This is the second part of a speech delivered by Michael Knowles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Wednesday, March 13, 2024.
Having examined and refuted the historical, legal, constitutional, and anthropological arguments for abortion — having cleared away all the muck that obscures the abortion debate — the final question remains: Is it moral? Is it moral to commit murder? Is it moral to kill an innocent little baby in the womb for any reason?
The first question to answer is whether it’s ever ok to kill at all. Is it ok to kill an animal? Is it ok to kill a plant? Plants are living things. Liberals sometimes hug trees. I, for one, think it’s perfectly fine to kill a plant, just as I think it’s perfectly fine to kill an animal. Our bodies are made to eat animals. And if you want to eat an animal, you’ve usually got to kill it. Unless you’re one of those Korean ladies on TikTok who eat live octopuses and squids and things, generally you’ve got to kill the animal first. Which is fine. Animals are not rational, they are naturally part of the human diet, and there’s nothing wrong with using a thing for its purpose.
Ironically, abortion supporters are much more likely to object to killing animals than pro-lifers are. You will not meet many conservative vegetarians. But virtually every purple-haired vegan you ever meet will support abortion. They oppose the killing of irrational animals as inhumane, but they support the killing of human babies as a human right.
These liberals will support laws like the Bald Eagle Protection Act. If you kill a bald eagle in the United States — if you destroy a bald eagle egg, if you in any way agitate a bald eagle, if you even so much as disturb a bald eagle’s nest when the eagle is not present — you can be fined $100,000, imprisoned for a year, or both — for your first offense. And the penalties only get worse after that. Kill a human baby? The liberals will throw you a party and call you a hero.
So much for animals. Is it ok to kill bad guys? It depends. The moral and legal tradition in our civilization — and every civilization — for all of history has been for the government, the civil authority, to kill certain bad guys. The civil authority has care of the community. When someone poses a threat to the community, the civil authority, which does not bear the sword in vain, has always been understood to possess the temporal power to enforce the laws.
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Here, once again, the pro-abortion people disagree. The pro-abortion crowd, the liberals, in recent years have tended to argue against capital punishment. They lobby to get even the very worst criminals — the psychosexual sadist serial killers — off the hook. They seek to abolish the death penalty.
How about the private killing of bad guys? Not the government, just individuals. Vigilantes. Private people hunting down their personal enemies. Is that ok? My view — the traditional view — is that it’s not ok because, while it’s lawful to kill an evildoer to defend the community, that right belongs to him who has charge of the community’s welfare. To borrow an analogy from St. Thomas Aquinas, just as it belongs to the surgeon to cut off the decayed limb of his patient, so too the care of the common good belongs to the persons entrusted with public authority. We don’t want randos going around chopping people’s limbs off; nor do we want randos going around shooting their own perceived enemies.
Again, the liberals seem to disagree. When BLM spent eight months pillaging and murdering all around the country, the most prominent liberals — some of the most prominent abortion supporters in the country, the current vice president of the United States and staff members of the president — raised money to bail the criminals out of jail. In recent years, liberals have openly called to defund the police, even to abolish prisons. They’ve allowed vigilantes to shut down highways. They’ve encouraged vigilantes to threaten and terrorize Republican elected officials. You might remember Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) in the early days of the Trump administration.
Is it ok to kill a person in self-defense? I think most reasonable people would say yes. The liberals, however, often criticize laws that defend self-defense — Stand Your Ground laws, the Second Amendment, etc. In practice, they deny the right to kill in self-defense.
So, for those still keeping score, the libs oppose killing animals, murderers, and people who are trying to kill you, but they support killing their private enemies and innocent little babies. The Left’s position on killing seems to become weirder and weirder the more we examine it.
How about killing yourself? Is suicide ok? My answer — the traditional answer — is no. Because it is contrary to nature. It’s contrary to the natural inclination to preserve yourself. It’s contrary to self-love and charity. Also, it harms the community, to which we have an obligation. This is why we describe suicide as a “selfish act” that traumatizes, often for life, the loved ones of the people who do it. Further, life is a gift given to us by God which we have neither the ultimate ability to create nor the right to end.
The libs, you will not be surprised to hear, say otherwise. Liberals throughout the West are presently attempting to legalize suicide and even to commercialize suicide by selling tickets to suicide pods and various “euthanasia” poisons. “Don’t kill an animal; do kill yourself.”
Now, we finally arrive at the core question: Is it ever ok to kill the innocent? Obviously, we wouldn’t be killing them in self-defense. We wouldn’t be killing them because they committed a crime. And we wouldn’t be killing them to protect the common good because (one) they’re part of the community — because they’re people — and (two) they actually advance the common good. Because they’re innocent. Therefore, it is never acceptable under any circumstances to kill the innocent, including the most vulnerable among us — innocent little babies.
Abortion is totally indefensible: historically, legally, anthropologically, and morally. Because it’s wrong to commit murder. In an earlier and saner age, we could have settled that question in pretty much those five words. Today, however, we’re more confused. We’ve made an idol of choice — a false kind of liberty — and we prefer it to reason. We mistakenly think that’ll make us better off. Because we forget that when society rejects reason, it necessarily conducts politics through irrational violence, which we see increasingly around us and which imperils not only our liberty but also our very lives.