The following is a guest post from commenter Mary to commemorate International Life Chain Sunday. Mary urges all of my readers to take this opportunity to stand up for the pre-born.
In my discussions with people on the topic of abortion, I frequently come across people (including many Christians) who claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion (or words to that effect), but who don’t think that it should be illegal. They believe in “a woman’s right to choose”. This all sounds very fine and magnanimous, couched as it is in the language of generosity, but an analysis of the reasoning behind it shows it to be seriously flawed.
Abortion should be illegal for the following reasons:
- Taking of innocent human life without morally sufficient reason should be illegal. Where the rationale comes from for believing this basic premise is another topic, but it is agreed on by all reasonable people – theists and atheists alike. (A morally sufficient reason would be something that saves another innocent human life.)
- The pre-born child is human. This is a scientific fact.
- The pre-born child is alive. This is a scientific fact.
- The pre-born child has committed no crime and can therefore be considered legally innocent.
- Taking the life of the pre-born child is to take an innocent, human life.
- Taking the life of a pre-born child should be illegal.
Abortion should be illegal for the same reason that murdering a newborn or a 2 year old is illegal. We don’t give women the “right to choose” to kill their newborns and for the same reason we should not give them the “right to choose” to kill their pre-born children either. The only case where we would consider it acceptable to take the life of a newborn would be where it was absolutely necessary to save the life of another innocent human being. The same should be true in the case of a pre-born child. We should give equal value to human lives and value life above the right to comfort and convenience.
Our entire legal system is based on the fact that there are certain limits to choice. If the right to choose were applied across the board we’d have to scrap every law in the books. Laws exist to limit choices that are damaging to others.
Legalized abortion is unfair discrimination of the worst kind on the basis of age and location. The right to life of the pre-born is a human right that should be fought for with passion and integrity. If we do not fight for this right we will be remembered in the same way as those who have failed to stand up for the rights of the oppressed in other areas.
Will we be like German citizens during the Nazi regime who failed to stand up for the rights of Jews, despite being “personally opposed” to Nazism? Will we be like those who failed to stand up for the right to freedom of those oppressed by slavery and Apartheid, despite being “personally opposed” to the same? Or will we be like Dietrich Bonheoffer and William Wilberforce who went beyond personal aversion, even though they weren’t members of the oppressed group, who spoke against oppression and who stood up for what was right, in the face of opposition.
I would like to end with two very apt quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King:
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Very well done, Mary. I made the same arguments in many classes when the topic came up. Saying you’re personally opposed to abortion but it should be legal is on the same level as saying you’re personally opposed to rape but it should be legal. When I point that out, people gasp and say it’s not the same because there is a victim involved in a rape. Au contraire, I say, and then point out the humanity and personhood of the unborn child as you aptly did above. ;) Except in the case of rape, the victim is usually allowed to live, while the aborted child is not. :(
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What about people who say they are prolife but are for the death penalty?
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Like me, since that’s my view. I think that there is a difference between an innocent baby who is the victim of the decisions of an irresponsible mother and father looking for sexual pleasure without consequences on the one hand, and a guilty criminal who confesses to breaking into people’s homes at night and raping and murdering them. The baby should be allowed to live, and the murderer should be executed.
I wrote before about the evidence of the deterrent effect that capital punishment has on violent criminals in the peer-reviewed studies I cited from anti-capital punishment scholars who nevertheless agreed that the data supports the idea of capital punishment as a valuable tool to deter criminals and protect the public.
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Here’s a redo on my previous comment with research:
Things are not so black and white, Wintery. I know you know that. And I’m sure you don’t mean to lump women who’ve been the victims of rape or incest into your catchall category of “irresponsible mother.” Or women who are at medical risk in carrying a child. Are these not innocents, too? Living innocents? You need to acknowledge the personhood and rights of these women. They’re not incidental to the issue.
Further, States Without the Death Penalty Have Had Consistently Lower Murder Rates. That’s capitalized because it’s a direct headline from a series of studies. Here’s the link, including statistics.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death-penalty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates
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Excellent comment, MCS. I’m talking about the majority of the 45 million unborn babies who have been killed in the USA since 1973. I am open to discussion of borderline cases, but those are the minority. And yes, some people are wrongly convicted, but that has to be balanced against the lives of those who are wrongfully murdered when the deterrent effect is taken away.
Here’s my data:
https://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/how-to-defend-the-bible%e2%80%99s-support-for-capital-punishment/
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I think on the whole this post is well reasoned, though it’s not something I like to argue with people directly about. Nevertheless, I can think of some rejoinders.
One argument is that abortion is fundamentally an issue for women, and that it’s inappropriate for guys to make laws about it, especially since we don’t have to deal with the consequences of those laws (child support notwithstanding).
Another is that the immorality of murder, rape, etc. stems primarily from the fact that it causes pain and suffering. The theory goes that there’s a point in a human’s development before which he or she (not it!) can’t experience pain, and therefore though a killing is still taking place, it doesn’t entail suffering and is therefore morally neutral – or, at least, less morally bad.
A third – which I don’t like at all – is the idea that while an embryo or foetus may be human, it isn’t necessarily a person – the former being a scientific question, and the latter a legal one. Legal rights and duties are given to persons, not humans (e.g., corporations are persons with certain rights). The reason I don’t like this is simple: if the class of persons can be added to or taken away from at will, then none of us is secure from an unsympathetic majority of lawmakers.
A fourth is the argument that ontology is determined by complexity. Why should a human zygote be treated as higher in law than an amoeba, when the two are physically very similar (at least, until the zygote divides)?
The final one is an argument from politics – that, however distasteful we may find the practice, the population has had 40 years to accustom themselves to abortion as a legal option, and that to re-criminalise it would simply cost too much, in effort and loss of goodwill from those who want it kept on the table as an option, to be politically feasible. This, it seems, is the real barrier that has to be overcome.
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Erica: Thank you for the encouragement. :) That’s an excellent point!
Mr Gronk: Thank you for your comments. Fortunately there are good responses to those rejoinders. I will address each of them below.
Abortion is not fundamentally a woman’s issue. It involves 3 people, at the minimum: the mother, the father, and the child. There are countless men whose lives have been scarred because their children were aborted – often without their consent. Of the children who are aborted, some are male victims and some are female victims. Moreover, abortion does nothing good for women. It brings anguish, pain, guilt, and sometimes even death. If a woman is engaging in self-destructive behaviour, a man has a duty to do what he can to prevent it. Even if she were the only victim, it would be necessary. We try to stop people from cutting themselves rather than enabling them. If a man does not speak up to prevent an act which kills a child and maims its mother, he is not being pro-woman. On the contrary, he being cowardly and failing to do his duty as a man. The sort of men we need in this world are not cowed by radical feminists into letting women hurt themselves.
While foetal pain is a strong argument for disallowing abortion, it does not follow that the absence of foetal pain is a condition sufficient to make it permissible. The case for the illegality of abortion rests on the humanity of the pre-born, as it does for the born. We would not consider it acceptable to take the life of a two year old under general anaesthetic and the same principle holds true for the pre-born.
Regarding personhood, your concerns as to how we define that are valid. The requirements for personhood are arbitrary. The infamous Peter Singer asserts that it should be acceptable to kill children up to 6 months because they are not, in his opinion, real persons. That is where such reasoning leads. But we cannot, in a matter this serious, afford to make a mistake.
Regarding complexity, the human zygote is not on the same level as an amoeba. While both are single cells, the information contained in the zygote is considerably more complex. Moreover, if we make the stage of development the measure of value then we must be consistent and we should then value the life of a 5 year old less than a 15 year old and a 15 year old less than a 25 year old. In this light the developmental requirement assessment becomes ridiculous. Oh and most abortions happen at 8 to 10 weeks or thereabouts, when the child has arms, legs, a brain, eyes, and a beating heart.
Recriminalizing abortion would be politically painful, but that is not sufficient reason to avoid it. The outlawing of slavery was a painful, arduous process, but it was right. I mentioned William Wilberforce in my article. He worked for forty years to outlaw slavery in the British Empire. It was difficult. People had money invested in the slave trade and relied on slave labour in their businesses. But it was still wrong and it was, thankfully, finally made illegal first to sell slaves and then, later, to own them. Difficulty and inconvenience are not sufficient reason to fail to oppose evil.
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Mary,
With regards to fathers also being hurt, I can’t say I’d ever really considered that. Perhaps because I’d bought into the idea that most abortions are considered necessary because the father “shoots through” and leaves a single woman to make the best of the situation.
Arguing on the basis of harm to the woman is problematic. The idea of volenti non fit injuria could come into play. If a woman came to me and asked for advice on the matter (or on any other matter where she was harming herself), I would willingly offer it. But as a private person I don’t think I could force her to change her course, and I would be scared of doing more harm than good if I were to try.
The real nub of the matter, as you say, is whether (and, if so, at what point) an unborn child becomes a person worthy of legal protection.
I myself would argue for conception being that point, on the grounds of humanity. But the other position is to say, “humanity plus some other characteristic, or set of characteristics” (e.g., ability to feel pain, consciousness, emergence of certain differentiated tissue types, looking like a baby). I disagree with that position, but say the law establishes that a brain is necessary for personhood. Under that binary criterion, your five-year-old (or even, you say, a 10-week-old foetus) would be legally protected.
The best challenge I can think of to the “personhood = humanity + something else” argument is to ask who determines what the “something else” is, how we can stop them changing it in the future (e.g., all people with red hair are no longer persons), and what happens if they get it wrong.
The flip-side to all this is the trope of the single woman who is forced by law to carry a kid to term, and that kid goes on to have a troubled childhood and turns to crime as a teenager or adult. I could never countenance that argument, implying as it does that people with a high potential of having their lives turn to custard should just be killed, thereby saving us all the trouble. But I’m sure part of the resistance to criminalising abortion (which, in America, Canada and possibly other places, is complicated by a finding that any such move would be unconstitutional) stems from the notion that legalised abortion is the lesser of two evils, and that lawmakers have to work with people as they are, not as we would wish them to be.
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Regarding the abortion and crime, this may help you to get rid of one of your concerns.
Part 1:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,365322,00.html
Part 2:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,377181,00.html
Here is some research that disconfirms the intuition that abortion reduces crime. Abortion normalizes the practice out-of-wedlock sex, which results in more out-of-wedlock children (because of generous welfare benefits to single mothers), and hence, more crime. And this is what we see today – the out-of-wedlock birth rate is now 40% – it has skyrocketed. Abortion RAISED the incidence of out-of-wedlock births by normalizing the idea of pre-marital sex.
Read the article in full before responding.
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Wow.
I didn’t realise about that. Now, I shall have to reconsider my position.
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That means that you are a good person. I hope that when people show me new data, that I can be as good as you are. Honestly, it’s a struggle to change my mind sometimes.
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Thanks Wintery, for your responses on the issue of crime.
Mr Gronk:
It really irks me that abortion is seen only as a women’s issue. Men need to be educated on the topic. I recommend reading this material on the many effects of abortion on men:
http://www.texlife.org/docs/affects_men.htm
I found this section on abortion law and men particularly telling:
“Law functions not only as a regulator but also as a teacher. With that in mind, it makes sense to ask: When the subject is abortion, what does the law of the land teach about the father of the unborn child? Very simply, that it denies him any rights to defend his child, he cannot say one word about the continued existence of his child in the womb. The Supreme Court’s decision has literally stripped him of all his parental rights regarding his own flesh and blood during the first nine months of his baby’s life. It is only at birth that the man’s full rights (and obligations) return. Because the teaching power of the law is so strong, many people in our country now blithely accept this incredible violation of the most basic human right, the right not to have an unborn son or daughter killed.
Many men are outraged at this. However, there are men who are delighted with Roe v. Wade. Now they can pursue their pleasures without a thought about the consequences. When told of a pregnancy, they say to the woman, “That’s your problem.” Other men do even worse—they apply pressure on the woman, threatening to break off the relationship if she doesn’t have the abortion. She must choose between the baby or the baby’s father.”
So when men are excluded from having a say on the subject of abortion it denies men the right to protect their own flesh and blood, it teaches impressionable men that they have no responsibilities, and it gives bad men an excuse to use and abuse women.
We need more men to stand up and oppose evil on this issue. I greatly respect the ones who do, in the face of extreme opposition from radical feminists. I consider it one of the key tests of a marriageable man.
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To follow up my earlier comment: The challenge is to convince people who are uneasy about abortion but aren’t interested in making it a hill to die on (and I suspect most people fall into that category), that on balance to allow abortion on demand is worse for the well-being of society than to prohibit it.
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I am really seriously concerned about any social trend that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of weaker human beings for the sole purpose of allowing those who are stronger to pursue pleasure without caring about the damage done to others.
I think that protecting the unborn matters because I don’t think that strong people should kill weak people just so they can have more pleasure in life by having sex when they are not ready to deal with a baby. I am sensitive to this idea of labeling an entire group of people as non-persons for the purpose of letting strong people pursue pleasure without having to deal with the consequences. I just don’t think that the desire for pleasure is an adequate justification for spilling human blood. Just don’t do that. Don’t hurt other people. Don’t burn them with saline. Don’t suck their brains out. Don’t stab them with scissors. Just DON’T.
Is it really so hard for people to postpone sex until they are ready to deal with a baby? Why is that so hard? Are we really going to say that it is OK to cut little babies into pieces because we want to go out, get drunk and have sex with people we just met because they are physically attractive and popular? Does that make sense? Is that who we want to be? Reducing the marital act to a form of recreation for drunk strangers?
I’m not expecting you to respond, I am just trying to explain why this matters to me. I think it’s wrong. I don’t think people should be acting irresponsibly and then using violence to get out of having to deal with the consequences of their selfish pursuit of pleasure.
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All I have to say to that is, not on my watch.
While my comments have been playing devil’s advocate, I fundamentally agree on the wrongness of killing any human being merely because his or her continued existence is inconvenient. (Wrongness is too mild a term. Depravity might be better.)
I’m also firmly of the opinion that anyone who really can’t handle having a baby shouldn’t be having sex. A certain friend of mine once predicted that my views would change if I ever find myself in a serious relationship; I hope that proves not to be the case.
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Further to my last comment: One thing I think is particularly despicable is when a guy tries to pressure a girl into having sex, or when guys in general send girls a message that they’re only as valuable as their sex appeal. It may be slightly OT, but I would guess that a lot of unplanned pregnancies are the result of these kinds of sex.
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I agree! I think that without the pressure from men, a lot fewer women would go that far. Some women are aggressive and want to push men into sex to see if the men will fall under their control without their having to love him self-sacrificially. But many other women are uncomfortable with men being aggressive that way. Women want attention and care. I agree with you that men need to be more responsible and modest to stop these unplanned pregnancies. Instead of having government pick up the tab for welfare, it should go directly on the man and the woman who did it! Then I could afford to marry and have my own kids, and this would all stop pretty quickly.
Cut them out of the entitlement programs in order to pay for it.
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Nice job Mary!
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Thanks, Todd! :)
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Hey nice guest post! We definitely need more posts like this here :)
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Thanks, Sid! :)
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In an era long past, a women like that would have been encouraged to let her kid be adopted. Nowadays, there are many more prospective adopted parents than available babies. Perhaps that is still the wise way?
(In South Africa- won’t know about Canada or America- babies who are abandoned by mothers are not available for adoption. If I were a lawmaker, I’d repeal that particular one.)
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Well, I’ve heard women say that they don’t want the trauma of having a child who knows that its mother abandoned it. So the mother opts for death instead – it’s less painful for the mother.
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I have a friend who was adopted. He respects his birth mother for giving him life and he says it makes him feel special that his adoptive parents chose to adopt him and love him. He is a Christian, so he links it to the way God adopts those of us who are Christians and makes us His children.
And of course it’s only temporarily less painful for the mother to abort – while she is in denial. Once she admits to herself what she has actually done, she has a huge burden of guilt which is very painful indeed.
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