It's just not that hard, folks. Unless we're dealing with the context of a justified war, there's simply no moral defense for killing innocent humans if there are any other options, let alone for the convenience of the living. And while both sides may exaggerate to make a point, only one side of the argument does insane logical backflips to hide the true and morally repugnant nature of the acts, their numbers, their consequences, and the assumptions underlying their "justifications".
Ever since the leaked Alito draft hinting that Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned, pro-abortion activists have had their day. I suppose I can understand a certain need to defend against what they perceive as a threat on their liberties and rights. So now that they've had their time to externalize their fears and put out ad campaigns, and fake being handcuffed at protests in unlawful locations, let's stand back from the emotions and just examine the core moral arguments for their accuracy, validity, and truth-value.
1. "Abortion is health care."
This half-truth hides a multitude of dark thought processes. It's flawed, however, from its definitional foundation to its carefully obscurantist consequences. Let's take the extreme case first, because it's clearest: what is the proper medical treatment to save the life of the mother if a pregnancy threatens it? The moral answer is whatever it takes to save her. If it's true that the only way to save her is to terminate the pregnancy, the procedure is, by definition, not abortion. Not everything that results in the death of the unborn child belongs to the definition of abortion. Abortion proponents will complain to high heaven that an ectopic pregnancy, for example, requires an abortion as its treatment, but expanding the definition of abortion in that way is a self-serving strategic choice. If they can make you believe that the life-saving choice a doctor must sometimes make from a position of expertise and under conditions of near-certainty to preserve the life of the mother is morally analogous to the choice a woman can make, from a position of non-expertise, under conditions of uncertainty, to reduce risks to her physical or psychological health, ambitions, education or career plans, emotional groundedness, or to other considerations, then you've already conceded an apples to oranges comparison and can appease your conscience, avoiding by a trick of sophistry the long-term guilt that would otherwise accompany such an obviously wrong and harmful choice. It's not a mere matter of degree, a threat to life is a categorically different thing from a risk to health. They want you to believe they are caring for the woman--considering these factors and leaving the "choice" with the mother--because that allows them to cast those who wish to defend the rights and well-being of the child in question as evil, uncaring, heartless and judgmental. It makes them feel better about themselves to think of any measure to protect the child involved as an exercise of force, control, or power because doing so casts themselves in the role of defenders of "reproductive rights" and "women's health". The problem, at bottom, is that their definition deliberately muddies the moral waters and converts a self-sacrificing ethos into a self-serving, self-justifying exercise in self-gratification. The only definition of abortion that makes moral clarity of the actual choice involved is the one in which saving the life of the mother is what is defined out. In other words, if the degree of certainty (she will die unless) and the degree of risk (endangering health isn't a high enough standard, only endangering life is) align with the condition that the child cannot be saved another way, then the treatment falls short of the definition of abortion. This leaves situations under that threshold of certainty and danger, and situations in which the child may receive its own saving health care properly but the choice is made to abort anyway in the same sphere of morality: they are elective.
We don't have nationwide statistics giving a reason for every abortion, as far as I can tell. Nor can I find statistics on the percentage of pregnancies in which a threat to the life of the mother occurs to know how many were saved at the cost of their child. But the state of Florida interviews women whose fetus died as the direct intended consequence of medical intervention, and they also carefully record statistics on maternal deaths whose causes are pregnancy related. Much of the data they have compiled seems eminently generalizable to me. They report that 0.27% of the roughly 70,000 "abortions" in that state performed in 2018 don't fit our proper definition of the term, because the reason was to save the life of the mother. In that same state, in 2017, there were identical percentages of women who died from ectopic pregnancies as there were of women who died from abortion procedures (see Figure 7, page 12 of Florida's PAMR). These cases are extremely rare, despite what abortion proponents will say, and while the number of cases isn't germane to the moral argument, it is germane to exposing the rhetorical sleight of hand that abortion proponents are trying to pull. They want you to believe, essentially, that the 99.73% of elective abortions that don't involve the gut-wrenching context of a doctor in the ethical quandary of being forced to save one life even if another must die as morally equivalent to the 0.27 % medical procedures that do.
Health care is about applying medical expertise to protect life first, reduce suffering second, and minimize risks to both third. Abortion is objectively about none of these, and only even subjectively about the latter two (with dubious results at best, counter-productive ones at worst).
2. "What about rape or incest or other hard cases, like devastating physical or mental malformations? You pro-lifers are just inflexible."
Leaving aside the deafness to their own hypocrisy on statements like these (many "pro-choice" activists seem to believe that only one choice is what defines a pro-woman position when it comes to abortion, which seems more than a little inflexible to me and to the millions of pro-life women who share my beliefs on these matters), let's categorize the "hard cases" into two separate baskets and tackle them each according to their own moral nature.
a. Crimes like rape and incest can result in pregnancies. Should the expecting mother, then, be expected to bear and raise the product of the crime perpetrated against her? Shouldn't she have the choice of escaping this second sort of "victimization" through an abortion? While my heart goes out to the victims of these kinds of crimes, and while they deserve the fullest redress and that the swiftest justice possible be done to their brutalizers, what's unclear to me is how to justify a crime against a second innocent party because, through no fault of their own, they happen to be connected to an initial crime. To be sure, there's no parallel to the traumatic kind of theft rape is, but in thinking of general principles of justice, where else would we want to harm a secondary victim in order to make restitution to the first? Would we burn a borrowed wallet before it could be returned to its original owner so the victim wouldn't have a reminder of the object of a mugging? Should the owner of a rental home be denied an insurance payout because the residents who are victims of an arson don't want the home rebuilt as a reminder of their trauma? Again, these comparisons aren't valid in terms of the emotional impact or nature of the traumas or their consequences, but are only valid at the point of intersection of the Venn diagram that abortion activists don't want anyone to consider--the one in which the child sits as innocent secondary victim of a crime. In a caring world, mother and child would receive the most supportive, expert, and continuous care possible, not the illusion of being made whole through the killing of an innocent. Should a woman be forced to carry a child? Never. And let's also keep the frame of decision-making in its proper scope: if there is a conception as the consequence of a rape, has the woman already been forced? Yes, and there's no reversing time on that. Moral choices after that point are not whether or not to continue the force--that's the false dichotomy abortion proponents want you to believe you're limited to--the choices are much more open and focused on what good can we make of things despite what happened.
b. What belief underlies the abortion of fetuses with mental or physical handicaps if not the already morally reprehensible failure of imagination that can't see a life "worth living" for such? The only logical difference abortion proponents propose between the crime of murdering an adult with Down's Syndrome and the murder of a still gestating child with the same condition of human neurodiversity is their age. The motivations remain every bit as condemnable: the fact that you may not be able to imagine the happiness and fulfillment they can have does not justify you taking their life.
3. "Abortion is a reproductive right."
It's understandable that many women would see a "right" to abortion question as a part of the march of progress toward equality of all rights. It helps them feel connected to something larger than themselves, to a broad current of a positive history to be able to claim that the tradition from which they spring argued for, militated for, then turned public opinion toward the granting of basic human rights of personhood, then property, then the vote, then education and career choices, and on to marital equality--with no-fault divorce options, for example. To this framing of the debate, it's more than a little useful to point to the institution of marriage as one of the key mechanics of patriarchal oppression, wherein no one married for love, no woman was happy in marriage, and no male was considerate in the least of the wishes of his spouse about planning the arrival of children into their lives. I make this obviously hyperbolic point to demonstrate that the edge of this idea is really rather absolutist and doesn't seem to reflect much nuance in the historical record. Of course the opposite would be equally ridiculous: that every marriage reflected an equal partnership between spouses in all matters across all time. But even allowing for the historical fact that different horizons of expectation about how the partnership could play out existed in different periods, and all have been largely biased against the women, let's not go too far: the institution itself isn't what's to blame for inequalities within it, it's the abuse of the principle of a perfect love at the heart of each marital union that is to blame for any oppression therein.
The diachronic record being misrepresented as it is by the pro-abortion side, it's also not surprising that they mischaracterize our current synchronic situation. What does a reproductive choice consist of? For the choice to procreate, ideally, the two considering procreation would communicate, come to a consensus, and then act until such time as evidence of fertilization crowns their choice with the knowledge of success. If the choice isn't mutual, ideally, the two either don't pass to the act itself, or put in place preventive measures to impede the act from achieving the procreative portion of its purpose. Of course, living in a world far from the ideal as we are, communication can fail, contraception can fail, or one party (let's be honest men, it's far and away you who are guilty of this when it happens) can enforce their will despite the lack of consensus from the other partner. If any degree of coercion by commission or by omission results in a pregnancy, the moral position condemns it and seeks redress for it. But let's also be honest about this, pro-choicers: abortion isn't a reproductive choice at all, it's an attempt to avoid the consequences of a reproductive choice. It's pretending that the choice that engaging in sexual activity which always has pregnancy as a potential result wasn't fully decided simply because there are medical means of "undoing" the choice before pregnancy advances too far for society to ignore the existence of the new life. It's an attempt at moving the goalposts on the effects of a choice, not a reproductive choice in and of itself. As mature adults, we all recognize that the principle of "if you break it, you bought it" applies just as much in the china shop as it does in nearly every other domain of choice; that the principle of "don't do the crime if you can't do the time" applies as an apt metaphor for nearly all exercising of agency; that picking up one end of the proverbial stick gives you both ends. It's part of basic maturity to recognize that denying that choices have consequences doesn't buy anyone out of suffering the actual consequences. Abortion may stave off a choice that a woman regrets, but it's only the avoidance of reproductive consequences, not a pro-active reproductive choice in and of itself.
And even after we think through the nature of the choice itself and conclude that it doesn't qualify as reproductive, we still have a consideration to make about whether it qualifies as a bona fide "right" in parallel with others like the freedom of association, conscience, or speech.
The mother's "right" to choose isn't made in the void--the consequences of an abortion are not isolated to her person. Why should someone else be made to pay the ultimate price because of your regret, or negativity (some reasons women give for abortion amount to a failure to imagine the blessings of going through with a pregnancy)? Just as my right to fight stops where your nose begins, a woman's right to kill a child within her stops where the latter's metaphorical umbilical cord begins. When the loss of the child, and the infinite potential each child represents both for their own fulfillment and for the advancement of the entire world, is given its due consideration, it become harder to insist that it's merely about the "rights" of the woman. The very definition of rights anyway has to include the concept that they include no imposition upon others except the duty of non-interference, and since abortion, by definition, interferes with the rights of the child, it doesn't qualify as a right worthy of the name.
4. "They're not going to stop at abortion. They're coming for your same-sex and interracial marriages too."
I could move on quickly by simply correctly labeling this as mere run-of-the-mill fear-mongering dirty politics, but it's worth pointing out that Alito himself, in the very draft of the opinion enjoined by the majority that abortion activists were all up in arms about, pointed out that the logic by which the court needed to challenge stare decisis in the Roe v. Wade case didn't apply to the nature of the other cases to which the Roe v. Wade case is often attached because hanging on similar questions of privacy. Each of those would require separate cases if they were to be overturned.
And in any case, the consequence of overturning Roe v. Wade was not to advance an agenda, but instead to remove the question from judicial purview and place it back where it belongs: either the US Congress takes up legislation that settles the matter at the federal level, or it devolves to the individual states to decide as they will. Many states had prepared trigger laws to allow abortion restricting legislation to go into effect immediately upon the repeal of Roe v. Wade, but many states didn't and Congress is far from even considering national legislation.
Finally, no one who argued that Roe v. Wade was bad law is also arguing that people shouldn't marry people of other races, or that the federal government should regulate same-sex marriages. Critics of those applauding this repeal simply can't point to actual examples that it's just a step to the rolling back of other decisions. I've seen a few attempts at misleading headlines, but the details of no news story since the repeal has supported the idea that the "right-wing" in the US has any serious initiatives or are making any public proposals to alter the state of rights for same-sex or interracial couples.
5. "It's just a clump of cells. You wouldn't deny me removing a wart, would you?"
I don't know by what extraordinary act of willful blindness to reality one can seriously advance the idea that abnormal growths of a body are analogous to an embryo or fetus, but it seems obviously clear that the moral status of the two are apples and oranges since only one is a person and only one results from a conscious act of will. Deeper, the whole "when does life begin" debate is what's implied here. No one seriously argues that killing an infant is morally permissible, but if we can define the beginning of their life at birth, or sometime between conception and birth, we'll have wiggle room in which to end the progress of the sub-organism before it becomes fully "human", right? We can claim that our act of killing an innocent being is justified because the being isn't really a being.
And here's where all kinds of claims about the status of human beings come into play: are they born? living? conscious? sentient? autonomous? viable? A vertiginous parade of prevaricating variables enter into the self-justifying calculus.
Let's go through the litany, even though it never seems to redound to the argument the pro-abortion crowd wishes. There's no denying that science and logic have to identify that a new entity is created at the moment of conception, and that this entity is unique and living, and is its own complete organism even while developing. Its biological systems have a nourishing connection within the body of another as they develop, but the systems themselves are distinct and discreet. This new entity goes through stages of development, but is fully human at the first union of the 23 pairs of donor chromosomes by definition--its species is homo sapiens and not any other. At the earliest of these stages of development, removal from the host environment would result in death, so there is a point of viability at which saving the life of both can become possible, but before which saving the life of only one might be the only possibility under a threat to life. It's quite well established, even among abortion proponents, that children are very much capable of feeling and perception in utero, and are therefore sentient, even if there remains debate on when those capacities become developmentally available. And the question of consciousness is simply ludicrous unless by the same standard our morality permitted the killing of coma patients for the convenience of the living.
The question of the living status, human status, and viability variables of a child in utero, including sentience, seem settled, and the ludicrous question of consciousness is dealt with, let's take the question of autonomy separately
Abortion proponents like to distinguish between internal and external resources because it helps them draw out a claim about the category of autonomy. In utero, a child isn't "autonomous" in the sense that they need resources that only the mother's internal organs can provide--they may have separately functioning biological systems, but one is housed entirely inside the other such that resources from the outside can't supply the baby's needs. This conveniently avoids the normal conception of the term "autonomous" which suggests self-reliance and independence of action, because it's important not to remind women considering abortion that this barely technically accurate conception of "autonomy" that an infant gains upon birth is extremely abstract, and does away with none of the very concrete and massive dependence an infant will have on resources for years. Still, they're not wrong that at the moment of delivery it becomes possible that someone other than the mother can provide the resources the newborn needs, such that the mother's internal biology is no longer the only necessary supplier. The infant isn't fully autonomous in any stretch, but it's a fair point that something changes at birth in terms of dependence on the mother's internal organs. So, as we've dealt with the variables of "status" of a child in utero (living, conscious, sentient, autonomous, viable), what still remains unclear to me, even with the special definition of "autonomy" that we can grant in these contexts, is what about the autonomy of child and mother justifies the killing of one for the benefit of the other. I mean, because it is separate although subsumed, because it's sentient, living, and viable after a certain point, and because it's human, when do we begin discussing a duty of care rather than a "right" to terminate? And let's push it even further: let's imagine we can't make the call, and we find it morally ambiguous enough that we'll justify killing it up to the point of viability after which it's no longer ambiguous and we have to grant it full rights as a human. What standard does that set up? Can we now "abort" other kinds of humans because they are no longer "viable"? Does euthanasia become our preferred solution for those whose death would be more convenient to those of us left behind? What about debilitating illnesses or accidents? Do we just set a "viability" or "quality of life" expectation and say everyone living below it it's okay to kill? A very slippery moral slope indeed.
6. "You aren't pro-life, you're just pro-birth. You couldn't care less what burdens you're forcing those mothers to endure. Plus, if you were really pro-life, you'd be pro-universal health care."
This old canard doesn't surprise me, but its persistence stymies me somewhat. Adherents to the pro-life position are varied and numerous, and omnipresent in the US and around the world. Many overlap in their beliefs about the value of life with other charitable enterprises and volunteer and donate countless hours and resources to helping those in need, many but not all of which are private. From soup kitchens and food banks to adoption agencies, hospitals, schools, and everything else our society generally finds to be a public good, you'll find pro-life people helping, organizing, and donating to, and not just occupying minor positions, either. As for the idea that a political opinion on minimum wage, or details of how welfare is administered, or even on whether it's best for the country to nationalize health care services, all of that deserves its own debate. Claiming that pro-lifers are hypocrites if they don't agree with you on these things isn't just an uncharitable application of the hasty generalization fallacy, it's reductive, and hostile as well.
Here's a link to a list of medical pregnancy resources that provide alternatives to Planned Parenthood, usually for low or no cost, some of which aren't even directly connected to pro-life activist groups. The network is wider than Planned Parenthood by nearly 20 times, if my count is accurate. There are networks nearly as vast for resources to support expecting mothers beyond their medical needs and in caring for anyone with needs from cradle to grave (and, if the spiritual help can be counted, sometimes beyond!).
7. "I cannot be compelled to support another human with my own body. My body, my choice."
This one, by far, is the most compelling argument. I've heard two scenarios offered to illustrate, both of which fall short, but let's take each separately
a. In moral dilemma A, a fireman has only enough time to save one of two things in the same room before the fire destroys it. One thing is a 3 month old baby, the other is a cooler with dozens of embryos meant for implantation. The logical trap for the pro-life position is that since we claim life begins at conception, we're supposed to be stuck in moral relativism reducing the thought process to a mere cold calculation: if the lives really are all worth saving, then saving more lives means choosing the cooler, does it not? If the pro-lifer chooses to save the single child, it's supposed to count as proof positive that when asked to vote with their feet and reveal their true beliefs, pro-life folks are merely hypocrites at bottom, unable to admit to themselves that they really do understand the difference between a child and a clump of cells because no one is really alive until born.
Ultimately this is very clever projection, but projection nonetheless. It's the pro-choice position that's hypocritical, morally relativistic, and in denial of its truly evil nature. Abortion activists know that the duty to save life is present from the earliest revelations of its existence, and that it's pure sophistry to fail to provide parental care to the growing lives within and beyond the womb as soon as it's clear that they exist. This very example demonstrates that they are the ones who need to objectify and dehumanize those lives in order to justify the choice to terminate them. The choice they're trying to impose is a false dichotomy, and it's held out facetiously. One must clearly save the infant not because the embryos are less vulnerable, or have less infinite potential, and not because the embryos aren't human and don't deserve saving, but just because two things are not morally equivalent doesn't make the less moral of the two things wrong. Ultimately, however, the scenario merely obscures the true nature of the choice one is making at abortion, which is killing--not an object, but a life.
b. In moral dilemma B an influential virtuoso musician whose loss would be incalculable to society and culture, nearly at his prime, but still expected to produce several chefs-d'oeuvre before his lifespan is over finds himself suffering from a condition that requires blood transfusions. On a flight in which no one else on the plane shares the compatible blood type, a woman awakes to find that she had been hooked up to a transfusion machine while she was unconscious. Is it morally right for her to unhook herself from that machine, since it requires her body and consent even if it might cost the life of the eminently valuable fellow human? Again, this scenario is intended to beat pro-lifers on their own turf: our appeal to fundamental human rights. Of course it is morally wrong for anyone to compel such a woman, and the "value" or lack of value of the other life isn't even part of the moral equation: if she does not consent, the other has no right to take her blood. And if a woman has an absolute right to deny life-saving sustenance to someone like that, all the more reason for her to be able to claim the same rights over her own body before the child's value is known, before it becomes a full human being, in their eyes. This argument only hold, however, when it succeeds in making you forget a few key elements of the context. First, the biological consequences of sex are not a mystery--the possibility of pregnancy is inherent in the act, therefore consenting to sex is tantamount to consenting to a possible pregnancy. One can consent to sex for its many other benefits, but one cannot deny that consent to the possibility of parenthood is inherent with it. The fact that medical technology allows us to intervene to terminate a pregnancy that a woman claims was not wanted doesn't remove the fact that doing so requires the death of the other being involved. The nature of abortion is that it's not merely refusing to consent to support another life, it's the active murder of the vulnerable and innocent life and the going back on the previous consent already inherently granted. Furthermore, there is a difference in the moral duties connected in this scenario. Yes, a woman has the right to deny support to another human for reasons of bodily autonomy. But that's because the musician isn't her child. In a parental scenario that same woman does have a duty to support her child, and can be prosecuted for failing to do so, especially if her neglect contributes to the death of the child. In utero, a mother's duty to nurture is morally every bit as present as after birth.
The pro-life argument isn't about controlling women's bodies, it's about protecting the value we place on life, and admitting the truth of the moral reality that modern medical technology cannot remove from the decisions that affect us all in society: all lives are valuable and require that we defend them.
8. "Your a man, so you can't have an opinion on abortion. This is all about men controlling women."
Of all the arguments pro-abortion activists make, this one is the most asinine. Besides the fact that a great many women are pro-life (to the tune of 33% on a flat average, even though Gallup's way of asking the question is massively reductive, since many pro-choice women don't advocate for zero restrictions to abortion), it doesn't require a uterus to understand the moral question on which society must legislate. This is about the value of human life and where to draw the line between protecting life and protecting individual liberties. Women need to have bodily autonomy as a fundamental freedom just as much as men do. And while biology has dictated that my double X-chromosomed fellow-humans can incubate humans in a way my body can't, that doesn't change the moral and political question: when does your freedom to do with your body what you see fit deserve to be curtailed by society? The answer is twofold: when it interferes with another's right to bodily autonomy, and when the harm you might otherwise choose to do to yourself has harmful consequences on others that rise to that society's agreed upon level of intervention, like when a parent fails to nourish their child. Abortion fails both: it denies the child it's bodily autonomy rights and its death deprives society of the next potential Einstein, Picasso, or Beethoven. You don't have to be a biologist to know what a woman is, a vet to know what a dog is, or a woman to know that's it's wrong to kill.
But let's be consistent with ourselves. If a child is a child whether born or not, then we need to undo a current double standard: let's accurately label the life as worthy of both protection and parental support. Under current law, men whose collaborative acts result in pregnancy aren't on the hook for the child support until the child is born. I'm in favor of the main idea behind this GOP-proposed draft legislation that would rectify this inequality between the sexes. There may be more precise language required concerning children that naturally don't come to term and what that means for the support by the impregnating party, but the general concept of making men responsible for the consequences of their actions is good, right, and necessary.
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