RadixJournal - Cruel To Be Kind： The Case For Abortion

00:00:00.000 Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.

00:00:03.000 With no natural predators to thin the herd,

00:00:06.000 it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most

00:00:09.000 and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

00:00:13.000 Having kids is such an important decision.

00:00:18.000 We're just waiting for the right time.

00:00:20.000 It's not something you want to rush into, obviously.

00:00:22.000 No way. 1.00

00:00:24.000 Oh, shit! I'm pregnant again! 1.00

00:00:27.000 Shit! I got too many damn kids! 1.00

00:00:29.000 Thought you was on the pill or some shit! 1.00

00:00:31.000 Hell no! 1.00

00:00:32.000 Shit! Must've been thinking of Brittany. 1.00

00:00:34.000 Brittany?! 0.99

00:00:35.000 No, you didn't!

00:00:36.000 There's no way we could have a child now.

00:00:39.000 Not with the market the way it is, no.

00:00:41.000 Oh, God, no. That just wouldn't make any sense.

00:00:43.000 Come on over here, bitch! 1.00

00:00:45.000 He don't care about you! 1.00

00:00:47.000 Yeah, well, there must be something he likes over here!

00:00:49.000 You mean nothing to me, baby?! 1.00

00:00:51.000 Oh, shit! It wasn't me! It wasn't me! 0.99

00:00:55.000 Well, we finally decided to have children.

00:00:58.000 And I'm not pointing fingers, but it's not going well.

00:01:03.000 And this is helping.

00:01:05.000 I'm just saying that before I have in vitro, maybe you should be willing to...

00:01:08.000 It's always me, right?

00:01:10.000 Well, it's not my sperm count.

00:01:13.000 Yeah!

00:01:14.000 Yeah! 1.00

00:01:15.000 I'm gonna fuck all of y'all! 1.00

00:01:17.000 That's my boy! 1.00

00:01:22.000 Cleavon is lucky to be alive. 0.75

00:01:24.000 He attempted to jump a jet ski from a lake into a swimming pool and impaled his crotch on an iron gate.

00:01:29.000 But thanks to recent advances in stem cell research and the fine work of doctors Krinsky and Altschuler, Cleavon should regain full reproductive function.

00:01:36.000 Put your hands on my jug! 0.85

00:01:38.000 I think the thing that they don't seem to understand, they shoot themselves in the foot, these pro-life type people, is that we have detailed data on the kind of people that get abortion.

00:01:57.000 And we have detailed data on the heritability of the traits that are involved.

00:02:04.000 Women that have abortions are helping to remove people like them, that is to say, anti-social unpleasant people, from the gene pool. 1.00

00:02:14.000 Yeah, we must be cruel only to be kind, is generally my attitude towards this. That's a phrase from our guy Hamlet.

00:02:33.000 Ed, how are you?

00:02:35.000 Yes, I'm alright. I was watching the second Jurassic Park movie with my son, and he seemed to enjoy it.

00:02:43.000 And then otherwise, I've just been working on some research on dysgenics.

00:02:50.000 And that's been the day. You?

00:02:54.000 Similar activities for me. No Jurassic Park yet, but we have been watching the Jurassic Parks a lot.

00:03:03.000 And I actually kind of liked, particularly the first one, and great stuff.

00:03:08.000 But of course, we actually even went hunting for actual dinosaur bones.

00:03:13.000 I haven't done that yet.

00:03:14.000 Well yeah, you've got a chance of finding them where you live.

00:03:16.000 I don't think they've ever found any serious dinosaur bones in Finland.

00:03:19.000 No, out here in Montana, it's T-Rex country.

00:03:24.000 And they're just all over the place.

00:03:26.000 If you go to a site where there's a lot of bones for whatever, you know, weird reason,

00:03:31.000 like an ancient riverbed or something like that, you're just literally stumbling over, you know, T-Rex jaws and all that great stuff.

00:03:40.000 Oh, exciting. Oh, well.

00:03:45.000 So, some of these places where we went are actually mentioned in the first Jurassic Park.

00:03:50.000 I think he says, I have a plane waiting in Choto.

00:03:54.000 That's where I literally was in that town.

00:03:57.000 Anyway, let's get started.

00:03:59.000 So, we're going to talk about a very, very difficult and divisive and sometimes heart wrenching or stomach turning subject, and that is abortion.

00:04:12.000 So, this has come back to attention.

00:04:16.000 This whole issue of abortion seems to never really leave the political scene, at least in the United States.

00:04:24.000 And there's, for forever, it's been a seemingly kind of 50-50 split between pro-life and pro-choice, at least those monikers.

00:04:34.000 That's not exactly accurate, however.

00:04:37.000 Roughly 70 to 75% of the American public more or less supports continuing the abortion laws that we have.

00:04:47.000 That is, they are kind of effectively pro-choice or effectively status quo.

00:04:52.000 But there certainly is a very organized, very passionate pro-life contingent that is always there and that is, at least for the past 30 years, been associated with the Republican Party.

00:05:05.000 In fact, they've kind of forced their will upon the Republican Party to a very large degree.

00:05:11.000 But I wanted to talk about this more seriously.

00:05:14.000 First off, I'll mention some details about the Texas law that was passed last week, just in case any of our viewers haven't been paying attention.

00:05:23.000 It's a rather strange law.

00:05:27.000 For people who don't know, there is a very famous Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade, that based the access to abortion upon a kind of right to privacy within the Constitution.

00:05:43.000 So, so much of abortion legislation really has been done through the Supreme Court, and I think that's actually a big problem to begin with.

00:05:54.000 But that Roe v. Wade law has been maintained for 40 some odd years.

00:06:01.000 And this law that was passed in Texas doesn't directly challenge it.

00:06:07.000 And that's some kind of the weird thing about it.

00:06:10.000 It makes abortion providers and even those people who assisted a woman get an abortion, though not the woman herself, I should add, libel in civil court to $10,000 judgments that can be brought by anyone in the country.

00:06:27.380 It's a really strange way of going about it.

00:06:30.200 And I think this is one of the reasons why the Supreme Court, at least for the time being, has punted on the law, claiming that there has been no harm yet, even though abortion providers have effectively shut down.

00:06:41.700 Basically, you could live in Montana, and you could hear about a woman who got an abortion after six weeks, and you could sue her, not sue her, sue the provider or sue, say, the person who drove her, sue the person who paid for it, sue the guy who made a hamburger for her beforehand, I don't know, there must be some limit.

00:07:05.560 But it does open up space for this just free-for-all of lawsuits, and that has made providing abortions effectively impossible. 0.97

00:07:15.440 So after six weeks, there are no abortions in Texas.

00:07:19.060 But again, because you can take people to court, which is just inherently debilitating, I think it raises questions of how many abortions are going to be taking place in Texas at all.

00:07:32.760 I mean, you could sue someone. Are you sure it's six weeks? Are you sure it's six weeks since you've been pregnant? It's before six weeks? I'm not so sure. I think it might be seven, so I can sue you for 10 grand.

00:07:42.460 It is a strange situation, to say the least. I don't quite know what's going to happen, but this is where we are.

00:07:48.980 But I think what Ed and I should do, because, of course, there's all of this talk about this law. This is going to affect the midterm elections. It's overshadowed COVID, at least for a time.

00:08:02.920 But I want to take a step back and really talk about abortion and fertility, and also, I think, how you can morally think about abortion and how abortion has been viewed in the past.

00:08:20.020 So, Ed, you know, we think about the anti-abortion crusade or the pro-life cause as being a Christian thing, not even just a conservative thing, but a Christian thing that's Catholic and evangelical, evangelical Christian.

00:08:36.960 It's worth mentioning that it might even be a political cause more than a Christian cause.

00:08:50.500 When Roe v. Wade was decided, the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed the decision, and they said, we all respect a woman's right to privacy.

00:09:00.920 It was only later that it became the centerpiece of the religious right and became very important in left-right politics in America.

00:09:12.900 But what has been the Christian response to an abortion throughout the ages?

00:09:22.940 Well, if you go back, well, it depends what do we mean by an abortion and what do we mean by a miscarriage.

00:09:31.380 Now, you have this idea that I remember that there was this debate in the 2008 presidential election, and Barack Obama and John McCain were debating abortion.

00:09:39.940 And John McCain asserted that life starts at the moment of conception.

00:09:43.780 And that stuck in my mind because Barack Obama said, well, I think this is a complicated question, which is the, you know, intelligent thing to say.

00:09:52.100 And so I was quite interested in that. It's actually quite complicated.

00:09:57.000 So St. Augustine of Hippo wrote that when an unformed fetus, so that's, you know, the moment of conception and quite a long time after,

00:10:06.960 he said it perishes like a seed that has never been fructified.

00:10:11.940 And he said he wasn't sure whether it should be understood to be, you know, human.

00:10:16.260 So Thomas Aquinas held what is called a hylomorphic view.

00:10:22.520 A hylomorphic view is that every natural body consists of two intrinsic principles, potential, namely primary matter and actual, that is, substantial form.

00:10:33.160 So what that means is you can't have like the body is the outward expression of the soul.

00:10:38.820 So you can't have a soul if you don't have a body.

00:10:42.360 That was his view.

00:10:43.820 And he further took the view that an embryo, therefore, has a vegetative soul.

00:10:49.280 It has the soul of a vegetable to the extent that a vegetable has one.

00:10:52.880 As it develops, it obtains an animal soul.

00:10:55.580 And only when it is a fully and clearly developed human does it have a human or rational soul.

00:11:02.460 So the view of Thomas Aquinas, doctor of the church, leading theologian, was that people that would be called premature children do not have souls.

00:11:19.820 And accordingly, in 1312, based on this kind of thinking at the Council of Vienne in France, they banned the baptism of severely premature babies.

00:11:29.540 Now, it's not exactly clear what the cutoff point was.

00:11:34.060 You've got some people saying it should be 30 days after conception.

00:11:37.440 Some people saying 60 days.

00:11:39.420 Some people saying six months.

00:11:41.580 But this was enforced until 1895.

00:11:44.320 And it was up to the priest, when confronted with this live fetus, to decide whether the fetus was human and thus deserving of baptism or not.

00:11:53.680 So it did oppose abortion.

00:11:55.320 You weren't allowed to have abortion because the Bible says you can't.

00:11:58.800 But basically, it took the same kind of view that medieval Islamic theologians took, which was that you could have an abortion before 120 days.

00:12:05.960 Because before 120 days, it is not human.

00:12:09.120 That was their view.

00:12:11.080 And so...

00:12:11.700 And I should...

00:12:13.140 I could add...

00:12:14.640 I would add that this is very important from a Christian perspective.

00:12:22.780 I was hoping he could just join in.

00:12:24.880 It's funny.

00:12:25.420 My dog, he didn't come into camera, but he walked down at the exact same time.

00:12:30.360 It's almost like they're communicating...

00:12:32.420 Instinct.

00:12:32.940 Yeah.

00:12:33.440 Instinct.

00:12:34.220 Instinctively and digitally.

00:12:36.520 That's my conclusion, at least.

00:12:39.080 Not a coincidence.

00:12:40.000 But it is actually important from a Christian's perspective in the sense that, I mean, one moral dilemma of Christianity is, what do we make of, say, a primitive savage in an island somewhere who's never heard the word, the good news of Jesus Christ, and thus haven't put their faith in him and repented and are thus going to hell?

00:13:02.200 Isn't that just profoundly unfair?

00:13:05.460 And, you know, Christians have answered that question in multiple ways, but it actually is a serious issue of whether a severely premature child has a soul or not, and is thus...

00:13:21.200 Should be baptized or is going to hell, or is actually... 0.85

00:13:25.000 Does not have a soul that could go to hell. 0.98

00:13:28.020 Yeah.

00:13:28.480 Just finishing up.

00:13:29.440 There was another idea that you had in medieval times, which was that the fetus only had a soul once it was quickened, that is to say, kicked inside the mother.

00:13:42.280 There was an English surgeon called Thomas Vickery, who died in 1561.

00:13:46.340 He said the fetus gained a soul at 46 days, and he said not every lump of flesh should be baptized, which lacks every arrangement of organs, wrote St. Alphonsus Ligurian, the doctor of the church.

00:13:59.440 Since it is universally accepted that the soul is not infused with a body until the latter is not infused, is not infused until the body of the latter is formed.

00:14:10.080 And, you know, Maimonides, the Jewish sort of early medieval theologian, Maimonides.

00:14:16.020 Oh, of course I know him.

00:14:18.740 Maimonides, yes.

00:14:19.600 Now, Maimonides, he invented this concept of the nephil, and the nephil is the neonate who is doomed to die.

00:14:27.780 And if the child was born early, it was a nephil rather than a proper human, and therefore it didn't have a soul. 0.98

00:14:34.560 Hmm.

00:14:37.740 Fascinating.

00:14:38.600 I think things have changed quite a bit.

00:14:41.700 I mean, as we've talked about this, the pro-life movement has made a very strong claim that life just begins at conception, the moment the sperm hits the egg.

00:14:52.780 And I think any reasonable person would agree that there's something has happened, at least potential for life or some kind of life form has occurred.

00:15:03.400 I think the wide availability of ultrasounds has probably shifted consciousness a little bit in the sense of you have a kind of photograph of a fetus and you feel like, well, this is clearly a real person and so on.

00:15:22.400 I think that has changed opinions.

00:15:25.260 I mean, we should remember that abortions are declining pretty significantly since the 1970s.

00:15:32.880 I think for a lot of many different factors, but they still make up from what we were looking at between 18 to 20% of all pregnancies do end in abortion.

00:15:44.100 And thus, it's, you know, it's an issue that at least has to be addressed seriously.

00:15:50.360 And I don't think a way, particularly in the current situation where we are now, I don't think addressing it by declaring it bloody murder is really all that helpful.

00:16:02.480 I think there is a great deal of moral ambiguity in it.

00:16:06.340 We're going to talk about the effects of it later.

00:16:08.120 But one thing that I've noticed and which I've always, it's always bothered me.

00:16:12.980 I mean, I generally support abortion rights, but is that the pro-life movement never wants to actually go after the mother in terms of persecution or criminal charges or civil charges in this latter Texas scheme.

00:16:34.240 And so there was a moment in 2016, it's largely forgotten now, but Donald Trump had discovered that he was pro-life like many other Republicans who want to seek the conservative, the Republican nomination, discover that like George Herbert Walker Bush and many others.

00:16:51.300 And he was asked, you know, oh, you want to ban abortions and would you have to, would this be criminalized to the extent that women would be arrested?

00:17:01.540 And Donald Trump thought about it for a moment.

00:17:03.220 He said, well, yes, we would have to do that, which is a reasonable response.

00:17:06.860 If you're going to claim that this is murder or at the very least a crime, you're going to simply have to take into account the woman who has the abortion.

00:17:15.460 And the pro, he got hit from both sides.

00:17:18.160 So the liberals freaked out, of course, but then the pro-life movement freaked out in the sense because they hated, at that point, they hated Trump and they were saying, well, this is not how we think about the issue.

00:17:28.120 And I, you know, you kind of do have to think about the issue in that way if you're going to declare this murder.

00:17:34.000 The fact that women can't be sued, but the abortion provider can be sued in Texas, it's morally speaking, it's the same thing as saying, well, we want to arrest the hitman who's profiting off murder.

00:17:48.800 But the person who hired the hitman, oh, well, that, she's an innocent victim of the profiteering hitman.

00:17:56.740 Give me a break.

00:17:57.580 They don't, they don't, I don't think in England anyway, prostitution isn't illegal, but being a pimp profiting from prostitution, that's illegal.

00:18:06.460 But actually being a prostitute is not illegal. 0.83

00:18:09.680 So it's a sort of similar silly equivalence. 0.93

00:18:13.880 And not giving agency to women, by the way.

00:18:16.720 No, no, they're not.

00:18:17.720 If anything, it could be considered a highly sexist set of law.

00:18:20.500 Yes.

00:18:21.220 A highly patriarchal set of law.

00:18:23.600 Yeah.

00:18:23.820 But I think the thing that they, they don't seem to understand, they shoot themselves in the foot, these pro-life type people, is that we have detailed data on the kind of people that get abortions.

00:18:36.100 And we have detailed data on the heritability of the traits that are involved.

00:18:41.200 So there was research indicating abortion, people that have abortions, and particularly people that have multiple abortions,

00:18:46.260 which is 42% of women that have had an abortion, have had more than one in England, have different personality traits for those that have not.

00:18:54.140 People that have abortions are high in histrionic personality traits. 0.79

00:18:59.480 That is to say, they are attention seeking.

00:19:01.860 They are low in agreeableness.

00:19:03.760 They're just basically unstable and not very nice people.

00:19:06.980 They are high in narcissistic personality traits, which includes low empathy and low altruism.

00:19:12.620 And they are high in antisocial personality traits, that is to say, psychopathic personality traits. 0.91

00:19:18.580 So the kind of women that have abortions are, on average, narcissistic, psychopathic and histrionic. 1.00

00:19:23.540 And the heritability of these traits is at least 0.5, if not higher, if not more in the region of 0.6.

00:19:32.860 And so women that have abortions are helping to remove people like them, that is to say, antisocial, unpleasant people, from the gene pool. 1.00

00:19:43.520 They want to, they're crying out. 0.76

00:19:46.600 Like in Ireland, you have these appalling witches on this bus from Dublin to Belfast, singing this song to Val Dunican. 1.00

00:19:55.100 We need abortion, da-da-da-da-da-da, making light of it. 0.99

00:19:59.400 We need abortion, quick, simple and free. 1.00

00:20:01.900 I'm like, please, surely, let them have abortions. 1.00

00:20:06.620 They want to resign from the gene pool.

00:20:09.820 And it is for the good of the gene pool that they do so.

00:20:12.400 Yeah, we must be cruel only to be kind is generally my attitude towards this.

00:20:19.920 That's a phrase from our guy Hamlet.

00:20:24.020 But it's hard for me not to agree.

00:20:29.000 And I think there's also been a, and this is even worth discussing in itself,

00:20:33.720 there has been a noticeable change in the sense that abortion in the 70s was declared a right,

00:20:41.600 a privacy, which is a kind of euphemism, you could say.

00:20:46.300 The famously Bill Clinton said we, abortion should be safe, legal and rare.

00:20:52.600 So they kind of inherently said, this is not something we want to do,

00:20:58.060 but it's not something that we want to make illegal.

00:21:01.920 And let's just open up this huge can of worms by doing that,

00:21:05.680 including throwing, potentially at least throwing women in prison. 0.98

00:21:08.560 As you know, in my book, Witches, Feminism and the Fall of the West,

00:21:11.280 I talked about this where I did an article on a woman that had had three abortions. 0.98

00:21:15.980 This is what I wanted to get to.

00:21:17.720 Talk about her a little bit. 1.00

00:21:19.740 Well, okay, yeah, let's talk about her.

00:21:21.820 So I met her at a conference, an academic conference.

00:21:24.960 And then one day, years ago, whenever it was, 10 years ago,

00:21:28.680 when I was working for this English language newspaper,

00:21:31.060 I put out that abortion in Finland is the most restricted of any Scandinavian country.

00:21:36.280 You have to go in and say you want an abortion, 1.00

00:21:38.180 then you have to go and think about it for a week or something,

00:21:40.360 and then you have to go back.

00:21:41.300 There's no abortion on demand. 1.00

00:21:43.100 It's more strict conservative here.

00:21:45.400 And so I thought, well, this is in the news.

00:21:47.160 That's my hook.

00:21:48.280 So I'll do an article about it for the newspaper about abortion in Finland.

00:21:51.660 I'll interview someone that's had an abortion. 0.88

00:21:53.360 So I put out on Facebook, look, has anyone had an abortion?

00:21:56.460 If so, get in touch with me anonymously.

00:21:58.400 And this girl wrote back and said, I volunteer.

00:22:01.680 And she hadn't just had one.

00:22:03.780 She'd had three.

00:22:05.780 And the first one, she was going out with this boyfriend,

00:22:11.700 and he was a drug addict and whatever.

00:22:13.500 And so she had an abortion. 1.00

00:22:15.340 Then she got pregnant, and she kept that child. 0.79

00:22:19.340 And then the third time, she didn't feel bad about it

00:22:28.200 because she took the morning after pill,

00:22:29.660 but it just didn't work.

00:22:31.180 That was the second occasion.

00:22:32.220 So she felt that was fair enough for me to have an abortion. 0.55

00:22:34.200 And then she got pregnant another time.

00:22:35.940 And so she obviously just didn't learn from her mistakes.

00:22:38.160 She wasn't able to efficiently use contraception. 0.92

00:22:40.420 I got the distinction.

00:22:41.360 She was underweight.

00:22:42.420 She was underweight.

00:22:43.260 So I got the impression she was quite sort of mentally unstable,

00:22:46.020 which is consistent with the kind of people that get abortions. 0.99

00:22:49.700 And yeah, and then she told me all this, and I did the article.

00:22:53.520 And then sometime later, I met her in a cafe just by chance.

00:22:57.940 And it was just really tense because I knew too much,

00:23:00.140 and she knew I knew too much.

00:23:01.700 It was horrible.

00:23:03.600 Nothing to say to each other anymore.

00:23:05.920 And I think that there is a sense in which she did feel,

00:23:08.280 because she said so, that she felt what she was doing when she first said,

00:23:11.320 it was very, very wrong.

00:23:13.380 And she remembered crying and saying,

00:23:15.520 my baby will never see this sunrise.

00:23:17.500 She felt on some level that it was murder.

00:23:20.420 And I think on some level, a lot of women do think that.

00:23:24.720 Even if they have it, they still kind of think it.

00:23:27.000 And I think a lot of us, it kind of is,

00:23:29.140 you kind of can't help but thinking that that embryo,

00:23:33.180 even if it has got no consciousness, it's got no feelings, whatever,

00:23:37.280 but it has the potential for life, for human life.

00:23:40.740 And it's completely and totally reliant on its mother and on the love of its

00:23:46.320 mother.

00:23:46.860 It's totally reliant on it in the way that that mother was once in the same

00:23:51.520 position,

00:23:52.620 on her own mother, not to fall down the stairs, not to drink,

00:23:57.220 not to stick a knitting needle up herself in a warm bath, whatever.

00:24:01.300 And it is the most vulnerable member of our community.

00:24:10.020 And yet it is, or future member of our community.

00:24:12.820 And yet it is the member of our community that has less rights than an animal. 0.50

00:24:18.200 And so you can see the cognitive dissonance that it brings about.

00:24:22.440 So it does have, I agree.

00:24:24.840 I have something, hopefully something that's interesting to say on this.

00:24:29.120 Real quick on less rights than an animal. 0.97

00:24:31.060 I did find it fascinating that Pete Buttigieg, the one time presidential candidate who we

00:24:37.820 talked about a few, a year or so ago, he and Chaston or Chaston or not, not,

00:24:45.680 not so Chaston, they have had a surrogate child and they actually photograph themselves 0.99

00:24:53.320 in a hospital bed for some reason, holding a newborn.

00:24:57.100 And I, it's interesting because I recently got a new dog and, you know,

00:25:01.140 you usually wait about six weeks with a puppy because the dog needs to breastfeed,

00:25:08.060 bond with his mother, bond with his siblings and so on.

00:25:10.740 A human child, however, is ripped right from his mother's arms and put into the hands

00:25:17.360 of Chaston.

00:25:19.120 It's, it's, it is rather shocking.

00:25:21.900 Pete Buttigieg has a husband.

00:25:25.840 Yes.

00:25:26.900 Is he a queer? 1.00

00:25:27.340 It's very brave.

00:25:28.680 Yeah.

00:25:29.740 He is a queer. 1.00

00:25:30.780 But yes. 0.97

00:25:32.200 You're the only one who thinks he's not gay. 1.00

00:25:35.520 You're like, is he gay? 0.59

00:25:37.860 No. 0.53

00:25:39.320 He's a queer. 1.00

00:25:40.020 He's definitely a quack. 0.95

00:25:41.780 No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a definite, you know,

00:25:44.160 that sketch we did about it.

00:25:45.580 But it's, it's, it's a definite, it's a definite problem.

00:25:49.040 It's a definite, it's something that makes me personally unsure.

00:25:53.040 But on the one hand, it's, yeah, there is some sense in, in which,

00:25:56.460 in which a community that triumphs over other communities in the battle of group

00:26:02.240 selection has a sense of itself as sacred and a sense of itself as God being on

00:26:08.080 its side.

00:26:08.460 You know, God bless America and God bless our troops, all that.

00:26:11.400 A sense of the, therefore, of the sanctity of life and all of this sort of thing.

00:26:17.160 And abortion and the fact that Christianity, which I'm going to argue in a future book

00:26:22.580 is highly group selective, it sanctifies life like that, is, is perhaps part of its success

00:26:30.500 in a way that others, others don't.

00:26:32.100 I mean, abortion is perfectly acceptable about, you know, you'll get women that are pregnant 0.98

00:26:36.180 among the Yanomama of Venezuela and they'll get their friends to jump on their stomachs. 1.00

00:26:40.300 Or they'll just commit infanticide. 1.00

00:26:43.360 They'll have a child and they'll just literally kill it because they don't want it. 0.99

00:26:46.180 Although Venezuela is a Catholic country, but I do, certainly, I do continue. 0.93

00:26:51.120 I think it extends to the Yanomama.

00:26:52.560 I think that they have their own.

00:26:55.500 And exposure, of course, the Greeks practiced exposure. 0.94

00:26:59.180 Aristotle wrote about his disbelief that the Egyptians didn't practice exposure.

00:27:04.140 Right.

00:27:04.260 So it was perfectly, if you had an unhealthy child, you just left it out for the walk to

00:27:08.200 be taken away, whatever.

00:27:10.700 And so there was this, there's this sanctity of life element, which they are lacking.

00:27:15.760 But on the other hand, there is a, there is something logical about it.

00:27:22.220 I mean, if you think about the chaos that's happening in Ireland now, you've got, this has

00:27:26.360 gone from being an extremely religious conservative society, which it was the first time I went there

00:27:30.780 in 2002, to within 10 years or a bit more than that, being more woke than England.

00:27:37.580 And it's just incredible how much it has flipped.

00:27:40.920 And it strikes me that it might be relevant to that, that they didn't legalize abortion

00:27:46.160 until a few years ago. 0.88

00:27:48.380 So all of these, these, these histrionic, narcissistic, psychopathic women, who in England 1.00

00:27:57.680 since 1967 would have been proportionately more likely to have abortions, in Ireland 0.68

00:28:03.560 probably would have been, well, they wouldn't, they would have been less likely to, okay, the

00:28:08.800 ones that had a bit of money would make their way to England and have an abortion in England. 1.00

00:28:14.120 That was a well-known phenomenon, the boat, the abortion boat to Liverpool to get an abortion.

00:28:19.520 But, but otherwise, so you've just got this buildup of ghastly people.

00:28:25.880 And those were the very people that were making their way on that bus to Belfast, singing their

00:28:29.660 lighthearted song about abortion.

00:28:31.480 Right.

00:28:32.120 It's this, this ironic cycle of a, a Christian society kind of sets the stage for a decadent 1.00

00:28:41.480 society that is going to become anti-Christian and then maybe back again.

00:28:45.300 Um, I, I, I would add this, I mean, I agree with most everything you're saying.

00:28:50.400 I would, I would add this, the way that people argue for and against abortion is all within

00:28:57.180 the confines of a rational liberalism.

00:29:01.860 And so for instance, yes, you can certainly find a pro-life Christian who will, who will

00:29:08.400 simply say, this is in the Bible.

00:29:11.220 No, you know, we follow the Bible literally.

00:29:13.000 We can of course find that, but what you mostly find is a, an argument that goes something

00:29:19.000 like this.

00:29:20.560 Um, this person, first off, life does, can, does begin at conception, even if the, you

00:29:27.080 know, a fetus or even an early multiplying cells are not conscious, uh, there is that spark

00:29:33.380 of life.

00:29:33.880 And so they must be treated like a human and they are the most vulnerable humans out there.

00:29:40.220 So this is all liberalism, human rights, um, type arguments.

00:29:45.080 Um, and where else do they go with this?

00:29:48.420 Oh, right.

00:29:49.420 A lot of, um, people who are pro-choice will talk about rape or, you know, child molestation

00:29:55.480 or incest or, or some of these just really terrible things.

00:29:58.500 And the, the pro-life answer to that is, well, it's, you know, rape, incest, molestation,

00:30:05.940 those are already crimes, but the life.

00:30:09.660 And so anyone who engages in that should be prosecuted, but the life in question is not

00:30:14.200 the woman.

00:30:14.700 It's actually the child and the child has not engaged in rape or incest or child molestation.

00:30:19.320 So his rights should be protected, but it's all that human rights kind of dogma.

00:30:23.700 The other liberal version of this, whether it, you know, it might just be based on just

00:30:28.880 pure choice and, you know, Oh, it's great to get an abortion. 1.00

00:30:32.480 So you can go have more sex and career or whatever.

00:30:34.700 But if they actually want to explain it, they also explain it within terms of liberalism.

00:30:40.120 So this is your body and you are in control.

00:30:44.600 You have total sovereignty over your body.

00:30:46.860 You can do with it, whatever you want.

00:30:48.200 You can be abstinent. 0.99

00:30:49.200 You could be a pornography actress. 1.00

00:30:51.000 It's up to you and a parasite in your body kind of does not have rights over you. 0.98

00:30:57.280 So that child, that is the movement to this individualistic worldview, which is both are

00:31:03.980 individualistic.

00:31:05.020 I guess what I'm saying is I permit me if I just say this and I'm not trying to be pretentious,

00:31:12.160 but Immanuel Kantz, he criticized pure rationality.

00:31:19.940 What he understood is that if you engage in just pure reasoning, you are going to reach

00:31:26.480 a paradox at some point.

00:31:28.760 And Zeno found this out long before Plato.

00:31:31.500 What he meant is you, pure reason is actually limited and you ha it has to interface with

00:31:38.220 the real world to be taken seriously.

00:31:41.080 Both of those arguments, which I represented, are pure liberal reasoning.

00:31:48.020 And they're both kind of right.

00:31:49.940 And I don't think they're ever going to defeat the other argument because you're just engaging

00:31:55.020 in the abstract language of rights in both cases.

00:31:59.500 And yeah, there's a little feminism potpourri thrown in here and there's a little bit of 1.00

00:32:03.420 Christian spice thrown in here, but it's still a liberal argument and you just can't get past

00:32:09.980 that.

00:32:10.280 A counter argument is that, yeah, exactly, is that we are a group-oriented species and

00:32:16.140 yes, you are an individual woman, but that child, that fetus, is part of the group.

00:32:22.620 Right.

00:32:23.360 It's distinct.

00:32:25.340 Forget about whether it has rights.

00:32:26.780 I don't care about that.

00:32:27.560 It's part of the group and it's a matter for other people, not just you.

00:32:31.120 Would you say that men should become warriors and women should birth warriors, all else's 1.00

00:32:37.540 folly, perhaps?

00:32:38.760 I wouldn't say that, but it's their relative.

00:32:41.560 It's their relative.

00:32:41.920 Right.

00:32:42.160 What I mean is you make a non-liberal argument.

00:32:44.980 It's their child.

00:32:46.080 It's their nephew, their niece, their co-ethnic.

00:32:51.460 And it relates to them.

00:32:53.680 And you relate to them as well.

00:32:57.140 And so this idea that you're separate and distinct from the body, from the group of which

00:33:01.180 you're part.

00:33:01.740 No, you're not.

00:33:02.760 You're reliant on that group and its cooperative interaction and what it produces and whatever

00:33:07.880 in order to survive.

00:33:08.880 And therefore, you can't be separated from it in such a black and white way.

00:33:13.660 I think that's the argument.

00:33:14.520 And I also think that I quite like Dave Chappelle's argument, which is that why is it that the

00:33:20.240 women have the right? 1.00

00:33:21.160 They can just say, I can have an abortion. 0.99

00:33:23.180 OK, that's their right. 1.00

00:33:24.400 Well, then surely the man should have the right to say, look, bitch, if you're going to have 1.00

00:33:28.100 this baby that I don't want, then I don't have to support it. 0.99

00:33:31.380 That would be, he should have a right as well.

00:33:34.140 Surely he should have the right to say, look, I don't want to have this child.

00:33:36.760 You're going to go ahead and have it.

00:33:37.980 I don't want it.

00:33:39.460 So I shouldn't be hassled to support him.

00:33:42.340 I thought it was quite an, he does make some quite intelligent points, Dave Chappelle.

00:33:46.560 But yeah, it's, I mean, there was a-

00:33:50.500 But all intelligent points is when you get away from liberal rationality.

00:33:56.600 I guess that's just what I'm trying to put forward.

00:33:58.880 It's like engaging in pure mathematics to understand politics.

00:34:02.920 You're just going to reach these weird paradoxes.

00:34:05.820 Both liberal arguments are correct.

00:34:08.000 I can't find like logical faults with them.

00:34:11.380 But that just proves that that's not the way you should think about the world.

00:34:14.960 And Dave Chappelle is a lot smarter than middle class liberal because he kind of gets it of

00:34:21.020 like their incentives involved here and so on.

00:34:23.260 And I think it actually is moral to apply pragmatism to this, to the case of abortion and ask who's

00:34:31.400 having these abortions.

00:34:33.380 Well, yes, indeed.

00:34:33.980 I mean, we know he doesn't, there was research by Michael Woodley of Mani and his team, which

00:34:38.140 found that there's no, there's no correlation between intelligence and abortion.

00:34:43.660 You'd think there might be.

00:34:45.140 Because you thought these, perhaps there is now, but perhaps it's changing.

00:34:50.200 But when he did the study, based on what, you have two kinds of people that have abortions.

00:34:55.720 You have these low IQ people basically that leave it too late and they can't use the morning

00:35:02.540 after pill.

00:35:03.080 And so they have to have an abortion. 1.00

00:35:04.100 And then you get sort of middle class, unpleasant people. 0.61

00:35:08.260 Yeah.

00:35:08.580 And also older people, just women that are older. 0.95

00:35:14.060 And they find out they've got a child with Down syndrome or something and they have an abortion

00:35:17.620 and they'll often be more intelligent.

00:35:19.860 And so they sort of cancel each other out.

00:35:23.440 So abortion doesn't seem to be doing anything to intelligence.

00:35:27.020 It certainly doesn't seem to be reducing intelligence.

00:35:28.860 It may even be increasing it because it strikes me that the abortion statistics now, for America

00:35:35.460 anyway, are that it's overwhelmingly poor of people that have abortions.

00:35:39.320 And those people will tend to be of lower intelligence.

00:35:43.160 And I guess this is because people that are increasingly people that are more educated and

00:35:48.980 rich just aren't having babies.

00:35:50.540 And so having babies and thus abortions is a matter for the less well-off.

00:35:55.400 And then, of course, it's those personality traits.

00:35:57.540 And those personality traits, I mean, they are dysgenic.

00:35:59.760 Those are the kinds of people you don't want in the society.

00:36:01.780 I mean, talk about a Christian perspective.

00:36:03.120 There was actually a British, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, the very Reverend William

00:36:08.320 Ng, and he presented a Christian case for eugenics, including abortion.

00:36:14.220 And he said a good tree, he said the Sermon on the Mount itself implies that humans are

00:36:19.560 animals that can be worse or better bred.

00:36:22.580 And he said a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit.

00:36:25.760 It says that in the Bible.

00:36:27.540 And he said, this is quite clear saying that we should have eugenics. 0.94

00:36:32.360 And he said that eugenicists believe that unless civilization is guided by scientific

00:36:35.740 principles, it must come to ruin.

00:36:37.620 We stand by scientific as against emotional or sentimentalist ethics.

00:36:41.700 And yeah, he was a leading Christian of his time.

00:36:44.420 I mean, look, I, God bless him.

00:36:47.300 But that's, that's not, you rarely hear that kind of those kinds of sentiments from Christians.

00:36:54.040 In fact, what we've seen is a kind of reaction to the Texas law of almost endorsing dysgenics,

00:37:02.260 of promoting Down syndrome births.

00:37:06.180 All, I think 80 to 100% of which are terminated in European countries like France and Iceland.

00:37:15.060 I was looking at the statistics of these.

00:37:16.880 And they are, the majority of them are terminated in the United States through abortion.

00:37:20.920 But again, the people who are really in support of the, the, the Texas law were just, they were

00:37:30.580 becoming almost radically dysgenic.

00:37:33.180 70% in the United States Down syndrome, 90% in Britain.

00:37:37.020 And in Iceland, they have a, they, they, they have a policy that they want to be Down syndrome

00:37:41.280 free.

00:37:42.700 So you do notice that.

00:37:44.440 I remember when I was a child, you would see these people with Down syndrome about.

00:37:47.820 And now you don't, they're all dead.

00:37:51.420 And there aren't new ones.

00:37:53.020 Finland.

00:37:53.400 Well, some of them host podcasts.

00:37:55.600 Finland.

00:37:57.720 Finland has, Finland has a rate of 50% only for Down syndrome abortion.

00:38:03.960 Right.

00:38:04.160 So you, you, you do see quite a few of them here, but no, not in, not, and the expense involved.

00:38:09.840 I mean, I can't, the expense and the illness and the whatever it is, is unbelievable.

00:38:14.960 The expense.

00:38:15.560 Yeah.

00:38:15.780 And, and the constant chronic illness that they have.

00:38:19.880 It's long, huge, long list of terrible problems.

00:38:23.260 Right.

00:38:23.700 And we're just in a different society.

00:38:25.580 I mean, the, sadly, I mean, we, we just have to recognize this fact that children were once

00:38:31.460 considered assets and are now kind of considered liabilities.

00:38:34.160 Now I am perfectly willing to impoverish myself on behalf of my children because I get it.

00:38:40.580 But the fact is it, you, you don't have more kids and then they help out at the farm.

00:38:45.940 And it's almost like this just benefit you're, you're getting dividends from children.

00:38:50.980 No, you, you have children and you, you raise them.

00:38:54.580 That's a lot of time, money for education and so on going forward.

00:38:59.640 And whether they're going to actually take care of you, uh, when you're 90 or something, you

00:39:05.700 know, you hope so, but it's not guaranteed.

00:39:08.260 We just had a different society where first off abortion was not as readily available, but

00:39:13.820 a few down syndrome kids in the village, they could help out or run around and play and

00:39:20.860 so on.

00:39:22.400 Um, bringing those people into a post-industrial post-modern world is just a different story.

00:39:28.700 And again, in order to deal with these questions morally, I think you have to interface with

00:39:34.380 reality and not just live in a dream world.

00:39:36.860 There was this one, I mean, I'll just mention this at the risk of sounding like shrill liberal,

00:39:41.100 but the Texas governor recently gave a press conference and they asked him about the issue

00:39:46.840 of rape, um, in this abortion law. 0.72

00:39:49.140 And he said, well, I guess you have to get an abortion quick basically. 1.00

00:39:53.060 But then he said, this is Texas. 0.81

00:39:55.300 We're going to end rape. 1.00

00:39:57.120 Uh, we're going to just round up the racists, get them off the streets. 0.96

00:40:00.580 That's how you solve a problem like this.

00:40:02.640 It's just this childish abstraction that we don't live in a fallen world where there are

00:40:10.680 crimes like murder and rape, incest, abuse.

00:40:14.680 I mean, the, this is, I, I too want all these people thrown in prison, but the idea that you

00:40:20.820 could just end it through being Texas tough guy sheriff is absurd.

00:40:26.500 And it makes it sound like you're not a tough guy at all.

00:40:30.560 You're just living in some childish fantasy realm where you can pass a law and rape is

00:40:37.180 no longer an issue.

00:40:38.260 Rape is an issue.

00:40:39.440 Rape is an issue with abortion. 0.55

00:40:41.380 Just face reality as opposed to, as opposed to moralizing about it.

00:40:46.380 But if a woman is raped, she is more likely to get pregnant than if she is, has consensual 0.91

00:40:51.280 sex because the man produced, as I looked at in my book, because the man produced, even

00:40:54.920 when he rapes, because it is unconsciously a matter that has evolved to, um, uh, to gang 0.99

00:40:59.880 rape and thus to sperm selection. 1.00

00:41:01.380 So he produces more semen when he rapes. 0.99

00:41:03.120 And also if you're more aroused by rape, then you're more likely to rape. 0.99

00:41:06.580 And in prehistory, you would have passed on more of your genes. 0.80

00:41:08.780 So there's this fusion of sex and violence. 0.93

00:41:10.440 So you're more likely to get pregnant by a rapist and that person will have psychopathic

00:41:14.820 traits, which will be passed on to your child at a rate of 50%.

00:41:18.620 So, so, you know, it's, it's, it's, um, it's not a good idea to bring the child of a rapist

00:41:25.500 into the, into the, uh, you know, particularly the kind of rapist that grabs, you know, lays

00:41:30.300 in weight or whatever, an opportunist, um, um, into, into the world.

00:41:34.500 Uh, so you can, but then on the other hand, you get this, there is this deep,

00:41:40.440 um, emotional argument.

00:41:42.840 I mean, have you heard of the British comedian, Spike Milligan?

00:41:45.940 No, he's, he's quite, he's very famous in the UK and he wrote this, he famously wrote

00:41:49.980 this course, typical leftist comedian, but he wrote this poem called Unto Us.

00:41:54.260 There's a hymn, Unto Us is born a son.

00:41:56.620 And it goes to start somewhere at some time, they committed themselves to me.

00:42:00.280 And so I was small, but I was tiny in shape, lusting to live.

00:42:06.080 I hugged my pulsing cave.

00:42:08.200 Soon they knew of me, my mother and father.

00:42:09.760 I had no say in my being.

00:42:11.460 I lived on trust and love, though I couldn't think each part of me was saying a silent,

00:42:16.400 wait for me, I will bring you love.

00:42:19.260 I was taken, lined naked and defenseless by the hand of one whose good name was given 0.79

00:42:23.500 on a brass plate in Wimpole Street and dropped on the sterile floor of a foot-operated plastic

00:42:28.920 waste bucket.

00:42:30.320 And then eventually he says, no grief filled my empty space.

00:42:33.500 My death was celebrated with tickets to Danny LaRue, who was pretending to be a woman,

00:42:37.960 like my mother was.

00:42:42.660 Danny LaRue is a transvestite comedian.

00:42:45.320 So, yeah, harsh stuff. 0.70

00:42:47.320 But there is a sense in which you react like that.

00:42:49.780 I mean, would you...

00:42:50.280 It's almost like a pro-life poem.

00:42:52.960 Well, it is.

00:42:53.480 Oh, it is a pro-life poem.

00:42:55.560 Okay.

00:42:55.800 Yeah, it makes it...

00:42:57.300 I remember a friend of mine told me that his wife had had an abortion aged 18.

00:43:03.840 They met, you know, nine, eight years later, but she'd had an abortion aged 18.

00:43:08.260 And he just found this horrifying.

00:43:10.880 He just couldn't get over this.

00:43:12.220 Just how could you do such a thing?

00:43:16.480 And even though all of the rational and reasonable argument, she was only 18, she made a mistake,

00:43:21.900 she got pregnant backs, and blah, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:43:23.640 He just couldn't...

00:43:25.820 He could never come to terms with the fact she'd done this.

00:43:29.640 Right.

00:43:29.800 And to get back to your idea of like a...

00:43:32.460 The modern world is the crucible of evolution.

00:43:35.540 So if the driving engine of evolution to a very large extent was child mortality previous

00:43:44.120 to the Industrial Revolution, it's something...

00:43:46.740 I mean, again, evolution is saturated with death.

00:43:51.780 And that was the driving force of evolution.

00:43:56.240 Now we have passed to a point where child mortality is 1% or even less, and there almost needs

00:44:01.820 to be new crucibles.

00:44:04.280 And if you want to move forward, if you are fanatically dedicated to your line continuing,

00:44:13.600 you will survive this.

00:44:15.320 And if you aren't, or if you have, again, histrionic or nihilistic traits, or you're just...

00:44:20.200 Or you have those middle class traits of like, you know, how could we have a baby?

00:44:24.460 The market as it is, you know, this type of...

00:44:27.680 You're overly thinking things and overly planning as opposed to just going out and doing it.

00:44:33.080 There's a good to be impulsive.

00:44:35.460 Yeah, you're going to lose and you're going to die.

00:44:38.140 But there has to be some funneling mechanism.

00:44:41.920 There has to be a bottleneck for humanity in some way.

00:44:45.600 As I've said, it's wokeness. 0.52

00:44:47.000 Wokeness is the new crucible of evolution.

00:44:50.320 Wokeness gives you abortion if you want it. 1.00

00:44:52.780 Wokeness induces you to be masculinized if you're a woman and thus drop out of the dating 1.00

00:44:58.700 market, or be feminized if you're a man and thus drop out.

00:45:02.120 It induces you to not have children.

00:45:04.340 Belief life is pointless. 1.00

00:45:05.500 And if you've got the genetic propensity to resist it, then you will have life.

00:45:10.040 So it is...

00:45:11.220 We have brought ourselves this new crucible.

00:45:14.200 And I think abortion is part of that.

00:45:17.040 Because it is...

00:45:18.760 And that might even be why the numbers are going down.

00:45:21.300 Because the kind of people that are going to want abortions are being selected out. 0.52

00:45:26.220 And so what you end up with is the kind of people that either cannot be inculcated...

00:45:31.620 That basically can't be inculcated with wokeness because they're just genetically old-fashioned. 1.00

00:45:37.120 Or just too stupid. 1.00

00:45:38.380 Just too utterly stupid to care. 1.00

00:45:41.460 Those two... 1.00

00:45:42.640 And they often can't be inculcated with wokeness either because they're too stupid to be brainwashed with such things. 1.00

00:45:47.040 Too instinctive. 1.00

00:45:48.120 So you get those two...

00:45:49.360 That's what's left.

00:45:50.380 And that's what I think is going on.

00:45:52.420 But I just...

00:45:53.220 You can't help but thinking...

00:45:54.540 Moving as that Spike Milligan poem is, you can't help but thinking...

00:45:58.180 You say, okay, yeah, that baby, that's a random baby.

00:46:00.760 But if that baby is in the womb of some blue-haired weirdo on a bus singing about wanting an abortion... 0.90

00:46:07.540 Yeah.

00:46:07.920 That baby will not be... 1.00

00:46:08.800 Or a rapist fetus lying in wait in the victim's womb just waiting to rape more people. 1.00

00:46:16.200 You should write a poem about that. 0.98

00:46:18.860 Let's talk about Spike Milligan's poem as utterly manipulative and simplistic.

00:46:24.000 It's manipulated me, in fact.

00:46:25.980 I knew where it was going, but it was hard not to be a little touched.

00:46:31.860 But yes.

00:46:35.540 All right.

00:46:37.600 Okay, that was a good talk.

00:46:39.020 Sorry, let's just crystallize it.

00:46:40.300 Abortion, right or wrong? 0.99

00:46:41.720 It's right.

00:46:46.080 I mean, I have to say it.

00:46:48.160 I have to be just brutally honest.

00:46:50.440 I think that there are many more, less evil ways of engaging in eugenics than abortion. 0.55

00:47:02.760 And that should be engaged in.

00:47:04.160 But I think it is imperative that we maintain the legality of abortion.

00:47:10.180 I say, yeah, imperative that we maintain the legality of abortion for woke people. 0.90

00:47:15.720 Right.

00:47:16.160 Right.

00:47:34.160 I say, yeah.

00:47:35.040 Right.

00:47:35.640 Right.

00:47:35.680 Right.

00:47:44.100 Right.

00:47:44.780 Right.

00:47:45.780 Good.

00:47:46.680 Right.

00:47:46.880 Right.

00:47:47.280 Right.

00:47:47.840 Now that's why it daqui is not UFO.

00:47:48.440 Right.

00:47:48.540 I feel so cuppa come here.

00:47:49.920 Right.

00:47:50.980 Right.

00:47:51.220 Right.

00:47:51.840 Right.

00:47:51.920 Right.

00:47:52.980 Right.

00:47:53.060 Right.

00:47:53.220 , it doesn't操 him.

00:47:54.400 Right.

00:47:54.960 Right.

00:47:55.320 Right.

00:47:56.520 Right.

00:47:56.740 Right.

00:47:57.840 Right.

00:47:58.980 Right.

00:48:00.900 Right.

00:48:01.760 Right.

00:48:02.340 Right.

00:48:02.540 Right.

00:48:02.880 Right.

RadixJournal - September 12, 2021

Cruel To Be Kind： The Case For Abortion

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