Students for Life of America released a brief video showing a college student arguing in favor of killing a two-year-old simply because the child cannot talk. The video is from the Pro-Life group’s visit to the campus of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. According to The College Fix, SFLA regional coordinator Brenna Lewis asked the student about whether he would support abortion up to age two, otherwise known as infanticide, the abortion supporter enthusiastically agreed, saying, “I’ll buy that.”
The student went on to explain his homicidal views, arguing that a two-year-old cannot adequately communicate “sentience” and therefore cannot prove he or she is fully human. The student claims, “The fact of the matter is without communication, we have no way of knowing if you’re sentient or not. I mean, it’s no different than this tree. It’s alive, but is it sentient? I don’t know. I cannot communicate to it.” When Lewis pointed out the obvious incongruity of equating a two-year-old child with a tree, the student promoting abortion repeated his talking points and stuck to his position that infanticide up to age two is acceptable.
The stunning clip demonstrates the growing anti-Life trend taking hold on college campuses. Advances in technology have given us a window into the womb, and further understanding of embryology has definitively demonstrated that human life begins at conception. There is no denying that preborn babies are human, even from the earliest stages of development. In light of these undeniable facts, many abortion supporters no longer attempt to argue that preborn children are “just a clump of cells.”
Once abortion supporters acknowledge the humanity of the preborn, they have to somehow claim that killing a preborn baby is different from murdering your nextdoor neighbor. Increasingly, anti-Life arguments use arbitrary characteristics to define humanity in order to distinguish between the preborn, the elderly, and the disabled, and independent adults. According to these convoluted arguments, cognitive abilities, which the preborn cannot demonstrate, define a person’s value and worth. The College Fix notes that such thinking has led an increasing number of students to argue in favor of infanticide.
Pro-Life speaker Ben Shapiro encountered an abortion argument similar to the student’s in the SFLA video. In his response, Shapiro noted that people who are sleeping or in a coma also don’t communicate sentience, but most people would not accept the position that those people can be killed as preborn children are killed in abortion. Shapiro also sums up the broader Pro-Life position, saying, “The problem is any time you draw any line other than the inception of the child, you end up drawing a false line that can also be applied to people who are adults. So, either human Life has intrinsic value or it doesn’t.”
Though the recent SFLA video is disturbing, the student’s argument clearly shows the logical conclusion of the anti-Life worldview. If taking human Life in the womb is acceptable, then we cannot argue that killing a two-year-old, or a 45-year-old, is unacceptable. SFLA points out that the disturbing extremism of abortion supporters are part of what is driving people to join the Pro-Life movement. Perhaps there is no more convincing argument for Pro-Life values than letting abortion supporters explain their views.