Live Action president and founder Lila Rose recently returned to the @Whatever podcast alongside Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins. The two debated Destiny, whose legal name is Steven Bonnell and who is known for his political online content, according to his website. The three faced off on the issue of abortion. Here are three of the highlights of the five-hour-long debate. Watch the full highlight reel below:
The unconscious coma patient
The basis for Destiny’s pro-abortion stance is that he erroneously believes life begins at consciousness. To defend this argument, he asked Rose, “For a sleeping person, tonight when you go to sleep, you have had a whole subjective experience right now. When you wake up, that experience will resume. But a baby hasn’t even begun to experience…”
Rose replied, “But, Destiny, what if I have amnesia and I don’t remember anything? I’m like a brand new, first moment of consciousness-human being. And during my coma, I lose all memory, I lose all sense of my personhood, and when I emerge from my coma I am like a brand new baby. Would it have been okay during that coma to kill me?”
The question seemed to stump Destiny, as he responded, “I would have to think a lot about that question.”
Withholding extraordinary care vs. killing
At another point in the debate, Destiny argued that abortion was similar to disconnecting a person from life support. “Unplugging Grandpa would be kind of like unplugging a baby. You’re disconnecting both from a life support thing,” he said.
Rose told Destiny, “There’s a difference between withholding extraordinary medical care, which would be like life support, and withholding ordinary medical care. For a child in the womb, they deserve the ordinary measure of being able to stay in their natural habitat, their mother’s womb, until they’re old enough to survive outside the womb…. So building these analogies that actually don’t work with what we’re actually talking about by saying, ‘Well, removing life support is like abortion.’ They’re not the same…”
Induced abortions are acts that intentionally and directly kill innocent children. On the contrary, not providing extraordinary measures of care means not going above and beyond the typical realm of care to keep an already dying person alive. The preborn child is alive in her natural, ordinary environment.
A preborn child is not a corpse
Destiny told Rose and Hawkins: “I don’t believe that you believe… that humans have the right to life. My next question would be: I show you a human whose been dead for 10 days, the corpse is still a human.”
Here, he is oddly attempting to compare a living preborn child with a dead human being in an attempt to prove that Rose and Hawkins don’t believe all humans have the right to life if they don’t believe in a right to life for already deceased humans.
But preborn children are not deceased. They are alive and growing.
He claimed that a preborn child does not have brain activity and is therefore the equivalent of a dead person.
Rose argued that Destiny was defining death improperly. “Death is defined as the complete and irreversible cessation of brain activity,” she said. “If that’s the definition of death, a child at 20-24 weeks in the womb doesn’t have that definition of death.”
Hawkins added that the preborn child has brain waves well within the first trimester. According to the Endowment for Human Development, brain waves begin at about six weeks and two days in the womb.
Watch the full debate here.
