Debaters go head to head on eve of Roe vs. Wade anniversary
A crowd of over 400 gathered in the basement of Eaton Humanities Jan. 18 to hear two philosophers engage in a verbal battle over abortion.
The St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center sponsored the debate over whether abortion is morally justifiable.
Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, took the affirmative and argued the pro-life position. Dr. David Boonin, associate professor of philosophy at CU and chair of the CU philosophy department, argued the negative position with a pro-choice stance.
Kreeft and Boonin each were given 20 minutes to present their arguments, a 10 minute rebuttal, and five minutes for closing remarks. After that, audience members were allowed to ask the philosophers questions.
“We’re really trying to facilitate academic dialogue,” Matthew Boettger, director of outreach and evangelization for the center said.
The St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center takes a pro-life position as an institution, but Boettger said he felt strongly that the debate was not biased.
“From what I gather from the pro-choice side, Dr. Boonin is very highly regarded,” Boettger said.
Boonin published his book In Defense of Abortion in 2003.
Kreeft has written 45 books several of which, Boettger says, concern abortion.
Kreeft argued a number of different points using diagrams on the room’s black board.
One of Kreeft’s arguments compared having an abortion if one was unsure of a fetus’s status as a person to “fumigating a room without checking that everybody’s out.”
The two men often clashed over the idea of whether a human fetus can be considered a person.
“The debate about abortion is often hashed out in terms of personhood,” Boonin stated in his argument.
The two men drew a number of other analogies, each arguing over the exact implications of what his opponent was saying.
“A person is someone who has consciousness . . . it’s your soul, not your body,” Kreeft said.
Boonin’s argument focused on refuting many of Kreeft’s assertions.
“We need some further reason to think that [his] claim is true,” Boonin said.
Students who attended the debate say they were impressed.
“It was interesting to kind of see the different strategies that they used,” sophomore engineering physics major Alex Fout said.
Other students say they learned a great deal from the debaters.
“Every time the speakers got up you felt compelled to their arguments,” Matthew McAllister, a freshman open option major said. “It left you with a lot to think about.”
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Sam Dieter at Samuel.Dieter@thecampuspress.com.
