Responding to pro-abortion advocates: Satanic Temple director Jex Blackmore

Responding To Pro-Abortion Advocates is a series where I focus in on comments made by pro-abortion persons. These comments might be seen in the news, read on various websites, or heard elsewhere. As always, the goal is to be respectful and respond to the arguments, not to attack the person.

Jex Blackmore is the chapter director of the Satanic Temple Detroit. She recently found herself pregnant, and decided to chronicle her experience leading up to her abortion. Her story was picked up by Cosmo and Jezebel, and she has been received warmly by the pro-abortion crowd. While there are two weeks of journal entries to cull through, we can begin by focusing on the first paragraph of her diary. We will address more of Ms. Blackmore’s diary in coming installments. She says…

11/14/15

“The decision to become two people instead of one is monumental.  Sometimes it’s the right time and sometimes it’s not.”

A couple of points to make here:

1. Ontologically speaking, Ms. Blackmore has not “become two people.” As fascinating and absurd as that sounds, however, it’s not an uncommon idea among pro-abortion advocates. They love to somehow make the baby part of their bodies so that it becomes easier to rationalize abortion. Scientifically, there is nothing accurate about the notion. At the time of conception, a completely new human being is formed with enough genetic material to fill a library of one thousand books. The new human being is growing and developing, and in no way can it be considered part of the woman’s body (or in this case, a second version of the woman).

1. Two people don’t decide to get pregnant. They decide to engage in sexual activity with the intention of getting pregnant. The pregnancy is the natural result of the activity that has the potential to create it. What follows is the idea that if a person wants to avoid what is considered the natural result of a certain activity, he or she should avoid that activity.

This particular idea is horrifying to pro-aborts, as they like to pretend that our society has created some great chasm between sex and babies. Sure enough, Ms. Blackmore later laments, “I for one do not believe that sex is a contract for pregnancy.” While sex may or may not be a contract for pregnancy (I’m not sure what a pregnancy contract is), it is the activity for which pregnancy is the natural result. That being clear, it is silly to engage in an activity, and then claim to not have given consent for what is the natural result of that activity. It’s clear that by engaging in that activity, a person gives implicit consent for the result.

Consider skydiving. When a man jumps out of a plane, the natural result of that activity is that he will fall to the ground. Most likely, he packed a parachute to help him avoid all the consequences of that fall, but if the parachute fails, it would be ridiculous for him to argue that he didn’t give consent to hit the ground.

In the same way, it is nonsensical for two people engaging in sexual activity to claim they did not given consent for pregnancy. They may have used contraception, but that doesn’t change the fact that pregnancy is still the natural result of having sex.

1. The third problem here is that even as Ms. Blackmore is writing this, she is already pregnant. There is already a second person involved. One of the great falsehoods promoted by pro-abortion advocates is the idea of abortion as a “reproductive right.” Given that reproduction happens at the moment of conception, it is factually inaccurate to say that abortion is a reproductive right. If reproduction has already happened, we aren’t talking about reproductive rights, we’re talking about the right to abort babies.

Perhaps Ms. Blackmore should remember that her decision to “become two people” is not a decision that she will make in the future, but rather something that has already happened.

Cullen Herout is a pro-life writer, and his blog can be found at Ready To Stand.