Pro-Life 101: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Case Persuasively

Rating:
Summary: Useful training material, but the arguments are weak.
Review:

This booklet will almost certainly succeed in its aim of helping pro-lifers to give clearer, more persuasive and more confident arguments or presentations about abortion. Lay pro-choicers, indeed, will probably find it difficult to respond to some of the arguments in _Pro-Life 101_. That alone makes it worth buying *if* you are looking, as many are, for a kind of training manual for pro-life apologists.

But I rate the booklet according to what I perceive as a lack of philosophical merit in its arguments. _Pro-Life 101_ contains several omissions, equivocations and confusions which, until they are cleared up, will probably hamper any prospect of resolution or progress in the abortion debate.

(1) _Pro-Life 101_ asserts that the morality of abortion depends entirely on whether the foetus has a right to life (pp. 2-3, 5, 8-9, etc). This begs the question against bodily-rights defenses of abortion, which claim abortion is permissible *even if* the foetus has a right to life. That is, pro-choicers often claim abortion is justified "because a woman has a right to control her own body." _Pro-Life 101_ has no response to such claims, and this is a glaring omission.

(2) Klusendorf omits to lay out his metaphysical hand. Science tells us, he says, that "individual human life begins at conception"; thus "[y]ou did not come from a zygote, you once *were* a zygote" (p. 12, his emphasis). But this is a mistake. At most science tells us that *individual human organisms* begin to exist at conception. To draw the conclusion that beings such as *you and I* began to exist at conception, you have to assume you and I are essentially organisms. And that assumption may be false. Instead of being organisms, we might be emergent substances (à la William Hasker's "emergent dualism"), or constituted persons (à la Lynne Rudder Baker's "constitution view"); on either of these views we come into existence not at conception, but when the brain becomes sufficiently developed. Moreover, you and I might even -- as I'll wager Klusendorf himself believes -- be immaterial souls. But if we are essentially immaterial souls, how can it be true that I was ever a *physical* thing, a zygote? _Pro-Life 101_ shows a lack of metaphysical clarity.

(3) Klusendorf, like many pro-lifers, is guilty of terminological deck-stacking -- using terminology that lends covert and illicit support to the pro-life position. The strategy is this: first, declare that the central issue is whether the foetus is a "human being" (p.1), "human" (p.9), "fully human" (p.16). Second, point out that, according to science, the foetus is indeed "human" (p.13). Well, it seems to follow, easily enough -- and Klusendorf does nothing to dissuade this inference -- that the foetus has a right to life; after all, "humans" have a right to life, don't they? But this is an equivocation fallacy: given that the foetus (as science tells us) is "human" in the biological sense (i.e., belonging to the species _Homo sapiens_), it does not follow -- at least, not without further premises -- that it is "human" in the sense of having a right to life. Klusdendorf has either committed this fallacy himself, or else has sloppily used ambiguous terminology in a way that will encourage his readers to commit that fallacy.

(4) Klusendorf's discussion of what he calls "functionalism" (the view of Mary Anne Warren and others) repeatedly conflates and confuses two issues: the conditions under which somebody would continue to exist, versus the conditions under which that individual would have a right to life. Klusendorf thinks that, by showing a particular individual existed as a foetus, he thereby shows the individual must have had a right to life when he/she was a foetus (p.36). Not so: the individual might have existed but without a right to life. Thus it is a mistake for Klusendorf to assert things like: "Someone cannot be in the process of becoming a human person, since one must first exist in order to enter any process" (pp. 37-8). For an individual might exist *and yet also* be in the process of becoming a human person -- just as an individual child exists and yet is in the process of becoming an adult. The error here has two possible sources. First, Klusendorf may have equivocated on the notion of personal identity: he may have inferred that since there is "personal identity" between the foetus and me (which means only that I am one and the same entity as the foetus), therefore the foetus must be a "person" (in the sense of having a right to life). Or, second, he may simply have assumed -- question-beggingly, since pro-choicers do not grant this -- that the right to life is an essential property of those that possess it (i.e., he has simply assumed that, since I have a right to life now, I must have had a right to life at all other times that I existed or will exist). Either way, his critique of "functionalism" fails.

(5) The arguments in _Pro-Life 101_ are at times distractingly and irritatingly tendentious -- as, for example, when Klusendorf appeals (p.13) to the "Law of Biogenesis" (a term that has meant a couple of different things in science, but never what he needs it to say), and cites medical evidence for foetal pain that is incongruent with the bulk of medical opinion (pp. 56-9). The concern is that pro-choicers will be able to focus on such errors instead of confronting the true issues in the abortion debate.

Ultimately, the problem with booklets such as _Pro-Life 101_ is that they lead to a kind of delusion. On the one hand the arguments are based on confusions and fallacies and are, therefore, completely unpersuasive. But on the other hand those arguments are rhetorically effective enough that pro-lifers -- at least lay pro-lifers -- will be deluded into thinking they have adequate, indeed overwhelming, support for their position.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been better...
Review: First let me point out the fact that I am pro-life, so that you know that I am not unfairly judging it from a pro-choice stance.

If you believe that a human who deserves full rights begins at conception, then this is will come in handy. However, you might want to pass this book up if you DON'T believe a zygote is a human being, because your whole case will come crumbling down since Klusendorf bases most of his arguments on this.

Also, his suggested rebuttal to the pro-choicer who says, "Don't force your morality on me" is unfair. Klusendorf says that this line is self-refuting, and advises pro-lifers to say, "You're saying I'm wrong, so why are you forcing your morality on ME?" But morality is subjective and not a fact, not to mention you would be committing the same mistake he calls upon the pro-choicer.

Furthermore, one of his suggested rebuttals for rape cases is flawed. When a pro-choicer asks us, "What about when the woman is raped?" Klusendorf says we should say, "Can you think of any other case where, having been victimized yourself, you can justly turn around and victimize another completely innocent person?" This argument is flawed, because it assumes that the mother is the one victimizing the fetus, which is an entirely debatable issue in itself (Is it the mother who victimizes the fetus in abortion? The rapist? The doctor performing the abortion?). The issue is not blame, so he shouldn't use this in his argument.

Rating:
Summary: All the tools you need to argue the pro-life viewpoint.
Review: Scott makes the issue of abortion simple and easy to argue. This is the one book that every pro-lifer should have. I have yet to find an argument I can't respond to using Scott's technique. Additionally, all of his arguments are philosophically and scientifically based, making them even more bullet proof.