This is the most amazing statement I have ever read by anyone in defense of elective abortion. I had to put the book down and walk away for awhile after reading it. This quotation is found in the introduction of Scott Klusendorf's excellent book: "The Case for Life." The quotation from Boonan's book, "A Defense of Abortion" is from p xiii-xiv. If you believe elective abortion is a moral right, I'd like to know if you agree with the sentiments expressed here by Boonan. Here is the full quote.
David Boonan, from "A Defense of Abortion," p xiii-xiv:
"On my desk in my office where most of this book [A Defense of Abortion] was written and revised, there are several pictures of my son, Eli. In one, he is gleefully dancing on the sand along the Gulf of Mexico, the cool ocean breeze wreaking havoc with his wispy hair. In a second, he is tentatively seated in the grass in his grandparents' backyard, still working to master the feat of sitting up on his own. In a third, he is only a few weeks old, clinging firmly to the arms that are holding him and still wearing the tiny hat for preserving body heat that he wore home from the hospital. Through all of the remarkable changes that these pictures preserve, he remains unmistakably the same little boy. In the top drawer of my desk, I keep another picture of Eli. This picture was taken ... 24 weeks before he was born. The sonogram image is murky, but it reveals clearly enough a small head tilted back slightly, and an arm raised up and bent, with the hand pointed back toward the face and the thumb extended out toward the mouth. There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows the same little boy at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point."
My Response:
Notice the use of 2 key words in his last sentence: "his" and "life." Usually, pro-abortion advocates try to argue (unsuccessfully) that the unborn are not persons, nor are they really human lives. But here, right at the outset of his own defense of abortion, this man refers to the unborn baby using a personal pronoun: "his" and even refers to the baby's "life." And he even says that it would be "morally permissible" to "end his life."
What are the unborn? That is the only question that matters. All of the talk about "privacy" and "a woman's right to choose" are irrelevant to the real issue: What is the unborn? Would it be "morally permissible" to kill a toddler in private? Would a judge acquit someone for killing their 5-yr-old because they happened to be "pro-choice" when it came to 5-yr-olds? Of course not. Why then do people think it is morally permissible to kill the unborn? Because they do not believe they are living human persons. If the unborn are living human persons, then abortion is wholesale murder. I would like to point out for the record and for all to see: staunch secularist defender of abortion David Boonan agrees with me, an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that the unborn are living human persons. But for some reason, it is "morally permissible" not to "dispose of an unwanted mass of tissue," or "discard an impersonal clump of cells," but to "end their lives." Can everyone see clearly what Boonan is actually saying here? He is saying that murder is morally permissible. I am thankful that at least one abortion-choice writer has the courage to simply come out and call abortion what it is: the ending of human life. It is my firm conviction that in time, people will wake up to the barbarism of this practice and see it as the holocaust it is. And when they do, one can only imagine what could possibly be done to make amends for the murder of more than 50,000,000 American citizens who, like all of us reading this, had the right to life.
