Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington, was at Oregon State University on a panel debating abortion. A student asked him:
“Dr. Adams, you mentioned that dead things do not grow. But then how can you explain how vegetarians will eat plants, which grow, but will refuse to eat animals. And doesn’t self-awareness matter to define what human life is in terms of personhood?”
In other words, it is the preference of the eater that assigns value to what is being eaten (or not) and the same principle applies to abortion, e.g. - you like babies so you keep yours and I find a baby an inconvenient truth so I dispose of it.
Adams replied with a brilliant question in return:
“Let’s just say, heaven forbid, that on the way home this evening you were involved in some sort of a car accident and you went into a coma. It’s a reversible coma and you’re going to be in that coma for months, if not years. In the process of being in that coma fortunately your brain is repairing itself. Eventually, you’re going to come out of the coma. When you do, you’re not going to have any memories. You’re not going to know how to read or write or speak. You’re going to have to be taught to do all of those things. Do I have a right to kill you while you’re in the coma?”
“I respect your opinion but let me answer the question. I don’t have a right to kill you. Absolutely not! Because you’re valuable … because you still have your basic human nature. And, guess what? I just described accurately the condition of the unborn. When they are born, they’ll develop all of those things. And they’ll have to be taught to do them. But they’re just as valuable as you. And just as I shouldn’t kill you I shouldn’t kill them either. That’s my answer.”
A good answer and the answer of the Declaration of Independence, which says:
To which the student replied, "Not necessarily." Sigh. Of such thinking come the Hitlers, Stalins, and ISILs of the world.
Adams disposed of the question and took the audience with him when he came back with this:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness... "
It is unthinking moral relativism that is at the root of the bad thinking of so many college students and entirely too many adults and allows them to so casually look at abortion as an option, indeed a "right" and a host of other equally poisonous thoughts.
Adams offers two takeaways from this interchange:
- We sometimes deal with people whose hearts are so hard that they cannot be persuaded by logic or by the glaring deficiencies in their own reasoning.
- When we respond to such people with respect and focus on their inherent worth as human beings, we bolster our credibility with people who are sitting on the fence while listening to the exchange.
Kudos to Adams for engaging, but the same is true for the rest of us. To be truly civilized, a society must recognize and cherish the inherent worth of human beings. To the extent that it does not, it is on its way back to savagery and the barbaric law of the jungle.
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