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When I was in college in the early 1990s, I briefly formed an undergraduate student group called Society for Putting Humans First. I wrote an article for this group stating that it would be better to sacrifice a thousand chimpanzees if doing so could save the life of one human being. It caused quite a fracas on campus at the time, and I was accused of sundry ill-defined moral misdemeanors.

Chief among them was that I was guilty of rabid “speciesism.” That term was first coined in 1970 by Richard Ryder, an English philosopher and animal rights advocate. Ryder defined it as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” Later, Peter Singer popularized the term in his 1975 book Animal Liberation.

This was exactly what I and my group were fighting against. We wanted to show that, among the hierarchy of living creatures, there were moral distinctions. This hierarchy of distinctions was already applied in colloquial life. After all, commonsense folks did not equate a mosquito, a germ-infested rat, or a cockroach as having equal moral value to a dog or a cat, and certainly not to a human being. We knew that amoebas were superior to whales in several respects, and that the superiority/inferiority distinction held a morally qualitative value. We wanted to draw a sharp distinction between human life, which was characterized by a humanity that was consciously crafted, and that of animals.

This was the era in which the animal rights movement was co-opting language in such a manner that animal rights activists started referring to animals as non-human animals. The sentience and complex behaviors of animals were sufficient to eradicate any fundamental differentiation and distinction between them and human beings. The term had a morally egalitarian effect on human perception and inflated moral regard for animals. The human dimension in human beings was being erased, and what was subtly reinforced when one referred to a non-human animal was not merely the human-like dimension of animals but, more sinisterly, an overemphasis on the animality of human beings.

Our humanity (which is not a biological endowment, but rather, an achievement), was being de-emphasized and, a fortiori, undermined. The continuum on which human life and animal life existed was not just being shrunk. It was being eradicated. Personhood status was being granted to animals. The studies and inquiries I would come across later on in graduate school, establishing the criteria for personhood among dolphins and whales and other “high-ordered” mammals, were then and still are almost irreducible moral primaries in animal ethics programs.

Even back then, as an undergraduate, I disbanded the group after a few months. I realized it was already too late. The culture was too morally relativistic, a creeping misanthropy had already been established under the veneer of love for animals, and no tests of philosophical meaning, appeals to reason, or worse, a celebration of the heroism of man and the stupendous achievements of human civilizations (which included political and economic configurations that emancipated human beings from a cyclical, non-creative, non-innovative form of existence that could culminate in a concept such as progress), would ever modify the growing anti-human sensibilities taking root. Our small group decided back then that Western civilization was on a decidedly downward trajectory.

Against the backdrop of all this decades ago, a friend of mine told me of a paradox he presented to a friend of his. His friend is a female pediatrician in her 60s who is childless. He asked her: Do you think there is anything paradoxical about pro-choice vegans who are committed to the inviolable dignity of chickens and fish, to the point of refusing to eat hens’ eggs or caviar on moral grounds, but not extending that moral principle to protecting fertilized human eggs?

Her reply was: What are you talking about? There is no connection between the two!

He replied, In both cases an egg is destroyed, and in the case of the abortion, the egg is fertilized.

The pediatrician replied, In reference to the fertilized human egg: It’s not a human being, so don’t even go there. And you’re a male, so you don’t get a say in the matter.

My friend responded that he did not want to argue about abortion. He just wanted to point out what he saw as a paradox. He conjectured that this doctor had perhaps performed abortions or perhaps gotten them herself and that the issue was too personal for her.

There are two issues to be observed here. First, the doctor’s fallacious dismissal of my friend’s right to make a logical inquiry into a moral paradox simply on the basis of his sex. This is the most egregious deployment of what feminists call “standpoint epistemology”: the view that one’s experiences as a particular embodied person are both necessary and sufficient to qualify one as a credentialed insider, and that such experiences as one may have as an insider are the only criteria for both determining truth and adjudicating among truth claims. Therefore my friend, because he is male, cannot summon the logical means for disproving claims and proving the rightness of a moral position. Biological sex is an automatic disqualifier, and experiences of being a female (whatever such experiences may consist in) are sufficient for determining truth. The female doctor is not only a misandrist, she is clueless about the rules of logic. If we extended her credentialed insider principle to other cases, then whites with no ties to slavery could not have any moral say in condemning slavery, and blacks would be excluded from condemning domestic battery including a white husband against his white wife.

Second, the dismissal of both his moral and epistemic right to participate in a debate about a paradox that logically culminates in a question about the moral value of a human life is pure malarkey—questions of when an embryo or fetus become a human being are irrelevant here. If the hen’s unfertilized egg has moral value, then certainly a fertilized human egg, which is the indisputable beginning of a human life, must have moral value.

My friend said the next time he sees this doctor he is tempted to offer her a proposal. He’ll say, I’ll abide by your conditions (male disengagement from discussions about abortion) if you agree to disengage from any and all discussion of policy relating to domestic violence, rape, overdue child support and sexual harassment.

He’s afraid she’ll say it’s a false equivalence. The examples he cited include humans of equal standing. Abortion, she might claim, involves one human and a clump of cells — it’s like clipping a fingernail.

Again, this would be perverted logic. Victims of domestic abuse, rape, sexual harassment and overdue child support most emphatically do not involve humans of equal standing. The asymmetry between these individuals and their oppressors is gargantuan. Dismissing the termination of a pregnancy regarding a human embryo which, if left to grow, would result in a full-fledged human being, as a clump of cells analogous to a fingernail is empirically untenable. Something being a clump of cells says nothing about its status as a moral entity. The term itself is nonsensical and has no traction in reality. A fully grown human being is, literally speaking, a clump of cells.

But the doctor, like all leftist pro-choice individuals, simpliciter, but more specifically, for the sake of this article — pro-choice vegans and vegetarians, really hate human life qua human life. Anyone who grants metaphysical and moral primacy to a hen’s egg over and above a fertilized human egg is guilty of the moral crime I outlined at the beginning of this article. They do not love animals; they despise human beings. They do not want to see animals flourish; they want to reduce human existence to a level lower than polar bears and snout-to-the-ground, groveling wild boars. They want man to aspire to a form of existence no higher than tsetse flies. If civilization were left in the hands of that pediatrician, we would not even suffer the dignity of living in grass huts. We would be relegated to the level of maggots mandated to a lifetime of fasting while rotting in the belly of a dead buffalo.

A quick rejoinder to the paradox my friend presented, that I’ve heard repeatedly, goes something like this: It depends on the reason why people are vegans (and by moral extension, non-animal eating vegetarians, such as pescatarians). An ethical vegan extends the principle of not eating meat to both the chicken and the egg because of how we treat the chicken. Industrial cruelty is about how we treat the chicken. How we treat women depends on what rights are accorded to them. It is not about whether the chicken is an egg. And it’s not about whether the egg is human. It is about women’s right as the ethical choice.

This answer is facile because it presupposes a univocal reason for why vegans abstain: unethical treatment of the animals. There are philosophers such as Matha Nussbaum, who argue that even if animals are treated ethically – as are free range chickens and turkeys – that it is still morally wrong to kill them as they have a right to live out their lives on their own terms. There is a new radical school of animal rights activists and theorists—of which Nussbaum is a member—who now ascribe inviolability and intrinsic dignity to animals. Many of them claim animals have an inalienable clause affixed to their animal agency which is inviolable.

But if the egg is human, then in no non-homicidal civilization could any woman’s ethical choice be exercised in such a manner that it would supersede the right of the human egg to remain undisturbed. Hence the paradox remains unanswered

According to Wikipedia, strict veganism excludes all forms of animal use, whether in agriculture for labor or food (e.g., meat, fish and other animal seafood, eggs, dairy products such as milk or cheese, and honey), in clothing and industry (e.g., leather, wool, fur, and some cosmetics), in entertainment (e.g., zoos, exotic pets, and circuses), or in services (e.g., guide dogs, police dogs, hunting dogs, working animals, and animal testing, including medical experimentation and the use of pharmaceuticals derived from or tested on animals).

Vegans place a higher value on animal life and even insect life than on human life. A strict vegan would, for instance, rank the consumption of honey or milk as a greater moral wrong than aborting an 8-month-old human fetus.

The pro-choice vegan and/or vegetarian is one of the worst ethical anomalies in our lifetime. As evil and demonic as transhumanism is, the movement still has to take the centrality of the human being seriously—at least before its practitioners wipe out humanity. These pro-choice vegans and vegetarians operate on a single principle: nihilism and civilizational regression. If we take that principle to its logical endpoint, we can see that like the transhumanists, they want to eradicate humanity. Human extinction is their goal. They want to return the earth to those whom they believe are its rightful owners, its first occupants: the sacred non-human animal.