Former evangelical psychologist and author Valerie Tarico, a graduate of the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois, has claimed that babies who are in danger of being aborted in their mothers’ wombs are about as human as zombies in some kind of science fiction movie. Tarico posted an op-ed to the politically progressive news website AlterNet on Monday arguing that “[r]eligious opposition to abortion is based on a kind of magical thinking much like that in zombie stories.” In the piece titled
“What the Unborn and the Undead Have in Common,” Tarico makes the argument that just like babies, zombies “look like people even though they aren’t.” “Sometimes stories and movies explore personhood by drawing us into the lived experience of mythical creatures who don’t look like humans but who share our capacity to think and feel, suffer and love, and cherish conscious life,” she wrote. “Zombie stories do the opposite — they take us into a world of creatures that look like us but who lack the qualities of personhood.” CONTINUE
