A Debate Challenge for Dr. Willie Parker

On April 4th, 2017, yet another book was published which claimed to present a moral argument for abortion.  Dr. Willie Parker – the book’s author, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and a nationally celebrated child killer – claims that he is “doing God’s work” by providing abortions.  I disagree.  I think that Parker’s “God” is a construct of his own imagination and that his so called “moral argument for choice” is a farce.  I’ve challenged Dr. Parker to a public debate in Birmingham, and I am eagerly awaiting his response.

Here are a few statements from Parker’s book that I am looking forward to discussing with him:
 

• “It is my personal belief that the abhorrence of abortion expressed by the men who place themselves at the barricades in front of abortion clinics is actually a misplaced horror at women’s sexual autonomy.”

 

• “The people who pass the new laws concern themselves with fetuses, but these are humans I am caring for—real people, not merely biological organisms with the potential to become such.”

 

• “Before twenty-two weeks, a fetus is not in any way equal to ‘a baby’ or ‘a child.’”

 

• “I regard the meeting of sperm and egg as a biological event, no less miraculous but morally and qualitatively different from a living, breathing, human life, imbued with sacredness only when the mother, or the parents, deem it so.”

 

• “In the Bible, few of the female characters actually have names.”

 

• “The Jesus I love … realizes that the petty rules and laws laid down by the fathers and authorities are meaningless, and that to believe in a loving God is to refuse to stand in judgment of any fellow mortal.”

 

• “I was not yet in possession of the intellectual tools to unpack or query the fundamental sexism embedded in the ancient Scripture, or to discover for myself a more nuanced, or feminist, vision of justice. Now I see the Bible as it was written: the inspired word of God, but also a historical document preserving the ancient hegemony of men; starting with Eve, women are always thrown under the bus when it suits the men in power to do so.”

 

• “that it’s impossible not to see abortion as a palliative solution to psychic pain.”

 

• “God is love, and God does not judge”

 

• “The radical nature of God’s love—always possible, never punitive, and never, ever conditional.”

 

• “I make sure I find every part, and I place them together, re-creating the fetus in the pan. I have done this so many times that it has become routine: no matter what these parts may look like, this is organic matter that does not add up to anything that can live on its own.”

 

• “I believe that the men who are passing the laws that limit medication abortion want to control women’s bodies, which is not so far from wanting to own them outright.”

 

• “The Bible offers many picayune rules”

 

• “In the Book of Exodus … The death of a fetus is regarded as a loss but not a capital crime. Throughout Jewish scripture, a fetus becomes human when—and only when—its head emerges from the birth canal.”

 

• “The woman beguiled the man and led him into the Fall, while the man—I remember finding this unfair, even as a child—could abrogate his responsibility. She tempted me, the man could say. All I did was eat.”

 

• “There is no ‘right’ interpretation of Scripture,”

 

• “As a Christian and a scientist, I can authoritatively attest that life does not begin at conception.”

 

• “there is no historical, philosophical, theological, or even scientific consensus on when life begins.”

 

• “But this falsehood, that life begins at conception, has become so commonplace in our culture as to seem, even to certain supporters of abortion rights, as self-evident.”

 

• “Instead, life—before and after conception—is a galaxy of contingent, interconnected conditions that must be met in order for a single human to achieve progress, maturation, and fulfillment.”

 

• “The scientific truth, which touches every living thing in the natural world, is that, in the process of life, from fertilization until death, all sorts of events can arise that interrupt maturation.”

 

• “An egg, unfertilized, is alive. And sperm are alive.”

 

• “Is an embryo that fails to thrive ‘life’? On the same level as a healthy newborn? Or on the same level as the woman carrying it?”

 

• “The antis may want to call a twenty-two-week fetus a ‘person,’ but if born, it will die.”

 

• “The antis don’t want to hear this, but ‘life’ is a gray area. There is a period, between about twenty-two and twenty-five weeks of gestational age, during which “life” is a vague state. A fetus may or may not be viable in that period … A fetus born during this period is not definitively consigned life.”

 

• “In the large and interconnected set of biological preconditions—conditions and processes that, taken collectively, are ‘life’— there is no right course.”

 

• “to refer to the fetus in utero as a baby is inaccurate. It reflects a hope, not a reality. In reference to a fetus, ‘baby’ is a cultural term, not a scientific one.”

 

• “Life is a process. Your life is a process.”

 

• "I don’t believe in moral absolutes”
  

 

• “I don’t think of the world in terms of good and evil”

 

• “I got angry, because no one is entitled to sit in judgment of others”

 

• “If God is human and humans are of God, then God has to love everything about us, and we have to love all that belongs to God.”

 

• “I needed a God of transcendence and justice more than I needed one that enshrined and preserved the Bible’s antique, patriarchal worldview.”

 

• “If God is in everything, and everyone, then God is as much in the woman making a decision to terminate a pregnancy as in her Bible.”

 

• “God is not human. God is not on the planet. God does not have babies, or make babies. People do.”

 

• “The God part is in your agency. The trust—the divine trust—is that you have an opportunity to participate in the population of the planet. And you have an opportunity not to participate. Is God vested one way or another in whether you, as an individual, become pregnant? No.”

 

• “The part of you that’s like God is the part that makes a choice. That says, I choose to. Or, I choose not to. That’s what’s sacred. That’s the part of you that’s like God to me.”

 

• “The procedure room in an abortion clinic is as sacred as any other space to me, because that’s where I am privileged to honor your choice. In this moment, where you need something that I am trained to give you, God is meeting both of us where we are.”

 
With an argument full of such statements, is it any wonder that Dr. Parker has yet to respond to my challenge?  I hope that he will eventually agree to a debate and give me the opportunity to reveal his flawed reasoning to our neighbors in Birmingham.