Get a free copy of Parental Rights & Education when you subscribe to our newsletter!
Peter Kreeft’s imaginative classic The Unaborted Socrates airdrops the father of philosophy into one of the most heated and consequential ethical debates of our day and age: the debate over abortion.
Ronald Reagan once famously said, “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.” While on the surface that may seem like such a simple observation, albeit delivered with Reagan’s classic wit and charm, the truth contained within the statement is devastatingly subversive.
Why? Because it forces those who support abortion to confront the reality that they themselves have benefitted greatly from not being aborted — yet they openly advocate the right to deny to others the same life they have enjoyed.
Had Socrates been alive in the 1980s, no doubt such a comment would have made the old philosopher himself nod with approval. Thankfully, due to the work and study of modern philosopher Peter Kreeft, we don’t have to just imagine Socrates alive in the 1980s, we can encounter the man himself in Kreeft’s book The Unaborted Socrates: A Dramatic Debate On The Issues Surrounding Abortion.
In The Unaborted Socrates, Kreeft brings the father of philosophy himself back to life and full dramatic form by airdropping him into one of the most heated, and consequential debates of the 20th and now 21st century: The debate on abortion.
The book is brief and engaging, composed of three separate dialogues that build on each other like concentric circles. First, Socrates spars with Dr. Rex Herrod, an abortionist, in his abortion clinic. Then he debates Dr. Attila Tarian, an ethicist/philosopher, at a philosophy convention. Finally, he separates fact from feeling while turning the tables on “Pop Syke,” a thoroughly modern psychologist. In each of these engagements, Kreeft unleashes Socrates to do what he does best: question everything.
Without once appealing to Christian morality, the God of the Bible, or a single Bible verse, the reincarnated Socrates uses logic, reason, rationality, and — most of all — simple questions to force this cadre of pro-choicers to confront the real reasons (or lack thereof) that underpin (or undermine) their support for abortion. In doing so, Kreeft’s reimagined Socrates always comes back to the most important question of all: Is the fetus a person or not?
Ultimately, through three main dialogues, The Unaborted Socrates forces the reader to cut through the heated rhetoric and instead wrestle with any unexamined presuppositions they may have had in favor of abortion. Not once does Kreeft use Socrates to say that those who are against abortion are absolutely right. Instead, he forces those who support abortion to ask themselves why they are so certain of their position, and should logic lead them towards a different conclusion, would they humbly follow the “common master,” or dig their heels into their feelings and refuse to be moved?
In the first dialogue, the reader encounters Socrates as he encounters Dr. Rex Herrod, an abortionist, in his office. As Socrates begins his examination, Dr. Herrod quickly becomes defensive. Herrod claims that reason is his master, while mere faith guides those who oppose abortion. But Socrates doesn’t quite see it that way. Instead, Socrates sees the question of whether abortion is morally acceptable as ultimately depending on the question of whether or not the fetus is a human being.
On page 27 Socrates summarizes the heart of the matter like so: “Whether we call abortion murder depends on whether we call the fetus a person. But whether abortion is murder, depends on whether the fetus is a person, does it not?”
Dr. Herrod replies that this is, of course, a matter of opinion, not fact, and that the nature of the humanity of the unborn child cannot be answered. Begin the inquiry!
The rest of this first dialogue deals with the metaphysics of being, the unique status of man as a rational animal, how one should define a “human being,” etc. While Dr. Herrod often wants to pivot to the question of the mother, or anything else for that matter, Socrates dogs him with definitions and a focus on questioning away Dr. Herrod’s attempts to diminish, dismiss, and deny the humanity of the fetus.
The reader will be educated throughout this dialogue as to why arguments such as the location of a fetus, its functionality, its connection to the mother’s body, viability, maturity, degree of development, etc., are not morally relevant factors that can somehow be used to justify killing a fetus. Once the day and the arguments have been spent, Dr. Herrod essentially admits that he cannot refute Socrates, and yet he still clings to his “opinion,” along with the hope that perhaps someone else can refute Socrates better than he. So he invites Socrates to meet his friend Dr. Attila Tarian, a philosopher who just so happens to be giving a speech on abortion at a convention the next day.
While the first dialogue seemed to follow a sort of free-flowing discussion between Socrates and Dr. Herrod, albeit one centered on the personhood of the fetus, the second dialogue between Socrates and Dr. Attila Tarian deals with five specific arguments, or five reasons, that Dr. Tarian presents in defense of liberal abortion laws: 1) opposition to abortion is ecclesiastical; 2) you can’t legislative morality; 3) restrictive abortion laws are unenforceable; 4) every child should be a wanted child; and 5) an ethics of compassion compels support for abortion (on behalf of the mother).
As Socrates sets his questions to each of these reasons, the reader is able to watch, and learn, how they might similarly disarm such arguments were they to encounter them in the real world. The essence of this dialogue is the contest between two philosophies: utilitarianism and ethical idealism. As Dr. Tarian struggles against the logical inconsistencies in his reasoning, he reverts to subjectivism, fleeing all the way to the echoing words of Pilate from John 18: “What is truth?”
As previously mentioned, Kreeft does not use an explicit Christian ethic or allow his Socrates to use theology as a basis for questioning the pro-abortionists. However, it is in this dialogue that Jesus Christ is most clearly called into the reader’s mind — not as a statement but rather as an answer to an unasked question.
When challenged by Dr. Tarian about his understanding of the “dualism” of human nature being both body and soul, Socrates responds: “Is it not you who in practice separate them more than I? You separate positive laws from moral ideals, business from goodness, politics from philosophy. ‘Poor Plato’ indeed — to think that there could be a meeting between law and morality, power and wisdom, king and philosopher, might and right.”
At this point, any Christian reader of the book would exclaim: “But there is! And His name is Jesus Christ, the true logos, the true wisdom of God, the final King, forever priest, lawgiver and ruler, and the ontological alpha and omega!”
Whether Kreeft intends to lead a Christian reader to think of Christ at this juncture isn’t completely clear, but given the subversive nature of Socrates, it is not beyond the pale that Kreeft left this little landmine to bring our minds back to the source of all wisdom and life: the Word of God, Jesus Christ.
As this second dialogue comes to a close, Dr. Tarian loses his patience with the Socratic method right when Socrates is bravely defending one of the most difficult dilemmas in the abortion debate: What about women who became pregnant as the result of a rape? The dialogue here is a high point of the book, so I will do it the service of letting it speak for itself:
Socrates: “…To be deprived of life is even worse than to be deprived of virginity or freedom, is it not?”
Tarian: “Yes…”
Socrates: “But the fetus is deprived of life. Where is your compassion for the fetus? Your ethic of compassion seems pretty selective; it is compassionate to one victim but not to the other.”
Tarian: “Hmmph. So you would force even the rape victim to bear the child?”
Socrates: “No, the rapist did that. I would simply forbid her to murder it, answering a grave evil with a graver one.”
Tarian: “Once again, you assume the fetus is a person.”
Socrates: “And once again, you assume it is not.”
After this, Tarian resorts to ad hominem attacks and accusations, while Socrates remains unflappable. Dr. Herrod, who has been listening, then proposes one last dialogue, this one with his psychologist friend “Pop” Syke. And as Dr. Herrod and Dr. Tarian depart together, the reader gets a glimmer of hope that Socrates may be breaking through, as they rush to leave before he rubs off on them, and Dr. Tarian muses “If it’s not too late already.”
In the final dialogue, Dr. Herrod and Dr. Tarian bring Socrates to their friend “Pop” Syke, a psychologist in the psychiatric ward of a Greek hospital (the whole book is set in modern-day Athens). Before Socrates arrives, Syke shares with his friends what he thinks will win Socrates to their side: Compassion. Syke seems to think that if he can just “befriend” Socrates and essentially make him feel loved, he will relent from his pursuit of questioning abortion, relax his absolutes, decrease his dogmatic approach, and so on and so forth.
Unsurprisingly, Socrates is not interested in feelings, least of all his own, and so instead undertakes a line of questioning that ultimately underscores the superiority of reason and logic over feeling when pursuing truth claims.
The highlights of this final conversation are how Socrates exposes abortion as being fundamentally pro-force (the mother forcing her will upon the fetus) rather than pro-choice; his explanation that reason is not God, but that God is indeed utterly reasonable; his exposure of compassion as, in fact, not a virtue but a feeling; explanation that justice does not mean the same thing as equality; and his defense of the natural order of the sexes.
As this third dialogue comes to a close, and Syke insists on ending the conversation, Socrates pays homage to all the mothers who did not abort their children, a thought that has perhaps escaped Syke, and the others, who so staunchly argue for empowering a mother with the freedom to take the life to be from her unborn child with impunity.
To begin with, Kreeft does a phenomenal job of “keeping the main thing the main thing”, that is, always returning to the question of whether a fetus is a person or not. He weaves this intricately into each dialogue, beginning with Socrates’ interchange with Herrod and ending on almost the final page of the book. Even a “skimmer” of The Unaborted Socrates could not avoid this most critical question. Socrates questions and questions the antagonists’ assumption that a fetus is not a person, because this is indeed the heart of the matter. If a fetus is a person, abortion is murder. If a fetus isn’t, then it is simply a surgical operation to terminate an unwanted growth of cells.
Second, Kreeft aptly exposes the danger of definitions — or, more appropriately, how dangerous it is for defenders of abortion to allow any terms to be defined. The reader can see this in the first dialogue, as Socrates presses Dr. Herrod for the definition of a human being. As Herrod hems and haws at the simple task of defining a person, you see that Kreeft has exposed quite the nerve: Abortionists don’t want to define anything because they thrive in ambiguity and emotional language, while precise definitions pin them down.
Third, time and again, Kreeft deploys Socrates as a philosophical pirate who makes his captives walk the plank of their own logical conclusions, or at least leads his conversation partners to the plank, whether they walk it or not. This is captured very clearly in the first dialogue when Dr. Herrod proclaims that the end of the argument about the personhood of the fetus is like a shark with two rows of teeth that threaten to eat him alive. The first row is that killing an innocent human being is murder and the second row is that abortion is killing an innocent human being since the fetus is a person. Confronted with this reality, Herrod attempts to backtrack, but cannot ultimately escape; he instead simply refuses to walk the plank of the inevitable conclusion.
Finally (for the compliments), Kreeft’s Socrates exposes what one could call “the fantasy land of feelings” that each abortion supporter inhabits. This is nowhere more evident than when Socrates is questioning “Pop” Syke and exposes his flawed understanding of compassion. What is at the root of this, however, is far deeper and more pervasive in the pro-abortion crowd. They ultimately live in a fantasy land, a land that is not real, because they refuse to acknowledge nature, biological facts, defined terms, and logical conclusions. The god of abortionists is the subjective sense of “compassion” that they have for women. Kreeft does well to expose this for what it is: a smokescreen that hides their self-worship.
As for critique, Kreeft’s Socrates is actually too soft on mothers who have an abortion. On page 129, Socrates says, “The real murderer of these innocent millions in the womb is society’s false philosophy…the fetus is the final victim, and the mother and her abortionist are the victims of the philosophy.”
While Kreeft may be making efforts here to not heap condemnation on any women who had an abortion and who may read his book, I would want to ask Kreeft a few questions about this statement. For example, does “society” force a human to take any action? If “society” is to blame for abortion, which we have established is murder, can we try “society” for the murder? If we are willing to blame “society” for the murder of the unborn, on what grounds do we then blame the murder of a born human on another born human? By the standard proposed here, wasn’t the action of the adult murderer of an adult also the “product” of a murderous society? The answers to these questions can only lead to one logical conclusion: The murder of an unborn human is an equivalent crime to the murder of a born human, and our laws should reflect that moral reality.
If the unexamined life is not worth living, then The Unaborted Socrates is indeed worth reading, as it will force its reader to undertake some serious self-reflection. Kreeft has served all hungry minds a well-cooked meal of dialogue, debate, question, evasion, and metaphysical considerations centered around what is perhaps the single greatest ethical debate of our day and age: the issue of abortion.
By bringing an ancient philosopher back to life, Kreeft has done right by the unborn, calling none other than Socrates to their defense. I have little doubt this book has aborted more than its fair share of logical fallacies, and in doing so, Lord willing, it has spared more than its fair share of valuable human lives who would have been the abortion victims instead.
The Church must be involved in public discourse and influence. That’s why we write — so our readers can be equipped to understand and pursue righteous change in the world. For more timely, informative, and faith-based content, subscribe to the Standing for Freedom Center newsletter.
