In previous blogs I have stated why I am prolife. I now want to address arguments you will hear from the proabortion side.
Choice
A woman has a right to do what she wants with her own body. This is the main argument the proabortion side gives. My body, my choice. You’ll hear this a million times in the media. And, of course, I support the sentiment as a general statement. In general, everyone should have the right to do what they want with their own bodies. No complaints there.
But we recognize exceptions to the principle. We know that if what you do with your body harms someone else’s body, then you do not have the right to do anything you want. In fact, we even have laws preventing people from harming their own bodies. You can’t put heroin in your body without going against the law, even if that heroin affects no one else’s body. You can’t enroll in school without putting certain vaccines in your body, even if you don’t want them. A new mom can be prosecuted for harming her child if she does drugs or alcohol while pregnant. Many governments codified COVID restrictions (masks, vaccines) and shut down businesses. Their rationale was the opposite of bodily autonomy. They said they can force people to do with their bodies what those people might not want to do. Why? It might help save other people’s bodies.
Whether you agree or disagree with the specific laws above, you understand the rationale.
Bodily autonomy has limits, and everyone knows it. The difference between the prolife and proabortion positions then is that the prolife position says a child in the womb is a special case that limits autonomy, but the proabortion position says it is not. So even when we talk about the central argument of the proabortion position, we come back to this question: is a pregnant woman carrying a human life?
If she is carrying a human life, then she does not have the choice to kill him, even if she does not want the pregnancy. If she is carrying a human life, then she does not have complete bodily autonomy, for what she does with her body affects someone else’s body. If she aborts, the consequence is not mild. It is death. One hundred per cent of the time.[i] If, however, she is not carrying a human life, then the morality of abortion becomes more difficult to discern.
In 100% of pregnancies, we have more than one human life. This fact limits bodily autonomy, and most pregnant mothers know this. Most pregnant mothers change their habits while pregnant precisely because they know they are caring for another human being, and they want to take care of that little one. In fact, we would consider a mom morally deficient if she did not care about the little one inside her.
This is the first problem with the choice argument. It does not recognize the harm that the mother’s choice brings to another human being.
The second problem with the choice argument is that it turns out to be starkly one-sided. The woman has a choice. The child does not. Ironically, this sounds like the thinking of the proslavery Confederacy. Choice or freedom was a central argument the southern aristocracy used to justify slavery. “You live your way; let us live ours. We want the right to choose for ourselves how to live.” This thinking was central to the Confederate psyche. Today we recognize such thinking to be bankrupt because the South’s appeal to freedom ignored the freedom of millions of black men and women. The freedom of choice the southern aristocracy spoke about was only for them. If you were a slave, you had no choice, no freedom. The proabortion position is just as narrow in who gets to choose. The child has no choice. She has the same choice a slave in Louisiana had in 1844.
This is why the appeal to choice rings hollow. It is an appeal to the choice of only one person in a decision that ultimately takes the life of another person. No one has a legitimate choice to do that.
Special cases
The proabortion side talks profusely about special circumstances that it says change the moral equation on abortion. Let’s discuss some of these.
Life of the mother: Statistically speaking, cases in which a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother are so rare that they round off to zero. Authorities on all sides, from Alan Guttmacher[ii] to C. Everett Koop acknowledge that in the United States, “abortion as a necessity to save the life of the mother is so rare as to be nonexistent.”[iii]
But let’s say one of these rarest of rare cases happens. We must now make hard choices. In these situations, we are now comparing one life to another. We can save the mother or the baby, but not both. If we can save the mother only by taking the life of the baby, then it is morally justifiable to take that life. In fact, in most of these cases, if the mother dies, the baby dies too, and we lose two lives.
If, however, we have other medical options, we should pursue them first. Abortion is a last resort.
Rape or incest: This argument states that anyone who would force a woman who has been raped to have a child is utterly callous to the woman’s feelings. The woman did nothing wrong. The woman does not want the child. The woman suffers enormous emotional pain as it is. Let her abort and move on.
I want to say several things to this.
The first is that obviously rape and incest are tragedies, and the mothers who experienced them need our love and compassion. They need a shoulder to cry on. They need friends to help them through their crisis. They may need counseling or financial help. They need prayer. They need to know they did nothing wrong. They need to see justice done to the rapist. They need people to come around them and love them. These are some of the things they need, and prolife people are not callous to those needs. Healing will not be easy or quick.
But what a woman does not need is an abortion. There is no such thing as abort and move on. That thinking is naïve. Research does not show that abortion helps women mentally or emotionally. Priscilla Coleman reviewed 22 studies on the effects of abortion. This entailed more than 870,000 participants. These studies show that women who have abortions have an increased rate of mental illness of all sorts – suicide, depression, substance abuse, anxiety and more – and that a significant portion of that increase can be directly attributable to abortion.[iv]
In addition, Coleman unequivocally states that the putative benefits of abortion have no empirical basis.[v]
Abortion does not seem to make traumatic events better. If anything, it makes them harder to deal with. Abortion may seem like an easy way out, but in the long run, it appears to be detrimental to a woman’s flourishing.
Having the baby, however, seems to help. In those same research studies, the comparison groups were women who carried to term and women with unintended pregnancies who carried to term, and in both instances, mental health was better for women who had their babies than for women who had abortions.[vi] This is common sense. So many times when a woman has a baby, the baby helps bring her healing. The baby gives her purpose. The baby gives her hope. The baby helps her love again. The baby brings her joy. The circumstances behind the baby may be horrible, but the baby is not horrible.
Second, according to research from the Guttmacher Institute, rape and incest combined account for less than 1.5% of all abortions.[vii] Roughly 99% of all abortions are for some reason other than the life of the mother, rape and incest. Let’s suppose then, for the sake of argument, that I say to my proabortion friend that I will allow abortion for these 1% of abortions if he will grant that we prohibit the other 99%. No one on the proabortion side is willing to do this, which tells me that rape and incest are not the real issues for them. If we are going to deal with the proabortion position, we must focus somewhere else. Proabortion people don’t consider these issues central.
Rape and incest get disproportionate press in this debate. As often as these issues come up, one might think that they are common reasons for abortion. They aren’t.
Third, we come back to the issue of whether the pregnant woman is carrying a human being. If she is, then we do not resolve a rape by killing a human being. One tragedy does not solve another. It simply produces two tragedies instead of one. If a pregnant woman isn’t carrying a human being, however, we can look at abortion as a possible solution.
Fourth, rape involves all sorts of evil and wrongdoing, but the baby has done nothing wrong. The person who needs to be punished is the rapist, not the baby. Condemning the baby to death does no good.
Financial/Social/Emotional/Career Reasons: The proabortion argument says that many women in crisis pregnancies are not ready to care for a baby. They may live in poverty or be immature or have no husband or want to pursue a career. I’m going to lump these reasons together, not because I believe they are identical but because the reasoning behind them is much the same. The mother is in an especially difficult situation, having a child makes the situation harder, and my proabortion friend says I don’t care about her. If I cared, I would let her abort. My proabortion friend sees abortion as a solution to the mother’s problems. I don’t.
I agree with my proabortion friend that many situations exist in which the mother is not ready to have a baby. I disagree that the solution is to kill the baby. My proabortion friend insists that the mother is not killing a baby, that she does not have a human being inside her. And here we are again. We come around to the central issue. We can’t escape it. Every argument, every case my proabortion friend brings up stands only if pregnant women are not carrying humans. If, however, pregnancy involves more than one human, then my proabortion friend is fatally wrong and blatantly denies basic human rights to real human beings. Everything hinges on this issue.
If a woman in a crisis pregnancy does not want a baby, she does have a viable alternative to abortion. She can put her child up for adoption. My wife was adopted as a newborn and grew up in a loving home. I’m grateful that her birth mom chose to have her. My life is much richer because a woman I never met decided to have a child she didn’t want. If I could meet my wife’s birth mom, I would say thank you. A thousand times over.
Couples who want babies are waiting in line to adopt them. Thus, a pregnant mom in a difficult situation can provide a good home for her child, even if that home is not her own. And she can still be free to pursue her career. If she wants to see the child as he grows up, she can. If she does not want to, she does not have to. Adoption provides a viable alternative to raising a child or to taking her life. You don’t have to do either.
In a crisis pregnancy, a woman needs people to come around her and help her. She needs to know she is not alone, and my proabortion friend wants to know what prolife people are doing for the mother. To him, the prolife position cares only about babies and nothing for mothers. This accusation gets flung around again and again, but I don’t find that it has much substance.
What do Christian people do for pregnant moms?
Let’s for a moment set aside every hospital, clinic, and shelter called St. so-and-so, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, New Life, Resurrection or some other such name. If you removed those sources of help for pregnant women, you would be removing an enormous swath of the American medical system. But let’s not talk about those. Let’s talk instead about the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the nation whose sole focus is to help women in these very pregnancies that prolife people are accused of ignoring. These centers provide medical care, financial aid, counseling, support, classes, diapers, bottles, formula, baby clothes, car seats, and more. And they provide these things with little to no government support and with volunteer staff. In other words, I see prolife people giving their lives and money, and I see them working at the street level with women in difficult pregnancies. I’d like to see my proabortion friends do something like this without government funding. Give sacrificially of their own money and their own time to care for women in difficult pregnancies. That’s what prolife people are doing.
Can you still criticize prolife people for not caring for mothers? Some will. There is always more that can be done, and there are prolife people who do little. But if you choose to criticize because you see more that can be done, please look in the mirror and go start doing something about it. And if you are not doing what the prolife groups are already doing, you might want to reserve your criticism for someone else. This idea that prolife people care only for babies and not for mothers is hollow and bankrupt.
Fetal deformities: The child has Down’s Syndrome. The child has a deformed heart. The child does not have two legs. When a mother learns that her child has something like this, it is emotionally straining. The proabortion position says we can save the parents the difficulty of having to raise such a child, and we can save the child from having to live such a life . . . if only we abort.
By now, you know what we come back to. Is the pregnant woman carrying a human being? If she is, then she has a human with Down’s Syndrome. We do not kill humans just because they have Down’s Syndrome. Or one leg. Or a deformed heart.
It may be true that this child will be more difficult to raise than a normal child, and it may also be true that this child will experience a more difficult life than a fully healthy person, but avoiding difficulty is not what life is about.
We say we help the child by aborting, but are we really helping? Can people with Down’s Syndrome live meaningful lives? Chris Nikic? How about people in wheelchairs? Joni Eareckson Tada? Or the blind? Helen Keller? Nick Vujicic was born with no arms and no legs. He now travels the world giving motivational speeches and hope to millions.[viii] His life was not easy, but ask him if someone in his condition can live a meaningful life. Often the most meaningful lives are the most difficult. When we say that people with abnormalities cannot live fulfilled lives, we are making an assumption about their life that we have no right to make. Many people with abnormalities have lived meaningful lives. And what is just as important, millions of them, whose names you have never heard, have brought joy and meaning to their parents.
These special cases often bring up the phenomenon of an unwanted pregnancy, and unwanted pregnancies are central to the proabortion position. Proabortion people genuinely want most women to have their babies because most women actually want to have their babies. But this creates an odd tension in proabortion thought.
Most proabortion people talk as if the fetus is a baby . . . IF the mother wants the baby. If, however, the mother does not want the baby, proabortion people will tell her “it’s just a clump of cells.” The fetus has human value if the mother wants him but no value if the mother does not want him. The humanity of the fetus then seems to depend on the desires of the mother. This thinking is utter nonsense. Our desires are irrelevant to the facts. If the fetus is a baby, he is a baby whether you want him or not. If the fetus is not a baby, it is not a baby whether you want one or not. You can’t have it both ways. The American emphasis on freedom and choice sometimes gets this absurd. We think we can shape reality to our desires. We can’t.
[i] Statistically speaking.
[ii] Guttmacher, Alan. “Abortion Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” The Case for Legalized Abortion Now (Berkeley, California: Diablo Books), 1967, page 3.
[iii] Koop, C. Everett, M.D. “How Often is Abortion Necessary to ‘Save the Life of the Mother’?” October 19, 2012, at https://www.nrlc.org/archive/abortion/pba/HowOften AbortionNecessarySaveMother.pdf.
[iv] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/abortion-and-mental-health-quantitative-synthesis-and-analysis-of-research-published-19952009/E8D556AAE1C1D2F0F8B060B28BEE6C3D
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Op cit. www.guttmacher.org
[viii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJnJ_fTYofQ
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