Anti-Abortion Atheists

In looking for Nat Hentoff's writings against abortion, I came across a humanist anti-abortion site. This site makes the exact arguments which we have made here, and which fit into the Atheist-humanist perspective also because they are not blind religious injunctions against killing, they are rational positions taken regarding the concept of both "human" and "human rights". But first to Hentoff.

Hentoff was a leftist before they were "progressives" for the second time. He rejected Obama, however, because Obama voted three times against the "born alive" bill when he was an Illinois senator. The "born alive" legislation would give a baby which survived its abortion alive protection from being killed and the same care as a "wanted" baby, even though she was no longer attached to the mother. For abortionists and apparently for Obama this represents a breech of the abortionist's promise to the mother: to kill her offspring. This particularly callous position persuaded Atheist Hentoff that Obama was not suitable for office. Hentoff in 2012:

"But I have other reasons for not possibly voting for him. One is that no previous president has been so radically pro-abortion as Obama, who, when he was in the Illinois Senate, voted three times against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. The bill would have ensured that if a live baby fully emerged before an abortion was successfully completed, he or she was to be saved.

To let this legislation die would be an act of infanticide, but it did not pass while Obama was in the Illinois Senate.

Hentoff has noted that Obama has a Kill List which includes American citizens. In fact, Obama has implemented kills of Americans without due process; he has bragged that he is "good at killing". From the Left: silence.

At Pro-Life Humanists, Atheist Kristine Kruszelnicki makes further cases against the kill imperative:

On Pseudoscience:

"While some abortion advocates have accused pro-lifers of using “pseudoscience”, in fact scientific evidence strongly backs the pro-life claim that the human embryo and fetus are biological members of the human species. Dr. Keith L. Moore’s “The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology,” used in medical schools worldwide, is but one scientific resource confirming this knowledge. It states:
“Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoo development) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”

Unlike other cells containing human DNA – sperm, ovum and skin cells, for instance – the newly fertilized embryo has complete inherent capacity to propel itself through all stages of human development, providing adequate nutrition and protection is maintained. Conversely, sperm and ovum are differentiated parts of other human organisms, each having their own specified function. Upon merging, both cease to exist in their current states, and the result is a new and whole entity with unique behavior toward human maturity. Similarly, skin cells contain genetic information that can be inserted into an enucleated ovum and stimulated to create an embryo, but only the embryo possesses this self-directed inherent capacity for all human development."

And on defining personhood:

The question of personhood leaves the realm of science for that of philosophy and moral ethics. Science defines what the preborn is, it cannot define our obligations toward her. After all, the preborn is a very different human entity than those we see around us. Should a smaller, less developed, differently located and dependent being be entitled to rights of personhood and life?

Perhaps the more significant question is: are these differences morally relevant? If the factor is irrelevant to other humans’ personhood, neither should it have bearing on that of the preborn. Are small people less important than bigger or taller people? Is a teenager who can reproduce more worthy of life than a toddler who can’t even walk yet? Again, if these factors are not relevant in granting or increasing personhood for anyone past the goal post of birth, neither should they matter where the preborn human is concerned.

One might fairly argue that we do grant increasing rights with skill and age. However, the right to live and to not be killed is unlike the social permissions granted on the basis of acquired skills and maturity, such as the right to drive or the right to vote. We are denied the right to drive prior to turning 16; we are not killed and prevented from ever gaining that level of maturity.

Similarly, consciousness and self-awareness, often proposed as fair markers for personhood, merely identify stages in human development. Consciousness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists only as part of the greater whole of a living entity. To say that an entity does not yet have consciousness is to nonetheless speak of that entity within which lies the inherent capacity for consciousness, and without which consciousness could never develop.

As atheist Nat Hentoff points out, “It misses a crucial point to say that the extermination can take place because the brain has not yet functioned or because that thing is not yet a ‘person’. Whether the life is cut off in the fourth week or the fourteenth, the victim is one of our species, and has been from the start.”

The inherent capacity for all human function lies within the embryo because she is a whole human entity. Just as one would not throw out green bananas along with rotten bananas though both lack current function as food, one cannot dismiss a fetus who has not yet gained a function, alongside a brain-dead person who has permanently lost that function. To dismiss and terminate a fetus for having not yet achieved a specified level of development is to ignore that a human being at that stage of human development is functioning just as a human being of that age and stage is biologically programmed to function."

Kruszelnicki recieved a lot of backwash from other Atheists, including not allowing her article to be published in "Humanist", for absurd reasons.

Despite these exceptions, most Atheists not only adhere to the tenets of Leftism, they persecute other Atheists who deviate from AtheoLeftist canon. Prime examples have been Anthony Flew, The Amazing Randi, Thomas Nagel, all of whom strayed from the dominant dogma and paid the price in personal defamation. One does NOT disagree with the religiously uber-toleranti without the possibility of excommunication from eliteness. The elites are nothing if they are not right, righteous, and bullies.