Every semester for nearly 25 years, Raymond Dennehy has stood in front of a mostly hostile group of hundreds of students at the University of California, Berkeley, and made a calm, logical case that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being.
It's unclear how many — if any — students walk into the lecture hall pro-choice and leave pro-life. But on a college campus that may be among the least reflective about the pro-choice position, Dennehy has clearly challenged assumptions and unsettled settled minds.
Dennehy is a philosophy professor at the Jesuit-led University of San Francisco and author of "Anti-Abortionist at Large: How to Argue Abortion Intelligently and Live to Tell about It." [Disclosure: Dennehy was a professor of mine — one of my favorites.]
His most recent visit to Berkeley was reported by the Los Angeles Times in a front page article. Here's a snippet.
Dennehy was unwavering. A woman can abort a fetus only to save her own life. [See addendum at end of this post.] In all other cases, even rape, abortion is tantamount to murder.
"Have you ever been raped or been pregnant?" a young woman demanded.
You could almost see Dennehy rolling his eyes.
"Suppose I said yes," he said, unable to keep a slight snippiness out of his voice. "What's your next move?"
"I was just curious how your opinion would have changed if you were in that situation."
"What has that got to do with the validity of my argument?"
Her gambit failed; now she was on the defensive: "It's just a question."
"There are only two issues in an argument, miss," Dennehy said. "The facts, and the conclusions you draw from the facts.
"When we teach logic, that common fallacy is one of the first things we teach: shifting the attention of the argument and the evidence to the person arguing. It's absolutely irrelevant."
Potts sat attentively; students shifted a bit in their seats. If students thought Dennehy was going to play the avuncular, patient professor, they were wrong.
Read the entire thing here.
Addendum: From Ray Dennehy: "The journalist does a great job, but inadvertently misrepresents me by writing that I approve of abortion to save the mother's life. I approve only of indirect abortion, e.g., cancerous uterus, ectopic pregnancy, etc."
