During one of his recent “Fireside Chats,” Dennis Prager, co-founder of PragerU, discussed abortion — specifically, differentiating whether it should be considered killing or murder.
On Episode 358, a caller posed a question to Prager: “My question for the founder is, in an episode you had stated that in the Ten Commandments, it says that ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ not ‘Thou shalt not kill,'” she said. “And so I’ve been wondering, is abortion killing or murder?”
Before answering, Prager cautioned that he doesn’t give answers based on what viewers may think — an indication that his stance may not be well-received by his generally conservative audience.
Preborn children are human beings
The response began with an accurate defense of the humanity of the preborn.
“The language with regard to abortion is a very, very morally complex issue,” Prager said. “So let me just say at the outset: I believe we’re dealing with a human life, okay? That’s one. Forget believe; I think the word believe is a little silly. It’s either true or not true. Belief is a theological question; whether or not the creature, the being, that a woman who is pregnant is carrying is a human life is not — it may well be a reflection of one’s theology, but it’s either accurate or not accurate.”
He then pointed out that while some political beliefs are rooted in religious beliefs, the reality of prenatal development is objective science, not religion. “There is an objective reality to what it is that a woman who is pregnant is carrying,” he continued. “It’s either human or not human; if it’s not human, what is it? Is it a peanut? Is it an animal, but not human? Is it nothing and it becomes a human?”
From the study of embryology, we have known for quite some time that what is conceived in the womb of a human mother is also a human being. At the moment of fertilization, that human being is already biologically distinct from his or her mother. That child’s ethnicity, hair color, sex, eye color, and other traits have already been determined. The baby’s DNA is unique from that of his or her parents. In just three weeks, the heart is beating — and it isn’t a meaningless electrical throbbing or a manufactured sound created to control women, as abortion advocates like to claim, but a vital part of embryonic development. The heart is literally pumping blood throughout that child’s body. This is a well-known fact found regularly in scientific literature. Without a beating heart, the embryo’s body would not continue to grow and thrive through the rest of pregnancy.
Abortion vs. murder
After clarifying that he fully understands the humanity of the preborn, Prager moved on to discuss the question at hand: is abortion killing or murder? Murder, he said, is defined as the premeditated taking of a innocent life — but to him, abortion does not qualify as murder, and claimed that’s why people rarely describe it using that term:
If every doctor who performs an abortion is a murderer, then many of them are mass murderers. And you can’t have it both ways; you can’t really say, yes, doctors who perform abortions are mass murderers, but we should not prosecute them. Is there any other example of a mass murderer, or even the murderer of a single human being that we don’t prosecute?
My point there is that, in some ways, abortion is ‘sui generis,’ which is the Latin term for, ‘its own unique thing.’ There’s nothing nothing quite like it.
I don’t know anybody who’s pro-life who — I’m not saying this person doesn’t exist, I just don’t know one — who believes that all doctors who perform abortions should be put away in prison for life. And presumably, all hospitals that allow that, they’re facilitating mass murders, and what about the mother? She’s an accessory to, not mass murder, but to murder.
So we don’t use that language, because even we in the pro-life community do recognize it as somewhat different than regular murder.
Interestingly, former abortionists have made the point that they have killed more human beings than most serial killers have. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, Dr. Kathi Aultman — who is now pro-life — spoke about how hard committing abortions was, and how the knowledge of what she had done was difficult to accept.
“Although many people view an abortion as just removing a blob of tissue, the abortionist knows exactly what he or she is doing because they must count the body parts after each procedure. Eventually the truth sinks in and if they have a conscience they can no longer do them,” she said, adding, “I have always thought of myself as a good person but at one point I was horrified by the realization that I had killed more people than most mass murderers.”
Then, in a later interview with Live Action founder Lila Rose, Dr. Aultman took that admission a step further, admitting that it took an article on the Nazi Holocaust to open her eyes. “If you don’t consider someone human, you can do anything you want,” she said. “That’s when I realized that I was a mass murderer….”
Meanwhile, pro-life advocates do advocate for abortionists to be charged with a crime, and this isn’t new. Whether or not pro-lifers want to abortionists to be “put away in prison for life” is irrelevant. Multiple states have enacted penalties for abortionists who break their pro-life laws, with some issuing felonies, fines, and years of prison time in addition to revoking their licenses to practice. Claiming that pro-lifers don’t advocate for imprisoning abortionists is mistaken at best and dishonest at worst, regardless of whether they want them in prison “for life” — especially when many people convicted of heinous murders don’t even receive life sentences. In addition, Texas abortion law even allows for people who aid and abet abortions to be fined for up to $10,000.
No current pro-life law in the country, however, allows for the prosecution of the mother of the aborted child. This, however, does not mean she has not murdered her child; it simply means that after 50 years of illegitimately and unconstitutionally allowing such a thing and calling it a woman’s “right,” much of society is experiencing difficulty shifting gears from seeing it as a “right” to now seeing it as “murder.” So does that then mean it isn’t murder?
If induced abortion is truly the direct and intentional killing of a human being in the womb — and it objectively is — then whether it is legally recognized as homicide/murder by a society which has, for over 50 years, subjectively treated that human as a non-human is irrelevant. A society’s discriminatory or subjective laws should not determine objective morality; it is objective morality that should determine society’s laws. When a society strays from objective morality given by its moral Law-Giver, it is not a wise course of action to choose society’s subjective definitions over morally objective ones.
The abortion holocaust
Prager then discussed the comparison people make between abortion and the Holocaust, in which over six million Jewish people (and millions of others) were murdered by the Nazis. Many in the pro-life movement have referred to abortion as a “holocaust.”
According to Brittanica.com, which also discusses the fact that different terminology was used early on to refer to the Nazi extermination of the Jews and others during World War II:
The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen, and gained wide usage, because, in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination camps—the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria or open fires.
Prager is Jewish, and does not like the use of that term to apply to abortion:
Though I am pro-life, and see no argument against the pro-life position, I do believe there is ultimately a moral difference I therefore wouldn’t use the term ‘holocaust.’ And this is where I said it might be jolting, and I don’t mean to jolt you and I may well be wrong, but I’d like to offer my thought on it. Because language is all we have.
I’ve often thought, let us say that instead of six million Jews murdered, because that’s the most famous Holocaust, instead of six million Jews murdered, what the Nazis would have done is, they would have aborted, they would have performed an abortion on every pregnant Jewish woman, between 1941 and 1945, the years of the Holocaust. I think Jews would have regarded that as an obscenity and as evil, but it wouldn’t have come close to the Holocaust.
It would have been evil and wrong, but it would not have anywhere near the the the resonance of the Holocaust.
It is true that the widespread scale of people killed by abortion is not seen on the same scale of the Holocaust (despite abortion’s death count being higher). It is also true that people might not have responded similarly if the Nazis had been routinely sterilizing Jewish men and women, and forcibly committing abortions on their preborn children. But despite’s Prager’s objections, something of this nature would still be a genocide, regardless of how people feel about it. And if the Nazis would have, as Prager said, aborted every Jewish child between 1941-1945, they would have still been objectively intentionally killing Jews even if society responded with complete apathy.
Just look at China, where a genocide is currently happening. It is believed that as many as three million Uyghurs are held in concentration camps in China, with children forcibly seized from their parents and placed in state-run propaganda facilities, where the goal is to “break their roots, break their lineage, break their connections, break their origins.” Chinese authorities are likewise allegedly engaging in widespread efforts to sterilize Uyghurs and prevent them from having children, through forced abortion, sterilization, and infanticide.
One Uyghur farmer was confirmed to have died in a concentration camp after saving his wife from a forced abortion; another woman fled a hospital to avoid a forced abortion, and also was detained and died. Survivors have testified to horrifying violence and torture, including sexual violence, and forced organ harvesting without anesthesia. Whistleblowers have also come forward to report that newborn babies born to Uyghur parents are killed in the hospital.
Prager’s point is sadly all too true, as the Uyghur genocide is widely ignored by the international community, which has done little to come to the aid of the Uyghurs.
However, that doesn’t make what is happening to the Uyghurs less evil, or less of a genocide, even if people don’t feel that they care for that terminology.
Prager’s argument seems to essentially boil down to this: the outrage something garners is what defines how evil it is or is not.
Moral relativism
Next, Prager moved on to engaging in what is a stunningly clear case of moral relativism, saying (emphases added):
There are gradations of evil.
If I murder somebody’s child — their five-year-old child, their 40-year-old child, but their child — versus, that I have aborted, even forcibly aborted their child, there is a difference.
People know that there is a difference; for one thing, because we have an emotional bond with a born human being.
And you can say, well, women bond with their unborn; yes, to a certain extent, that is true. But it’s not the same extent, and and ask a woman, ask any parent who might have had the tragedy of both the miscarriage and the death of a child, if she would be honest, which caused you the greater pain. I don’t think it would be measurable, the greater pain of the child versus the unborn.
So there is gradation of pain, there is gradation of evil. So the language that we use, I don’t know what language we can use.
Murder doesn’t quite work, because if you really believe it’s murder, why would you not prosecute these people? Both the mother and the doctor. So what is correct technically or legally may not be correct morally, and certainly not emotionally.
First, we’ve already addressed the issue of prosecution.
And again, we see that Prager is basing which is worse on how someone feels about it, or how great their pain is in comparison. This is nonsensical; for example, if a serial killer feels no remorse or pain at the fact that he has killed 20 women, does that mean that those 20 women were worthless because he lacks feelings of guilt? Or would it still be objectively true that those human beings had value, regardless of their murderer’s feelings about them?
Prager’s argument is also very similar to a common pro-abortion “gotcha” scenario often posed as a question to pro-lifers: if an IVF clinic was on fire, would you save a five-year-old child inside, or a container with 10 frozen embryos? The idea is that the five-year-old child’s life has more value, even to pro-lifers, and therefore, abortion should be considered acceptable. But as Live Action founder and president Lila Rose pointed out in a video, the person you choose to save has no bearing on the humanity or inherent value or the other person. She reframed the argument as one of having to choose to save a stranger or a family member, and acknowledged that most people would choose to save their loved one. But that has no bearing on the stranger’s right to life.
“In the same way, a person’s choice to save a five-year-old over the embryos does not make the embryos less human or less valuable or give anyone moral permission to kill embryos,” she said.
Prager also seems to again be relying on the crutch of “which is more emotionally hurtful” to determine what makes something more or less evil. But regardless of whether something is emotionally hurtful, it can be objectively wrong and evil.
Some humans are more equal than others?
In a continuance that could have come straight out of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Prager then engages in some casual ableism, and argues that some lives are simply worth more than others. He used euthanasia to make his point:
It’s one of these, abortion is a unique arena. I’ll give one more example of again, gradations of evil. I am not for having euthanasia as legal; I am opposed to it.
But do I believe that taking the life of a person who no longer can think, there’s no self-awareness, and is in horrible pain… is taking that person’s life the same as taking another person’s life?
Is it immoral? Is it morally identical?
Of course not, even though technically, it’s deliberately taking the life of an innocent person. But there are circumstances under which I wouldn’t want my life continued.
First, it’s unclear how a person could be totally not self-aware, no longer able to think, but also in horrible pain. It’s like a pile-on of all the imaginable worst case scenarios rolled into one sentence to justify who it’s acceptable to kill. And to answer Prager’s question: Yes, taking that person’s life is the same as taking another person’s life, because those persons are both intrinsically valuable human beings, regardless of their vulnerability, ability to defend themselves, or any other arbitrary factor.
Additionally, if we stick with Prager’s argument that there are “gradations of evil,” then it could be argued that killing someone in such a vulnerable state is more evil, because they have no ability to advocate for or defend themselves.
The most vulnerable among us should receive the highest protection from those who are stronger. Instead, Prager appeared to argue that it’s not only acceptable to kill those who are weaker or more vulnerable, but that it’s less evil to do so.
If a person is alive, then there is no circumstance in which that one can say it’s acceptable to intentionally kill him or her… yet Prager argued that it’s not as bad to kill some people than it is to kill others. A person’s life does not rely on his or her ability to think and reason, or their level of pain, just like it does not rely on their size or location.
Every life has meaning and value, and every life deserves to be protected, regardless of the moral equivalency in which self-described pro-lifers want to engage.
