Guest Post: Atheism, #GamerGate and Abortion: A Rationalist Perspective

This is a guest post from Allen Harris, an outspoken voice in the atheist and GamerGate communities. The views expressed in this post are those of Allen Harris and not necessarily those of Godless Mom. You can follow Allen on Twitter by clicking here. If you want to be a guest blogger on godlessmom.com, click here.

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Godless Mom

I recently (well, not really recently, but recently enough) had a rather surreal experience with a Twitter personality whom I like and respect a lot, @PolitiBunny (who has since either changed her Twitter handle or deleted her account). We were tweeting back and forth about abortion and I brought to the discussion my argument that the propriety of the right of abortion must end at 16 weeks (although in fact I meant between 12 and 16 weeks).

Bunny seemed to be rather stunned, saying (not in a menacing or judgmental way, just as an aside of surprise) that she considered the position to be unreasonable (that is, she thought it was WAY too long into the pregnancy to allow abortion).

I went on to explain that, as a non-religious person who hasn’t had children, my ability to decide the propriety lies solely in developing a rational metric. The lines of reasoning that led to this metric are as follows:

•We kill animals, plants and insects all the time. Some for food, some for sport, some because they’re pests.
•We have a problem killing humans, therefore a rational foundation must be established to determine why killing, say, a monkey isn’t murder but killing a human [without cause] is.
•The greatest substantive difference between apes, monkeys, dogs, cats, or other animals and humans is a quality one might call “sapience” – the ability to intuit a rational, deliberate decision which leads to controlling oneself to do something that isn’t explicitly instinctive. In essence, this is called “executive function”
•This “executive function” lies almost exclusively in the prefrontal cortex
•Therefore, the substantive difference between other animals and humans, which makes humans protected life, must be the emergence of the prefrontal cortex
•The prefrontal cortex forms and binds with the rest of the brain (and is therefore able to function executively) between 12 and 16 weeks
•Therefore, the life isn’t protected until between 12 and 16 weeks

http://godlessmom.com/guest-post-atheism-gamergate-abortion/