardly surprising that the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg recently said he did not believe in abortion, because he is a man of conviction as well as a Roman Catholic, and this is the teaching of his Church. Yet his view was treated with incredulity and disdain by everyone from trolls and women's groups to the higher echelons of the political Establishment.

Catholics need to to realize that it is utterly foolish to invoke the teachings of their church in justification of their beliefs when countering leftists. If that is what the Tory MP did, then he needs to wise up. In the eyes of a leftist, he may as well have 'defended' his opposition to abortion on the ground that his mum/mommy taught him that it is very bad.

Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept? The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative, although few seem to understand this. Yet another reason why you need my blog.

I argue it out here.

Do Black Lives Matter?

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not now, and never have been, a Southerner, a redneck, a plantation owner, slave holder, apologist for slavery, Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate (or Union) side, racist, or white supremacist.

I condemn slavery as a grave moral evil. I also condemn abortion as a grave moral evil.

Holding that all lives matter, I hold that black lives matter, including unborn black lives.

Abortion: The Actual Future Principle, An Objection, and a Sophistical Reply

Elizabeth Harman puts forth the following 'principle':

The Actual Future Principle: An early fetus that will become a person has some moral status. An early fetus that will die while it is still an early fetus has no moral status. ("Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion," Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1999), 310-324, 311. http://www.princeton.edu)/~eharman/creationethics.pdf)

What Harmon is saying is that the actual future of an early fetus determines its moral status. This implies that there are two different kinds of early fetuses. There are those that die while they are early fetuses. At no time during their existence do they instantiate the intrinsic properties that confer moral status. Thus the members of the first kind do not have moral status. The members of the other kind will in the future have the full moral status of persons for they will come to instantiate the intrinsic properties that confer moral status. Harman thinks that if an early fetus will one day possess the full moral status of a person then that is a "good reason" (her words) to think that it has that status when it is an early fetus.

The idea, then, is that an early fetus that does not, while it is an early fetus, have the properties that confer moral status nevertheless possesses moral status while it is an early fetus if it comes to have those properties later on in its development.

Harman is thus denying a widespread if not universal assumption, namely, that

A. For any two early fetuses at the same stage of development and in the same health, either both have the same moral status or neither does. (311)

Questioning assumptions is something philosophers do and so she cannot be faulted for that. But not all assumptions are reasonably denied. This is one of them. Her fancy footwork does nothing to detract from the evident truth of (A).

When I first encountered Harman's argument in the muddled form of a video in which she is interviewed (see below) by an actor and another professor the following objection occurred to me:

Harman is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on something contingent: how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor.

Harman's argument issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no actual future. If it has no actual future, then it has no moral status by Harman's principles. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified.

A reader points out, however, that Harman anticipated something like my objection in the above-cited paper:

"Third objection: "According to the Actual Future Principle, you just can't lose! If you abort, then it turns out that the fetus you aborted was that kind of thing it's okay to abort. If you don't abort, then it turns out that the fetus was the kind of thing it's not okay to abort." (320)

My objection, however, asserts only the first of Harman's conditionals. My objection has the form of a reductio ad absurdum: if you accept Harman's principles then you are committed to an absurdity; you are committed to saying that you can morally justify your abortion just by having one. But this is absurd in the sense of incoherent. One cannot justify an action just by performing it.

Harman responds by saying that here view is "very liberal." No doubt. "Therefore, according to the Actual Future Principle, no moral justification is required for an early abortion." (320) But now she is contradicting herself: moral justification is required if the early fetus has an actual future. It cannot be true both that no moral justification is required for an early abortion and that moral justification is required if the fetus has an actual future.

But there is no point in wasting any more time on this sophistry.

One gets the impression that many of the producers of these bad pro-abortion arguments want to have sex whenever they want, with whomever they want, with no consequences. Should a human life arise as a result of their sexual activities, they want to be able to dispose of it easily for their own convenience. One gets the impression that concupiscence is what drives these 'arguments,' suborning the otherwise truth-directed intellect, and seducing it into self-serving sophistry.

Ayn Rand on Abortion

I was a little unfair to Elizabeth Harman the day before yesterday. I said she has "presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public." As knuckleheaded as her argument is, there is one that is worse.

Elizabeth Harman’s Abortion Argument

A curious new abortion argument by Princeton's Elizabeth Harman is making the rounds. (A tip of the hat to Malcolm Pollack for bringing it to my attention.) It is not clear just what Harman's argument is, but it looks to be something along the following lines:

1) "Among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings . . . ."

2) One kind of early fetus has "moral status."

3) The other kind of early fetus does not have "moral status."

4) The fetuses possessing moral status have it in virtue of their futures, in virtue of the fact that they are the beginning stages of future persons.

5) The fetuses lacking moral status lack it in virtue of their not having futures, in virtue of their not being the beginning stages of future persons.

Therefore

6) If a fetus is prevented from having a future, either by miscarriage or abortion, then the fetus does not have moral status at the time of its miscarriage or abortion. "That's something that doesn't have a future as a person and it doesn't have moral status." (From 5)

7) If a fetus lacks moral status, then aborting it is not morally impermissible.

Therefore

8) " . . . there is nothing morally bad about early abortion."

Some will say that this argument is so bad that it is 'beneath refutation.' When a philosopher uses this phrase what he means is that an argument so tagged is so obviously defective as not to be worth refuting. There is also the concomitant suggestion that one who refutes that which is 'beneath refutation' is a foolish fellow, and perhaps even a (slightly) morally dubious character when the subject matter is moral inasmuch as he undermines the healthy conviction that certain ideas are so morally abhorrent that they shouldn't be discussed publicly at all lest the naive and uncritical be led astray.

But to quote my sparring partner London Ed, in a moment when the muse had him in her grip: "In philosophy there is a ‘quodlibet’ principle that you are absolutely free to discuss anything you like." That's right. The Quodlibet Principle is one of the defining rules of the philosophical 'game.' There is nothing, nothing at all, that may not be hauled before the bench of reason, there to be rudely interrogated. (And that, paradoxically, includes the Quodlibet Principle!)

I hereby invoke that noble and indeed Socratic principle in justification of my attention to Harman's argument.

What's wrong with it? She is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor.

This issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no future. If it has no future, then it has no moral status. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified.

Is it ever morally right and reasonable to question or impugn motives or character in a debate?

I have just demolished Harman's argument. She has given no good reasons for her thesis. Quite the contrary. She has presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public. But what really interests me is the bolded question. And I mean it in general. It is not about Harman except per accidens.

Is it ever morally right and reasonable in a debate to question motives and character? I didn't get a straight answer from London Ed in an earlier discussion. So I press him again.

We agree, of course, that arguments stand and fall on their own merits in sublime independence of their producers and consumers. I have hammered on this theme dozens of times in these pages. One may not substitute motive imputation and character analysis for argument evaluation.

But once I have refuted an argument or series of arguments, am I not perfectly morally justified in calling into the question the motives and character of the producers of those arguments? I say yes.

I have a theory about what really drives the innumerable bad pro-abortion/pro-choice arguments abroad in this decadent culture, but I leave that theory for later. Here I pose the bolded question quite generally and apart from the abortion question.

Do you now see my point, Ed? And what do you say?

Harmon's argument is here.

More Proof that ‘Liberals’ are Morally Retarded

1) JPod on Kathy Griffin. It is not just Griffin who is at fault here, but every 'liberal' who contributes to an environment in which the sorry Griffin can get away with her vile stunt, at least initially. The nadir of cultural decline is still a ways off yet, however: CNN fired the sick comedienne.

2) Did you know that a pre-natal human being is a tough little object hard to dismember? Here:

In the new video, which is a compilation of excerpts from video filmed at the trade shows, abortionist Dr. Susan Robinson of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte is heard saying, “The fetus is a tough little object and, taking it apart, I mean taking it apart on day one is very difficult.”

Dr. Lisa Harris, medical director of Planned Parenthood Michigan, is also heard saying, “Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing, let’s just give them all that.”

Director of abortion services for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine states in the video, “If I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg or two, so it’s not PBA [partial-birth abortion].”

One irony here is that feminists protest, legitimately, against 'objectification.' But if the girl is young enough, then she is a "tough little object" the objectification of which can legally take the form of literal dismemberment.

If you voted for Hillary, you are complicit in this and also in the further moral outrage of using tax dollars to fund it.

What if you voted for neither Hillary not Trump? I'll leave that for you to think about.

The Collapse of the Catholic Universities

Yet another example, one so egregious that I pinch myself to see if I am awake:

Stéphane Mercier, a lecturer in philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (UCL) in Belgium initially was suspended from teaching, pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings, because there was opposition in a class from a feminist group to his philosophical argument to the effect that abortion is the killing of an innocent unborn human life, which is an “intrinsically evil,” always unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. The response from both the UCL administration and the Belgium Bishops Conference to his philosophical argument, which was put forth in a document entitled “The Philosophy Supporting Life: Against a so-called Right to Choose an Abortion", has been confusing.

UPDATE 2/24:

A reader sends this:

A student at the institution informs me this is the passage that led to the lecturer's sacking. It was a First Year Philosophy course:

"[…] reminds me of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Voluntary interruption of pregnancy is a euphemism that hides a message, namely the truth, which is that abortion is the murder of an innocent person. It is a murder particularly abject, because the victim has no defense against it. if murdering an innocent person capable of self-defense weren't repulsive enough, taking the life of someone who doesn't have the power to defend himself is even more vile. Today, we hear people who believe abortion is immoral, but don't think about making it illegal, a disturbingly absurd way of reasoning. […] Imagine that the same person declares rape immoral, but thinks it shouldn't be made illegal in order to protect the freedoms of an individual (except for the victim…). that's absurd, right? So, if abortion is murder, as it is said to be by some, doesn't that make it worse than rape? Rape is immoral, and fortunately illegal as well. Shouldn't abortion, which is even more immoral, be illegal too?"

BV's comment: Imagine getting sacked at any university, let alone a supposedly Catholic university with the word 'Catholic' in its name, for giving this argument!

Leftist termites are undermining the great institutions of the West, and the authorities in charge of these institutions have either abdicated, or are termites themselves. The edifices of higher culture are in dire need of fumigation. Figuratively speaking, of course . . . .

Trump Against Abortion

Here:

President Trump on Monday reignited the war over abortion by signing an executive order blocking foreign aid or federal funding for international nongovernmental organizations that provide or "promote" abortions.

You conservative pro-life Never Trumpers are starting to look mighty stupid 'long about now, don't you think? You refused to support the one guy who could defeat Hillary and promote the policies that you claim to support.