Abortion is Murder: What You Need To Know about the "Embryos aren't people until they're conscious" argument, and How to Refute It

In a widely-discussed debate on whether abortion should be recognized as the taking of a human life, Lila Rose and Kristan Hawkins joined forces in a face-off against the popular streamer Destiny. At one crucial moment, Destiny leaned on one of the most common pillars of the pro-abortion worldview: the claim that “personhood only begins once consciousness begins.” It’s a sleek, sound-bite version of their old argument—that a child in the womb is not yet truly a “someone,” but only a “something,” until the mysterious switch of awareness flips on.

This argument often stumps people because it sounds "scientific" and "neurological." Countless studies show that the brain really does play a vital role in consciousness, after all, and nobody wants to seem as if they're contradicting years of evidence and research. The pro-abortion advocate, thus, often uses it as a "trump card" to win the debate and send a dramatic shockwave of rhetorical force through the audience. I have to admit, it can certainly feel challenging to argue against the fact that consciousness is vital to our existence. That is...at first, until you think more deeply about what it actually means for reality and human existence as we know it. The truth is, Destiny's argument is built on very shaky ground with countless weaknesses that make it utterly collapse once you scrutinize its foundations.

First, neurology explains how consciousness correlates with brain activity, but attempting to use neural activity as the cause of consciousness itself crosses outside the jurisdiction of neurology and into the jurisdiction of philosophy and metaphysics. Science makes it clear the brain is correlated with consciousness, thus being vital—we don't need to debate that, otherwise we wouldn't have brain healthcare as we know it. But the particular issue at stake here is Destiny's claim that consciousness itself is 100% created by a specific stage of development.

This is where the claim overreaches, because the data shows correlation, but correlation ≠ causation—and consciousness is an inherently metaphysical topic rather than something in the scope of neurological chemistry.

Here, it becomes clear that Destiny's argument smuggled in a very specific philosopical assumption: physicalism (the belief that reality reduces to physical objects.) However, physicalism is riddled with fatal flaws. In fact, I had a whole section in one of my captions on the Sacredness of Life Instagram where I argued exactly why physicalism is flawed.

However, in a discussion context, trying to argue philosophy of mind often leads down rabbit holes that end up complicating the debate rather than solidifying it. That's precisely what happened with my post—in the comments section, I got lost in skirmishes about all sorts of issues on philosophy of mind/consciousness. They were complicated things that could not possibly be resolved in such a limited format. And that's definitely not suitable for the kind of rapid-fire exchange that happens in our everyday discussions—the kind that tends to deeply shape our worldview and, oftentimes, even goes viral.

So here, I'm going to share two ways that you can refute this argument without needing to rely on philosophy-of-mind rabbit holes. It's still metaphysical, but here, you can see how it's also just obvious common sense that you can bring up in everyday discussions.

First, you can't have conscious experiences without having somebody to actually experience them

When Destiny argues that a baby isn't a person until their first conscious moment, he's actually making what philosophers would call a "non-sequitur." A non-sequitor means "just because this is true doesn't automatically mean this other thing is also true." Even if a person's consciousness may begin at a certain stage, it is a non-sequitur to argue that the person themself does not exist before that stage. Sure, you might postulate somebody's first conscious experience happens at a certain neural development stage. But that doesn't tell you the exact time the "somebody" doing the experience first began to exist. Being conscious is not the same as existing, and not being conscious is not the same as not existing as a person.

It helps to think of it with the logic of verbs and nouns. Destiny conflates the verbal action of experiencing consciousness with the noun entity: the experiencer of that consciousness. It's like how containers hold something. Consciousness might begin at some point, but somebody has to already be exist to actually do the experiencing.

If you think about it, a person is like a container for consciousness. If you're going to put something in any container, you obviously need the container to exist in the first place. Otherwise your water would just spill out because the cups don't even exist to hold it, and you would die of thirst because your mouth wouldn't exist to hold the water.

Likewise, you need to exist as a person before you can have any conscious experience. Otherwise, all our thoughts, values, and memories are just floating bubbles without names or faces that they belong to, and nothing would be meaningful, because without persons...they just don't happen to anybody! "I love you" is a beautiful experience, but it does not matter if there is no "I" or "you" to love or be loved. Personhood is a prerequisite for consciousness, not the other way around.

So, having said that, when does personhood begin? Answer: Conception.

And in future posts, I'll explain why, and why it's obvious.

Second, it's wrong to kill the baby because it's still preventing life from occurring in one of the most direct ways possible.

We don't even need to begin explicitly from a basis of personhood to realize that abortion is still murder, even if the first conscious experience is weeks later than conception. It'll still be woven in, but situationally demonstrated.

Imagine a clinically brain-dead person—the entire brain is inactive, even the brain stem. Their body are still biologically working because they're on life support. That's the thing that makes brain death so agonizing and tragic. Despite the body being physically operational, there's no way to reverse brain death. You can still feel the warmth and vitality of your loved one's skin, yet. You feel their chest rising and falling as their heart's still beating. But the tragic reality is that they're dead, which is why taking them off life support is necessary, even if the body appears to be alive. That's why so often people struggle to accept their loved one is gone—the feeling of such visceral vitality of the body makes it incredibly hard to let go of the hope that there could be a way to make them wake up.

But what if, hypothetically, there was a miraculous cure—a way to revive the person from brain death? Then the moral stakes change drastically.

If there is such a cure, then it's obviously wrong to end life support. You'd be depriving the brain-dead person of all future life—all the beauty and truth they could have admired, all the memories they could have made, all the relationships they could have continued cultivating, and robbed them of the person they'd grow into. The cure is the chance to restore things, but removing life support would rob the person of the chance to be restored to life, and continue living.

The same moral stakes apply to abortion even when the child isn't conscious yet. They have a biologically alive body, and their life support is, intimately, the mother's womb. And the mother can feel the baby in her, and even see the child through an ultrasound. Abortion would deprive the child/of all future experiences, memories, relationships, and the man/woman they would have become. Thus, it's wrong to abort a child out of the mother's womb even if the child's brain isn't technically active yet.