The Case for Life (Second edition) (eBook)

1

What Is the Pro-Life Argument?

Seeking adventure, you post the following to your social media page and hang on for the ride: “Some choices are wrong. We can do better than abortion.”

Right away a “friend” is typing. Six minutes later, you have a string of comments, not all of them nice. “Why do you hate women? Do you want them to die in back alleys?” “What are you doing for kids after they’re born?” “Do you have a uterus? If not, shut up!” “If you were truly pro-life, you’d care about all life, not just fetuses!” “Who are you to dictate what’s right or wrong? Don’t impose your views on me!” You expected controversy, but marvel at how much outrage your brief post provoked. It feels like something else is going on here.

Indeed it is.

What’s driving the abortion controversy is not who loves women and who hates them. Rather, it’s a serious philosophical debate about who counts as one of us. Either you believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life, or you don’t. That’s why abortion debates can heat up in a heartbeat.1

The Essential Pro-Life Argument: Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

How can pro-life advocates keep cool under fire in a deeply polarized culture? The key to successful engagement is clarity: when critics muddy the waters with phony appeals to tolerance, gender, or caring about other issues, it’s crucial that you stay anchored to the three most important words in pro-life apologetics:

1. Syllogism

2. Syllogism

3. Syllogism

A syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. It’s a way to formally state your argument. The pro-life argument can (and should) be stated as a syllogism. If you do not stay tethered to your syllogism, critics will change the subject.

The pro-life argument—its syllogism—can be stated as follows:

Premise 1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

Premise 2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.

Therefore,

Conclusion: Abortion is morally wrong.

As we shall see, pro-life advocates support their formal argument with science and philosophy. They argue from the science of embryology that the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings. You didn’t “come from” an embryo; you once were an embryo.

In the 2020 edition of their medical textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, authors Keith L. Moore, T. V. N. Persaud, and Mark G. Torchia write this:

Human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, the zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell (capable of giving rise to any cell type) marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.2

Pro-life advocates argue from philosophy that between you the embryo and you the adult, there’s no essential difference that could justify intentionally killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependence are not good reasons for saying you had no right to life then but you do now. Stephen Schwarz suggests the acronym SLED as a helpful reminder of these nonessential differences:3

Size: You were smaller as an embryo, but since when does your body size determine value? Large humans are not more valuable than small humans.

Level of development: True, you were less developed as an embryo, but six-month-olds are less developed than teenagers both physically and mentally, but we don’t think we can kill them.

Environment: Where you are has no determinative bearing on what you are. How does a journey of eight inches down the birth canal suddenly change the essential nature of the unborn from someone we can kill to someone we can’t?

Degree of dependence: Sure, you depended on your mother for survival, but since when does dependence on another human mean we can kill you? (Consider conjoined twins, for example.)

In short, humans are equal by nature, not function. Although they differ immensely in their respective degrees of development, they’re nonetheless equal because they share a common human nature—which they’ve possessed from the moment they began to exist.

Again, we’ll explore that scientific and philosophic defense in detail later, but for now, notice the key point: pro-life advocates present an argument for their position.

Arguments can be evaluated three ways. First, for clarity: Are the terms clear? Second, for soundness: Are the premises true? And third, for validity: Does the conclusion follow logically from the premises? If the argument passes these tests, it stands.

Defining Our Terms

For the purpose of clarity, let’s define what we mean by some key terms used in the abortion debate.

1. What do we mean by “wrong”? We’ll take a closer look at this question later, but to say that abortion is wrong is to make an objective moral claim rather than a subjective one. Subjective claims are about what I like or prefer—for example, ice cream flavors. Objective claims are about what is morally true regardless of likes or preferences. When pro-life advocates state that abortion is wrong, they aren’t saying they merely dislike abortion. They’re saying abortion is wrong regardless of anyone’s personal tastes or preferences. Their claim is objective, not subjective.

2. What do we mean by “abortion”? The pro-life argument (syllogism) defines abortion as the intentional killing of an innocent human being. That abortion entails intentional killing is acknowledged and even affirmed by many who defend the practice.

Abortionist Warren Hern, author of Abortion Practice—the standard medical text that teaches abortion procedures—made the following statement to a Planned Parenthood conference:

We have reached a point in this particular technology [dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion] where there is no possibility of denying an act of destruction. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.4

In a Salon piece, feminist Camille Paglia, writes this:

I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.5

Philosopher and jurist Ronald Dworkin describes abortion as “a choice for death,” one that “deliberately kills” a developing embryo.6

In a dissenting opinion in the 2000 Supreme Court case Stenberg v. Carhart, former Justice Anthony Kennedy states this:

The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: it bleeds to death as it is torn from limb to limb. . . . The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.7

Feminist Naomi Wolf says that abortion involves a “real death,” and that to claim otherwise cheapens our view of human life:

Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life. . . . We need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.8

As early as 1970, an editorial in the medical journal California Medicine conceded that abortion kills a living human being and that claiming otherwise was intellectually dishonest:

Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.9

In his book A Defense of Abortion, David Boonin—a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado—writes that “a human fetus, after all, is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her...