The JJR McLeod Auditorium was the site of a heated debate about abortion on Friday. Students for Life, a pro-life campus group that arranged the event invited Steve Wagner from the Christian group Stand to Reason to debate with Philosophy Professor Wayne Sumner.
Up for debate was the rather provocative question “Is elective abortion an immoral act?” First up was Wagner, who ended his opening statements with gruesome slides of bloody aborted fetuses next to American dimes. He claimed that this was merely to show the size of the fetuses, when a student questioned why the little bodies were placed next to the inscription “In God we trust.”
Wagner insisted that the moment of inception was the creation of a human being with a full right to life. “If the unborn is a human being then they must be granted protection,” he said. He cited scientific evidence such as “two human beings can only produce humans…two human beings cannot produce something non-human that then becomes human. The unborn is a whole living human organism.” As a human being, argued Wagner, this fetus is then equal to all other human beings in rights. He asked if differences such as size, level of development, environment and level of dependency were morally relevant to the question of abortion. Wagner reasoned that a toddler, although differing from the unborn in many ways such as being outside of the womb and being larger than a fetus, should clearly not be killed and so neither should a fetus. The crux of his argument was that there are many differences between human beings (including being born or unborn) but that the quality of being human gives us all equal right to life. “If we’re not valuable because of being humans then that’s a big problem for human rights.”
Professor Sumner reframed the question when he asked if a rational case could be made for elective abortion regardless of religious belief. Sumner argued that the premises for the pro-life stance were not valid, a key point being that for self-defense, “killing someone with a full right to life is not necessarily wrong.” In the case of abortion, there are competing rights. Sumner argued that the woman’s body is a private space and her rights include “the right to defend herself against the threats to her life or health and the right not to serve as a host to another human being…nine months of pregnancy imposes a burden she has the right to decline.” Sumner disagreed that rights should be dependent on membership in a certain species. Fetuses, he pointed out do not have “even the most rudimentary form of consciousness.” This capacity is important in having rights and that the mere potential to acquire rights was not a sufficient basis for having them. “The right to self determination is acquired when the capacity is acquired,” he stated.
The questions and cross-examinations covered a wide variety of angles including the extraterrestrial. At one point Wagner demanded to know if hostile aliens should be allowed to enslave us, if it was discovered that they were in fact more advanced and conscious than us. Sumner replied that he believed that humans should not be allowed to enslave great apes.
Wagner also asked whether it would have been permissible for Hitler to force Jewish women to have third trimester abortions instead of using concentration camps. Sumner responded that no one should be forced to have an abortion. Professor Sumner asked Wagner to consider why groups such as Amnesty International did not take up abortion as an issue if it was the grave human rights issue that Wagner thinks it is. “The injustice of abortion has not been seen by the Canadian public. It has formed an inaccurate opinion,” offered Wagner.
In response to why abortion is taken up as an issue mainly by religious groups, Wagner said that “it makes me want to argue that religious people may be more rational than the non-religious on this issue.” After a cry from the audience Sumner suggested that he didn’t think Wagner would really want to make that argument. In closing statements Sumner also pointed out a glaring irony in the arrangement of the debate: “It seems strange to have two men up here arguing about abortion. It seems to me to be an issue in which women should something to say.”
