Barber: Abortion May Have Killed Person to Cure AIDS
Okay, I find this absolutely hilarious. Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel makes a profoundly silly argument that AIDS would likely have been cured by now if abortion was illegal because the person who would have found the cure for it was probably killed by an abortion.
Seriously, there’s no limit to how stupid their arguments get. None.
davidct:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Of course we also missed out on an endless number of mass murderers.
Draken:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
The prolifers, on the other hand, just let the next Joseph Pol Hitler slip through.
Raging Bee:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
That practicing physician they murdered in his church might have found a cure for AIDS too, had he lived.
tommykey:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
That’s just one aspect of anti-choicer rhetoric about how we wouldn’t have a shortage of primary care doctors or we wouldn’t need immigrants if we didn’t abort 40 million babies in these countries. The implicit message of this rhetoric is that it is the patriotic duty of American females of child bearing age to crank out the babies for the good of the country.
embraceyourinnercrone:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:20 pm
I guess Matt Barber doesn’t realize we can play the What If game all day:
Maybe the person who would have cured AIDS was never born because their (potential) mother could not get an abortion. If she could have aborted a pregnancy at one point a child she would have had later would be the brilliant scientist who found the cure. But because abortion was not available to her, she carried the first pregnancy to term and her life turned out differently. Who knows?
Never mind the fact that many discoveries were the product of teams of people collaborating, not one person having a light-bulb moment in a lab all by them self. AND many discoveries are simultaneously “invented” by more than one person, its just that the one who gets to the patent office or publishes first gets the credit.
freemage:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:22 pm
Of course, if you subscribe to destiny-based thinking (ie, “God has a plan”), this sort of would’ve made sense, assuming you also decide that your omnipotent, omniscient deity didn’t know about/couldn’t prevent the abortion from occurring. Hm… nope, even crawling into their world-view doesn’t actually account for it.
Randomfactor:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:28 pm
Guess they’ve given up on praying for a cure and are now expecting science to bail them out of the plague they think their god loosed on mankind?
usingreason:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
The Anti-Christ was also aborted and Armageddon will never come. Hallelujah!!!
Raging Bee:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:30 pm
And of course, there’s lots of alraedy-born people who might have found a cure for AIDS if the “pro-life” party hadn’t spent so much time opposing serious medical research…
Johnny Vector:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
That kid who was aborted was quite something, wasn’t he? Not only would he have cured AIDS, he would have brought peace to the Middle East, defeated an invasion of spiders from Mars, and set a new record for most points scored in a game of five dimensional Plutonian steam hockey.
Sastra:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:36 pm
There’s something just as bad as being aborted: not even being conceived. No you. No him. No her.
When you turned down that date back in ’98, the chain of events which would have eventually resulted in the next Einstein never even got started. You cold blooded science-hater, you.
That “what If” game follows the same basic rules as Calvinball. Or theology.
Raging Bee:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Speaking of abortion, the sponsor of the “protect a fetus as human life by treating it as evidence” bill is now “horrified” at the bill she supported, and had it changed. A bit.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/cathrynn_brown_wants_to_abort_mission/
I take it as a small victory that one anti-choice scumbag is starting to feel ashamed of her movement’s lack of integrity.
grumpyoldfart:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:43 pm
As Christians always tell us when discussing the problem of evil, everything happens for a reason and it is always for the greater good. God knew about that abortion and he wanted it to happen – otherwise he would not have allowed it to happen.
Raging Bee:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
When you turned down that date back in ’98, the chain of events which would have eventually resulted in the next Einstein never even got started. You cold blooded science-hater, you.
I’m not laughing, because at least one moran at Evangelical Outhouse — excuse me, Outpost — said exactly that, with absolute seriousness. He really did seem to believe that people who didn’t even exist yet had rights that trumped a woman’s right to use birth control. That’s why birth control = eugenics.
Not sure if they had a position on teenage girls who choose not to have sex…
dingojack:
January 25th, 2013 at 1:47 pm
Why is it that only Americans can find the cure for AIDS?
Did an American discover the cure for the bulk of stomach ulcers or most of the cause of uterine cancers, did they isolate the chemical that kills certain lethal bacterium such as Treponema pallidum and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Penicillin)?*
Dingo
——–
* just as an examples…
Randomfactor:
January 25th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Why is it that only Americans can find the cure for AIDS?
Well, most other developed countries tend to be saner than we are on the abortion issue. So they’re losing more EinsteinCuriePasteurs than we are.
pacal:
January 25th, 2013 at 3:26 pm
Equally valid would be the thought, “Abortion may have killed the next Hitler”.
baal:
January 25th, 2013 at 3:31 pm
Echoing Bee – imagine all the kids who would grow up to cure aids if only they had adequate nutrition so they could pay attention in class…. It’s not the liberals slashing school based feeding programs.
Gregory in Seattle:
January 25th, 2013 at 3:33 pm
People like Barber love to say that “AIDS is God’s judgement against sin.” So anyone who found a cure for AIDS would either be 1. working for the Devil to thwart Almighty God, or 2. proof that people like Barber have either been ignorant or lying about God’s feelings about AIDS. Of course, the actual answer might be 3. it was God’s plan to have that fetus aborted so that the Devil could be thwarted, but that brings us back around to point 2.
Hmmm… this is a conundruum.
Ace of Sevens:
January 25th, 2013 at 3:37 pm
Maybe the person who would have cured AIDS was never born because their potential parents practiced abstinence and didn’t have sex at the correct time.
cry4turtles:
January 25th, 2013 at 3:42 pm
What if Jesus was fixin to return, but mama #2 went and died in childbirth trying to carry his older sister to full term because mama#2 was refused an abortion at Saint Somethings?
footface:
January 25th, 2013 at 3:49 pm
Gregory in Seattle:
I agree. It’s almost like it doesn’t make sense.
John Hinkle:
January 25th, 2013 at 4:11 pm
I’m not going to bother listening to the clip, but I like how he picks AIDS. It’s like he’s trying to appeal to liberals, which is just as stupid (it turns out) as Obama trying to appeal to republicans.
Doug Little:
January 25th, 2013 at 4:17 pm
I thought AIDS was gawd’s punishment for “Teh Gay”. Why would he care if it was cured or not.
Chris T. Smith:
January 25th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
it’s obvious now that the “conversation about abortion” in our country has evolved into something like George Orwell’s book “1984” and the “doublespeak” thing… where the meaning of words or phrases are completely turned upside-down… the real “war on women” in this country is being waged by the abortion industry: http://www.know7things.com/sin.html
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :):
January 25th, 2013 at 6:53 pm
It’s a lot likelier that the person who would have cured aids by now dropped out of high school or college due to an unplanned pregnancy and being denied or pressured out of seeking an abortion.
schelde:
January 25th, 2013 at 11:08 pm
Chris T. Smith,
Thanks for the link. In shows you’re an idiot. Again, thanks for making that clear.
Rip Steakface:
January 25th, 2013 at 11:13 pm
How very deterministic. So much for God allowing free will – nope, there’s no free will and you’re all predestined to go to hell, and people are predestined from conception to follow the exact order of the universe. This also means of course that if you’re poor, you’re meant to be that way and should just suck it up.
You know, their ideas make more sense when you eliminate free will.
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :):
January 26th, 2013 at 3:21 am
No they don’t. Their ideas are slightly less incoherent when you eliminate choice. “Free will” apparently means something the soft-philosophy types won’t define but is allegedly inconsistent with a material universe, and doesn’t seem to preclude meaningful choices even by its absence. Let them and the undefinism bury each other.
cactuswren:
January 26th, 2013 at 4:08 am
pacal@17:
I pointed this out to an anti-choice acquaintance who liked to use the “Congratulations, you just killed Beethoven” argument. She responded with a completely bizarre (and almost certainly completely fictive) anecdote about two people who were born in a little village in Bavaria On! The! Same! Night!: one was a girl with Down syndrome who grew up and cared for her parents in their old age and was loved by everyone who met her, and the other was Hitler. I never understood what the point was supposed to be.
slc1:
January 26th, 2013 at 7:07 am
Re cactuswren @ #30
Frankenberger was born in a small town in Austria.
chrishyland:
January 26th, 2013 at 7:38 am
I think the interesting thing here is not that he believes that (he doesn’t sound very convinced himself ), but he thinks that’s a good argument to make to liberals. I guess if you think liberals just irrationally love gays and killing babies, maybe if you put those two things at odds someone might choose one. As if they guy in his story was going to say “Oh my god you’re right I must oppose abortion immediately so we can cure aids!”. Or alternatively: “Screw the gays lets kill more babies!”.
jayarrrr:
January 26th, 2013 at 10:04 am
Barber should consider that maybe the person who should have killed him 10 years ago over his wallet was aborted, too, thus allowing him to spew his bilge today.
Markita Lynda—threadrupt:
January 26th, 2013 at 1:56 pm
Illegal abortion may have killed the female science graduate who would have discovered the cure for AIDS, cancer, and the common cold.
lpetrich:
January 29th, 2013 at 5:50 am
I like the “killed the next Hitler” argument. In fact, I like this version of it:
.
In the little town of Braunau am Inn, Austria, near the German border, a certain Klara Poelzl has discovered in the fall of 1888 that she is pregnant. She and her husband, a minor customs official named Alois Schicklgruber, decide that they don’t want to have a child at that time, so she gets an abortion.
.
Guess who got aborted.