Andrew Easterbrook

What I’d like to know is the percentage of people that are pro-life that also eat meat. By my reasoning, it’s brazenly hypocritical to say an unfeeling, unconscious, undeveloped, barely existing foetus deserves more of our respect than a living, breathing animal which can feel pain, is conscious, does feel happy and sad and does have a memory.

My guess is that a very large number of pro-lifers are also ravenous carnivores and this angers me. The pro-life argument is that a foetus is “alive” and should be treated as sacred (forgive the simplification) – but conspicuously missing is that life is worthy of respect only if it’s human life. Most of the animals we eat have far higher capacity for life than a foetus yet we treat them differently on the grounds that they are not human. Prima facie this is acceptable to a lot of people, but then you ask, “Why does absence of humanity justify such discrimination?” and rarely get an adequate answer. I suppose one has a slightly less incoherent position if one is Christian and believes humans are inherently different because God told them so, but that’s not really good enough for me.