The Overblown and Under-Reported Influence of Birth Dates

I’m not a regular reader of Scientific American. They’ve been publishing pro-abortion articles since before I was born and insist that “science” required them to endorse Joe Biden. Because science, of course, is infallible. It’s never misconstrued, never manipulated, and never allows for more than a single conclusion. That’s sarcasm, by the way. Scientific American is about as objective as the DNC, but one of their recent articles caught my eye. It’s titled “Inequality Before Birth Contributes to Health Inequality in Adults.” The basic premise is this: some of the chronic health problems people suffer as adults stem from things that happened to them in the womb. Think about the ramifications of that for a moment. The author writes:

Decades of research show that [diabetes, hypertension and asthma], usually diagnosed in adulthood, can reflect hardships experienced while in the womb. Children do not start on a level playing field at birth. Risk factors linked…

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Abortion and the Veil of Ignorance

My oldest son is a senior in high school. I’ve watched him play hundreds of baseball games over the years—along with a smattering of football, basketball, and soccer contests. My daughter is 16 and plays sports year round: volleyball, basketball, and softball. All that to say, youth athletics is a big part of our lives—and so are loud, unruly parents. The two go hand in hand. But I’ve never in all my life seen a parent lose their mind over a “bad” call made in their team’s favor or berate a coach for playing their child too much. For all our talk of “fair play,” we seem awfully adept at selectively applying it—which is why we might benefit from a “veil of ignorance.”

The veil of ignorance—not to be confused with the cone of silence—is a hypothetical construct articulated by the renowned political philosopher John Rawls. His 1971 work, A Theory of Justice, coined the term to help describe a means of making judgments that aren’t tainted by personal bias. The reason umpires tend to be more reliable arbiters than parents, fans, or coaches is that they don’t have a…

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12 Rules for Protecting Life (Part Six)

This is Part Six of "12 Rules for Protecting Life: An Antidote to Abortion"—which applies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life to the issue of abortion.

Rule #11 Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

There are lots of reasons why parents and municipalities frown upon skateboarding. It’s dangerous. It’s countercultural. It’s a public nuisance, and it creates all sorts of liability issues.  But Jordan Peterson isn’t buying any of that. More precisely, he doesn’t regard any of these reasons as providing a sufficient rationale for trying to shut skateboarding down or squelch its irreverent boundary-pushing soul. Here’s why:

Kids need to go out and push themselves against danger, because that’s what life is—pushing yourself against danger. And when you see kids doing things that are dangerous but spectacular you kind of have a moral obligation to back the hell off and…

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12 Rules for Protecting Life (Part Five)

This is Part Five of "12 Rules for Protecting Life: An Antidote to Abortion"—which applies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life to the issue of abortion.

Rule #9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't

If Rule 7 offers the most straightforward condemnation of abortion, this one might be the most roundabout. I say that because—at first glance—it’s a rule devoid of internal substance. It’s ideologically neutral. It’s the Switzerland of life rules. It refuses to take a side. How then can Rule 9 offer anything like a definitive condemnation of abortion? To my thinking, it all hinges on the word “might.” Jordan Peterson isn’t arguing that all people have something to teach us or that all positions are equally valid, but he does commend a willingness to listen to all comers with an open mind. In today’s political clime, that is an ideological position—and it’s one that moves people emphatically away from abortion.

There are two…

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12 Rules for Protecting Life (Part Four)

This is Part Four of "12 Rules for Protecting Life: An Antidote to Abortion"—which applies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life to the issue of abortion.

Rule #7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Of all Jordan Peterson’s rules for life, I would call this one the most explicitly anti-abortion. Abortion, after all, is almost always carried out in service to expedience while opposition to abortion stems from the conviction that every human life is meaningful—and worth protecting. Peterson himself calls Rules 7 & 8 the most central of the twelve. It’s not hard to see why. They are the broadest and most far-reaching. Peterson writes:

Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon.

Virtually all of the…

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12 Rules for Protecting Life (Part Three)

This is Part Three of "12 Rules for Protecting Life: An Antidote to Abortion"—which applies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life to the issue of abortion.

Rule #5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

On the surface, this rule may sound pompous and self-serving—the kind of thing you’d expect from not-to-be-bothered parents who won’t deign to be inconvenienced by their kids. But that isn’t it at all. This principle is not primarily for the benefit of parents. It’s for the safety and well-being of children. Jordan Peterson is a big fan of kids, but he’s been around enough of them to know that they’re not the innocent cherubs society makes them out to be. Young children need no instruction when it comes to selfishness and savagery. Peterson writes:

Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such a thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To dominate his mother. To see if…

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