Hey everybody, today we are debating the ethics of abortion and we are starting right now with Steven's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Steven. The floor is all yours. When we talk about protecting human life, we're talking about protecting conscious experiences. So when I look to see what ought to be protected in the womb, it's going to be some creature that is having or at least capable of having a conscious experience, the necessary parts in your brain that form to have conscious experiences form at around 20 to 24 weeks. So I think things like first trimester abortions are absolutely fine and permissible. That's my position on abortion. You got to kick it over to Tree who is also on the pro-choice side. Thanks for being with us, Tree. All right. Thank you for having me. My parents divorced when I was five years old and my mother got on welfare and taking custody of me. And we moved into a Roche infested department in one of the most dangerous ghettos in America located in Anacostia, DC.  Every now and then while playing hide and seek with my friends, we will come across a dead body. But as a little girl, there were two things I had to do to stay alive in the hood. One, avoid predatory men who pursued young girls like me at the time to either trick us out or to just flat out rape us. And two, to survive the constant beatings of my mother. Saying that my mother beat me was just putting it lightly.  At the age of 11, I couldn't take it anymore and I ran away and my father took custody of me and that's when my life changed for the better. I was the first child on my father's side to attend college.  If you get pregnant, you are no longer welcome back into my house and you'll be dead to me. Everything was going great until the spring of my sophomore year. I was dating a guy and we were very sexually active, but we used condoms and we was very careful. On one day while having intercourse, the condom broke and I freaked out. I called a local clinic and they told me to come back in 30 days to take a pregnancy test. On the 30th day, I went into the clinic to get a pregnancy test. However, this was not a Planned Parenthood clinic. This was a clinic funded by a Christian organization to convince Black women to avoid abortions. After giving the woman a cup of my urine, I was placed into a small room with a TV and a VCR and was told to watch a VHS tape called The Silent Screen, which was a pro-life propaganda piece that will pull the heartstrings of women, making them feel guilty about wanting to have an abortion. When the tape was over, the counselor came into my room with a box of Kleenex tissue and she was shocked to see that my face was just as dry as it was then before I even entered the room. While sitting there at the desk, she said that she had my test results back and she said, now before I share your test results, I want you to know after watching that video, knowing that the test could come back positive and you could be pregnant.  Do you want to go to hell?   She got up, got my test results, and I wasn't pregnant. But I want you all to know that if I was pregnant, I would not hesitate to get an abortion. So I want to ask my opponents, instead of going for banning abortions, how about you do the following. First, eliminate child poverty, improve the maternity leave here in America, improve Medicaid and Medicare to help healthy, to help and also help fund health facilities that will help lower the maternal mortality rate among black women who, by the way, have the highest mortality rate than any other race in America and improve the foster care in America. Just to name a few. Why aren't you fixing these problems first instead of adding to it by trying to ban abortions? I yield. You've got to thank you, Rush, for those opening statements from the pro-choice side. We're going to kick it over to Rachel and Kenden for their openings as well. If it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, folks, we're a neutral channel hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button because we have plenty more juicy debates coming up in the future with that. Rachel and Kenden, thanks so much for being with us. The floor is all yours. Do you want to go for it, Rachel? Sure, I'll go for it. Tree gave a really compelling personal anecdote there. And I think that what she proved is that even children who are born in the worst of circumstances can make a really fantastic life for themselves and that they're valuable and their life has meaning and they can grow up to affect the world in a really wonderful and positive way just like she has. I'm not going to take that angle on this. I'm going to stick to a more logical, rational type of argumentation here, which is to say that if you look at it historically, abortion was something that 100 years ago when it was first legalized in the USSR was supposed to be temporary. It was considered a stopgap measure until birth control would be legal and widely available. And then it was generally believed that abortion would be safe, legal and rare. If you're my age, I'm 41 years old, you might remember the propaganda of the 80s and 90s was that abortion was a necessary evil and the phrase was safe, legal and rare. We're 100 years into birth control being legal. It's widely available, super cheap and or free for almost anyone. You can walk into a clinic and get birth control usually for free. You can get condoms for free from health centers all over the place. You can get a prescription from Medicaid and get a $4 a month prescription for abortion or for birth control pills. We have 18 plus well tested forms of birth control yet abortion is still extremely popular. It hasn't gone away. It hasn't become safe, legal and rare. In fact, now the argument is people want absolutely no limitations on it whatsoever. We have shout your abortion. We have people who are proud to have abortions. We have people who want to tell you how they've had multiple abortions and see it as like a fight the patriarchy kind of thing to have an abortion. You're pushing back against the system by doing this. The problem with that is that it does not fight back against the system. It doesn't push back against anything. It's actually very conducive to the system. If you have a problem with things like that, abortion actually is a eugenics industry at this point. In the USSR, when they made abortions free in state hospitals without any restrictions between 1920 and 1935, it got so bad that they got to the point where Stalin, when he took power, had to make abortion illegal again because you had three abortions for every one live birth in Russia and the birth rate plummeted. This was after they'd already been through World War I in a famine and it was clear that they were not going to survive as a nation unless they did something to stop abortion. We could easily end up in that situation again if we do what the far left wants or what abortion advocates want, which is it's a woman's choice up until the baby is born. I don't think there's any historical evidence that abortion is helpful. I don't think there's an argument that it helps babies, this argument that your life isn't worth something if you're going to be poor or have a really rough time of it. Believe me, we have a lot of sympathy for those situations. I was in situations like that myself. However, there's more to life than that. My position is that it's a human life from conception and that you wouldn't have to kill the baby if it wasn't murder. You got to cook it over to Kenden as well. Hello everyone. Yes, I'm Kenden Farr. Much like Rachel, I'm not so much a pro-life as anti-choice. I don't believe that any human agency should decide whether an individual human life should end arbitrarily. I've noticed as well whenever we talk about this issue or whenever one talks about this issue, a lot of the terms that we use are euphemistic. The word abortion is actually the wrong word. Abortion is another word for miscarriage. What we're actually describing as a termination, which is more honest because we're terminating a life before it's truly emerged from the womb and flourished. We also refer to clumps of cells as opposed to fetus or baby just tied to anesthetize. Is that the right word? To soften the bloat, to massage the truth.  I noticed that the personal autonomy argument only reapplies in this issue, my body, my choice. You very rarely hear that phrase in any other context. Unlike deaths, I don't really care when the baby becomes conscious or not because eventually if left with no devices, if it's a healthy normal pregnancy, it will become conscious. I'm mindful of the fact that consciousness is an inevitable part of the growth within the womb. It appears to me that the pro-choice advocacy is mainly economic rather than moral. Abortion is seen as the cheaper option, and this is where I want to tap into what Tree was saying earlier. Now Tree has obviously given us a harrowing story, and I have genuinely sympathy for her and she's obviously come up hard and I respect that. She talked about how instead of banning abortions, why don't we improve the welfare system and healthcare provision for women and things like that? As someone who lives in northwest England and as someone who has studied the American healthcare system quite tentatively, it's my opinion that the healthcare system in your country is a joke, no offense to any Americans listening. The problem is that because abortion is no longer just safe, legal and rare, it's as common as cookies, there's no incentive to improve any of your welfare systems because it's cheaper simply to kill the baby. In the same way, it's the difference between building shelters for the homeless and exterminating the homeless. Both would solve the problem of homelessness, but one of them is brutal and it's unconscionable. For me, abortion is unconscionable. You don't need to improve food stamps or women's shelters or anything like that if there's no baby to feed, and I think that's the reason why a lot of pro-choice activists take that position, at least in politics. That's kind of an opening statement. That's my ramble over. I'll kick it over to somebody else. You've got to thank you very much for that opening. We're going to kick it right into open dialogue. Why don't you know, folks, if you'd like to hear more, if you'd like to learn more about any of our guest views, you can by clicking on their links, which are down in the description box waiting for you right now, and that includes if you're listening to this debate through the podcast. As we put our guest links in the description box for the podcast as well. With that, thanks so much. Destiny, Tree, Rachel, and Ken in the floor is all yours for open dialogue. I would like to ask Rachel, I want to say that don't look at my story as a typical thing. I am not the norm. I'm very rare. A lot of children die in the hood through stray bullets or through the abuse of their own parents. As a matter of fact, the reason I just spared this because I didn't have that much, but the reason why I ran away is because I began to get taller and as I get my father's six foot seven and I'm six foot three. So I began my mother's five foot one. So I began to have a growth sprout and I began to get stronger and I got tired of those beatings, those horrific beatings. And one day I just grabbed the belt that my mom used in the belt buckle and the way she looked at me. That was like the worst beating I ever got. And I thought she was going to kill me.  And I thought, well, let me, because I was a Christian at the time, let me run away. Let me run away so I don't go to jail.  Because eventually she said, we have a thing in the black community that that black parents say, tell to their children, I brought you into this world. I'll take you out. That's how they feel. And it has happened many times. So don't look at my situation as something that's the norm. It's not the norm. Also, I want to address your argument in reference to birth control. Birth control has been going on for centuries. You're pagan, right? Did you or did I somebody was telling me you were you practice to pray pagan religion? Rachel? No? Sorry. Oh, no, I'm Orthodox Christian. Oh, that makes it easier. Well, why is it that God is allowed to kill babies, but I'm not?  It's very harrowing. But we can't base an entire debate of ethics over, you know, my personal story, yours, Destiny's or Kendall's. And although suffering is a reality of life, it's we're never going to eliminate suffering. You're never going to completely eliminate poverty, disease, abuse or suffering. And I eliminated my suffering by well, if I had an abortion, I would have eliminated my suffering if I had an abortion. Well, but to say that the way to solve these problems is to just kill babies before they're born is a very eugenics sort of statement to say that it would be better for them to be dead than to grow up in poverty. First of all, I mean, I was eugenics equivalent to an income situation. Well, that's exactly what Margaret Sanger proposed was that, you know, these people are she thought blacks were inferior. She thought we were subhuman. That's the reason why Margaret Sanger did that. You're making the argument that it would be better for people to be dead than to be poor or suffer. And I'm saying that you can't eliminate suffering. My argument is, is that I have dominion over what's going on in my uterus and nothing within my uterus have more dominion over me. I am, that's why I thought she was a God. I thought she was pregnant because I was going to bring the goddess and the God situation in there. But since you are religious, I'm just saying like, you know, God don't have no problem with abortions. But let me just say this, there was no such thing as abortion during the biblical time because abortion is a medical procedure.  So I'm saying, obviously, God does not have a problem with just killing children after they're born. And there's also scriptures in the Bible where he also have women to drink a potion that gives you a miscarriage. So if there's no problem with having miscarriages and God killing children, why is it, why is it a problem for me? I'm not making a religion. I am Christian, but I'm not making a religious argument. I'm making a logical argument, which is that you don't stop suffering. You don't end suffering by killing people before they can live by by that logic. It would make sense to just wipe out the planet than we end suffering.  That's the false comparison because there's something growing inside my uterus. Okay. Yes. And that thing is a person. So at what point does the fetus, what point does the baby inside your uterus have bodily autonomy? Because you're making a bodily outside my uterus. Okay. But at one point you couldn't survive outside someone else's uterus. Well, here's that you asked me a question. I answer it. I asked it. It hasn't it hasn't autonomy autonomy where it can survive outside my uterus. Usually when it's like five months, right? It's usually when it's five months. Okay, but that argument also doesn't make sense. And here's why, because when a baby is viable at 22 weeks, it still can't survive without intense round the clock care until it's what I mean, at what point do we no longer need people to survive? Are we going to, are we allowed to kill everyone before they're 16, before they're 18, before they're 12? If you depend upon my body to survive, I get to make the rules.  Okay, Trie, but that would, then that logic would have to apply to a baby who was born at term at nine months. When that baby is born, if the mother does not feed it, it dies. Yes, it's the exact same argument. No, no, no, no. Baby can be. No, no, because a lot of women can't lactate. Okay. No, but someone has to feed it. It's dependent on some, but it does. So that person can say, Look, if I don't feed you, you get to die. And that is a thing. No, no, no. Other people could feed the baby. It's not, there's we have a thing called as a community to raise a child. Okay, depends on some.  That's just silly. Hold on, hold on. Let me just finish saying this. The child, you're just straight out lying. The child can be fed through other means, through formula, through a wet nurse, and through other means. The child does not need me after this. You're missing what I'm saying. I'm saying the logical extension of your argument is that nobody has a right to live until they are no longer dependent on someone else for survival. That's not my argument. My argument is if you live, I'll stop. No, if you depend upon, here's my argument. Listen to me closely. If you depend upon my body to survive, I get to dictate the rules. What I'm saying to you, like I said earlier, if the body, if the baby kids, I think from a distance research prior to coming here, because I just was told today I can come. A child has a chance of surviving a preemie at five months. So, hey, there is that. But so therefore underneath that, and I'm willing to say, I like the heartbeat bill, but I also rather say in three months is a good number. But there's no hill I'm willing to die on. What I'm saying is, is that I'm giving you the date where I'm giving you my cutoff period. The baby can survive outside my body. Good luck. I'll give you a quick, but then we got to kick it over to Steven. Steven, you look especially enthralled. So go ahead, Rachel, and then we'll kick it off. I'm just, I'm letting them do the back and forth instead of, because for abortion arguments, there's like 12 different ways to approach it. So we keep like, you want to get to like 20 different arguments, so rather let them run down the whole like. Right. What I'm trying to do is show that what Tree is doing is making an arbitrary decision about when someone is autonomous and can live on their own. And that biological extension, her argument means that when a baby is born, if the person who is charged with taking care of it says, look, this baby is a burden to me. It depends on me to live. I have to get up in the middle of the night. I have to feed it or the group or the home that it's at. Whoever is charged with taking care of a child because children cannot survive without round the clock care for years after birth. That's neither mother to do that. I'm telling you that logically, because this is, I do debates all the time. I'm a student of logical argumentation. If you're going to argue that you have the right to kill a human being, because it depends on you for survival, then by logical extension, you would have to apply that to after birth abortion or after birth. The baby does not have to depend upon a mother after she gave birth to it. And you know that you're just being disingenuous. I'm not. It's not disingenuous. It's perfectly logical. So answer this question. I'm gonna show how very you're disingenuous. If the mother dies at birth, the baby's gonna die because there's nobody to give breast milk to it.  Someone has to feed it, right? Answer the question. If the mother dies- If someone doesn't feed it. No, answer the question. I did. No, you're not. I'm answering the question. Yes. So you're saying that when a mother dies that nobody's gonna take charge of the baby and feed it. That's what you're saying.  But when has that happened? I'm telling you that logically- The argument you're making could be used. Just to be sure that we can hear each of you. That doesn't happen. The baby is born. If the mother dies, somebody takes care of the baby. She's saying that if the baby doesn't die, if the mother decides that she doesn't wanna breastfeed the baby, the baby's gonna die. That doesn't happen. That's not what I'm saying. You're not understanding. I'm sorry, but you don't understand logic. What I'm saying is that the argument you're making could be used for people to say- Ill-logical. If this baby depends on me to live, then it is within my rights to kill it at any point if I decide to breastfeed her and some- That's not what I'm saying. It is a logical extension of your argument, ma'am. I'm sorry that you don't understand the argument. I did not say that. I said when the baby- You don't understand the argument. No, you don't understand my argument. And do you know I'm questioning you? Your argument is based on feelings. That's why you're reframing it. You're reframing my argument. Hold on. If we have too much speaking over each of them, you won't be able to hear either of you. Just wanna be sure that there's not- No, she's reframing my argument.  That's not exactly what I'm saying. That's not what I said. That's not what I said. Okay, I said- She doesn't understand what I'm saying. Hold on, because you won't ask this question. I'll just feel. No, she didn't- No, you- This is- Wait, hold on. Let's let the tree finish, and then we'll come back to Rachel. Hold on, I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna ask Kinden. And I'm gonna make it plain again. If the mother dies, after giving birth to the child, does that mean that the child dies because there's no one to take care of it? That was not my argument. That was your argument? No. I thought you- I'm sorry, I thought you- Yeah, why are you still talking? You said you- I still hear ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Okay, I'm at- And also I'm talking to Kinden. I'm trying to give somebody else the talk. Kinden, answer that question. If a woman dies, after she gave birth to a baby, the baby's outside the womb, does the baby die too? Not necessarily, no. Okay, the man can have it now. Do you wanna go for a Disney? I'm not sure how to come back from that. Wonderful being honest. So this is like my simple question for Kinden and Rachel. Are when you consider a person dead? The problem of death is a great philosophical conundrum. Even scientists find it difficult to identify death. We know symptoms of death. For example, obviously decomposition is the obvious one. But obviously the body doesn't die at once. It dies in stages. There's brain death. There's all sorts of things. So when do I consider a person dead? When they're six feet under and they've decomposed so thoroughly, they're not even a talented doctor could bring them back. That's the best you're gonna get. If I were to chop a person's head off and I were to show you the body and it's not six feet under yet and hasn't begun to decompose, you would say that that person is still alive? No. So with this, I don't think that decomposition, we can decompose as living people. Frostbite might be an exception. Yeah, this is living necrosis. Yeah, and we're probably dead before decomposition happens. Probably dead before we're buried, hopefully. So backing up, I think we, I'll try again. Like reasonably, I understand there's a hot philosophical debate, maybe, I guess, around when a person is dead, but when will we roughly consider a person to be dead? I think we've all kind of come to a consensus on this, societally speaking. Yeah. Me, it's when the soul is no longer in the body. Where is the soul at? Well, now that's a metaphysical question. That's a philosophical question that I'm sure you're not interested in because I remember in our previous debate when I talked about souls you scoffed, so. Well, sure, but like, how do you tell me, when do you know the soul's left the body? Let me ask that. If I show you a corpse that's rotted six months, do you think that the soul is still in that body? Or if I show you somebody that just had a heart attack and they're on the table, is their soul still in their body? I think I can grant you this without damaging my argument. We'll just, let's just say that death is after the heart has stopped and there's no more brain activity. Let's just grant you that and see where it goes. Sure, okay, I think that's fair. I think without, before we even get into slide debate tactics, I think people generally agree that death is when you cease having a conscious experience. There's, it seems like there's not happening anymore. It used to be heart death. We found ways to keep the heart going a little bit. And as long as there's some sort of brain activity going on where it seems like you can have a conscious experience, people seem pretty comfortable to say you're either alive or dead based on that, right? If you're in a coma, why do we keep people in comas alive? Because hopefully they wake up. If we think that they're never gonna wake up then we pull the plug. So I think generally we say that death happens at the cessation of a conscious experience. So turning around, I would apply that to the beginning of life. If we don't say that life ends when the body is completely decomposed, when the body is completely destroyed, when some biological processes happen, when we say death happens when a conscious experience ends, but when I look to the beginning to see, well, what is the start of our experience that we wanna protect? I'd probably say it's the beginning of a conscious experience. I think that's the most consistent way to define the parts of life that we're interested in protecting. But like the coma patient who has the possibility of a conscious experience in the future, so does the unborn child in the belly of the woman. So the coma patients, so oftentimes people will bring up this potential of life and they'll make an ontological error where they'll say the potential of life, therefore we should protect it where they're trying to instantiate all of the concepts that go along are all of the properties of life they try to give to the potential of life. But that doesn't really work. We can talk about two different things. We can talk about life, we can talk about the potential of life, the potential of life is not life. There is no other category where we would treat the potential of something as something else. The reason why we would protect a coma patient isn't because they have the potential of being alive, it's because they already were alive and they asserted some, hopefully ability to stay alive, right? If you go into the hospital unless you filled out a do not resuscitated DNR, people assume you probably wanna be kept alive. So I reject the idea that because there's a potential of life, it ought to be granted the same ontological properties as a life itself because I don't think anybody else treats any other category that way. No, okay. Potential of life is not the phrase I should use, it's the potential of consciousness. The baby is still, the fetus is still alive, even if it's not capable of thinking and dreaming and planning its future. And so the potential of future consciousness developing is true, but there's not one yet. Nothing exists yet to assert itself. There's nothing to regard. Yes, but it's an inevitable part of the growing of the development process. Yeah, sure. If the pregnancy is healthy and viable and there are no complications, this clump of cells to use that popular phrase will eventually develop into a baby that is able to do cogitate. And it is inevitable that when we drop a seed on the ground, a tree will grow, but the seed is not a tree. And my hand holding the seed is not a tree. The potential or the future development of something is not the same thing as the stage is preceding it. So it is true that oftentimes left to their own device as a pregnancy will grow into something that will have a conscious experience, that conscious experience is not there yet and you cannot treat the development of something in the future as the thing that exists now. There are two fundamentally different things. Potentially, but the seed itself, I agree, the seed is not the tree, but the seed is tissue, whereas the sapling or the root system and everything is the organism in its earliest form. So while you might not call the seed with the roots and everything else a tree yet, you would acknowledge that as long as nobody sabotages the growth of the sapling, the tree is inevitable at that point. Absolutely. But there's a lot of statements that are being thrown in now that are, I'm not gonna obfuscate, makes it sound really bad for you, I don't mean that. But it's clouding the argument and I don't think they matter. So the seed is tissue, the seed is an organism. A corpse has a lot of tissue. A corpse arguably has more biologically going on than a seven month old fetus, which I would say has a bigger right to life than a decomposing corpse, right? But so the presence of tissue, the presence of organs, the development or whatever of some biological system isn't sufficient to say that something is alive, right? It might be one necessary condition, but it's not sufficient. Seems like in order to get that sufficient to be protected as life, we need to have that conscious experience, something that exists that's asserting itself to exist and that doesn't exist in fetuses until around 20 to 24 weeks. Okay, well, in response to that point, I would suggest that sufficiency is a matter of personal taste. That obviously you've drawn the line with the development of consciousness. I can respect that as long as it's consistently applied and obviously we'd have to talk and hash that out. The problem is that as I said in the beginning, I'm not so much pro-life as anti-choice. I do not like the idea of people deciding whether a thing should live or die based on economic or social circumstances over which it has no control. The thing I always bear in mind with this is that the child didn't ask to be conceived. It's growing in the belly. It's entirely at the mercy of external forces that as you pointed out in the first few weeks of its existence, it's completely unaware of.  I don't want to take it too far off the path. One of the reasons I oppose the death penalty is precisely this reason.  And one of the big reasons, because I should come clean on this, I used to be a teacher and part of my teacher, a high school teacher, my part of my teacher training was I was taken on what we call an SEN school, special educational needs. I imagine you must have an equivalent in the United States. And the deputy head teacher. Well, the deputy head teacher, what you would call a vice principal, was taking me on a tour of the building and he was showing me the work that the kids were doing. And these are kids with severe learning difficulties, severe disabilities. They're learning to tie their shoelaces and make a hot drink. It's very basic life skills. And he was talking about the nature of it and he never renders malformations. But we don't get many kids with... And of course, we don't get many kids with Down syndrome anymore. And I went, oh, okay. And why is that? And he goes, well, because, well, there are two theories and one mainstream tools are better at integrating them, which is a good thing, that's positive. But the other reason is the parents just abort them. And I went, oh, okay. And that issue, that answer haunted me as he took me around the rest of the school. And the reason it haunted me for a good 15, 20 minutes, I had to solve it, is that that was a eugenics argument. The people had decided that because their child had Down syndrome, it was unworthy of life. It was unworthy of existence. Whereas I would argue that it falls upon a society or culture as Tree was mentioning in her opening statements, we ought to provide more resources for people who, through no fault of their own, have difficulties and complications. So that's my position. Okay, so if possible, it would be nice to stick to one of these at a time. So every single thing here it's a non sequitur or not relevant to the argument. So initially you said that anti-choice, whether things should live or die based on economic or social circumstances, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about if there is a thing to be protected that is being killed. Because we can all agree that if it's not a thing worth protecting, it doesn't matter if it's being removed for economic or social circumstances. The same way that I might remove a tumor from my neck, I might abort a, or I might cause a miscarriage or abort a fetus because it doesn't serve whatever purpose. So we're not talking about killing a child based on economic or social circumstances. We're talking about whether or not a life exists that ought to be protected. You make the statement too, like the child didn't ask to be conceived. That would be like me making the statement, how do you feel about something five years after your death? You can't, you have no feelings. There is no person or entity there to have a feeling. A child doesn't ask to be conceived because the thing that is conceived does not exist to assert its preference. It doesn't exist to assert any point of view. So yeah, it doesn't ask to be conceived but that's a, as nonsense as statement is, as talking about the preference of somebody that's already dead. There's nothing there to speak of. For the first few weeks of existence, we talk about something being completely unaware that's my argument. There is no awareness. There's not even a conscious experience there, hence forth, nothing to protect. And then when we say open the door to all manner of horrors, that's up to interpretation. I mean, given my subjective view of this, if we say that my interpretation of everything is correct, I always say that the manner of horrors it's being open to is forcing women to be incubators for things that don't even have conscious experiences yet. I would say that's a potential manner of horror. If you can see a potential horror that might logically flow from any of my stated positions, I'd be interested to hear them. I don't think there are any. I think I'm pretty consistent. That's why I started, how do we define death? And then I walked that back to how do we define life? I don't think I'm making any concessions about how we treat living people based on my views of abortions, whereas you necessarily are making the concession that a woman must be forced to do something with her body against her will to incubate something, which I would argue is a much bigger concession than what I would ask for. You talk about opposition to the death penalty, not relevant. One is to support the death penalty and support or be against abortion. One is talking about whether or not a life is in existence yet and the other is talking about the appropriate punishment for a moral agent that is making a choice that we all agree is immoral. One of those punishments could very easily be death. That's fine.  If you can make decisions, then you are ready to deal with the consequences, et cetera, et cetera. And then you talk about, a lot of people bring up eugenics arguments all the time. I don't believe people are against eugenics. And I don't think eugenics is in and of itself necessarily a bad thing. For instance, everybody will say that they're against eugenics, but then if you ask, why ought we oppose incestual relationships?  They might have dozens. Okay, well, that argument against incest is an argument in favor of eugenics. When you tell a woman, hey, it's not really the best idea to get pregnant after age 35 because the rates of Down syndrome start to increase dramatically. That's a eugenics argument. Women opting to have children earlier in life because they can have healthier pregnancies and have healthier children. Kind of eugenics argument. So I think that there are certain types of eugenics that are probably very bad. So not having black babies or not having babies with brown eyes, that's probably not good. But other types of quote unquote eugenics where we're checking for fetal health, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. So to circle all the way back, I still haven't heard a single good opposing viewpoint for why we shouldn't value the beginning of life when the conscious experience starts rather than when just the formation of some cells begins. I haven't heard any controversy. I think I can jump in and maybe help because I see where you're coming from, Destiny, what you're trying to say. And I wanna know, are you aware of the fact that scientists generally have trouble understanding what consciousness even is and that we don't necessarily know for sure that babies, let's say at 16 weeks of gestation, do not have some kind of conscious experience? An example of this would be, if I take a high dose of DMT and I'm seeing machine elves and I'm hallucinating all kinds of fun, crazy stuff, I'm having a conscious experience, but what does that mean and where does the value of that come in? So I think to cite consciousness is somewhat arbitrary. Could you maybe give us a better definition of when you think consciousness starts, why you've chosen that as the marker, why that's the bar that you've chosen? So I said at the very beginning of this debate, the reason why I chose, so I don't believe that consciousness is arbitrary. I think for the purpose of a debate, maybe somebody could wheel that line out, but when we step into the real world, it is very clearly the line at which we draw between alive and dead when it comes to people in hospitals. This is not an assertion of philosophy, it's not a game that a neuroscientist might play and it's not just in the domain of internet debate, it is a choice that is made every single day in hospitals all across the world throughout all the history of time, throughout all the cultures of society for when a person is dead or alive. When you no longer can wake up again and be a conscious person, you're considered dead.  Well, if you're never gonna wake up again. How do we know if I'm never, never is a very metaphysical concept. How would you know if I'm never gonna wake up again? So let me understand, do you think that these determinations are never made? I think that they're made, but I do think that they're arbitrary. For example, when you said we generally pull the plug on people if we think they're not gonna wake up, that's not something that I would necessarily do. And that gets into a whole nother debate over whether you think that life extension is a good idea or how far we should take that. What I'm saying is your argument is resting on the fact that if somebody is unconscious and we don't think they can have a conscious experience in the future, it's ethical to let them die. And as Kenyan said, or Kenan said, we know that babies will have, like the vast majority of them will have conscious experiences if we don't kill them first. So I'm trying to- Yeah, can you tell me what you mean when you say arbitrar? I need to understand what you mean when you say arbitrar. I mean, you're kind of basing it on a preference or something that's not very objective or something that you don't have a good epistemology for, something you don't have a good logical reason for. So when we talk about the beginning of life, we're almost necessarily in some normative category because we're trying to create a definition. We're not going to find this epistemically, like scientifically, right? So necessarily it's going to be somewhat arbitrary, of course, but any definition that you give is going to be just as arbitrary as any definition that I get, right? Whether or not we ought to value something as living as necessarily a normative position, right? You can't think of any, even if you tell me life begins at five seconds past conception or at the moment of conception, I'm going to ask you, why do you value it at that point? And that's when the normativity comes in, you're going to have to adjust it. So say that my position- That's actually why I would reject the idea of using normative ethics because depending on, you know, the time and the ethos that you are raised in will determine what the normative ethics of the time are. So I don't think that we can use just normative ethics kind of infers like a consensus, right? Can you give me an example? Can you give me an example? Just a very simple, quick statement. What is an example of something about when life begins that you believe is devoid of normativity? What do you mean? Something- Like what's the statement of like, this is when life begins that you think is an enormous statement? I think we know when life begins but you're not hinging your argument on that. You're hinging it on when consciousness begins and I'm asking you to tell me how we establish when consciousness begins. Hold on. So all of us are trying to figure out like when human life, when the thing is like a human worth protecting, we're all trying to figure that out. So I'm asking you, what's an example of a statement you believe is not normative? Is it a moral statement? What's an example of that? Well- Is there all gonna be normative statement? So my moral statement, which is that if it's a human being and you intervene to kill it, even if it's in the earliest fetal stages that that would be unethical because if you did not intervene, it would probably grow and more likely grow and have a conscious experience and be born. You would probably say that that's not normative, right? Well, the part that I would say is normative is when you're saying that like this is a human being, like at the very beginning of this moment of conception that that's like, real quick, when I say normativity or normative statement, that's another word for like a moral statement. I would say that that statement has some level of subjectivity to it. We can't go into the world and discover like what is a human, when do humans exist, right? These are statements that as humans, like we decide these things. There's not like an answer to that. But I think we can. I think we can definitely determine that something's human. Your argument is that it doesn't matter if it's human, it matters if it's conscious, right? Okay, let me try this one more time. What I'm saying is that you can't say that my definition is arbitrary when we're talking about like, when do we begin to protect a life as like a thing that is worth protecting? Because every single statement is going to be somewhat arbitrary by your definition of arbitrary. All of them are arbitrary. There isn't like, this is objectively correct. They're all arbitrary. No, I'm speaking specifically to your argument of when consciousness begins. Sure, that's fine. I'm just saying that they're all arbitrary. I don't think that's a good like contentional argument. But I'm sorry, moving past that one real quick. So you're telling me, if you want to point to the idea that it's hard to draw some distinction between A and B, like when is a person going to have a conscious experience again, like in the coma versus never, and you're going to try to argue that, that like, well, because you can't give me the exact answer for this, that actually there's a specific name for this logical file that I can't think of it. But basically like, if you have two different categories and there's a lot of overlap or blur, and it's hard to distinguish one from the other, you can, what? Oh, I thought I heard him say, sorry. But yeah, if it's hard to distinguish between A and B, or there's a blurry line in the middle, therefore there's no difference between the two. That's, that doesn't logically follow. Like, for instance, if I point out- Let me clarify then. Let me clarify because it sounds like we're getting off in tweets. Can you tell me- Hold on, let me finish real quick. We're not getting any tweets. I don't like that you said that. Okay, so let me just finish this quick example, okay? You're trying to say like, oh, well he could be countries, could not be countries.  But their brain was exploded. And then I give you another person who fell asleep and I say, which one is more likely to become conscious again? You're always going to point to the sleeping person. So it might be hard to tell the difference between one or the other in a lot of narrow edge cases, but you can't use that to say like, well, we have no idea because clearly we make these judgments all the time about who will become conscious. Perfect, that's perfect. So tell me when consciousness begins. So it's hard to know exactly when, but it seems to be the case that conscious is an emergent property from several structures in the brain that start to exist and communicate with each other at around 20 to 24 weeks during gestation and the brain of the fetus. So we don't know. Well, we don't know exactly, so what I'm saying is there's no ethical line you could draw where you could say, this is conscious now and it's not conscious now and that's where we can draw the line of where we can abort something. When you tell me that I don't know exactly when it is, what you could do if you wanted to attack Mark and say, well, you need to broaden your range of it. Since you don't know exactly 20 to 24 weeks is not good. You should say 16 to 28. If you want to do something like that, then you could do that. But you can't say because I can't give you an exact argument that I'm incapable of making that distinction very, very, very quickly. Loki makes a wager with some goblins, eventually he loses and what he'd wager was his head.   You can't take any of it but you can take my head but not any of my neck and they move the ax back and forth and they're not entirely sure where does the neck end and the head begin and he ends up walking. It's called Loki's paradox, I think. Just because I can't tell you exactly where one begins and one ends, doesn't mean I can say, look, there is no such thing as heads or necks because it's hard to tell when it starts. It doesn't work that way. So what I would say to that is that if you to hinge your entire ethical argument on consciousness and when consciousness begins when we cannot even quantify what a valuable conscious experience is. If I'm dreaming, am I conscious or am I not? If I'm DMT tripping, am I conscious, am I not? If I'm 18 weeks gestation versus 24 weeks gestation, am I conscious or am I not? I would say that it makes much more sense logically to say we're not going to intervene and kill something before it can have a conscious experience because that's our preference because it would be either more convenient for us, it would be less hardships for us because we foresee that the child might not have a good future. I'm saying these are all very bad. I'm not making any of those arguments. It could be clear also every argument you're making can be very easily addressed. When you take DMT or when you're dreaming, even if you were to temporarily completely cease your conscious experience, you already existed and you already asserted something. If Rachel says, I'm gonna do this, don't let me die. And then you disappear from consciousness. They do exist. You're just saying that because they're not conscious yet. No, no, we're not talking. You're saying that if it's not conscious yet, it doesn't matter if it already exists. No one here is denying that fetuses exist. And I'm saying that if you stop it from having the conscious experience, then it can't have it. No one is saying whether or not fetuses exist. We all agree that they exist. The question is, has there been a conscious experience yet to assert itself or any preferences? For Rachel, for you, before you take DMT. How does a 20 week gestation in fetus assert itself? Because it's having a conscious experience. How do you know that? You don't know that. Because the necessary, I don't know what to put it. Scientists told you? No, you don't know 100%. Technically, if you wanna get ultra philosophical about it, there's something called a philosophical zombie. I don't even know if you're having a conscious experience. It's not an insult, but we don't technically know if anybody is right. How do you know you're not just a brain and a vet? How do I know I'm right? How do any of us know? So I'm saying this is a very silly place to place an ethical argument off of, in my opinion. It's not silly, only in debate terms, as it's silly in the middle of a debate. But if you step into the real world, these are the decisions that we make in hospitals every single day across all of time and across all of space. Why do you debate? If you think that debate is silly and there's this delineation between the real world and philosophy and that we can't use logical argumentation to determine these things because in the real world, we just all agree, or in the real world, these are all fallacies. It's a logical fallacy to say, well, in the real world, it works differently. No, no, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying- So what's the point of debating? No, no, I'm not trying to hand wave debate. What I'm trying to do is to take, because if I'm in the middle of making an argument, sometimes I'll take a step back and I'll say, have I committed myself to a position that actually seems highly incongruable with a macro picture? So when we're in the midst of an argument and we start saying things like, well, really, we don't have any idea if any conscious experience exists. We don't know anything about it. Well, let's take a step back on a macro scale. Do we really believe that? Clearly we don't believe that. If we look at how we behave in the real world, if we look at how we behave in hospitals, where we're deciding when to kill people or not to kill people, clearly we have some concept of conscious experiences. When we look at how we treat people with medicine, when we look at how we analyze structures of the brain, when we look at where like death comes from, right?  It's not when you lose a kidney. It's when your brain stops to function. It seems like we have some conception of where conscious experience comes from. So we go back then to the debate and we look at the microscopic arguments we're making to say things like, we don't know anything about conscious experience. It seems like not the best faith of an argument. It seems like a debate argument because that's not true. All of us have some concept of like how consciousness works and how we decide when people are dead. Yeah, I don't wanna soak up the whole entire debate with you and I going back and forth on epistemology and philosophy and logical argumentation. So we'll just kind of leave that there for right now. I think we've kind of exhausted that and we'll let the other two panelists say some things. Rachel and Kenden, are you both life absolutists? Can you define that? Meaning that everybody should live no matter what. Under no circumstances, no one should die under any circumstances. Actually, I'll even say under no circumstances, should anyone be killed? I would not be a life absolutist. There are too many variables there. So for example, in the case of self-defense, I know there are people like Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, who refuse to defend themselves, even if someone comes at them with a knife. I'm not one of those people. Is it that situation? For example, in the case of self-defense, if there's a chance that one of you is gonna go down, it's an animal reflex to defend yourself. So if you believe that, if what you mean by life absolutist is someone who cannot think of a situation in which killing another human being would ever be invisible, then no, I'm not one of those people. Okay. There must be exceptions to it.  So there must be an exception to an absolute rule. If you see what I mean. If that's not an absurd thing to say. But there are certain decisions. Rachel, can you kill the spirit? No. So what's the problem with abortion as a Christian? Well, again, I don't know if I wanna get into a religious framework because that's not really in honor of the panel. I don't wanna sit here and talk about like theological concepts because everyone else here besides me is secular. So I don't think it's actually proper to get into God. Cause then we would have to define who God is, what God, which God. I'll take your definition of God in the Bible. Is that fair?  Because people interpret the Bible differently. Even Christians. Yeah, I was gonna say as well though, because it would put right, I would argue that not that Rachel needs me to defend her, but it would put her on the spot. Because of course, any religious argument we, she makes in defense of the pro-life position can be easily discussed with, yeah, because I'm not religious, so it doesn't matter. You know, that kind of invalidates the position. That's true for you, Kenden. But when I'm talking to Rachel, you know, I wanna see what is the root cause of why she really is against abortion.  And that's why I asked her. No, so that's why I don't, I'm not making a religious argument. I'm making an ethical argument. Well, could spirit be spiritual too?  Yes, but you're forming a strawman because I'm not making that argument. That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying- I'm not, I'm asking you a question. I didn't even frame nothing. I asked you a question. I asked you, do you believe- Well, I mean, you could ask me what my favorite color is or what my favorite dessert is, but we're here to debate the topic and that's not my argument. But you accuse me of strawmaning you and I'm saying, no, I did not. You're lying on me again. I asked you a question. I asked you- Not lying. Do you, yeah, you did. I asked you- Everything I said that you don't like is lying. No, I mean, no, I asked, did I not, yes or no? Did I not ask you, can you kill the spirit? Did I not ask you that? Yeah, and I said no. So how was that strawmaning you?  I did not say that. Okay, I answered your question. I answered your question. So are you going to actually make an argument?   And by the way, I'm agnostic, I'm not religious.  So I wanted to know like, what's the big deal? I told to get the argument of conscious, not conscious sent in, I get that.   I didn't tell you anything but what I was just saying.  Right. Right. And did you say that would you agree then that you can't kill the spirit as you put it? Well, I'm not religious, but that's what I'm asking. But I'll go ahead and say, I mean, I'm not asking, but I'll just say, sure, you can't kill the spirit. I'll go ahead and tell them.   It's just a dead end, it's a total non sequitur. It's not even worth considering when we're trying to have an argument here. Well, killing me right now is against the law and nice try, you wouldn't even have that opportunity before I get you first. And I'm only talking about- I don't know about that, I'm a firearms instructor and I teach defense, yeah. You don't know what I'm doing. Well, you're trying to get all bad on me, so I just thought- I mean, I'm just saying, do you know my firearm experience? Okay, so- Do you know mine?  But you're trying to, this is ma'am, I'm with all of you- Okay, so, but anyway, let me get back on that.  You're in contests with me and I just took you on it, okay? So here's my thing. So let me go ahead and say what I gotta say. So- Destiny, I'm sorry that this person is- This person? I'm enjoying this, I'm having fun. This person? What do you mean by this person? Uh-oh. I mean, so you want to dehumanize me now? No. How wide are you, okay? I'm saying that you do not understand the basic framework of logical argumentation. You'll take a position that can be extrapolated to something absurd, and you don't even understand it. No. That's what that is. You did it with me and you did it with Destiny. I am following the logic of your position, ma'am. No, you're not. No, you're not. Stop lying again. So, okay. Here's my thing. I want to get back to the argument on what I said in my opening statement. To try to ban abortion is like a slippery slope. Do y'all want to go to now banning plan B? Next? When will it stop? I mean, right now abortion is legal. What is plan B? Plan B is a pill.  So in other words, that is, if you really want to be technical, that is a way of aborting a child because you're preventing a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, therefore being discharged through the cervix and out of the vagina and dying out. The only nuance I would draw there is that if you're still talking about tissue, then it doesn't vex me too much. I'm also rather soft on the topic, probably I shouldn't use this the way, I'm gonna phrase this poorly, but in the cases of rape, I understand that because it's not just a physical but also a psychic trauma and I'm also a coward, I couldn't look a rape victim in the eye and say, well, tough, I couldn't do that. Now, if that's an inconsistency in my argument, then that's fair enough for me to take it to pieces if they want to. No. But because I couldn't, I mean, so let's make this personal to treat, right? I'm gonna make this personal to you, right? If you told me that you were pregnant and you were pregnant through rape, I couldn't say, well, sorry, you're gonna bear the child if you're rapist. Because I know I can't do that, I don't have the stones to do that. When it comes to that particular scenario, I tend to be rather soft. It's still, I'm still killing a child, I would still maintain that position. Also, when it comes to medical abortions, medically necessary abortions like ectopic pregnancies, that's a non-issue for me because obviously in that scenario, the baby dies either way. My fundamental abortion argument, anti-abortion argument is that, you could draw the line at consciousness, but we don't even know if consciousness exists. You could talk about the quality of life when it's born, but who's to say whether someone's quality of life, who sets up the scale. There are certain decisions that I don't believe human agencies should make. And one of them is whether an entire human timeline, because that's ultimately what we're talking about here. An entire human timeline should be snuffed out before it's emerged from the uterus. That's my fundamental pro-life position or anti-choice position. Yeah, so I don't know what you're supposed to do with that. I'll just drop that there. You can pick it up and do it. Well, okay, well, one last thing. Like I said in my opening arguments, why go for banning, like I said, abortion is not completely banned throughout the entire country. By the way, I saw your debate, you did very well. And I wanted to address something in reference to... You didn't say this, it was said to you about back alley abortions. That's not gonna be a thing, okay? We have too many programs, we have too many foundations that will actually pay for women, no matter what state they're in, whether abortion is abolished completely or if it's a heartbeat bill. They will pay for that woman to get a ticket to a pro-abortion state to have that abortion and they will provide her medical needs as well as her room service and her travel fees. So the whole, this whole argument of, we're going back to the co-hangers, that's not a thing. So I just wanna let you know. With that being said. I'm sure that's true. No, I said I'm sure that's true. Yes, when I was talking about the fight with Stardust. Even Canada has stated that they will pay for abortions. You have Amazon, you have, there's so many corporations out there that specifically stated that they will pay for a woman's abortion. But can I pick up on that trees? Is that all right? Yes, sure. Yeah, the reason why corporate, in my opinion, the reasons why these big companies, well, the two reasons why these big companies are prepared to sponsor their employees, to fly to California. They don't want to pay for the maternity leave. They don't want to pay for the maternity leave, they don't want to lose. Yeah, now, if we're talking about the ethics of abortion, I would argue that that's a complete abnegation of the topic. Because what you're doing is, what these companies are doing is saying, well, we could sponsor young mothers and make sure they've got diapers and formula and baby grows and things like that.  That's the cheaper option. And as a corporate entity, that's the decision we're going to make. And that is so callous and cold and calculating, it's actually preventing. Oh my God, I am still listening to Keenan, Kenden, and you are butting in Rachel as always. Kenden, can you please finish your argument? I was very, I was enjoying you thoroughly before she was rudely interrupted by her. Sorry, please pick up what you were saying. But I was going to say, well, Rachel, you know, I was, I'm sure Rachel wasn't- You haven't really been talking that much. So I would like to hear more of your voice and her voice if you don't mind, but go ahead. Well, my argument is, is that the only reason these big companies are paying women to fly to, I don't know, Honolulu or wherever they're gonna have these clinics to have these procedures is because it's the cheaper option. And if you remember when I'm opening arguments, I said most of the arguments for abortion are purely socioeconomic, like someone of your background tree, born in hardship, raised by abusive parents or whatever, or callous pair of people. Those are problems we can address. But my argument is, is that abortion is used as a kind of ejection button.  It's like, well, ignore all the social problems that affect, and I realized that you live in a different country. I don't know where in America you are, but I've been, oh, you're in Georgia, right? Well, I'm one of the few British people I know who's been to the South side of Chicago, and I've seen areas of Greater New York City that are a bit run down. And I can imagine that it'd be totally tempting that if you were pregnant and you lived in those circumstances to go, right, well, I can't raise a kid here because I live in a slum, so I'm gonna destroy this child. Whereas my argument is, is that if you increase, if you deny that option, that get out clause, it would encourage, hopefully, people to provide all of the welfare reforms that you mentioned in your opening statement, do you really think our government would do that?  Let me repeat your argument back to you, so I'm not accusing, I'm not knowing your logic. You're saying that, you're saying that if we allow abortion to be illegal, this will force, if not encourage facilities, including the government, to impose upon good Medicaid, good Medicare, and also good programs to help not rectify, not eliminate child poverty, but relieve it tremendously. Did I understand it correctly? It would encourage them to do something. Okay. Force is probably the wrong verb. Okay, now force. Because obviously I'm, because now, because my thinking is entirely wishful. I cognize that the United States, oh, it seems to think that all welfare is communism or something, and it's not very keen on it. A blended system of capitalist economic forces and social welfare provision, it seems like a difficult marriage, a troubled marriage for the United States. But it certainly would encourage it. It would strengthen the arguments for any kind of welfare provision. Whether it actually works or not, it is something that, well, I'm gonna, I mean, you're all Americans, you tell me. Whether it actually works or you live there, I'm merely spitballing. But my argument would be, is that there is simply no incentive. If it's cheaper to just exterminate human beings before they're born, that's the option everyone's gonna go for. And anything like school starts, shore starts, or food stamps or whatever, that stuff will never improve because there's no incentive to improve it. Does that make any kind of sense? Yes. Yeah. The only thing I was gonna add to what Kenyon, Kenyon, sorry, I keep saying Kenyon. I don't know why I'm saying that. Kenyon was saying is that corporations have an even bigger incentive, which is not just the short-term cost, but the longer-term cost. We have data from a century of countries around the world that shows that where you legalize abortion, female participation in the workforce goes up exponentially. Like by a large margin, I think it's something like it went up like 10 to 12 times in countries where they made abortion legal. So of course corporations have a very vested long-term interest in providing abortions to females that they want to have in the workforce. That's all I was gonna say. Well, I was gonna say, and if I can pick up on that, Rachel, one of the other, you often find that a lot of people who are pro-choice are also anti-capitalist, especially in the United States. They hate the corporatocracy, if that's even a word, runs the United States of America. And obviously lobbies, politicians all the time and things like that. By constantly treating this issue as an economic one, a socio-economic one, and ignoring any kind of spiritual or moral, what are philosophical ramifications, you turn, as Rachel's alluded to, women as well as men, of course, into just cogs in the corporate machine. And the advantage of having a home life, is away from the markets, away from the factory, making widgets or whatever, is that it takes power away from them, I would argue. Again, you want to tear that apart, you can do. Yeah, go ahead. I don't know. I think that when you provide, excellent, and I'm speaking from experience, I used to live in Germany for five years. The maternity leave is two years. Is it two, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, they take care. The Germans are doing it properly, then. I'm gonna jump to you when you're impressed with that. Yeah, and it encourages the women to not leave the workforce, but also allow to have a baby. Germany also provide them a, not a nanny, but somebody come and help clean the diapers and also, oh, shoot, sorry about that, my freaking phone, to also clean the diapers and to also help around the house with the mother. So, this is something that should be here. So my argument would be why not have that here in America first and then start going for the abortion? Well, timing could well be an issue, I suppose, but why not do both at the same time? I suppose you could argue. Why not get rid of abortion and improve your welfare service? But the trouble is as well, I think because Roe versus Wade in your country, was, it was, I don't wanna say sneakily done because it was done in public, but it was slipped in. Is that the phrase I want to use? I think this has been a hot, since 1973, Roe versus Wade was put into place, wasn't it? Since the 1970s, Roe versus Wade has been a hot button issue. It's not even about abortion at that point. It's the way it was done. It was the way it was punted upstairs to the Supreme Court. It was passed without grassroots support, really, no popular vote, no consideration of state legislature. It's anti-democratic, it's undemocratic, I could argue, it's anti-federal because yours is of course a federal system as you know better than I do. And so I think Roe versus Wade has been there like a thorn in the side of constitutional conservative America since the 70s and that's why they're desperate to get rid of it. Also, a lot of Republicans in your country believe rather than having a bloated, centralized state welfare system, they believe in local government, they believe in local charity, religious involvement, of course, religious charity. So yeah, a lot of the people who oppose Roe versus Wade also oppose very welfare provisions that I would actually endorse. We're gonna agree on that one, actually. I'm gonna tell you, this is, see the CUC server that's over here, they're so hypocritical.  And let's not talk about anchor babies.   Because the Lord said so. I can't stand that. And I don't come from that position at all. I think like, hey, like I want abortion to be available so that we don't have to worry about a bunch of welfare.  Yeah, as I say, I'm not addicted to welfare in the sense that I don't particularly want everybody to be slaves to welfare state. But I recognize I've had this conversation thanks to James and Stephen Ryan of the YouTube channel, Cider and Port. I don't know if he's watching, but then I've just provided his YouTube channel for him. This is where the conversation starts. It's not where it ends. And I think the trouble is particularly in the American conversation, it's either pro-life or pro-choice. And that's it, but of course there are ramifications for what I am proposing and what Rachel is ultimately proposing is an increased number of babies in the civilization that we're discussing. So what are you going to do about it? It's no good preserving, ensuring forcing women to carry a baby to term and giving birth if mother and baby are going to die in the street because they're sleeping in a cardboard box. You know, there has to be some kind of adjustment, maybe not a massive one, but there has to be some kind of adjustment. Yeah, so what was I going to put on a point and it's gone. I'm going to leave that there, I think, because I'll stop, I'll stop rambling. I'll try and remember what I was coming up with. Does anybody else want to tear apart what I've said? Destiny's been very quiet for a while. I don't think any of the conversation topics are relevant to anything. I think that the only thing that matters with abortion is determining when it's a life or not, and that past that point, every conversation topic is meaningless. Because any topic you talk about socioeconomic or any issues, we would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, except killing a one-year-old child. So if we think that a fetus is a life, then I don't care what any other arguments are. You just shouldn't have an abortion. So I usually don't engage with anything past that, past that distinction of when is it worth protecting and when is it not? Because I don't think it's relevant. Well, the only thing I would say is that, you know, life does begin at conception. Even the medical forces would acknowledge this. I don't think consciousness is a particularly good barrier because, of course, there's some debate about whether consciousness even exists. There, because the potential of consciousness, like waking up from deep sleep or a coma, exists for most babies. It exists, you know, there's very few babies. You know, still births and miscarriages are fortunately rare.  It's worth preserving because it's a living, it's an organism at that point. It's worth preserving. It's gonna become a baby. It's gonna become a human being. And I find that all lines that are drawn about, you know, whether it's a true human being or not are entirely arbitrary. It's entirely down to personal taste. And I don't think that any human agency, whether it's government or religious or social, should have the right to determine whether something should live or die or not, based on a definition that someone's written down somewhere, which is obviously subject to revision. So yeah, there we go. Okay, I disagree with every single statement. So we say life being is a conception. Sure, there is a life, some kind of life there, some kind of living thing, but we don't protect all living things we're concerned with protecting human life, right? So when does that thing become something worth like protecting is the question. When we talk, we don't even know if people are conscious. I don't know how to engage with that. I think I've demonstrated adequately that like consciousness is something that all of us consider and it is the thing that we consider for when people are dead or not. You can keep a body alive for a long time with a bunch of different fancy machines, but if they're never gonna wake up, we don't waste the money to do that because there's no purpose in doing that. We don't say that things are worth preserving just because they're organisms. There's a million different types of organisms we wouldn't preserve. When you talk about the fact that it's going to become a baby or human being, it seems like you're acknowledging that there is a distinction between what it is and what it's going to become. And it is not the thing that it's going to become. That's why it's going to become that thing. And you do not have all of the inherent properties of the thing you're going to become when you haven't become it yet. Therefore, there is a distinction there. When we say that it's entirely arbitrary, sure, but that's not a way to get rid of any arguments because obviously we need to decide at some point, we're not gonna kill five-year-olds and say, well, it's all arbitrary. And its personal taste also doesn't apply here because we're talking about social values for the entirety of society.  And to say that the government doesn't have the right to turn or something should live or die, that is probably one of the most important functions of the government is to protect life.  You're not allowed to just dump your child on the street and watch them die or you have some obligation to take care of children in your house.  So yeah. I agree with everything that Stephen just said, strangely enough, except for the fact that I would not say that consciousness is the thing that we would use. It shouldn't be- What would you say then, I guess?  That we know for sure. We don't- But I'm asking at what point do you endow it with like moral consideration? What does that happen? Immediately, like you would have to say conception and my definition of that would be like implantation because you don't know if a fertilized egg is gonna be, you just, there's no practically- Wait, why would you say implantation and not conception? Well, because up until it implants that's not any, it's not necessarily human life. You can't say that cell division is happening or things like that because you just won't know. Like, what are you gonna do with it? Let's say that we take an egg from a person and we start growing it in an incubator. Is this never gonna become a human because it didn't implant in a uterus? Oh, well that, okay, that would be an exception then. So if we did do that, then yes, it would be a human life. Okay, then are you in favor of also plan B since that prevents implantation? I'm not really in favor of plan B, but as a legal, so there's- Wait, how well you got it? You have to say why. Right, right, I'm gonna say why. I'm gonna totally explain why. So there's a difference to me between the ethical argument and the legal argument. Ethically- I'm only asking ethically, I don't care. Right, ethically I'm against it. Legally, I would probably come in it further.  I super don't care because I don't have any legal argument right now. So how can you be against it if you think that implantation is the moment of life begins? Because I'm against any measure that prevents human life. So if you've already, you don't know, right? When you take a plan B, you don't know if that egg is fertilized or not. You don't know if- We need to, you have to amend that statement because I'm guessing you don't think that condoms are a form of abortion or something, right?  No, I think there's a difference between abortificent types of birth control and non-abortificent types. Well, how is it an abortificent if you don't think it's a human life until implantation begins? So let me clarify. It's not that I don't think it's human life. I was mainly making a pragmatic like legal argument of where I would go. I'm not looking for pragmatic legal arguments as an ethical debate. So eject all the legal arguments. Yes. I think that any attempt to prevent implantation would also be an attempt to prevent human life from continuing its natural- Sure, but if so, if we're saying that preventing implantation is in and of itself immoral, then implantation can't be the point at which you say it's endowed with some moral consideration. It must be the moment before that. It must be conception and not implantation. Implantation is just another step on the journey to becoming a fully-fledged human being. Yeah, this is kind of consistent.  Everybody just wants to have sex. Well, hold on, don't care. That's not relevant to the conversation.  I have an 11-year-old. I'll be honest about that, but that doesn't make it a moral writer. I don't say that. That's horrible. Okay, if you've had a two-year-old kid, right? Okay, but somebody that wants to do something, just we're focused on the ethics. So I'm going to delete, we're not talking implantation, we're talking conception, the moment of conception. Purely ethically, and this is the stance of my church, is that no, you don't try to prevent humans from being born for any reason, out of personal convenience or anything like that. So we're going to say the moment of conception then is going to be the moment that we endow it with all of the moral consideration that we would for any normal human being, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Okay, yep. So, okay, if we have that figured out, why? Why? Because as you said yourself, it's a human life. I don't base it off of conscious experience because I think that that's, you get into some really subjective territory. Okay, do you think that like a corpse should have the same protections as a fetus? Do you think a corpse is alive? I don't, but your definition is that it's a human life. I don't know, what is a human life to you? What does that mean? Well, okay, a human life would be if you can see cellular activity and there's so bacteria is alive, right? I'm not trying to equate human life to bacteria, but I'm saying we know that an embryo at any stage is human life, it's alive. If it wasn't alive, you wouldn't have to kill it, that's my whole problem with abortion.  Okay, hold on, so that argument is total nonsense. No one is saying that you're not killing anything. What's being said is you're not killing like a human life that has moral consideration. Well, you're not saying that, but a lot of people will say. There's not a lot of people in the car who know it's just me though, okay? So saying that like, well, if it's alive, you would not kill it.  So, okay, so then backing up, there's a lot, there's so many different, it's just, okay. Well, you say that it's a human life because you can see cellular activity. So I'll skip ahead to all the boring stuff and we'll qualify this one because I'm assuming you can see decomposition and dead bodies, that's technically cellular activity, but we'll clarify that you probably don't mean that type of cellular activity. We'll say maybe a nicer phrase might be some sort of like metabolic activity, or some homeostasis activity where the body is making. Cell division, something like that. I'll say something like that, okay. Even if that was the case though, okay. If I could demonstrate to you, if I could show you a body where I put a body on a table and I could hook it up to blood bypass machines, dialysis machines, everything, I can leave it functioning and all that, but I scooped the brain out and the person will never wake up again. Would you say that that is a human life? No, because, well, here's the distinction. I think I can help you with this. We're talking about intervention, right? We're talking about human intervention. The reason- Wait, no, no, no, no, no, that's, I'm just, I'm trying to figure out what it is you're protecting. I don't know what that- Life. Human life, right? No, no, it's not life.  I'm trying to figure out- It's not though. How is a decomposing body human life? That's bacteria living off the dead tissue, but the body is no longer alive.  It's literally part of the development is you, from the moment of conception the absolute decomposition of every last cell in your body is all part of your biological journey from start to finish. No, no, no, no, no. I don't think that that's, so number one, you're relying on like some, some sort of scientific definition, right? No, I'm trying to figure out what your definition, I'm not trying to rely on anything. And I'm trying to help. There's some bounded area in you. But surely if the human being is dead, if the bacteria are feeding off the dead tissue, the tissue is breaking down. It's not working. That's happening in your living body right now. Bacteria feeds off the dead tissue. You're saying if we could take all kinds of crazy measures to animate some kind of dead course. Hold on, wait, I have to, wait, wait, wait, wait.  Crazy arguments. There are bodies that can be kept alive almost indefinitely that are in like long-term commas and hospitals. That's not crazy. That's not far out. Not only is it not crazy far out, there have been very real medical debates about this in the United States. I'm sure you remember Terry Shiva, right? Yeah, these are huge issues of people like that. So these are not crazy things. These are very real, very grounded, very pragmatic issues. Grant, thank you. I imagine that technically if someone were brain dead, but you could hook their bodies up to various machines to keep their organ systems running, that you would qualify as human life. However, if the person, the patient, let's use that word, if the patient were brain dead without the possibility of recovery and therefore without the potter of consciousness of all the rest of it of going into the world impacting human society in hopefully positive ways, you could argue that switching off the machine and then harvesting the organs for donation wouldn't make much of a difference. But at that point, because it's on the downward trajectory at that point, if the person has reached a physical maturity, they've suffered a head injury, they're not going to experience consciousness again, et cetera, et cetera, they're on the downward slope. We don't know. I think that whether or not something is alive, we view fairly binaurally, binaurally in a binary manner. We don't say that since you're on the downward slope, now we're going to kill you. Like grandma's on the downward slope, we're not killing her, right? So I'm trying to find where the bounds are for what you consider to be a life worth protecting because that's where I'm going to find where your definitions are. Because everything that's said so far has been hazy. I understand what you're saying. That's all I'm looking for. But I think that there's a distinction between intervening to prevent a life from progressing as it normally would and intervening to end a life faster than it might normally end. I think there's a difference there. I don't think you can say that they're exactly the same. Sure, those are different things, but it's not relevant to what intervening to prevent why we're ending one. So why do we keep talking about corpses and how long we're going to preserve life versus the conversation about abortion is about people stop. The whole reason you have an abortion is to prevent that human being from further developing into. Yeah, but it's the same reason why you would wear a condom or practice abstinence is to prevent the formation of a human being. Yes, but once it's already formed. Yeah, abortion isn't contraception because contraception takes place before conception. That's great. And as fetus, the potential to become conscious is not a conscious being either, right? I agree with you. Cluster cells are not human beings actually. Sure, we're all cluster cells. But we're all cluster cells. We're all cluster cells. I'm a cluster of cells. But I'm saying that there needs to be something a little bit more, it seems, because when I'm pushing you on the like, what is a dead person? Or when are they dead? Or if I scoop a person's brain out, even if I can show you all of the other organisms are functioning fine, it seems like that brain doing something is pretty important for us to determine whether or not that thing is still alive. I don't think that it's in the brain. And I think you're making like kind of an unequivalent analogy by trying to say, well, the score says- When you say it's not in the brain, when you say it's not in the brain, could you give me an example of a thing with a brain that like this is a life that has to protect, right? Destiny, if I may interject, sorry, this is one of the dangers with the consciousness argument or the quality of mental life, if you like. To be clear, I don't think I've had any dangerous parts of my argument. I feel pretty consistent with mine. I'm still pushing. I'm not even at mine. I'm trying to get one from you guys, but go ahead. Well, no, the problem is that what do you mean by consciousness as well as the other problem? When I say consciousness, you don't have to ask and pretend I don't have an answer. I can answer every question you have for me. So when I say consciousness, it seems like we have an awareness and that awareness is an emergent property from the communication of several underlying structures in the brain. And those structures that are necessary to communicate with each other for the emergent property of a conscious group here seem to be in place and communicating with each other at around 20 to 24 weeks in gestation. Okay, so what if someone is experiencing, experiences a traumatic head injury and their consciousness is impaired? Would that make them a lesser life? No, I don't think so. Having an impaired consciousness or a higher consciousness doesn't make you lesser. You might, but you're still having a conscious experience worth protecting, even if it might be somewhat impaired. Right, but do you not think that if a baby is going to develop a consciousness, that you know that that's coming, that the potential of consciousness is just as valuable as consciousness itself? No, there's no other ontological category you can give me where the potential of a thing is the same thing as the thing that just never ever exists.  Or would you say, no, you destroyed the parts of the building. The potential of a thing to become a thing is its own thing. It's not the same thing as the thing it's going to become. That's not true. Well, no, but no, but there are two problems. The gestation of a human being is a unique scenario anyway. But also, if you're talking about, but no, but if you're talking about like, that you've got the bits of the building and you haven't built it yet, then you're not, you're talking about tissue, if you like. Whereas if you're assembling the building and you've put the foundations in and you've got the major structures in, for example, and then I come and knock it over with a wrecking ball, you could argue that I've destroyed your building, but the building was being assembled. So if you just talk about- No, you would say you've destroyed the foundations of a building. You wouldn't say you've destroyed an entire building. If 9-11 happened with a foundation dug out and there were no towers there, people wouldn't say, oh my God, they blew up two buildings. It's like they've crashed into the foundation of a newly constructed building, right? That was in the progress or the process being built. But the thing that you're going to become is not the thing itself. These are two separate things. I just, I think, so backing up again, I'm just trying to figure out, it seems to me, I'm curious if either of you answer this, if you scoop, if I can take out, okay, so here's a thought challenge that I would give to both of you. I would argue that I can remove every single organ, at least one organ from anybody, from any person. I can take all any organ out and replace it with some kind of machine.  I can do dialysis for your kidneys. I can process things to your liver. I can do all these things, but if I remove the brain, something has fundamentally changed with that person. If I take out the brain and I keep everything else working, it seems like something has changed there. Do you agree or disagree with that? Do you think you can remove brains from people and still have like a functioning, like working human? You can just substitute that out with some other thing. Well, no, I mean, it's, you know, you can't communicate with the body once the brain has been removed. That's certainly true. Well, so then let's say theoretically, if you believe that to be the case, now I'm not gonna say this is happening, but let's say theoretically that a fetus had no brain until six months. Would you then agree that the fetus with no brain until six months doesn't even have a thing worth protecting yet or? No, but what it has is that it's going to, because you know that a brain is coming and you know that if you intervene, that human life will be sabotaged before it's truly developed. It's not the same thing as removing a brain from a, well, it's a different scenario, isn't it? Okay, so if I push you on this category, so when you say you know something is coming, okay? So now you're not protecting a particular thing. It seems like you're making the concession that the thing in and of itself is not really worth protecting, but it's gonna become something that will be worth protecting. I would say no. And here's the reason that it's not, we're not talking about something composed of parts that's going to become a thing. It's human life and we do have a scientific definition for that. When you have human life, you have things like cell metabolism, you have reproduction of cells. That's not something you have in dead bodies. First, it's just not true, okay? Hair in your nails will grow for, I think maybe weeks, at least it's days after death, but I'm... No, actually, I think I'll just... No, that's a myth, yeah. That's a myth. The tissue shrinks, it's the illusion. It's not that the tissue is growing. You don't have cellular reproduction and division going after the body's dead. That's not true. Okay, sure, maybe you don't. Even if that was the case, if I can give you a healthy body without a brain where the cells are still metabolizing and everything, it sounds like you guys earlier said you wouldn't agree that that's a living body worth protecting. Well, again, you're talking about... There's a big... This is not analogous, right?  It is taking its natural process.  And now we're gonna talk about... There's a body and we're gonna do all kinds of scientific Frankenstein stuff to keep it alive without brains or alive without organs. These are not analogous. Okay, okay, hold on. We're talking about intervention. Nothing here is analogous. We're not talking about intervention.  The reason why I'm asking these hypotheticals is I'm trying to figure out because however eager you are to attack my definition of consciousness, you've given me nothing yet. Your position... I can give you something right now. Okay, but just be careful because you keep saying things like human life cell division, but any time I've tested any of the examples you've given with a hypothetical, you're saying... You're asking scientific questions with your hypothetical. And I will tell you... Wait, I'm not... None of these questions are science. Human life is intrinsically valuable in and of itself. It doesn't have to already meet certain criteria that you're arbitrarily putting in there. It is human life and the purpose of abortion is to come in and prevent human life.  Okay, but preventing human life isn't all wrong. Because I'm trying to get a simple narrow definition because you would say condoms aren't... No, it's something that's already alive.  Sperm are already alive. So there's something else to happen. Sperm of tissue. No, that's not... Sperm of tissue. The ovaries... Tissue is alive. The tissue in your body is alive. What do you mean? It's not a human being. You have to have both... Yeah, but neither is a fetus. A fetus is not a human being. It is a human being. The fine human being. Now that I was going... Steven, beat me to it. The fine human being. Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure out what is like that. When we say human being, when does the life become that thing that human being that's worth protecting? At conception. At conception. OK. Because it now has both sets of DNA from the sperm and the edema. If we intercede to kill it, it would continue to develop. And it's already human. Wait, OK.  You're still killing it.  Yes.  I'm saying you're alive. Wait, no one here is arguing whether you're killing a life or a living thing. It's a human, whether it's an embryonic stage, a fetal stage or a fluid level of stage. So in my, hold on, wait, hold on, wait. And then show you can go. So in my opinion, when arguments come to the point where you circle the drain this hard and then there is like a hard pivot on every single question. I think that I think that I think that the conversation is run as course. So I'm good on where I'm at for establishing my points. I think I set up consciousness as a pretty valid thing. I think I argue that convincingly, this is why you're dead at the end of your life. It's when your consciousness is to exist. I've tried for like 30 minutes to figure out like, what is your thing for life that you would protect? And I've got like 50. It's not that I don't like it. It's that every time I try to push on what about this or what about that? I get these answers like, well, that's a while. Because they're not analogous. Because you're coming up with things that are right. So then it can be dismissed. It can be dismissed without logical penalty. Human life is human life regardless of the stage of development. Is that clear enough? I gotta run downstairs real quick. No, nothing was clear in your definitions. It was nothing was. Human life is human life regardless of the stage of development that it's in.  I think that's super clear. Define human body. Well, this is the problem, this is the problem because what I think the frustration is, is that because a different... Say again? Q&A coming in soon. Okay. Okay. Let them answer my question. I'll drop everything to it. That's what I want to add. See, the problem is trees that because one of the reasons why I love coming onto debates like this and James has invited me a few times because I always approach these debates assuming that I'm wrong because it must be... If I was right, everyone would agree with me. So I want to hear from different points of view. The trouble is, is that I think particularly with abortion, it's one where everyone thinks that they're right. And I think I'm kind of like that way too. The problem is, is that you're asking how do you define human life? That has trouble for less of us. I've got a definition right here for human body. The human body is the physical substance of the human organism composed of living cells and extracellular materials organized into tissues, organs and systems, which is exactly what I just said. You know, I got to fact check you because you're known to lie. You said that's the definition of a human body. Yeah, go ahead and Google it. Define human body. I don't lie. It's just that you don't understand logic. It's not lie. The thing is, is that these definition of trouble people from the limit. You lie by omission, okay? The human body, the physical substance of a human organism composed of living cells and extracellular materials. That's what I just said. Let me finish, shut up, and organize into tissues, organs and systems in a human body. So you left out the organs. I think I said all of that. You're going to need to hum that. Back it up and watch it when I saw it. She did that. I did. She did that. She did that. So here's the deal. Here's the deal. What organs does a fertilized cell have? Well, it says composed of living cells and extracellular materials and organized into those things. So- And organized tissues. And it says, comma, comma, organs. And systems. And systems. Yes. Even embryos have systems. That's how they sustain their life. I just asked a question. Do- Is it alive or is it not? No, no, no. I just asked a question. Does a fertilized egg based upon this definition have an organ? It has systems, tissues, and cellular materials. Yeah, it definitely has tissues, but it doesn't have organs. Thank you, Kendra. Notice how you answered the question as she just skates by it. She does that every time. I asked, does this fertilized egg have an organ? She got a ha, take you, and take them. And then you just asked the question, yes, it has organized tissues, but it doesn't have an organ. That's all I wanted to know. Thank you for answering my question. Here's the question I would put to anybody who's prepared to answer it. If a fetus or an embryo is not a human being, what is it? Human fetus. I mean, okay, but it's still human. Yes, it's still human life. I mean, a tadpole is not a frog, right?  A body could be a human body. Fetus can be a human fetus. We can talk about the biological body that exists, but it seems like the thing that we value, that we treasure, that we're trying to protect is the conscious experience. It seems to be the thing that we're aimed at. I don't agree. Okay, that's fine. I know you don't agree, but you guys ever gave me a good, kind of like other... But you haven't given a good reason why that needs to be the thing. What if I believe that all human life is valuable? That there's a soul in the body at conception. And in the embryo at conception, there is a soul and that you don't have any better push back against that idea. I would ask you, I absolutely would. I would ask you, where is the soul? It's not something you can like, well, it's not something you can physically locate, right? That if it's not something that I can measure, I can't have no, there's no way. How does this can't be measured either? It absolutely can be in some ways. Yes. In some ways, see, you had to qualify that because we don't, this is something that's hotly debated in a philosophy of science. Yes, it is. This is your whole argument is Loki's wager, that if I can't pinpoint 100% exactly what consciousness is, you're telling me that it is the same validity as your concept of a soul, which has no physical manifestation whatsoever. Right, I'm saying if you're going to choose consciousness, you have no way to be back against my concept of a lesser soul. If you are going to employ debate terms and rational and logic and all that during this conversation, you have to understand the absurdity of saying that since I cannot give you a concrete 100% like analysis of where this particular thing is, that very concept becomes equal to every other absurd thing that I can possibly think of.  I understand that you don't like it, but what I'm saying is that we're on equal ground. I'm not saying that I don't like it. I'm telling you that we're not on equal ground. I'm saying that consciousness versus the soul, we are on equal ground. You can't unequivocally prove in some sort of, you like to, you want to prove it in a material sense. If I make a statement, if I make a statement, if I make a statement that there is a pink demon floating behind you that spins around every time you turn around to look at it. And then you tell me, I think that there is like oxygen floating behind you. We, not all of us can prove that. Are we on equal ground when we make those statements? Yes, we are. Okay, I rest my case. That's it, okay. I rest my case. We're absolutely not. But if you think we are, then I understand more of your argument. Okay. This may be your time for Q and A. If you happen to have questions, folks, we have got to move fast because we have a huge list already. We're going to move fast. In the meantime, I want to remind you, our guests are linked in the description such that if you want to learn more about their views, you certainly can by clicking on their links below. Al Dan, thanks very much, says murder is a legal term. Laws reflect interests of the state. How does abortion hurt the state?  Well, abortion, sorry, murder just means unlawful killing. So technically, if anything is permitted by the law, it's no longer murder. Abortion doesn't threaten the state. And I don't think any one of us made that argument. What I think it does is it threatens, there's a kind of cultural, that's what I'm looking for, a kind of the social value that we place on other human beings. That would be the only argument, but abortion doesn't threaten the state at all. In fact, the state would like certain women, particularly they're poor, to kill their unborn sponges, to reduce the burden on the welfare state. So you could argue that abortion is that the government would be rooting for. I just, I think that it should. You got this one coming in from. Didimus says, owing a baby resources is not the same as owning it your literal body. By Rachel's logic, stealing is the same as rape. Well. What? Stealing? Okay. I'm trying to wrap my head around that. I'm not sure. This is again, people not understanding that if you're going to make the argument that, hey, this thing depends on me for survival, therefore I have the right to kill it, that you can logically extrapolate that to say that children who are one year old, two year old, six month old, depend on me for survival. How dare they? They have no right there for I can kill it. And there are people who do make this argument. It's just a lot. The problem is that there's a fundamental difference between saying somebody that's wired to and growing inside of your body is going to be fundamentally different than an external being that exists, whose responsibility for life can be shared upon a bunch of people that are volunteering for being paid to do the work. No, no, wait, wait, when you say that might be what I'm saying is I'm totally breaking the analogy. For you to say that everything I was saying earlier was disanalogous, your comparison is disanalogous. To say, hey, would you want to take care of my three year old son? And you're like, oh yeah, sure.  It's the same thing. No, it is totally not the same thing. So you're saying that it's a responsibility argument? No, it's not a responsibility argument. There is fundamentally a difference between somebody being hooked into and relying on your body versus somebody that could be taken care of by multiple parties that are being compensated for. Everybody here understands that it's super, super easy. It's not like invasion of the body snatchers. This is an alien where a baby just jumps in your body and takes it over and it's like some kind of parasite succubus, right? We all understand how babies are made. We all understand how to avoid that. Sure, so now when you say that what you've basically admitted is you've conceded every part of your earlier image. Okay, it is fundamentally different. But don't you in some ways, don't you in some ways consent, don't you consent to that baby kind of taking over your body for a while? Which by the way, that's not even, that's not, hold on, that's not a bad argument, right? There are arguments to be made, but by making that argument, you've conceded there's fundamentally, there is a difference between something growing inside of you versus a bunch of people being able to share the responsibility of taking care of an external created being. That's, those are fundamental things. But you also can't say that there is no analogy that it's not a logical extension. It's not saying the two things are completely analogous. It is a logical extension to say that if this life depends on me for survival, I have the right to kill it, that well then people will and do make the argument that, okay, what about a two week old baby? So it depends on me to live, right? The problem is you've created a slippery slope to use the term that you've created a slippery slope. That might be, but it's still valid. No, you've created, no, you've created, I can explain why it's not valid. So you've engaged in a slippery slope fallacy because you're saying that you've created one circumstance and you're saying that it will lead to the second. The first being- No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying- Hold on, that I'm literally, I didn't even say what you're saying.  Shut, shut, shut, shut, shut. You're saying that if you say something that depends on me for survival can be killed, then a one or two or three year old child can be killed because they depend on people for survival. The only reason why this slippery slope works for you, though, is because you are uncharitably interpreting the first statement as, depends on me for survival. But that's not really what a fetus does. The fetus grows inside of you while plugged into your body depending on you for survival. It's not something that requires you to just feed it to give it food or to change its diaper.   I just wanted to finish real quick.  Well, no, of course not. Children aren't hooked into your body, relying on it for growth. There are external parties that can be involved taking care of that child. That's why your argument is disanalogous and why it's a subversive fallacy. Yes. It might not be completely analogous, but what I'm saying is that you can't say, look, this thing is like a baby growing inside of you is not any different than have you ever had? I mean, you've got an 11 year old.  When that baby comes out, it still completely depends on you for survival or it will die. No, it doesn't. Rachel, how many times? How many?  How many times in the nine month period that you were pregnant with any child did your husband carry that baby for you? You're assuming that someone else will. No, I need you to answer the question. I need you to answer the question. It's not true. Because you're wrong. And then my next question, so you won't answer that. The answer I'll tell you guys in chat. No, you're assuming that there would be a third party that would stand in. I'm assuming that he never took the baby out of your tummy and carried it for you. We're talking about the logical extension of the argument that she made. The answer to number one is zero times.  The answer is probably more than zero. That's the difference, Rachel. No, what I'm saying is that although these things are not, these situations are not analogous. That does not mean that the extension of the logic of the argument is not valid. Those are separate things. If you're going to say something depending on me, well, because it's in my body, okay, whether the location doesn't have anything to do with the fact that that life depends on some outside thing to survive. You're assuming a third party or somebody else will come in. None of that matters. I'm saying it doesn't matter. I'm saying the extension of the logic of the argument is still valid. And we can repeat the same words all you want. It's true. But it's not. Because if I were to ask you how many times- You just don't like it. Again, you just don't like it.  That is not the argument I'm making. Never. I'm saying the logic of her argument is- And I'm showing you why your logic is breaking down because there's a fundamental difference between taking care of like an externally born child versus a thing growing in your body. No, so do you think that you just feed it like every couple hours and it's fine? No, it requires 24 seven around the clock here. It's just outside the body rather than inside the body. Yeah, but it doesn't require your 24 seven care. It doesn't matter who is the caretaker. It kind of does because if women could take- No, because then that caretaker can kill the child by logical extension.  It kind of does matter because that's what pregnancy is all about. Well, and people do that, right? People have- No, they generally don't. It's usually pretty complicated or hard to take a fetus out of a body with one-month fetus. Actually, by that logic, then, why not just birth the baby and let someone else take care of it then if you don't want that? Why not just follow the pregnancy to term?  I did watch my baby's mom do that though. It seems to be a pretty involved process for going all the way to the delivering the baby more so than an abortion. Am I right or wrong on that? Women are the gatekeepers of reproduction. That's a fact of life. There's nothing that can be done about it. That's not what we're talking about. You said, why not just take it to term? Because that's a bit more complicated and arduous. Let's go back to how you said that my logic is not correct. I'm saying, again, that it doesn't matter if it's inside the body or outside the body, the location does not defeat the argument. I'm saying that if you're going to make the argument that this life depends on anyone, someone, many people, one person- Yeah, nobody made that argument though, which is good. Because if we did, that would be a really good counter-argument, but nobody's saying that. No, you're saying that the location is the thing that makes it different and it doesn't. Listen, let me get it from you. Appreciate it first name, last name says Destiny. I would like you to look into Biafra. What is that? And support my nation. Okay, we could use anybody's support. Please look into Nazdemadi Canoe in our plate. Thank you for that as well as Hypnolama says, wow, Tree's logic is so broken. Destiny, don't pander. You know her logic was flawed. If anyone is dishonest, it's that. About what? He didn't say which logic? Yeah, I was going to say, okay, he's made the accusation, but he needs to explain what Tree's got wrong.  Yes, still they want to sit up here and give out the very same thing that's going to cause that to increase. Yes, 1350, I've heard about this one. Yeah, no. I was only going to start doing internet things and I don't know what 1350 was.  Yeah, sorry, go on. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Endos is Rachel. Biologists aren't concerned with moral epistemology. Quote, unquote, human is specifically a biological definition. Why is having specific DNA sequence inherently valuable? Substantiated, by the way, pigs have 98% of our DNA. So this was an ethical debate and if you want to use scientific terms like Stephen does to try to establish meaning, then we would have to get into a metaphysical argument about whether God exists, what the meaning of life is, what is meaning, how do you know what's good, how do you know what's bad, what are morals, things like that. We didn't want to get off into crazy metaphysical stuff for the purpose of this panel. So my argument was never that there's like some kind of DNA or some kind of scientific medical definition of life that matters.  That's how I define the value of human life. You got it, thank you very much for this question coming in from real men love blueberry waffle says Rachel, are you being honest by your reasoning? Do you defend the infanticide order by God on the Medianites, Amalekites and Canaanites as justified? I can't speak to that because I am an Orthodox Christian and we are in the West and in the West, the predominant interpretations of the Bible are Roman Catholic and Protestant, which I disagree with and I don't think are correct. And I don't have the time to do an entire like Bible hermeneutics for somebody to put those things in context. So that's why I stay away from those kinds of things in these debates and we just do it ethically, not on the basis of my Christian God. This one coming in from Sal Willis says because of Ohio's six-week ban, a 10-year-old rape victim has already had to cross state lines to get abortion care. What happens if you have a nationwide six-week ban? And how often is rape provable? I think that's for you, Ken and or Rachel. Well, this is the big problem. One of the reasons we have such low, I mean, I'm sure it's true in the United States is definitely going to be true in the UK.  There are no witnesses. There's very little physical evidence sometimes, especially if the victim has a shower afterwards or whatever, it can be destroyed. So the proving rape regardless of abortion is always going to be a nightmare. In terms of pregnancy through rape that might lead to an abortion, those pregnancies are actually astonishingly rare. Most abortions are performed on healthy women who are conceived by accident rather than by force and who just don't want the trouble, the inconvenience, the ordeal of bringing a baby to term. So while obviously, if we're talking about a young girl who's been raped, I mean, that's just horrendous. There's no way you can massage that. There's no way you can ground it. What we're in danger of doing, I think, is focusing on these extraordinarily unlikely scenarios, plausible but unlikely scenarios. Distracting ourselves from the main point, which is abortion is still killing a human being is that perfectly justified. So with that one, as I say, I'm rather soft on the topic of rape, but trying to prove it as the interrogator has put it, it is hard. I'm not sure if I've got an easy solution for that one, if I'm being brutally honest. You got it? Yeah, so sorry for that non-answer there, James, I do apologize, but there you go. No worries. Sal Willis says, I am a mother of one married and have an intrauterine device because I don't want more children. If life begins at conception, am I a serial killer? No, this is another time where when we're talking about logical argumentation versus people's emotions surrounding this topic, abortion is an extremely emotional topic. There might be things that are logically consistent and ethically consistent that are going to make people upset. This would be one of them. That's why I don't advocate for things like IUDs or other forms of birth control. People will disagree, they will get upset, they will get emotional. I'm saying it's still logically consistent that no, you don't want to try to prevent human life. You avoid sex then at that point. You got this one coming in from? Wait, real quick. So the answer to that question was yes, lady, you are a serial killer, Rachel's eyes. I wouldn't call her a serial killer. She absolutely is. She's taking active steps to prevent life and she is preventing a conceived egg from implanting, from implantation. She's a serial killer, or at least her husband is because he's one of the babies in. The only thing is, well, the distinction I would draw, maybe this is where people want to correct me on this, is that if the egg is fertilized, it still hasn't started dividing necessarily and it's therefore not complicated enough to be. Okay, so then wait, hold on. So then in that case, it's not the moment of conception, it's the moment of first mitosis or what like? Yeah, as I say, we're splitting hairs, aren't we? Yeah, well, that's the thing, yeah. You have to, at a certain point you have to. Oh, you don't, well, the reason why you have to is because when you provide an inconsistent definition, that's when the 50 million asterisks will explore your afterwards, because you have to keep saying like, well, I've provided a consistent definition. Then call her a serial killer. Tell her she's a serial killer. But that's not technically true.     You have some super vague definition of consciousness that you can't even pinpoint. So it's like, yeah. Are you conscious right now? Does it feel very vague? I guess it feels kind of vague for my end. I think you're pretty conscious. Right, we don't know. We have to assume. We truly don't know. We act as though we are. We truly don't know. I truly can't figure out if any other person in this conversation is conscious or not. It's so mysterious. This is legitimate. This is a legitimate debate. It's not. No, this is not a legitimate debate. The legitimate debate is gonna be like, what are the precise areas? No, no, no, it's not. There might be debates about the precise, there might be debates about the precise mechanisms that give rise to consciousness, but nobody's debating if we are or it's conscious. That is squarely in the realm of esoteric philosophy that we'll write papers back and forth because we're totally done. It's not that I don't like it.  I don't know why you won't call her a serial killer. This one from OG snoop says, destiny are people with Down syndrome conscious. Yeah, they seem to have the necessary structure in the brain to have conscious experiences. So yeah, of course. Made by Jim Bob says destiny a human is and becoming at every moment from conception to death. Steven was once a fetus, same human being different stage.  It doesn't make the discrete materials a building. You're talking about composition and that's different. I'm not talking about composition. I'm talking about emergence and ontology. When something becomes something as the emergence of other things coming together, it does not mean that it is the things that was proceeding it.  They are fundamentally something different. The DNA is already combined though. It doesn't matter DNA in and of itself.  When we talk about, this is actually a topic of metaphysics is substance. There's a difference between like the substance of a thing and the relationship of things to make another thing. An emergent thing that appears is fundamentally different than the discrete parts that make that thing up.  It's not human because it's not put together like a human. The human itself is fundamentally different than the sum of its parts and the things that exist discreetly beneath it. Yeah, there's an endo says, Rachel. Biologists aren't concerned with moral epistemology. Quote unquote, human is specifically a biological definition. Why? I don't know, we read that one, sorry. Bull of Spaghetti says, condescension doesn't cover up pure idiocy. Okay, I don't know who that was. I don't know who that was. Who said four? Coffee mom, thanks so much, has don't conflate abortion with infanticide, thanks. Okay. This one doesn't explain why, but. Just the obligatory quote, what about the test of the unfaithful wife in the book of Numbers? Unquote, question for brolifers, biblical abortion. I don't use the Bible as a source for this particular argument because that would be hypocritical. I'm not a Christian. So I don't know what that story, I've read the Bible. I can't remember that story. So I can't deconstruct it any meaningful way. Yeah, and I would give the same answer I gave earlier, which is that I don't believe you can properly interpret the Bible without the Orthodox church. So that's why I don't argue these things. This one coming in from Bull of Spaghetti says, prove that there is a soul. What is the evidence for a soul? Well, you can't prove the existence of a soul any more than you can prove the existence of consciousness. It certainly seems that way, right? We all operate as if there's consciousness. We all operate and act as if there's a soul. But what do you mean by prove it? Like, do you want material proof or you know what I mean? That's when you get into, can you materially prove these things or are we having a metaphysical debate? What gives rise to a soul? God. Okay, if I show you a desk, does a desk have a soul? No. If I show you a human foot, does that have a soul? The foot in and of itself.  No. So, okay, so you can tell me where it's not. Can you draw some kind of boundary around where it is? Okay, I will try to, but again, we're getting into a theological debate here. In orthodoxy, we have something called in essence, energy's distinction. We don't think that human beings are just substance and we don't think they're just energy. We think they're a combination of both.  Where are the faculties found? There's not a physical location necessarily, but when people talk about the heart, that's usually what they mean. Then again, you get into a metaphysical debate. So if somebody has like, it's a physical location, not everything. So like consciousness doesn't have a physical location either. Well, yes, it does. It arises from a physical location. No, a lot of scientists don't believe that the brain is where consciousness necessarily resides. Again, if you get into scientific philosophy, I challenge you to find me a single published scientist that thinks that consciousness arises from something that's not the brain. I will send you some discourse between scientific philosophers. No, I don't want somebody to do the philosophy of science. That's a fundamentally different topic. The philosophy of science is extremely important. You can't do science without it. Unfortunately, you absolutely can. No. So philosophy of science is a markedly, yes. Philosophy of science is a markedly different thing than the practice or exercise of science.  Then you're talking about only materialism. So then it's a whole nother debate. Oh, he says two questions for Rachel. Rachel, you were getting so much attention. It's not even funny. They said, should you be forced to donate organs to someone that is dying? No. And two, do you understand that women can't choose to be pregnant? I totally disagree with that. Yeah, they can. Yeah, they can totally choose. Oh, no, no, no. No, in all scenarios, maybe. In my case, we used the condom. It broke. Now, let's say for a rape. You just don't have sex, and then you'll never get pregnant. Well, that was not the question. If you just don't have sex, you can choose to never get pregnant, right?  The way the question was, the phrasing of the question was poor. The phrasing of the question was poor. It is, of course, possible for a woman to choose to get pregnant if she, you know, because that's how people plan families, right? You can choose to be pregnant if you engage in certain activities. It is also true to say that sometimes a woman falls pregnant by accident, so she didn't choose to be pregnant in that scenario. Or without her choice. A woman can be pregnant without her choice. Yeah, but you can also, there is a foolproof way to not get pregnant if you don't want to get pregnant, and that is a fact. And this is why Christianity is losing.  I'm not making a Christian argument. That's a secular argument. I'm not making a Christian argument. You don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex.  No, it's logically correct, and it's true, and it's a fact. Is that not correct? If you don't have sex, are you going to get pregnant, Trie? To be fair, Trie, yeah, abstinence. To be fair, abstinence, however unlikely it is, is a really good way of not getting pregnant. Right. You might not like it. You might be a most wanted, but it's true. Are you guys saying, realistically, that if you're teaching abstinence, which is what they're doing in a Christian church and people still getting pregnant up in the church? No, no, no. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. That's a separate argument. That's a separate thing. Trie, Trie, Trie, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not Trie, I'm not saying that people are actually. I'll answer your question. Yes, it's true. If a woman does not have sex, she can't get pregnant. Exactly. I will yield. Yeah, but I'm talking to you, I'm talking to him. I will yield to that. What I'm saying is, is that the question is, I will say that a woman, like you said earlier, a woman can have sex and choose not to get pregnant. She can use a condom. She can also be on birth control. These things are not 100% effective. But if she makes the conscious effort to prevent pregnancy and she gets pregnant, I believe it's just evil to make her have a baby if she doesn't want to, especially if she's in poverty and especially if she's 10 years old as in that story you shared earlier. Well, these, yeah. Where's this one coming from? Creepfighter says, is the soul as detectable as, okay, that's weird. Rhettx101 says, destiny slash treat, if lines are arbitrary and meaningful conscious experience is hard to define, would it be reasonable to say a person with an encephaly has a reduced conscious experience and perhaps meaningless? Wouldn't it makes more sense to put the line at the point when the equipment develops? That's where I put the line at, but the equipment develops for around 20 to 24 weeks. Gotcha, on range process, congratulations on discovering fetal transplant. Gnostic informants says, Rachel, what happens to souls of aborted babies?  If they go straight to heaven for being sinless, then why risk hell from world sin? Again, this is a conversation that I cannot give you my entire theology. It would take a long time to give you my entire theology. All the different Christian churches disagree on this. My church's position is that we don't 100% know. We rely on God to make that decision, we assume, and we think it's highly likely that because they have not been able to commit a sin that of course aborted babies would go to heaven. That is generally the position of the church, but there's a lot of things that my church doesn't say we know unequivocally for sure because we don't know the mind of God. Again, it's a separate argument. I did not make a single Christian argument in this entire debate, yet all the questions are, well, if God real, why that thing happened? Explain Christian woman, so. That's how it goes though. That's just how that goes. Both spaghetti says, does Rachel agree with Noah's flood? There's a lot of going into Christian type arguments or against this argument, but we'll go into Roger Bernanke says, Kenan and Rachel, is there no difference for you between an abortion one week after conception and an abortion one week before delivery, such as maybe eight months, eight and a half months into it? If there is, then why? Well, the difference is purely the matter, I suppose, that's been removed from the uterus, but the result is the same and entire human timeline has been stopped. So yeah, okay. An abortion not one week in, you're dealing with, I don't know how many cells. I did say someone with a calculator could work it out. If you're doing, you're talking about abortion one week before birth.  Yeah, it's just a matter of degree. It's just a matter of degree at that point. It's third degree murder versus first degree murder, something along those lines. I'm not trying to make a perfect analogy, but it's a matter of degree. Gotcha. Endos says, Rachel, it's not, quote, this thing depends on me so I can kill it. Instead, it's, quote, this thing uses my body and I have a right to get my body back. Should people have that right to get their body back from it being used? Well, the fetus has a body as well. The baby has a body. The baby is a body. And if we're going to make a, we never really got into a personal autonomy argument on this panel, but it's one of the easiest to defeat because then you can just pose the question, at what point does someone have bodily autonomy? Is it at two weeks gestation? Is it at six months gestation? Is it after birth? Is it at two years old? There's a body in your body. You have bodily autonomy perhaps, but why would then that body within your body not also have bodily autonomy? You got this one coming in from do appreciate your question. Farron Salas says question for Rachel. Since you are relying on a metaphysical faith based argument to bolster your position like the soul, do you not see that as a defeater to your own position? No, because all of the arguments I was trying to make were secular arguments. And Destiny and I have a bit of a history where we tend to push each other into this metaphysical area where we are trying to just deconstruct each other's philosophy. My arguments against abortion and my opening statement, and if I do get to make a closing statement are secular arguments, which is that it has nothing to do with metaphysics or God or the Bible or my religion. They're secular arguments that are the same as Kendens. This one from Rattox 101. Go ahead, Kevin.  That's why you can't argue these things with a religious perspective. Among religionists that have a shared faith system, that's fine, but if you're a Muslim and you want to make an Islamic case against abortion, the instant response is I'm not a Muslim, go away. And that, so again, there's no point of making religious arguments like that. Anyway, I don't know what that adds to the conversation, but you know, Carol.