Benjamin Cain
2 min readMay 16, 2022

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Lots of emotionally-based strawman objections here.

My argument about how conservatives are better than liberals at politics has nothing to do with the Supreme Court. The argument is based on a comparison of the collective strengths and weaknesses of the two groups in question.

You say, ‘You also make clear you don't understand the Constitution or the facts, when you say things like "most Americans disagree with efforts to further restrict women's ability to have abortions". That statement summarizes how flawed your whole argument is.’

But what this shows, rather, is that you have a reading comprehension problem. That point I made had nothing to do with questioning the Supreme Court’s evaluation of Roe v. Wade. This was just a tangential point I made in laying out who the American liberals and conservatives collectively are. I was just saying that on the abortion issue, most Americans are moderate so they’re closer to the liberals who think abortion shouldn’t be entirely outlawed. Your response that “the Constitution doesn't care what the majority thinks” is therefore quite irrelevant.

The most amusing part of your comment, though, is this bit of misdirection: ‘You also cleverly use the phrase "murdering a person" because you are aware even in the first trimester according to science, human life begins at conception, whereas "person" is a legal definition.’

“Person” is not just a legal concept. Perhaps you’re thinking of the personhood of corporations, which is indeed just a legal fiction. No, I’m afraid that the concept of a person is psychological, philosophical, and moral. Murder isn’t the taking of a “life,” but the killing specifically of a person, that is, a human being with the psychological standing of a person (self-awareness, intelligence, freewill, and so on).

Unlike the “pro-life” crowd, I’m not the one who resorts to clever rhetoric to obfuscate the abortion issue. You seem to have missed the part of the article where I talk a lot about that and duly mock conservatives for their muddying of the water.

You say that “trying to pretend the unborn baby is anything other than a human is simply delusional.” But that’s just a strawman that doesn’t engage at all with my article. A baby is a person (a fully developed human being), which is why killing a baby would be murder. The life in the mother’s womb late in the third trimester could indeed be called an unborn baby, so aborting that late stage of a fetus could arguably be considered murder, and such late-term abortions should perhaps be outlawed except in extreme cases.

But only one percent of abortions happen at that late stage. Most abortions happen in the first trimester, so the question is whether that early-stage fetus is an “unborn baby.” If not, that fetus (i.e. that zygote, blastocyst, or embryo) isn’t a person, so terminating its development wouldn’t be murder. Do you see how easily your misdirection is corrected?

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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