Customer Reviews

Pro-Life 101: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Case Persuasively

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Klusendorf deserves high praise for his laser-sharp focus, clear thinking, and brevity. He hammers home the key question about the unborn ("What is it?"), which clarifies every other issue in the abortion controversy. In 69 footnoted pages Klusendorf simplifies the abortion issue for those who think it's complex, scientifically and philosophically builds the case for the rights of the unborn, refutes five common objections to the pro-life view, and suggests ways to help a friend through a crisis pregnancy. As a wrap-up he collects the best resources for further reading in just two pages.

Before you send your sons and daughters off to school, give them this book to prepare them for the "intellectual" attacks of the pro-choicers.

While other pro-life books answer the socio-economic arguments presented by the pro-choice side of the issue, Scott Klusendorf convincingly defines the moral issue as resting on only one question, "What is It?". The popular pro-choice position revolves around individual rights and the avoidance of hardships, yet these arguments are irrelevant to the moral issue.

Scott also exposes the faulty logic used by the pro-choice side, such as begging the question by assuming the fetus isn't a person and by leveling personal attacks at pro-lifers, rather than presenting sound arguments for the pro-choice position.

Pro-life 101 is just what the teacher ordered. The release of 101 is wonderful news for educators who truly care for their students. It uses simple logic to bring about discussion of a very difficult subject. Any teacher can bring Pro-life 101 into a classroom and engage the students in fair, unbiased and stimulated dicussion on abortion.

Away from the rhetoric and name calling this issue usally brings with it, students come away from a session of pro-life 101 with an unbiased informed conscience. Mr. Klusendorf has captured a moment in time and stepped back from the abortion wars to objectively look at where we stand as individuals, as a people and even as a society.

His work promises to provide fodder for the continued debate about how we should live. Rather than simply giving all his reasons for being opposed to abortion, he analitically disects the Pro-Choice position, ultimatley asking them to answer his questions.

I reccomend Pro-life 101 to everyone truly interested in stepping back objectively from the debate over abortion. Rather than having your opinion shaped by ranting raving and media bias, look at the facts. Get Pro-life 101.

John Hof

A generation equipped to articulate the clear thinking apologetics contained in Pro-Life 101 is the generation that will change the course of American history. Pro-Life 101 has immediately become one of Justice For All's primary equipping tools for all of our university clubs. Whether a novice or an experienced pro-life apologist, this is a must read for those who want to constructively engage a culture mesmerized by relativism.

This book is a condensed, point-by-point borderline pamphlet that acts as a syllabus for those wishing to speak up on behalf of the unborn. The author sticks to key points, and has footnotes available for further study.

Most of the time, pro-live versus pro-choice, at least in my experience, revolves around just a few key points. And being able to at least have a background on those helps tremendously. Definitely recommended.

This concise book clearly lays solid, succinct arguments for the pro-life position in a clear, understanding, and memorable way. He uses good examples and mnemonics to help you be persuasive.

If you want a concise, easy to remember defense of life which can be used for all ages, this is the book for you. Scott Klusendorf has written an excellent book to present the pro-life side effectively. Easy to read, quotes sources, and has other sites to research.

After reading this book, I went to political comment sections of the internet and watched what was being said following news stories involving abortion. It seems that the pro-choice crowd has learned a thing or two themselves.

I won't bother going over in detail the reasoning contained in this book. Suffice to say that the opposition has found ways to deal with every pro-life argument this author puts forth. This book is fine for those preaching to the choir. However, it is not going to give you any advantage over a seasoned, intelligent pro-choice supporter.

If you want to know what the other side is thinking, get your toes wet and wade thru the internet at liberal news sites.

This book fails to address the most important pro-choice argument, the so-called "Abortion-as-Justifiable Homicide" argument. There are actually three closely related arguments, but any of them would work alone. They all acknowledge that fetuses are live, human persons who should enjoy all the same rights and privileges already-born persons enjoy. But no SPECIAL rights. Like the rights of born persons, the rights of the unborn are limited by other people's rights, in particular:

1. I'm entitled to kill anything, and anyone, which is located inside my body, no matter what or who it is. If all the people in the whole world--innocent and guilty, unborn and already-born, great and small, rich and poor, smart and stupid--were assembled somewhere inside my body, along with Baby Jesus, Almighty God, and The Flying Spaghetti Monster, then I'd be entitled to holocaust 'em at will. That's part of the meaning of the word "my" in the phrase "my body".

2. If something or someone is living by means of my body's life-support functions, on food I eat and digest and on air I breathe, I'm entitled to stop that anytime. The life-support machine is part of my body, so it's mine to switch off.

3. If someone is getting ready to subject me to major medical/surgical trauma, I'm entitled to prevent that by killing the someone. You know, just as a man would be. Even if they're doing so unintentionally. It's not punishment; it's protection.

Maybe the author should write a sequel specifically on the body-ownership argument.

This booklet will almost certainly succeed in its aim of helping pro-lifers to give clearer, more persuasive and more confident arguments or presentations about abortion. Lay pro-choicers, indeed, will probably find it difficult to respond to some of the arguments in _Pro-Life 101_. That alone makes it worth buying *if* you are looking, as many are, for a kind of training manual for pro-life apologists.

But I rate the booklet according to what I perceive as a lack of philosophical merit in its arguments. _Pro-Life 101_ contains several omissions, equivocations and confusions which, until they are cleared up, will probably hamper any prospect of resolution or progress in the abortion debate.

(1) _Pro-Life 101_ asserts that the morality of abortion depends entirely on whether the foetus has a right to life (pp. 2-3, 5, 8-9, etc). This begs the question against bodily-rights defenses of abortion, which claim abortion is permissible *even if* the foetus has a right to life. That is, pro-choicers often claim abortion is justified "because a woman has a right to control her own body." _Pro-Life 101_ has no response to such claims, and this is a glaring omission.

(2) Klusendorf omits to lay out his metaphysical hand. Science tells us, he says, that "individual human life begins at conception"; thus "[y]ou did not come from a zygote, you once *were* a zygote" (p. 12, his emphasis). But this is a mistake. At most science tells us that *individual human organisms* begin to exist at conception. To draw the conclusion that beings such as *you and I* began to exist at conception, you have to assume you and I are essentially organisms. And that assumption may be false. Instead of being organisms, we might be emergent substances (à la William Hasker's "emergent dualism"), or constituted persons (à la Lynne Rudder Baker's "constitution view"); on either of these views we come into existence not at conception, but when the brain becomes sufficiently developed. Moreover, you and I might even -- as I'll wager Klusendorf himself believes -- be immaterial souls. But if we are essentially immaterial souls, how can it be true that I was ever a *physical* thing, a zygote? _Pro-Life 101_ shows a lack of metaphysical clarity.

(3) Klusendorf, like many pro-lifers, is guilty of terminological deck-stacking -- using terminology that lends covert and illicit support to the pro-life position. The strategy is this: first, declare that the central issue is whether the foetus is a "human being" (p.1), "human" (p.9), "fully human" (p.16). Second, point out that, according to science, the foetus is indeed "human" (p.13). Well, it seems to follow, easily enough -- and Klusendorf does nothing to dissuade this inference -- that the foetus has a right to life; after all, "humans" have a right to life, don't they? But this is an equivocation fallacy: given that the foetus (as science tells us) is "human" in the biological sense (i.e., belonging to the species _Homo sapiens_), it does not follow -- at least, not without further premises -- that it is "human" in the sense of having a right to life. Klusdendorf has either committed this fallacy himself, or else has sloppily used ambiguous terminology in a way that will encourage his readers to commit that fallacy.

(4) Klusendorf's discussion of what he calls "functionalism" (the view of Mary Anne Warren and others) repeatedly conflates and confuses two issues: the conditions under which somebody would continue to exist, versus the conditions under which that individual would have a right to life. Klusendorf thinks that, by showing a particular individual existed as a foetus, he thereby shows the individual must have had a right to life when he/she was a foetus (p.36). Not so: the individual might have existed but without a right to life. Thus it is a mistake for Klusendorf to assert things like: "Someone cannot be in the process of becoming a human person, since one must first exist in order to enter any process" (pp. 37-8). For an individual might exist *and yet also* be in the process of becoming a human person -- just as an individual child exists and yet is in the process of becoming an adult. The error here has two possible sources. First, Klusendorf may have equivocated on the notion of personal identity: he may have inferred that since there is "personal identity" between the foetus and me (which means only that I am one and the same entity as the foetus), therefore the foetus must be a "person" (in the sense of having a right to life). Or, second, he may simply have assumed -- question-beggingly, since pro-choicers do not grant this -- that the right to life is an essential property of those that possess it (i.e., he has simply assumed that, since I have a right to life now, I must have had a right to life at all other times that I existed or will exist). Either way, his critique of "functionalism" fails.

(5) The arguments in _Pro-Life 101_ are at times distractingly and irritatingly tendentious -- as, for example, when Klusendorf appeals (p.13) to the "Law of Biogenesis" (a term that has meant a couple of different things in science, but never what he needs it to say), and cites medical evidence for foetal pain that is incongruent with the bulk of medical opinion (pp. 56-9). The concern is that pro-choicers will be able to focus on such errors instead of confronting the true issues in the abortion debate.

Ultimately, the problem with booklets such as _Pro-Life 101_ is that they lead to a kind of delusion. On the one hand the arguments are based on confusions and fallacies and are, therefore, completely unpersuasive. But on the other hand those arguments are rhetorically effective enough that pro-lifers -- at least lay pro-lifers -- will be deluded into thinking they have adequate, indeed overwhelming, support for their position.