Nascent Thinker | Contemplations Along The Way

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 … (Read more)