Abortion is often treated, even among some pro-lifers, as a complicated and nuanced moral issue with many challenging dimensions. However, in truth it’s very simple. Assessing the exact moral culpability of any participant in an abortion might be more complex, but we are not tasked, as human beings, with making that determination. All we can do is judge the rightness or wrongness of an act itself, and taking the life of an innocent child always falls rather severely on the “wrong” side of the equation. If anything at all can be considered wrong, then killing a defenseless human being must qualify. This is why, as we’ve established, our culture must fall back on blanket moral relativism to protect abortion. Once you let even the faintest hint of an objective moral truth seep in, you jeopardize your rationalizations for child murder.
The pro-abortion camp is in a precarious spot arguing in favor of something that seems so obviously and immediately repugnant. But they do have the enviable advantage of not being tied to one justification or another. They float untethered in a morally incoherent fog. They can pick up an argument and drop it just as quickly. It doesn’t matter. Only truth needs to be consistent. Lies can contradict themselves all day long.
For this reason, debating a progressive can feel a bit like wrestling a giant mutant slug. It isn’t particularly skilled, but it is slimy. You think you have it nailed down with one move, but next thing you know it’s slithering on top of you and eating your face, or doing whatever giant gastropods do. Take down one point and it slides on to the next.
The point is, it can be difficult to win an argument with a “pro-choicer” because one argument so quickly turns into several: she starts a conversation about rape and incest, or insists that babies aren’t people, or shouts vapid slogans about a woman’s “right to choose.”
Let’s respond to each of these, one at a time:
Argument: What about rape?
I have to address this point not because it’s compelling or valid, but because it’s inevitable. If you argue with a liberal about abortion for more than twelve seconds, they are guaranteed to pull the rape card. Think of this as a version of Godwin’s Law, that famous principle that says all debates on the internet will devolve until someone brings up Hitler.
Admittedly I’ve already brought up Hitler, which wasn’t entirely fair to Hitler. The Nazis killed some ten or eleven million when they were in power. The abortion industry, on the other hand, kills about forty million a year. And it’s been going strong for half a century. You do the math.
Rape is obviously a serious matter, but it has no actual bearing on the abortion question. Aside from the fact that abortions because of rape are exceedingly rare (they account for about 1 percent of all abortions), the larger point is that the murder of a human being can’t be justified by the actions of a third party. Either a “fetus” is a human with a right to live and be protected by the law, or it isn’t. If it is, the manner of its conception is not relevant. If it isn’t, the manner of its conception is still not relevant.
Liberals bring rape into the abortion debate as a means of obfuscation. I prefer not to play that game, so let’s move on.
Argument: So never mind how it was conceived. A baby isn’t a person/human—it’s just a lump of cells.
Lump: a compact mass of a substance.
Cell: the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism.
Yes, babies are “lumps of cells,” just as you are. Actually, if you look anything like the average Walmart shopper, you’re probably quite a bit lumpier than the average “fetus.” Trying to disqualify a human from the human race on the grounds that it is a compact substance composed of cells is like disqualifying a car from the classification of “automobile” because you have decided it is a metallic structure with wheels and an engine. And how could it be both?
But most moderately sophisticated liberals (a small sample group, to be sure) will not try to seriously pretend that an unborn baby is categorically unhuman. The fact that it is human is not remotely debatable. We know that “fetus,” which simply means “offspring,” is not a species but a stage of human development. It seems rather impossible that a thing could be in a stage of human development yet not be human. It seems impossible that a thing could be one species and then become another.
So we know that it is human, but is it alive? Well, if it isn’t alive, what is it? Dead? The dictionary provides two definitions for “life”: (1) “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death,” and (2) “the existence of an individual human being or animal.”
An unborn human is organic, it is growing, it is functioning, it is changing, and it does exist. By any measure, it lives. It’s certainly closer to a living human than it is to a rock or a computer or a roll of paper towels. Is there a state of existence between paper towel and human? If so, science has vastly failed us, because all any scientist has ever said since the beginning of time is that a thing is either living organic matter or it is not. To my knowledge, there is no such thing as “living-ish.”
An unborn child is not a sperm or an egg. The “fetus” is not waiting for some other ingredient to be added to it. It has, at the moment of conception, all that it needs to grow and develop. It is a being—a genetically distinct individual with its own DNA, its own blood type, its own chromosomes. Granted, it has to exist for a while in its mother’s womb in order for it to mature and reach whatever state of development the modern liberal subjectively decides it must reach, but just because it requires a certain environment and must have access to certain nutrients doesn’t change the fact that it’s human. You and I require that too.
Are you less human because you need to be on Earth breathing oxygen, drinking water, discharging your bowels, eating, and sleeping? Your life depends on your always having access to a very specific environment and very specific nutrients. You are a fragile little thing whose continued existence demands that many factors come together at all times.
Does that mean you’re not quite as human as someone who requires less sleep, or who eats less, or who is generally stronger and more capable of withstanding harsh environments?
If our humanity depends on our development and our ability to survive without vital nutrients, then it stands to reason that this game of assigning degrees of humanness based on strength, physical maturity, and lack of dependency should continue beyond birth. LeBron James is more physically advanced than you; therefore, he is more human. A child with cerebral palsy is less advanced, and therefore less human. This is quite the scary world we’re constructing. One where the disabled can be discarded and NBA stars can be gods.
Come to think of it, that pretty well describes our culture right now.
Thank you, liberalism.
Now, what about personhood? Can a thing be alive and human but not an actual person? Liberals say so, but you’ll notice they never actually define the term person. This is their game with virtually every topic: attack the old definition, refuse to offer a new one.
They’ll say that the unborn child from conception lacks the limbs, organs, and other physical features necessary to be considered a person. But does this mean that once it attains those necessary markers, it can be afforded the rights of all other people? Not according to the liberal. Babies at twenty weeks certainly look an awful lot like people, yet liberals reject twenty-week abortion bans. The “lump of cells” argument is based on the fact that humans do not look much like humans early on, but they don’t generally follow their own logic once the human begins to develop more recognizable physical features.
If they did, they would oppose most abortions after the first trimester. Likewise, they would support abortions of humans of any age who are born missing organs or limbs or who suffer other abnormalities. If personhood is to be determined by merely resembling other people, then many people are not people, or else they are less people-y than most people. How does this work exactly? Liberalism can’t explain.
Some people think that a baby is expendable before “viability,” but the whole idea of viability is ridiculously vague. Never mind the fact that describing humans as “viable” or “nonviable” makes them sound like robots or science experiments. A significant percentage of babies born at twenty-three weeks, or sometimes even earlier, are “viable,” in the sense that they can survive outside the womb. But that doesn’t mean you can release them into the wild, leave them to their own devices, and expect them to be fine. Babies born that early require intense, constant medical attention from a team of health-care professionals. They are “viable” as long as very strict conditions are met. The same is true of newborn infants. Come to think of it, I’ve met plenty of twenty-five-year-olds who can’t function independent of their parents’ supervision and financial support. Perhaps we should move the age of viability to thirty-five.
The fact of the matter is this: either a living human is a person regardless of physical features and development and medical needs, or we should petition the government to turn the murder of midgets and the severely handicapped and deadbeat college graduates into a misdemeanor offense. Personhood is either an absolute state, or it is acquired in degrees. Personhood is either contained in the essence and nature of a human being, or it is contained in the human’s physical proximity and likeness and comparable functionality to other humans. If the latter, then there is not a single coherent reason why the acquisition of personhood automatically stops at birth for all people.
But let’s take a step back. Liberals are wrong when they say that unborn children aren’t people, but let’s engage in our own thought experiment and suppose, for a moment, that they’re right. Suppose we live in Abortion Candy Land, where unborn children become people only upon emerging from the birth canal.
What of the millions of potential people populating the wombs of the world? Are they worthless? If liberals were right about the non-personhood of “fetuses,” would they consequently be right about the moral legitimacy of abortion?
Nope. Still wrong.
Even in their version of things, unborn children would be, if not people, then the most valuable non-people resources on the face of the earth. They would be entities still vastly more important and precious than any endangered spotted owl or dolphin or any gold bar or diamond. They would still deserve our love, care, and protection. They wouldn’t be people, but they would be worth the equivalent of one.
In this fantasy, the destruction of a fetus would be kind of like someone tearing up your winning five-hundred-million-dollar lottery ticket. Sure, the ticket itself isn’t five hundred million dollars until you cash it, but it’s worth five hundred million, isn’t it? If it were destroyed, you wouldn’t react like someone who’d lost a piece of paper with some numbers on it, but like someone who’d lost five hundred million dollars.
Similarly, if liberals are right about “fetuses,” abortion is not the killing of a person, but it might as well be. There would still be no significant distinction between killing a person and killing a human who is about to become a person.
Incredibly, liberal arguments are so bad that even if they were right, they’d still be wrong.
Argument: But women have the right to choose!
No, they don’t, and neither do men for that matter. No human being possesses the absolute “right to choose” any more than he does the absolute right to walk or eat or speak. These are all human functions, but no rational person believes we have the “right” to do these things whenever and however we want. We don’t have the right to walk into the Oval Office unannounced, or the right to eat human flesh, or the right to slander another person. We can walk many places, eat many things, and say many phrases, but there are restrictions. Of course there are restrictions.
I could list ten thousand choices that few people think we have a right to make. Start with any felony—murder, rape, burglary, larceny, fraud, etc.—and we already have dozens of areas where almost nobody is “pro-choice.” It becomes therefore apparent that the “right to choose” is not absolute, despite how it’s frequently presented by liberals. It means nothing. Everyone believes many choices ought to be permissible, and many other choices ought not. On the matter of choice, every human being on the planet takes, for different reasons, a conditional approach.
Some choices are OK, some are not. It depends on the what, the why, the where, and the how. Indeed, the ability to distinguish between a good choice and a bad one, especially on moral grounds, is among the primary capacities separating us from beasts and bugs.
Abortion supporters have, against all odds, achieved the unbelievable feat of convincing our society that you can’t attack the slaughter of children without attacking free will itself. It makes me wonder if I could punch a liberal in the nose and, when he protests, claim that he is protesting not the fact that I used my arm to punch him, but the fact that I have arms in the first place. Clearly, he must be an anti-arm bigot.
This is the tried-and-true strategy of many who find themselves in the difficult situation of having to answer an unanswerable argument. Simply invent an argument nobody is making and answer that one instead. Liberalism cannot, when it comes down to it, debunk the rather simple and unassailable point that it’s wrong to kill babies. Instead, they debunk the point that it’s wrong to not be able to make choices, which is a point literally nobody has ever made.
THE ONLY ARGUMENT THAT MATTERS
But these arguments are all too easy to address. And, in any event, they seem to be more like warm-ups before we get to the only “pro-choice” rationalization that actually matters. As we’ve seen, what lies at the bottom of our progressive culture is a worship of the self. The self has been elevated above God—it has replaced Him completely—and therefore nothing and no one may make a claim on the self that supersedes its own desires. Depending on the issue, our culture has different ways of dressing up this principle. With abortion, they call it “bodily autonomy.”
Liberals claim that a woman’s body is autonomous—self-governed, independent—and that an unborn baby, whether human or not, has no right to his mother’s body. Already, there seems to be a pretty serious logical problem with the self claiming ownership over itself. In order for one thing to own another, the owner must exist outside of, and apart from, the owned. All things that exist came into existence because of something else, so how can anything be called truly autonomous?
If there is a God, then we all originate by His hand, and certainly nobody can be considered completely sovereign. But if there is no God, then we are the result of meaningless and mechanical natural processes, and the notion of “autonomy” is even more absurd. How can one pointless accident be autonomous or independent of another? In this version of things, the only sovereign thing is nature itself, and to interfere with the natural process would be the only true moral crime. This, again, would make abortion the worst sin. Perhaps even the only sin.
Bodily autonomy has been a popular defense of abortion ever since Judith Jarvis Thomson proposed the idea with a famous thought experiment in her 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion.” This constitutes the best argument anyone has ever made for abortion, and in recent years, liberals have abandoned most of their other talking points in favor of repeating the bodily autonomy canard over and over again.
Thomson’s analogy goes like this:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months.”
You see, in pregnancy, the woman is the slave. But rather than being forced into labor by a plantation owner, she has been brutally subjugated to labor by her baby. If you gaze into any ultrasound, you will witness not a beautiful and innocent child but a tyrant callously coercing his own mother into a life of servitude. He is, in Thomson’s comparison, a stranger affixing himself through tubes and wires to the woman’s internal organs—and doing so without permission, no less.
I call this the best “pro-choice” argument, but that doesn’t mean it’s a solid one. It’s the best in the same way that, if you had to choose, you might say the guillotine is the best way to be executed. In fact, Thomson’s analogy immediately brings to mind five objections:
1. The analogy assumes that the relationship between mother and child is no more significant, and carries with it no more responsibility, than the relationship between a person and some random stranger.
Absurd, obviously. If we’re trying to make this hypothetical as close to pregnancy as possible, shouldn’t the sick violinist at least be the woman’s own child? The argument doesn’t work because the fact that her child is her child, not some strange adult from across town, is precisely the point.
Hidden cleverly in this hypothetical is the implication that one cannot agree that an unborn child has a right to his mother’s body without agreeing that anyone in the entire world, in any context, for any reason, at any point, for any period of time, has a right to a woman’s body. One minute you’re attempting to explain why a baby shouldn’t be stabbed in the brain with a poison needle, and the next you’re suddenly justifying rape. That’s how this works, the pro-abort claims.
But just because a mother is expected to be a mother doesn’t mean she’s also expected to be a slave, a prostitute, or a forced organ donor to talented musical artists. Indeed, the extent of our responsibility to a person hinges in many ways on our relationship to them. Abortion fanatics would, I assume, agree that they have a special responsibility to their born children, wouldn’t they? And their responsibility to them extends far beyond their responsibility to their neighbor, or their plumber, or a violinist, no matter how acclaimed.
If I go a lifetime without clothing, feeding, or changing your child, I will not face any legal repercussions. If I go two days without doing the same for mine, I could end up in prison. Why? Because they are my children.
Last week, my wife and I hired a babysitter so we could enjoy one meal that doesn’t involve someone dumping applesauce on their lap or their sister’s head. But we only hired a babysitter for our own kids. In fairness, I asked our sitter how much it would cost for her to watch 1.9 billion children for a couple of hours on a Friday night, but the quote was a bit out of our price range. Yet we went to the pub down the street and had our meal and drank our beer, and we still haven’t heard from CPS about it.
Why is that? Because all laws everywhere in the world, and all even partially sane human beings everywhere in the world, recognize that you are particularly responsible for and to your own children. In every other instance, parents are expected, required, and forced to do things for their kids that they aren’t for anyone else. Only in the case of abortion does this principle become strangely controversial.
2. The analogy leaves out an important detail: How did the violinist become ill in the first place?
Aside from cases of rape, a child is only conceived because two people intentionally committed a particular act that has, billions of times, resulted in the conception of a human life.
This violinist came down with a terrible sickness. I might feel pity for him, but I didn’t cause him to be sick. I didn’t put him in this state. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. The same cannot be said when a child is conceived. To make the scenario even close to parallel, we’d have to say that the violinist is your child, and that he is sick because you deliberately did something to make him sick. Now, obviously in that case you wouldn’t be forced to donate blood or organs, but certainly your refusal to do so would make you seem selfish and cold-blooded.
Now imagine you stabbed your son, maybe not intentionally but recklessly. Maybe you got drunk one night and decided to try your hand at knife juggling, only you failed to catch one of the knives and your infant caught it in his chest instead. Then imagine you take him to the hospital and the doctor tells you that he needs a blood transfusion quickly or he will die; luckily your blood type matches. Then imagine you say, “Nah, my body is my body. Sorry, son.” You would, I assume, have this right legally. But morally, your decision would be frowned upon, to put it mildly.
Pro-aborts are fond of comparing pregnancy to organ donation—whether using this hypothetical or something similar to it—but that brings up its own question: Can you donate an organ to someone and then take it back? I do not think pregnancy is akin to donating your organs to your child, and even less is it akin to being forcibly hooked up to some violinist in a hospital bed. But let’s say these scenarios are equal. In that case, the woman “donated” the organs to the child when she became pregnant. If she can change her mind and withdraw the offer after the fact, shouldn’t we allow any organ donor to do the same? Shouldn’t a man who donates a kidney be allowed to renege a few months down the line?
3. Beyond those points, the analogy is bunk because abortion is not the same as “unplugging” a person from medical equipment.
It might be quite sanitary and pleasant to refer to abortion as a woman “withdrawing support” from her child, but the procedure goes beyond this. During a “termination,” the baby is actively killed. It is crushed, dismembered, or poisoned. It is actually, purposefully, intentionally killed.
In fact, even in the violinist analogy, while it would be acceptable to unplug yourself, it would not be morally or legally permissible to shoot the poor guy in the head. A person’s physical reliance on you does not give you the moral (or legal, usually) right to murder them. “Pulling the plug” is precisely what an abortion isn’t. If it were, then the baby would be delivered and left to die in the corner of the room. Of course, this is how some abortionists conduct business, but it’s illegal. If they’re caught, they go to jail. The only kind of abortion that’s actually in keeping with the bodily autonomy position is precisely the kind that isn’t legal or defended by the very people who assert bodily autonomy.
So to put Thomson’s hypothetical in the same ballpark as abortion, we’d have to suppose that you hurt your child, then refused to give blood to save him, and then, to make your position clear, you grabbed a gun and shot him in the head.
Abortion analogies are pretty disturbing when made accurate, aren’t they?
4. In any case, the analogy fails to get to the heart of the matter because it doesn’t account for one crucial thing: natural order.
An unborn child is exactly where he is supposed to be. He couldn’t possibly be anywhere else. This is the inherent distinction between two strangers who have been mysteriously hooked up together on a hospital bed and a “fetus” connected to his mother inside her womb. The former represents unnatural and extraordinary measures, while the latter represents something natural and ordinary. The unborn child in the womb is where nature (or God, as I call Him) intends her to be.
Unborn children are not, in any medical sense, intruders or parasites. They are where they belong. A fish belongs in water, just as an unborn child belongs in his mother’s womb. Bodily autonomy asserts, incredibly, that a baby doesn’t have a right to be in his own mother’s body, which is like saying that a bird doesn’t have a right to fly, or that Earth doesn’t have the right to orbit the sun, or that we don’t have the right to exist in three physical dimensions. It makes no sense.
When you separate “rights” from any notion of what is not only natural but necessary to the very existence of the human race, you end up with lunacy. If “human right” means anything, it must mean, at an elemental level, that we are entitled to be what we are. The Declaration of Independence calls our rights “inalienable” and “endowed by [the] Creator.” Inalienable means “unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor.” The only way to stop someone from expressing their inalienable right is to oppress or kill them. That is how fundamental and ingrained these rights are.
Life, at any stage, is endowed and inalienable. Therefore, to forcibly remove from a person the essential components of life and the very things that enable a person to continue living is a terrible infringement on his right to life. I cannot, through a purposeful and intentional act, deprive someone of the ability to breathe, or eat, or drink. To do so would be an attack not on his right to breathe, eat, and drink but on his right to his very life, which is necessarily sustained by breathing, eating, and drinking.
So it is with an unborn child. An unborn child is the only thing it can be, in the one place it needs to be in order to live, which is the only place it can be, and the same place that every human being who has ever lived must have been at some point. If he does not have a right to be there, where he must be, where he should be, where he is supposed to be, then truly nobody can have a right to anything.
5. All analogies aside, bodily autonomy doesn’t exist anyway.
Our bodies are not autonomous.
If they were, if our bodies could never be used without our consent, why would this apply only to pregnancy and organ donations? Children, at any age, create profound demands on their parents’ bodies, whether it’s waking up in the middle of the night for the crying baby, working long hours to pay for their food and clothing, carrying them around when they cannot walk, staying home when you’d like to go out, or going out when you’d like to stay in. An argument for absolute bodily autonomy means that it can’t be illegal, or considered immoral, for a parent to decline to do any of these things, so long as their decision was made in the name of bodily autonomy.
Take breast-feeding, for example. A child requires milk from his mother in order to survive. If she cannot or does not wish to give him that sustenance, legally she is required by law to find and pay for a substitute. She is not permitted to let her baby starve to death, or to cut to the chase and “abort” him outright. Somehow, she has to make sure he is fed, or she will go to jail on charges of neglect and murder. But even feeding the child formula is an enormous strain on the body and the bank account. You have to physically go to the store, purchase it, come home, and then wake up at all hours of the night to give it to him. He will also need feeding during the day, so you either have to be there to do it or you have to arrange and likely pay for someone else to do it for you.
All of this constitutes a claim not just on your body but on your life. As a parent, existence itself is made nonautonomous. Your body is no longer your own; your money is no longer your own; your house is no longer your own; your food, your free time—nothing is your own. Tragically, even your television is no longer your own, which means you’ll find yourself cursing the name of the jerk who invented the damn thing when you’re stuck on a Saturday morning watching cartoons about monkeys and talking trains instead of SportsCenter or Law & Order reruns. Everything changes. Nothing is yours anymore.
If we concede that we ought to be expected or even required to do certain things for our children, then we are invariably placing limits on our bodily autonomy. If we place limits on our bodily autonomy, then we are admitting that limits can be placed. If we are admitting that limits can be placed, then we must consider whether abortion falls within or outside of those limits. And here’s the rub: if we contend that abortion falls within the limits of bodily autonomy, we must justify that belief beyond simply reasserting our right to bodily autonomy.
So we see that all justifications for abortion fall apart under scrutiny.