Abortion: Pregnancy and Life

20 Arguments Against Abortion, Rebutted

October 13, 2013 By Bob Seidensticker 162 Comments
Seventy percent of Americans are in favor of letting Roe v. Wade stand, a new high. Nevertheless, pro-life advocates remain vocal.
I’ve heard a lot of arguments against abortion. Here many of them, with my rebuttals.
1. The Bible says that abortion is wrong.
For starters, in the U.S., our secular constitution trumps the Bible. “The Bible says so” is irrelevant when the First Amendment forbids government from enacting laws guided by religious dogma.
And, as I’ve argued before, the Bible doesn’t say that abortion is wrong. Indeed, God has no problem killing people, including children. The Bible demands that women suspected of adultery be given a poison that will miscarry any illegitimate fetus (Num. 5:16–29). Babies begin to count as persons only after they are a month old (Lev. 27:6 and Num. 3:15–16). In the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII said that an embryo of less than 40 days was not yet human.
The heels-dug-in pro-life position within some Protestant churches is a new thing. Asummary of a 1978 analysis of abortion shows a surprisingly pro-choice attitude. The names of pro-choice churches are a Who’s Who of American Protestantism: American Baptist Churches, American Lutheran Church, Disciples of Christ, Church of the Brethren, Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist Church, and United Presbyterian Church.
Maybe if politicians let Christians figure this out on their own, the pro-choice stand would be even more a majority position.
I apologize for piling on, but the Catholic Church’s loud voice demands a response. The Catholic priest pedophilia scandal was a moral test. The church’s cover-up—its focus on the well-being of the church over that of the flock—shows that it failed that test. The Catholic Church has vacated its place at the table on the question of abortion.
2. Abortion tinkers with the natural order.
We have cheerfully adopted medicine and technology that “tinker with the natural order”—antibiotics, vaccines, and anesthesia, for example—to which we don’t give a second thought. We prolong life beyond what the “natural order” would permit and allow it to happen where it otherwise wouldn’t (in vitro fertilization, for example). Abortion might be bad, but that it changes the natural order is no argument.
3. You argue that a newborn has more cells than the zygote that it started from. Is this just a size thing? What about someone who’s lost a limb? Or had tonsils, appendix, or gall bladder removed? Are they less of a person?
The difference between an amputee and a newborn is trivial compared to that between the newborn and the single cell. In the long list of organs, limbs, and systems, this amputee merely has one fewer. Compare that with a single cell, which not only has none of those body parts but doesn’t even have a single cell of any body part.
We can push this thinking to the ridiculous. Imagine technology that provides life support so that a human head could survive. Is this less of a person?
Well, yeah. Obviously. Someone who’s been reduced to just a head isn’t as much of a person as they were. Or consider Terry Shiavo, who was allowed to die after 15 years in a vegetative state. Was she less of a person? Her severe brain damage certainly made her less of something, and you can label this whatever you want.
4. Imagine if you’d been aborted!
I wouldn’t care, would I? But how about you, Mr. Pro-life? How do you feel about the fact that you took the opportunity for life that was denied to uncountably many other combinations of egg and sperm? If you think that it’s a silly hypothetical question, you can understand my similar reaction.
There are also voices who confront that challenge directly. Here’s someone who said that her mother’s life was clearly worse for having her and that she wished her motherhad aborted her.
This thinking isn’t far removed from the Quiverfull movement, which encourages no restraint on birth and childishly “lets God decide” how many children to have. Where do you draw the line? If we are morally obliged to bring to term a 2-week-old embryo, are we also morally obliged to bring to term the thought, “Gee, I wonder if we should have another baby …”?
Seeing life as a spectrum is the only way to make sense of this. Yes, that leaves unanswered the question of where to draw the line for abortion, but let’s first agree that a spectrum exists.
5. Imagine that you had two planned kids, and then you had a child after an unplanned pregnancy. You wouldn’t want to give that child up. But if you’d aborted it, your life would be emptier.
Of course I’d love my unplanned child as much as my other ones. But what do we conclude from this? That I should have not had two kids but rather three? Or five? Or fifteen? Should I expect some tsk-ing behind my back as neighbors wonder why my wife and I could have been so callous to have not had as many as biology would permit?
(The Quiverfull Movement goes down this path, and I explore that here.)
By similar logic, is a woman’s menstrual cycle a cause for lamentation because that was a missed opportunity for a child? It is a sign of a potential life, lost. But in any life, there are millions of paths not taken. C’est la vie.
I don’t think it’s immoral to limit the number of children you have, and I don’t see much difference between zero cells and one cell—it’s all part of the spectrum. I’ll agree that the thought “Let’s have a baby” isn’t a baby … but then neither is a single cell.
6. What’s the big deal about traveling down the birth canal?
The big deal is that before that process, only the mother could support the baby. Afterwards, it breathes and eats on its own. The baby could then be taken away and never see its mother again and grow up quite healthy. Before, the mother was mandatory; after, she’s unnecessary.
I’m not arguing that abortion should be legal up until delivery, though others do, and that has created this argument. I’m simply arguing that birth is a big deal. I’m not arguing for any definition of when abortion should become illegal. My main point has simply been that the personhood of the fetus increases from single cell through newborn, which makes abortion arguable.
7. It’s a human from conception through adulthood! The DNA doesn’t change. What else would that single cell be—a sponge? A zebra? (OK, if you don’t like “human,” let’s use “person.”) No—person means the same thing as human!
This name game is a common way to avoid the issue. I don’t care what you call the spectrum as long as we use names that make clear what the newborn has that the single cell doesn’t.
The only thing that connects the two ends of the spectrum is the Homo sapiens DNA. This pro-life argument devolves into an argument from potential. Sure, the single cell will be a baby in nine months. Get back to me then, and we’ll have something to celebrate. At the other end of the spectrum, however, it ain’t a baby.
Yes, a single cell has the potential to make a baby. So does the lustful idea that pops into a guy’s head. Neither is a baby.
I wonder at the pro-life advocate getting misty-eyed at the thought of that single microscopic cell. A eukaryotic cell with one strand of Homo sapiens DNA—wow. They wouldn’t get excited if it were the cell of a slug or a banana, but because it’s human, somehow that’s so fabulous that not only do they get choked up about it, but they demand that the rest of us do the same.
Sorry—not convincing.
8. What if the mother wanted to abort because the fetus had green eyes or was female or would likely be gay?
This is a red herring. How many cases are we talking about? Abortion to increase the fraction of male babies is done in India and China, but this isn’t a meaningful issue in the U.S. (And in the third world, ask yourself if infanticide would be the alternative if abortion was denied.)
Abortions for capricious or shallow reasons also aren’t the issue. Mothers-to-be have plenty of noble instincts to judge what is appropriate so that society can rest assured that the right thing will usually be done. (If you balk at the “usually,” remember that that’s how society’s laws work. They’re not perfect, and we can only hope that they’reusually on target.) We can certainly talk about the few special cases where a woman’s actions seem petty, but don’t let that change abortion rights for the majority.
The woman who aborts for some trivial reason would likely be a terrible mother. Let’s let a woman who isn’t mature enough to take care of a baby opt out.
Consider how society treats parents. There is a wide variety of parenting styles, but most parents are decent and loving. We have the laws, police, and social services to remove children from abusive households, but the parents get the benefit of the doubt. Similarly, the instincts of the pregnant woman are on target in most cases. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt as well. In the domain of parenting, we start with, “You are a good parent.” That’s the null hypothesis. And the null hypothesis in the abortion debate is, “You know what’s best for you and your fetus.”
9. Abortions are dangerous!
Not really. The chance of maternal death from delivering a baby is 14 times higher than through abortion. This is what you’d expect, since the fetus only gets bigger (and more dangerous to deliver) with time. Of course, this statistic will change if abortion is made illegal and more dangerous. Does Kermit Gosnell scare you? That’s what an America with illegal abortion would look like.
There is no indication that abortion is a risk factor for cancer or women’s mental health.
10. Murder is wrong because it takes away a future like mine. If we found intelligent humanoids like us on another planet, killing them for sport would be wrong for this reason. And this is why abortion is wrong—it takes away a future like mine. (This is Glenn Peoples’ “Argument from the Future.”)
Why focus on the future? Assuming these humanoids are largely unchanging month to month, like people, killing them for sport takes away a present like mine. I assume Peoples focuses on the future only because he has no argument otherwise. A two-week-old fetus doesn’t have much of a life (yet).
But let’s take the path that Peoples points us to. Killing a fetus would deprive it of a future like mine, but so would killing a single skin cell, once they are clonable into humans. Would it then a crime to scratch your skin? Or, let’s take it further back. Suppose I have two kids. Was it criminal to not have three? Or four? Or fifteen? I’ve deprived those people-to-be of life.
Extrapolating back to the twinkle in my eye, saying that we have a person deserving of life at every step is ridiculous. But the facts fit neatly and logically into the spectrum argument.
11. But a fetus has a soul!
Does it? If the zygote has a soul and then it splits into twins, does each twin have half a soul or do they get another one as needed or did they get two to begin with? What happens if one of those twins is later absorbed? What about conjoined twins—do they share a single soul like a shared body part? What about babies with terrible birth defects that leave them with very little brain function? What about a person cloned from a skin cell—would they have a soul? And if the story for the soul has a happy ending for the 50% of pregnancies that end in spontaneous (natural) abortion, why not for an artificial abortion?
This mess vanishes if we don’t insist on a soul. As Daniel Dennett said, “What isn’t there doesn’t have to be explained.”
12. “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent.”
These are the words of an archbishop from Brazil. He was outraged at the abortion done on a nine-year-old girl, raped and impregnated by her stepfather. In response to the abortion, the church excommunicated the family of the girl and the doctors who performed the abortion.
Wow. Let’s leave this example of how religion makes you do crazy things and focus on the claim. First, a fetus is not a child. Second, the spectrum argument defeats this claim.
Variations on this argument are popular, and they all have pretty much the same response. Here are a few.
12a. Abortion kills a human life (at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy) to help with another human’s self-actualization (higher on the hierarchy). That’s the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work.
The two “human lives” are not comparable. This ignores the spectrum of development from single cell to trillion-cell newborn.
Killing a blastocyst with fewer cells than the brain of the fly troubles me less than killing a civilian in another country due to war or killing a criminal on death row.
12b. Don’t we normally go out of our way to defend the defenseless?
Again, this ignores the spectrum. Defenseless people are more important than defenseless cells.
12c. Haven’t we been through this with racial minorities? Declaring that single cells aren’t human is like declaring that African-Americans aren’t human.
Nice try. Spectrum argument.
12d. In response to your abortion clinic example: you argue that, if given a choice between saving a child and ten frozen embryos, you’d save the child. Okay, and if given the choice between your wife and a stranger, you’d save your wife, but that doesn’t mean that you can kill strangers.
Spectrum argument.
13. Haven’t you heard of adoption? That’s the answer to an unplanned pregnancy.
No, it’s clearly not the answer. Two percent of all births to unmarried women in the U.S. are placed for adoption. “Just have the baby and release it for adoption” is a pat on the head. It might make you feel good, but it doesn’t work.
Adoption can also be psychologically difficult, both for mother and child.
14. You say that a trillion cells is definitely a person. Okay, how about a trillion minus one—is that a person? And if so, how about a trillion minus two? And so on.
This is the sorites paradox: if you can take a grain of sand from a heap and it’s still a heap, can you continue to do so and get a “heap” of one grain?
This same game could be played with the blue/green spectrum. If this color is “green,” what about just a touch more blue—isn’t that green as well? We still can’t get around the fact that the two ends of the spectrum are very different—green is not blue! Similarly, a single cell is not a newborn with arms, legs, brain, and so on.
15. The woman who got pregnant knew what she was doing. Let’s encourage people to take responsibility for their actions.
Did she know what she was doing? Not necessarily. Sex education is so poor in the United States that many teens become sexually mature without understanding what causes what.
But let’s assume that the woman knew what she was doing and was careless or stupid. What do we do with this? When someone shoots himself accidentally, that was stupid, but we all pay for the medical and insurance system that puts them back together. Let’s educate people, demand responsibility, and have a harm-reduction approach where we find the best resolution of problem. For a woman whose life would be overturned with a pregnancy, that resolution might be abortion.
Having sex with imperfect contraception is no more a willingness to accept pregnancy than eating a sandwich is a willingness to accept choking. When someone is choking, we do our best to take care of the problem; let’s continue to do the same for an unwanted pregnancy.
16. If you’re so smart, where do you draw the line?
I don’t. I find that pro-life advocates quickly turn the conversation to the definition of the OK/not-OK line for abortion, hoping to find something to criticize. I avoid this, both because it diverts attention from the spectrum argument—the main point I want to make—and because I have no opinion about the line and am happy to leave it up to the experts.
Legislatures make these kinds of distinctions all the time. In fact, in the hundreds of jurisdictions around the world where abortion is regulated, they already have.
17. Imagine a woman seeing an ultrasound of her unborn baby. Sometimes the hands and feet are visible, and the baby is sometimes sucking its thumb. Why aren’t such images shown to women considering abortions as part of informed consent?
Let’s consider this proposal only after adding conditions to make it practical.
This should be an option rather than part of a mandatory gauntlet forced on women considering abortion.
This should not be the first time the woman has seen this information. That is, public education should teach about the stages of fetal development as part of comprehensive sex education that would minimize the chances of her having this unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
The woman’s choices should be made available as soon as possible. Putting obstacles in her way—by closing down nearby clinics, encouraging pharmacists to refuse to offer morning-after pills, and so on—increases the age of the fetus she must consider aborting. If an abortion is to happen, let’s make it early so that the woman doesn’t see a fetus sucking its thumb.
18. But the fetus is innocent, and we always protect the innocent.
Some things are on a spectrum of innocent/guilt (adults, say), but other things are not (squirrels, rocks). The squirrel may have shorted out the transformer, and the rock may have been used to whack someone on the head, but neither the squirrel nor the rock were guilty of what we interpret as bad. But you wouldn’t call them innocent either; it makes no sense to say they were even on that spectrum. A fetus is also not on that innocent/guilty spectrum. It doesn’t have the capacity to be in that spectrum.
One commenter observed that it’s a moral decision either way. If you choose life, you condemn that baby to his life. That is, you force life upon it, and every life has suffering. This may not be an easy choice, but who’s in a better position than the mother-to-be to decide?
19. Let’s suppose that we’re doubtful that the unborn child is a human being with human rights. Given this uncertainty, shouldn’t we err on the side of the child?
A fetus is not a person. Play games with the name all you want (“The fetus is a Homo sapiens, ‘human being’ is simply a synonym, and if a fetus is a human being, it must have human rights!”), but there’s no ambiguity here. Despite your word games, a newborn baby is still not the same thing as a single cell. There is a spectrum.
Worse, you pretend that there is no downside—as if carrying a pregnancy to term was a “What the heck?” kind of thing. Bringing a baby into the world where it is unwanted or won’t be cared for properly is a gargantuan downside. It’d be refreshing to hear a pro-lifer say, “Okay, an abortion would be a smart thing from the standpoint of your education, career, life, family, finances, happiness, and so on. I’ll grant you that. But it’s still morally wrong.”
I could look at a cow and think “hamburger,” while you could look at it and think “pet.” These are two different bins that are valid from two different standpoints. Similarly, one woman could think “baby” and the other “a clump of cells that is standing in the way of my life dreams.” If you want to see it as a baby from day one, that’s fine, just don’t impose that view on the rest of the country. Illegal abortion means forced pregnancy.
This is a bit like Sharia law. Hey, if you want to constrain yourself with Sharia law, go ahead. Just don’t do it to the rest of us.
20. Have you seen the cartoon where the cancer patient shakes his fist at God for giving him cancer? God replies, “I sent someone to cure cancer, but your society aborted him.”
The Atheist Pig has some nice rebuttals. Let’s imagine God instead saying, “I sent someone to cure cancer … but she died after being denied an abortion despite her high-risk pregnancy.”
Or: “… but he died, having been denied appropriate medical care because his parents insisted that only prayer was the response to illness.”
Or: “… but he killed himself as a teenager after being relentlessly bullied by Christians for being gay.”
Or: “… but she lost interest in science because her public school watered it down to satisfy Christian extremists.”
Let’s not imagine that the Christian path is always the best path.
Abortion and the Christian worldview
Many Christians with whom I’ve discussed abortion have a naive desire to have their cake and eat it too—no abortion and no premarital sex. In a primitive society where kids got married upon sexual maturity, that happened by itself. But when maturity happens earlier because of better nutrition and marriage happens later because of more education and social customs, we have a gap of a decade or more where young adults are sexually mature but not married. Wishful thinking won’t get us safely across.
Christians often point to embarrassing aspects of society during Old Testament times such as slavery or polygamy and say that that was simply a different culture. They operated by different rules. Okay, let’s accept that logic. Just extend the list of “things that made sense back then but don’t now” to include an abstinence-only approach to premarital sex.