Ross Douthat

I'm going to ask you some very simple questions now.

Why is abortion wrong?

And what would you argue to someone who listens to that and says, well, surely there's some kind of ambiguous ground in there?

Someone who says, look, I can accept that abortion kills an organism that is a member of the species Homo sapiens, and I can even accept that that might be wrong.

But I don't think that that rises to the level of what we think about when we think about homicide, murder, and so on.

And I think usually when people make this argument, if they push it through, they end up saying something like, you know, there is some feature of...

awareness, consciousness, you know, brain development and so on that is just not there in the tiniest embryos.

I think there's a lot of people who have a hard time seeing the tiniest embryos as the equivalent of an infant or an adult human being and so on.

So what's your response to that sort of quest for a kind of wrong but not murder perspective on the subject?

Indeed.

I'm shorter.

I intend to die at the podcast, Mike.

Oh, no.

That sounds quite dramatic.

I've always thought that the dependence question has ended up being, I think, where a lot of the legal and political arguments have rested, right?

Because it is connected to the idea that it is, you know, in effect, illegitimate for the government to ask women to sort of carry the unique burden of having this life that is so dependent on them, is literally inside them, is, you know, you've had three children, you're

you're aware of the substantial burden that pregnancy involves.

I do think the level of development argument is the place where there is a kind of intuition that people have that

until you have consciousness, you have not sort of passed some kind of threshold into humanity.

And obviously a problem there is no one knows exactly when consciousness begins and so on.