Mistaking Emotion for Argument

I couldn’t figure it out. A number of students were claiming the speaker was evoking emotion to convince his audience.
The speaker didn’t want them to feel. He wanted them to think. To reason. To deduce right from wrong. Feelings had little to do with it. But today, feelings make an argument. Most people don’t discern between feeling and thinking.
In the early days of the abortion debate, those who support abortion would accuse pro-lifers of just being emotional–too emotional–about the unborn.
Pro-lifers asserted that support for unborn life was more than hand-wringing anguish over potential life. It was reasoned protection for innocent human life. All innocent human life. The foundation for protecting such life was religious, moral, and scientific. It was never solely a religious argument. Sometimes, it wasn’t a religious argument at all. (See Dr. Bernard Nathanson.)
“Mary Doe” of Missouri is turning the pro-abortion argument on its head. In a lawsuit to go before the Missouri Supreme Court, Doe is protesting a Missouri law requiring a waiting period of “72 hours before having an abortion, [that she] look at an ultrasound and sign a form which states [she’s] read material that contains the line, ‘(t)he life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.'”
A member of the Satanic Temple,* she asserts that the Missouri law violates her freedom of religion and that “she must not support any beliefs that make her fetal tissue a being distinct from her body.”
“Mary”–an ironic pseudonym–has already had her abortion. She refused to hear her unborn child’s heartbeat. She said she was made to feel “guilt and shame.”
Her emotions trump truth. She is entitled to believe what she wants. But she is not entitled to her own facts.
She is not entitled to declare a baby a non-living entity simply because that’s what she wants it to be.
The lack of logic, however, is clearest in its assertion that fetal tissue is not separate from her own body. To say the unborn are human and alive is a Christian view is also illogical.
Those assertions ignore facts borne of science: The unborn is a separate being. The child has his or her own DNA. The DNA is human DNA. He or she is not part of the mother; he or she merely resides within her–and does so temporarily. He or she is growing. That makes him or her alive.
It is not a religious idea that we can hear an unborn heartbeat. It’s not religious to see fingers, toes, and a face on sonogram imagery. And it is not religious to recognize them as human.
The only appropriate religious view to insert in this discussion is that Satan is the father of lies.
Satan’s Temple of death for unborn children–The Satanic Temple–is aptly named. I pray for them the blessing of truth.

*The Satanic Temple is also challenging abortion restrictions in Ohio and Texas.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

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