Ben Shapiro Outlines ‘Strongest Case’ For Being Pro-Life On Lex Fridman Podcast

Daily Wire co-founder and author Ben Shapiro outlined the “strongest case” for being pro-life Monday, which he said includes a “bright-line moral rule” about when life begins that “shifts the burden of proof” to the person arguing for abortion.

Shapiro was asked to lay out the pro-life case during a wide-ranging multi-hour interview with Lex Fridman, a computer scientist, MIT professor, and podcast host.

“The ‘strongest case’ for pro-life is that from conception a human life has been created; it is a human life with potential,” Shapiro responded to Fridman. “That human life with potential now has an independent interest in its own existence.”

“The clear dividing line between a-human-life-exists and a-human-life-does-not-exist is the biological creation of an independent human life with its own DNA strands, etc., which happens at conception,” the “Right Side of History” author explained.

“Once you acknowledge that there is that independent human life with potential — and I keep calling it that because people sometimes say ‘potential human life’; it’s not a potential human life; it’s a human life that is not developed yet to the full extent that it will develop — once you say that, and once you say that it has its own interest, now the burden of proof is to explain why bodily autonomy ought to allow for the snuffing out of that human life, if we believe that human life ought not to be killed for ‘no good reason.’ … The burden of proof is now shifted.”

“It’s very difficult to draw any other line that doesn’t seem somewhat arbitrary,” Shapiro offered. “If you said independent heartbeat, well, people have pacemakers; if you say brain function, people have various levels of brain function as adults; if you say viability, babies are not viable after they are born. If I left a newborn baby on a table and did not take care of it, it would be dead in two days. Once you start getting into sort of these lines, it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly.”

“If you’re looking for sort of a bright-line moral rule, that would be the bright-line moral rule,” Shapiro posited. “That’s sort of the pro-life case.”

Fridman followed-up, asking if the question about when life begins is religious or scientific.

“When life begins is a question of science,” Shapiro quickly responded. “When that life becomes valuable enough for people to want to protect it is going to be a question that is beyond science — science doesn’t have moral judgments to make about the value of human life.”

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