Thinking to Believe

Mary Elizabeth Williams recently wrote at Salon that

when we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb? … It seems absurd to suggest that the only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady’s vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better.

If you are cheering on Ms. Williams as an articulate pro-life apologist, you would be mistaken.  She is a card-carrying member in the pro-abortion cause.  What makes her rather unique among her peers is that she admits “life begins at conception,” and yet also fully supports a woman’s right to kill that human being because “all life is not equal.”

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Daniel Williams has written a nice piece on how Roe v. Wade affected the pro-life movement.  While many think that Roe gave rise to a substantive pro-life movement, this is not true to history.  Williams notes the following facts:

• The pro-life movement witnessed a string of legislative victories to curtail or outlaw abortion in 1971 and 1972.  They defeated abortion bills in all 25 states who considered them in 1971.  In 1972, voters defeated abortion initiatives in MI and ND by large margins.
• Abortion became legal in CA and CO in 1967.
• In 1970, four states legalized abortion for virtually any reason up to the 20^th or 24^th week of pregnancy
• There were 586,760 abortions in 1972, the year before Roe was decided. In 1973, the number of legal abortions rose 28% to 750,000.  By 1980 the number reached 1.5 million.
• When Roe was decided, 19 states permitted abortion, and 4 of those 19 allowed abortion-on-demand.
• White women used to constitute the majority of those obtaining abortion (75% in 1973), but now poor, minority women constitute the majority (55% in 2008).
• Several courts had recognized the unborn to be persons prior to Roe declaring this to be a wrong reading of the Constitution.

What would you say if I told you that a politician supported a man’s legal right to physically abuse his wife under any circumstance, but is “a pro-woman hero” because his policies will help undermine the root causes of spousal abuse?  You’d say I was nuts, right?  Well, this same sort of argument is made all the time when it comes to pro-abortion politicians.

Eric C. Miller seems to have drunk this same Kool-Aid.  The title of my post is the title of his article in Religion Dispatches Magazine.  The title is as oxymoronic as “Adolph Hitler, Zionism Hero” or “Chick-fil-A, PETA hero.”  How does one come to the conclusion that the most pro-abortion president this nation has ever seen is actually a pro-life hero?  Birth control.

President Obama’s “Obamacare” will require all health insurance companies to cover contraceptives free of charge.  And according to a recent study by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, access to free birth control can reduce unintended pregnancies by up to 75%.  Miller reasons that since virtually all abortions are due to unintended pregnancies, access to free contraception will lower the number of unintended pregnancies, and thus severely lower the abortion rate.

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While dialoguing with a friend on the topic of abortion, I was asked how I define abortion.  After communicating my own definition of abortion, I thought it would be interesting to see how various dictionaries define it.  Needless to say, I was amazed at how inaccurate and politically correct the definitions were.  Here are a few: 

Dictionary.com
Abortion:

1. The removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus in order to end a pregnancy.
2. Any of various surgical methods for terminating a pregnancy, especially during the first six months.

Interestingly, there is no mention of the fate of the unborn baby.  Instead, the focus is on the “pregnancy” and terminating that pregnancy.  

The first six months?  How is that relevant to the definition?  If a child is killed in utero at seven months, that is also called an abortion.  

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Gallupreleased the results of their annual abortion questionnaire yesterday.  Since 1995 they have been asking Americans whether they identify as “pro-life” or “pro-choice.”  When they asked the question in 1995, 56% of Americans considered themselves pro-choice and 33% pro-life.  In 2012 the situation is nearly reversed with 50% identifying as pro-life and 41% as pro-choice. 

Often in questionnaires about abortion people’s true positions get blurred by the legal vs. moral distinction.  For example, someone may be opposed to abortion morally, but think people should have a legal right to an abortion.  Such a person could rightly identify as either pro-choice or pro-life.  To truly gauge people’s views on abortion we need to separate the legal question from the moral question. Gallupdid just that, asking people what they thought of the morality of abortion, apart from whether or not they think it should be legal.  The result was 51% saying they thought abortion was morally wrong, while only 38% thought it was morally acceptable. 

Bioethics is a strange field.  Not only are there no objective qualifications for being a bioethicist, but one need not even hold views that are deemed ethical by most morally sane people.  Indeed, it seems that the field of bioethics consists primarily of liberals who hold to a utilitarian philosophy of ethics in which almost everything is permissible.  That is why you can have bioethicists advocating infanticide in respectable bioethics journals like the Journal of Medical Ethics.  Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva wrote an article for the journal titled “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”[1] that appeared online February 23, 2012.

The abstract reads:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

While I disagree vehemently with their reasoning and conclusion, this is where the arguments for abortion logically lead one to.  The authors recognize that birth is a trivial and subjective dividing line for determining who is valuable and who is not; who can be killed and who cannot.

HT: Wesley Smith

Scott Klusendorf is the best pro-life apologist out there.  No one can say as much as Scott can say in as little space and as eloquently as he can.  He wrote an essay for the Christian Research Journal addressing five questions often asked of pro-life advocates and the pro-life movement:

1. Are pro-life advocates focused too narrowly on abortion? After all, informed voters consider many issues, not just one.
2. Why don’t pro-life advocates care about social justice both here and in developing countries?
3. Why don’t pro-lifers oppose war like they do abortion?
4. Instead of passing laws against abortion, shouldn’t pro-life Christians focus on reducing its underlying causes?
5. Should pastors challenge church members who support a political party sworn to protect elective abortion?

It’s worth checking out his answers.  It is not a long piece, and he provides some great answers to ponder.

This is where a culture of death leads to: believing that people with disabilities are better off dead, and suing doctors for “wrongful life.” This is what happens when you stop believing humans have intrinsic value, and when selfishness becomes a virtue.

This is reminiscent of the Nazi idea of a “life unworthy of life.” When we think we are being more merciful by killing people with handicaps, we have become a very sick society. Can you imagine if this boy ever finds out about this: that his mother would have rather aborted him and sued the doctor for allowing him to be born?

There has been a long debate over whether or not abortion is directly tied to poor mental health.  In 2008 the American Psychological Association concluded that there wasn’t any research supporting the idea that abortion caused poor mental health.  A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, however, is challenging this conclusion.

This new study is a meta-analysis of 22 previous studies which examined the mental health of 877,000 women, of which 163,831 had an abortion.  According to the study, “the results revealed that women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 per cent increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10 per cent of the incidence of mental health problems were shown to be directly attributable to abortion.”  Having an abortion was found to increase one’s risk of experiencing the following:

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Recently I was listening to the July 23, 2011 broadcast of Unbelievable, a great UK radio program that faces off Christians and non-Christians on a range of theological, philosophical, and moral/social topics.  The July 23^rd broadcast addressed the issue of abortion.  Representing the pro-abortion side was Wendy Savage, and representing the anti-abortion side was Madeleine Flannagan.  While much could be said concerning the dialogue, I want to focus on one particular comment from Ms. Savage.  Ms. Flannagan was arguing that it was just as wrong to kill a baby in the womb as it is to kill a baby outside the womb.  Ms. Savage responded to the effect, ‘It’s not a baby, it’s a fetus.”

Pro-choicers often make this sort of “argument.”  The problem is that it commits a categorical error.  “Fetus” is not a type of life distinct from a “baby” or “human being,” but the name we give a particular stage of human development—on the same level of “adolescence, toddler, adult,” etc.  So to say “it’s not a baby, it’s a fetus” is only to say “it’s a younger human being, not an older one.”  But that observation does not tell us whether or not it is morally acceptable to kill younger human beings.  That’s the million dollar question, and one pro-abortion advocates like to skirt.

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Abort73.com is known for using powerful visuals to demonstrate the gravity of abortion.  Now they’ve used their talent to create a video that tackles the common misconception that the unborn are just a clump of cells in the first trimester of pregnancy.  Check it out.

Pro-life advocates often scoff at fetal homicide laws, arguing that they represent just how schizophrenic our legal system is when it comes to the unborn.  On the one hand our legal system says the unborn are not persons, and therefore they can be killed per the mother’s request.  On the other hand, fetal homicide laws treat the unborn as a person, allowing for an individual who kills an unborn child without the mother’s consent to be prosecuted for murder.  The legal distinction is based almost entirely on the mother’s will.  If she wants the child, it is illegal for someone else to kill it.  If she does not want the child, it is legal for someone else to kill it.

While I am pro-life, I want to argue that the current law is consistent in its treatment of abortion and fetal homicide.  Just because the unborn are not deemed persons with legal status—and can be killed at the mother’s request—does not mean the state could or should allow anyone to kill an unborn child without consequence.  If the unborn is not a person, then it is property[1], and the same laws we apply to property must be applied to the unborn as well.

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