Book Review: Three Approaches to Abortion by Peter Kreeft

Pages: 133
Pub­lisher: Ignatius Press
Year: 2002
Author: Peter Kreeft

Admit­tedly I was some what unpre­pared for this book after hav­ing read (almost all of) Kreeft’s Socratic dia­logues. As the front cover sug­gests, Kreeft does take a “thought­ful and com­pas­sion­ate” approach to the “issue” of abor­tion. At the same time, how­ever, his approach is very directed and may come off as pre­sump­tu­ous, even con­de­scend­ing, espe­cially in the first chap­ter (“The Apple Argu­ment Against Abor­tion”). The rea­son for this, it seems to me, is that Kreeft is assum­ing a par­tic­u­lar kind of reader has either pur­chased or been given this book (by a friend per­haps) and that this sort of reader is quite insis­tent in their pro-choice views, though ulti­mately self-refuting (con­tra­dic­tory, and per­haps ignorant).

Kreeft’s first argu­ment, as the chap­ter title sug­gests, is that we are all meta­physi­cians who really know what an apple really is and from this foun­da­tion we can con­clude (through 15 log­i­cal steps) that most of us can really know what a fetus really is. Kreeft is very adamant in this point, which is where some might take him as pre­sump­tu­ous or condescending:

And from this, I deduce the third prin­ci­ple, also as an imme­di­ate log­i­cal corol­lary, that we really know what some real things really are. This fol­lows if we only add the minor premise that “an apple is some real thing.“
Now that did not seem too much of a stretch, did it? Did it make you feel like a reli­gious bigot, a dan­ger­ous fanatic, or a right-win extrem­ist to claim that when we say “this is an apple, not a cherry”, we are not talk­ing non­sense?
(I promised above not to use rhetoric instead of logic; I did not promise not to add a lit­tle sar­cas­tic spice to the argu­ment. Peo­ple can­not eat pep­per instead of steak, but they can eat steak either with or with­out pep­per.) ¹.

The argu­ment itself is easy to fol­low, intu­itive and shouldn’t be beyond the grasp of even the most philo­soph­i­cally inept per­son. The chap­ter deals with the def­i­n­i­tion of per­son­hood, “what is” a human being, the incon­sis­tency of skep­ti­cism in allow­ing abor­tion and the rela­tion between soci­ety and morals.

The sec­ond chap­ter is enti­tled “Why we Fight: A Pro-Life Moti­va­tional Map”. As the name sug­gests (as an aside, I’ve been read­ing Mor­timer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s book How to Read a Book, and it’s appar­ently an unfor­tu­nate real­ity that peo­ple don’t read chap­ter head­ings, thus have no idea what the chap­ter they are about to read is about) this chap­ter presents 15 rea­sons that moti­vate pro-life work. Some of these rea­sons are  “mean­ing,” “oblig­a­tion,” “fam­i­lies,” “women” and “chil­dren”. The chap­ter is very straight­for­ward, accu­rately con­vey­ing the rea­sons why there are those who adhere to a pro-life posi­tion. This chap­ter isn’t meant as a philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise, only as a pre­sen­ta­tion of views. As such, Kreeft does make assump­tions regard­ing the sanc­tity of life, per­son­hood (and intrin­sic value) of the fetus, etc.

The third and last chap­ter is enti­tled “What Hap­pens when an Irre­sistible Force Meets and Immov­able Object?” This is a Socratic dia­logue between two char­ac­ters — Libby (“a sassy, classy Black Fem­i­nist” and ‘Isa (‘[a] pro-lifer.. “Mus­lim Fun­da­men­tal­ist philoso­pher”). These two char­ac­ters were also used in Kreefts other work (which is excel­lent), Refut­ing Moral Rel­a­tivism. This chap­ter is a philo­soph­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the issues dealt with in chap­ters 1 and 2. As with all of Kreeft’s Socratic dia­logues, this is easy to under­stand and engag­ing to read.

In the end this is another very good effort from Kreeft, one I would rec­om­mend to any­one who is inter­ested in or per­son­ally deal­ing with the “issue” of abortion.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Unaborted Socrates by Peter Kreeft
2. Book Review: Between Allah and Jesus by Peter Kreeft
3. Book Review: Socrates Meets Jesus by Peter Kreeft
4. Book Review: Mak­ing Sense of Suf­fer­ing by Peter Kreeft
5. Book Review: Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Kreeft