I don’t feel I’ve changed all that much in ten years, but if there’s one opinion I’ve done a complete 180 on, it’s the subject of abortion and reproductive rights. When it comes to the pro-life position, it can get difficult to draw the line between “pro-life” as a set of principles which guide us to make policy decisions meant to preserve human life at all stages, and “pro-life” as a political movement only against abortion. For example, I believe that providing free healthcare is a pro-life position, but the pro-life movement does not agree. So for the purposes of this post, when I talk about the pro-life movement, I will only be talking about the political phenomenon which begins and ends with aiming to make abortions illegal and impossible in America.
In that sense, I am now pro-choice. The following post is meant to show why I have made up my mind in that area. This is not a scientific journal or anything and I am not looking to prove via a mountain of evidence why you should be pro-choice. I only seek to provide more than enough evidence than was adequate to convince me personally. If you need more evidence, it’s readily available to you. Although, if I may be frank, the type of person who requires encyclopedia-sized books of evidence to believe my position is likely to only require a Ben Shapiro tweet from 2014 to “prove” the pro-life position. If you think the following post is not enough evidence, but you freely believe in the pro-life movement without examining it yourself, your objections to the pro-choice position are irrational.
I’m also not here to prove one way or another when and whether a fetus is a human baby. I don’t know the answer. As we’ll see, the answer is irrelevant. For this post I am looking at three points which I believe form the crux of the anti-abortion position:
1. Abortion is murder
2. People who get abortions are immoral (or “people who get abortions are correlated with immorality”)
3. Abortion should be illegal
Hopefully you’ll forgive me if I ask you to take my word for it that these are the pro-life positions. But I think they are obvious enough to not require sourcing. They tend to follow one another, such that if you can call into doubt any one point, the successive points weaken considerably, if they don’t fall flat outright. And there are no significant other points to add to the pro-life movement that aren’t safely folded into one of the three I’ve written here. The pro-life movement must belive all three of these points. However, we’ll see that they are factually wrong, morally repugnant, and/or legally unenforcable.
1. Is Abortion Murder?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim that abortion is murder is an extraordinary claim. We will see here that the pro-life movement does not have sufficient evidence. The burden of proof is on them to prove all abortion, at all times is murder, not on me to prove it is not. Without sufficient evidence, we must say the pro-life position falls flat. Here is the evidence, one way or the other:
1A. The science on when life begins is not settled.
The pro-life movement hinges on the belief that a fetus is alive at the moment of conception. While you could find some scientific reason to declare life to begin at conception, it’s just as easy to find scientific reasons to declare other stages of in-utero development as the point when life begins. It is not enough to pick from a list of options what best suits your worldview; there must be a reason why that choice is the only correct one.
Why conception? Why not the quickening? In the past, America and the church were both fine with abortion, provided it was performed before this “quickening” period, which was defined as the moment the mother could feel the baby moving inside her. Or, why not the point of fetal viability (which gets earlier and earlier with scientific progress)? The decision from Roe v. Wade seemed to hinge around whether the baby could survive outside the womb. That is, if the baby can’t survive outside the womb it’s not considered its own life but just a piece of the mother. The issue with saying life begins at conception is not that there is no precedent for it - rather, there is no special precedent. I bring up those other points because the reproductive process is more complicated than we think. As much as it makes me gag to link to RationalWiki because obviously, their page on the subject provides a less, uh, emotional overview than other sites as to why it’s hard to say the moment a fetus goes from 0% alive to 100%.
In order for abortion to be murder, we must know with ultimate certainty that the fetus is just as alive as you and me. “Just as” alive is important because merely having the potential for life is not the same as being alive. Every sperm and egg have the potential for life, and it certainly isn’t murder when those die. We must have a very narrow definition of what a fetus must be to qualify as a human life, and we must define it such that (1) the instant before fertilization there is no human, but also that (2) there is nothing that happens after fertilization which creates more qualities of life than the fertilized egg. But don’t you see how this is backwards? Instead of taking the data and interpreting it, the pro-life person must begin with the definition of life and then work out which data best supports that position.
You might reply that all scientific measurements are decided this way, and so it’s just as well we choose a point which allows for the greatest capacity for life. I would say that, yes, scientific measurements are arbitrary in that they are tools used for understanding. For instance, the scienfitic definition of the length of a meter is: 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of red-orange light from a Krypton-86 atom. Why this many wavelengths? Why red-orange light? Why Krypton-86? Well, we already had an idea of what we wanted the meter to be, but we needed a definition that could never change so our measurements would always be accurate. Both the meter itself and the means by which we arrived at it were arbitrary. But certainly the pro-life position isn’t that life is arbitrary. If we want to justify calling a fetus alive from the moment of conception, we need this justification to be based on something better than a manmade standard which conforms to our previously held beliefs. I don’t think I’m saying anything above my pay grade if I claim that the question of human life is more meaningful than the question of how long a meter is.
In shorter words, the claim that abortion is murder does not have sufficient scientific evidence. This is not due to a complete lack of evidence but due to a large array of conflicting evidence that requires human interpretation. Thus, if we are to declare abortion to be murder, we need additional sources.
1B. Science cannot answer metaphysical questions.
But even if we could scientifically prove beyond a doubt that life begins at conception, that still doesn’t answer whether or not abortion is murder. If I shoot a deer and use its meat for food, that’s not murder. But I could not shoot a human adult and eat them. Is this a double-standard? Of course not. While we consider both the deer and the human alive, there is a different value and quality of life between them so that we attribute more value to the human.
In other words, the human has a soul. I’m not necessarily referring to the idea that humans have a non-physical or spiritual part. Regardless of whether materialism is true, the soul can still exist. It is what we attribute to a human who has the power of reason and emotion, someone who thinks like you and me. It’s a reductive definition but I don’t have the time or the smarts to go further. Suffice to say we all know what this is, it’s what makes us capital-A “Alive,” and animals don’t have it. From now on, when we talk about a fetus being alive, we mean this capital-A Alive, or as it was called in the past, “ensoulment.”
It is this ensoulment which makes it possible to condemn the killing of a human as murder. If a human has no soul, it is not murder to kill them. Also, if a human has no soul, then they cannot be accused of murder if they kill. This is why we can never accuse an animal of murder, no matter how many other animals or even humans they kill. This means the pro-life movement has an extra burden of proof: they not only need to prove that the fetus is a living human, but that that human is Alive-with-a-capital-A. If not, if a fetus is merely a living animal, it’s possible that killing a fetus is not murder.
I realize this is splitting hairs a bit. We all know that the humans we see around us have souls according to this definition, so why should an unborn child not have one? Well, right now we’re talking about science. Philosophical and metaphysical problems are not the domain of science. It can’t tell us about ensoulment, so it’s foolishness to say that science has declared a fertilized egg to have a soul. You can talk all day long about how a fertilized egg has all the building blocks to life, but what scientific reason does anyone have to believe it’s in that moment of concpetion that the soul is imparted to it? Could the soul, like the heart, brain, fingers, or toes, develop later in the womb?
1C. The Bible does not talk about abortion.
I don’t think I need to convince anyone that the pro-life movement is tied to the Christian religion. So let’s look at the Bible, the Christian holy text, to see if there is anything which will give us a command from God that abortion is murder. It is not necessary for Christianity to be true, the Bible to be right, or even for God to exist, in order for this to work. If it can be proven that the Christian religion declares abortion to be murder, that’s enough for the pro-life movement to have at least some evidence for the claim because at least there is some standard they’re pulling from besides their feelings.
It’s probably not enough if I tell you I’ve personally read the entire Bible multiple times and found not one passage on this. You’ll want proof yourself. Well, the burden of proof is on the person claiming the Bible does teach “abortion is murder,” so let’s hear what they say. I’ve pulled what I believe are the verses which best support that claim. I will link a page with most of these verses here so you know I don’t misprint them. If you think I’ve left others out, you are free to search yourself, but it would be fruitless to print the entire Bible in order to show there is no link - and again, it’s not my burden of proof. Nevertheless, I’m printing some verses just to show how lacking in sense and morality one has to be to declare the Bible is definitely anti-abortion.
VERSE #1
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
The Psalms are a book of poetry. They are not reliable when it comes to facts. The poetic phrase that we are “knit together” is not literal. We know how babies are made. I’m sure the psalmist knew enough to know that God wasn’t literally inside the womb knitting.
Furthermore, it is two-faced to claim that a book of poetry can be trusted to tell a literal truth in this passage, but that it is merely poetry when it claims the earth is flat and has four corners. Either the poetry is figurative or it is not. If Psalm 139 tells us a fetus is alive, then the Psalms also teach us the earth is flat. But if the flat earth is a symbolic, figurative line meant to highlight God’s sovereignty, then Psalm 139 is also a symbolic, figurative passage meant to show God’s love for us at all times.
VERSE #2
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
If this verse is to be taken literally, then life begins before conception since God knew us before he formed us in the womb. But that’s not the pro-life position because it’s insane. If God can know us before conception and we still aren’t alive, then it’s not necessarily true we’re alive in the womb.
This verse has to be taken massively out of context to be applied to abortion. It’s the opening crawl of the book of Jeremiah. The prophet begins by recounting how God came down to speak to him. The first few verses of the book are meant to give credence to what Jeremiah has to say by claiming it comes from a higher power and not his own words. To make this about “when life begins” is to strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.
VERSE #3
“Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.”
And?
VERSE #4
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
If your defense of the pro-life movement requires a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, you have larger problems. While I, too, believe that we are created in the image of God, I don’t find anywhere in this passage that talks about the unborn. To apply the image of God to the unborn, we have to presuppose they are Alive.
Also, Adam and Eve were created as adults and never went through the fetal stage, so...
VERSE #5
“When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”
This verse isn’t on the website I linked you to. It is also the only verse that comes close.
If you recall from earlier, this verse really only supports the theory of the quickening. And if Luke wrote this passage to specifically declare the unborn to be alive (which he did not), he likely meant the unborn who have gone through that quickening. To interpret it any other way would be to cast a 21st-century eye on the passage and apply a claim that was not there. Not only that, but if the quickening proves a fetus is Alive, then abortion is not murder before that point, so the claim “abortion is murder” is false.
These are the best verses I could find. We see that not only do none of them talk about abortion at all, but none of them declare life to begin at conception. At best, the Bible promotes the quickening theory. So if the pro-life movement wants religious authority as evidence, they don’t even have that.
1D. Religious texts are not the source of social laws.
Even if the Bible had verses on abortion, that would not mean its rules are enforcable. In order to prove abortion is murder, we’d need the Bible to be considered universally authoritative. While I believe the Bible is a reliable book, that’s a far cry from saying everyone, including people of other religions, must hold themselves to the standards therein. The pro-life position would stall: “Abortion is murder, as the Bible proves.” “So? I’m Buddhist!”
Supposing you got people to decide to base their morality on the Bible. Then what? How could you enforce this? The American government does not base its laws on what religious texts say. At the end of the day, a Biblical proof of abortion being murder is only useful for Christians and is impossible to logically enforce on unbelievers.
1E. Pro-lifers do not behave as if they believe abortion is murder.
It’s clear there is no sufficient evidence abortion is murder, but it’s possible still for the pro-lifer to be convinced in their heart. That isn’t necessarily wrong to do - I’m sure all of us have moral beliefs which we’re convinced of without being able to show scientific evidence for. Morality itself is impossible to justify with science alone. But we’ll see that those who are convinced abortion is wrong do not act as if they believe it. If pro-lifers truly believed abortion is murder, then they should logically demand the punishment given to any other murderer.
While there are some pro-lifers who do argue for women to be punished, they are pretty few and far between. The link I provided is one such person. You can find more with your own google searches. But at the pro-life marches and abortion clinic protests, they aren’t calling for the deaths of the pregnant women walking in. Why is that? Why do less than 100% of pro-lifers demand justice for the unborn?
The truth is, if you believe abortion is murder, and a woman gets an abortion, you necessarily must demand the woman be charged with the crime of murder and sentenced as any other murderer. In a place which allows capital punishment, this means you must demand that all women who get abortions be put to death. And if you’re being totally fair, you need to charge with the same or a similar crime anyone who: (1) performed the abortion, (2) brought the woman to the clinic where it was performed, (3) worked at the clinic, and (4) persuaded the woman to get the abortion. You have to do this. You have to do this if you are pro-life and believe abortion is murder.
The mere fact that pro-life people don’t en masse support the death penalty does not, on its own, prove abortion is not murder. But if pro-choice people agree abortion is not murder, and pro-life people by and large behave as if abortion is not murder... then who out there believes it is? Why are we trying to make any sort of argument for something that no rational person believes and no decent person wants to enforce?
Conclusion:
It should have been enough to say that pro-lifers have no convincing evidence that abortion is murder. But it’s even more damning that we can show evidence that not only will pro-lifers never find that evidence, but that they don’t even believe the things they are saying. To call all abortion murder, we must declare ensoulment to begin at conception, and we don’t have enough scientific, philosophical, or religious evidence to make that claim.
In other words: abortion is not murder.
2. Are people who get abortions immoral?
If abortion is not murder, it becomes harder to make this claim. But it is possible that getting an abortion shows some defect by which we can claim abortion is strongly correlated with immorality. Again, this requires a significant amount of evidence and not just feelings. Also, the immorality must be something in addition to the abortion and not simply the abortion itself - for if it isn’t murder, what is immoral about it? The burden of proof rests on the pro-life position to show signs of immorality. We’ll see the evidence is scant. I could leave it there, but I’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty:
2A. There is insufficient data linking abortions to other immoral behavior.
The first possible way to prove that abortion is immoral enough to condemn would be to prove that abortion is correlated with some other immoral trait that we must purge as a society - such as crime, murder, tailgating, and so on. Again, this rests on the pro-life position to prove, and no one has. If women who had abortions, or the doctors who performed them, were truly more immoral, shouldn’t we have tons of data on this? Sorry I can’t link you to anything. That’s because the data is so non-existant no one has even made up a lie to link abortions to crime or other moral defects.
That should be enough to end the discussion. But while I found no data proving the point that abortion led to immorality, I did find data suggesting the opposite - that access to abortion reduces crime.
Here’s one (paid) study you can read.
Here’s the (free) followup.
Here’s Freakonomics on the topic.
Here’s a Vox summary of the two sides.
Here’s another summary of the studies.
I’m not totally sure how much this correlation matters. It’s possible abortion directly reduced crime a significant amount. It’s possible the reduction was minimal and not extremely related to abortion. But even if all the studies are false, the conclusion we are stuck with is that abortion is not linked to criminal behavior because there are no credible counter-studies. If the studies are true, then the conclusion is that abortion is linked, but negatively, meaning abortion decreases crime.
The only real conclusion we can draw for certain is that the claim of abortion being immoral is not supported by any additional immorality among participants in abortion.
2B. Many pro-lifers get abortions themselves.
I once believed, foolishly, that the pro-life movement, though in error, was sincere in the error. They may not believe the right things, but they believe them without swerving. It turns out this is false.
There are many instances of pro-life women getting abortions while “remaining” pro-life, excusing this behavior among their own, or in the case of men, forcing the women in their lives to get abortions. Apparently it is so well known that it takes a while to find the source of this information because it gets unsourced quotes all over the internet, much to my annoyance. The ubiquitousness of this fact shouldn’t on its own make it true, so I’ve looked for evidence myself. Here’s a quote from the book Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic by Wendi Simons:
“Many workers spoke of dealing with clients who felt conflicted about abortion rights or who even declared that they were against abortion (on the phone, in group sessions, or while waiting in the exam rooms). Yvette said, “I’ve had a lot of people [clients] tell me lately, ‘I used to be pro-choice, but now I’m not.’ And that one really bothers me.” Health workers sometimes confronted clients by asking them how they could have an abortion if they were anti-choice, as Janice described: “I get mad, but I ... just present the opposite side view, ‘Well, you know, if you are anti-abortion, then maybe this isn’t the decision that you want to make,” you know, and just try to present it in a way that, well, that it’s not really compatible to be anti-abortion and to have an abortion. ‘Well, my situation’s different.’ ‘Okay, right!’” Janice laughed, using sarcasm to dismiss a client’s claim to a unique route to abortion.
Clients would attempt to justify their own abortions as necessary compared with the frivolous abortions of other women. Many health workers said, as Janice did, that they often assured such clients that their situations were not unusual. This recurring conversation frustrated staff members, who often found it easiest to simply ignore clients’ anti-abortion remarks. Carrie, a health worker, said, for instance, that she rarely felt she had the energy or desire to argue with clients and that she worried she might not argue politely. She believed that what she would like to say expressed too much anger to maintain the nurturing stance she had been taught. “It makes me really angry—it really frustrates me—that you’re coming in here to have an abortion and telling me that you don’t believe in it! That you would deny other women the choice, the option that you have now to come in here and do this!””
Here’s a link to a McSweeney’s article. McSweeney’s is a comedy site. However, with this article, they provide links to numerous stories of pro-life men either making women get abortions or otherwise sexually abusing them. This may surprise you, but all the pro-life men in the list are Republicans.
Certainly not all pro-life people get abortions themselves or sexually abuse other people. But it turns out that not every pro-choice person gets an abortion or sexually abuses people either. There’s very little difference between the two. But while one group - the pro-choice group - behaves according to their principles, it turns out the pro-life group behaves according to pro-choice principles. This makes it very hard for the pro-life movement to make any sort of claim to morality in order to denigrate those who choose to get abortions.
2C. The leaders of the pro-life movement are morally reprehensible.
The pro-life movement began with two people - Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich - and is now led by the GOP. Hypocrites are in every movement, but if the founders and leaders of a movement are morally reprehensible it seriously damages their legitimacy. Yes, every founder and leader has skeletons in the closet, but we will see the skeletons in the pro-life closet are so numerous and severe as to disqualify them from making any moral stance against the pro-choice movement.
Jerry Falwell - the most well-known founder of the religious right and the pro-life movement. I think I’ll quote his words about 9-11 first:
“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
He didn’t just say mean things about gays. He also sought to overturn a law that decriminalized gay sex. He, uh, really didn’t like the gays. He also didn’t like the Jews, as you can find in this lovely document. In case you’re too lazy to read it, here’s the great quote:
““A few of you don’t like the Jews and I know why,” said the Rev. Jerry Falwell. “He [sic] can make more money accidently than you can make on purpose.””
Paul Weyrich - inventor of the “moral majority.” It’s hard to believe he honestly cared about abortion, rather than propping up a conservative voting bloc, because he said:
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
He also saw ghosts everywhere. The “cultural marxist” bogeyman wasn’t around yet, but Weyrich had the next-best thing:
“The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in this society.”
Oh wait there’s an anti-semitic quote too:
“Christ was crucified by the Jews... He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.”
(In case it needs clarifying, the claim that Jesus was killed by the Jews is always anti-Semitic for two seemingly contradictory reasons. The first is that he was technically killed by the Roman government after being handed over by Jewish leaders. The second is that the race of the people who killed Jesus is not really significant because that’s who you’d expect to live there. If we said Americans killed John F. Kennedy we’d be right but it would mean nothing. Who else lives in America?)
The GOP - I consider them the leaders of the pro-life movement for two reasons. First, all pro-life legislation comes through them. The Democrats and Independents do not push pro-life legislation. The second reason is that pro-life figures overwhelmingly and outspokenly support the GOP. If the GOP is not the de facto leader of the movement, who is? The mere fact that Trump, who used to support abortion, changed his mind in order to run as a Republican, should prove that the GOP has such a strangehold on the concept of pro-life that no one can be admitted to their party without accepting the pro-life creed.
I don’t think I need to prove to you that the GOP is a hellhole of misogynist, racist, and homophobic immorality. If you don’t already know that, you are one of them. Our president is famous for having boasted about sexually assaulting women, calling African nations shitholes, calling Mexicans rapists, barring trans people from serving in the military, and most recently referencing the trail of tears to mock senator Elizabeth Warren. The GOP has gone along with every single one of these racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks as if they own them.
The bottom line is that the founders and leaders of the pro-life movement - the people who carry the banner, decide the tenets of the faith, and keep everyone in line - are so morally bankrupt that they have no right to claim abortion is immoral.
2D. The origins of the pro-life movement are deceitful.
The only reason we have a pro-life movement is because Falwell and Weyrich wanted a conservative takeover of the American government. They needed to galvanize the right around an issue. At first they tried segregation, but at the time the racist dogwhistling didn’t work because conservatives in the 70s were a very different breed from today’s so-called conservatives. They weren’t successful until they used abortion, and it was rather clever of them to figure out how to ally the right under that banner since conservatives were not at that point all that riled up over Roe v. Wade. That landmark decision was in 1973, but the “moral majority” only appeared about six years later.
I’m not making this up - the real origins are all revealed here in this Politico article.
If the origins of the movement are deceitful, it casts a dark shadow over the whole thing. What claim to morality does the pro-life movement have when it was not founded over an issue of morality, but as a way to get the right to rally around conservative GOP candidates? If you yourself are a member of the pro-life movement, you were bought by Falwell and Weyrich in order to get more Republicans in office.
Conclusion:
If abortion is not murder, the claim that it is immoral has no legs to stand on. What is the immoral behavior typified in someone who gets an abortion? Pro-choice people are not significantly less moral, and pro-life people display such staggering depths of hypocrisy and sexual immorality as to render any claims of morality useless. The only conclusion to draw is that abortion is not immoral and the morality of a pro-choice person cannot be called into question, especially by anyone pro-life.
I want to remind you this portion has only to do with the claims of moral superiority by a group. Individual pro-life and pro-choice people can be saints or sinners to any degree. All we can say for certain is that: abortion is not linked to immorality.
3. Should Abortion be Illegal?
Once we know that abortion is not inherently immoral, let alone an act of murder, it becomes harder to make the case it should be illegal. I’ll try to address any possible serious cases below.
3A. There is precedent for something bad being legal.
If abortion is not strictly immoral, it can still be bad. For example, we don’t view it as immoral to die of cancer, but it’s also not a good thing. (Apologies if the cancer comparison is rough, but it’s hard to come up with situations where we have objectively bad things which are divorced from morality.) Perhaps there is merit to the idea of making abortion illegal simply because it’s a bad option. I would agree that abortion is a bad option, in that it’s not a desirable outcome; nobody wants to get an abortion until it’s the least bad option available to them. But just because it’s a bad option, doesn’t mean there’s an automatic justification for making that option illegal.
Adultery is legal. You are legally allowed to cheat on your spouse with anyone you like. You will not be arrested for having sex outside of marriage. “Hello, 9-1-1, my husband cheated on me,” will only bring the cops to your door to have a little chat about abusing the emergency system. Yet we all know adultery is wrong. At least I hope so. I don’t think I’m mistaken to believe the pro-life movement is anti-adultery as well. So if something is objectively a bad thing, and bad things should be illegal, why the push against abortion and not adultery?
(More cyncial readers may conclude that it’s because the pro-life establishment is rife with adultery. While it’s a hilarious irony, I can’t prove that the adultery in the ranks is the reason pro-life advocates don’t push to criminalize unfaithfulness.)
The truth is that there are plenty of “bad” actions that we allow legally. There are even immoral actions that are legal. Adultery is not just considered bad, but also immoral, yet the most legal repercussions for the cheater is the loss of their marriage, maybe, if they signed a contract? This isn’t to say that all bad actions should be kept legal, but that the argument to make abortion illegal because it’s a bad action doesn’t have enough strength. Abortion is bad, and... then what? It’s hard to get from an “is” to an “ought.”
3B. There is precedent for not modeling our laws after a Biblical worldview.
We’ve already seen that the Bible doesn’t directly talk about abortion. Nevertheless, the pro-life movement is very keen on letting us all know that the Bible is super pro-life and if we modeled our legal system after that book we’d all be in good shape. But I don’t believe a single person making that argument is aware of the laws in the Bible.
In the Old Testament, there is a law regarding the forgiveness of debts. According to Deuteronomy 15:1-3, at the end of every seven years all debts must be cancelled. If someone owes you money, well not anymore. The book even goes on to say later in that chapter that you should not refuse to offer a loan to someone near the end of the seven years out of fear of losing that money. Another law in the Old Testament from Exodus 23:19 says you can’t boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. We have no idea why this law existed. Maybe in those days there was a very good reason. But these days it’s complete nonsense.
I point out both of these laws because we probably have different feelings as to the moral quality of those laws, yet neither are included in this Christian nation’s legal system. We probably think the forgiveness of debts sounds like a very moral thing to do, and yet religious people in America aren’t calling for it to be implemented on a national scale. Conversely, we all probably think the goat law is dumb and we aren’t going to bother pushing for it. So we have precedent for ignoring both Biblical laws that we think are moral and laws we think don’t touch on ethics at all.
Despite our reputation as a “Christian nation” (which is debatable), our society makes laws for very different reasons than the ancient Jews did. Even if you believe the Torah is a divine mandate, directly written by the hand of God, it does not follow that every society build their laws according to that mandate. America doesn’t really make laws because certain things are moral or not - many laws concern moral behavior, but if the immoral behavior doesn’t threaten the society at large it goes ignored. I know this because adultery is legal. Adultery doesn’t threaten society in the same way that, say, murder does.
The point here is that if we want to make abortion illegal, we have to show a reason why modern America should implement that law. Bringing in the laws of another country from another time according to a cherry-picked description of a religious text won’t work.
3C. Nations with legal abortion and sex education have lower abortion rates.
Another potential argument for making abortion illegal is that it will reduce the number of abortions. But this turns out to be false. Nations with fewer abortions are correlated very strongly with laws that allow completely free access to abortions, sex education, and contraceptives.
Here’s a list from CBS News.
Here’s an explanation from NBC News.
Here’s one from the US News.
Strangely enough, this is a fact that is not really brought up on pro-life sites. Those pro-life sites will often have wonderful little articles about “how to DESTROY pro-choice arguments” which are little more than straw man exhibits. Check this one out! No mention of how abortions decrease with more access to the procedure, more sex education, and more contraceptives. It’s almost as if the pro-life movement won’t put that in their handy-dandy checklists because they have no response.
So if the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, then it makes logical sense to make the procedure cheap or free, and easy to access for all women. We also must step up our sex education in the classroom (another thing the pro-life movement is famous for pushing against), as well as making access to contraceptives free of any barriers.
3D. Criminalizing abortion disproportionately affects women.
Do I need to explain why?
I don’t feel I need to go looking for sources showing why anti-abortion laws negatively effect women, since it’s obvious that only women can be affected by these. Furthermore, the sources for this point are the same as the sources for all the above ones so I’d just be repeating myself.
3E. Criminalizing abortion goes against our right to bodily autonomy.
If abortion is not murder, if it is not immoral, if restricting it increases the abortion rate, and if anti-abortion laws are harmful, what is left? All that is left is the desire to preserve life, and it seems like this choice should only be made by the one whose life is at stake when she gets pregnant. Yeah, I can already hear the “it’s not just her body, it’s the child’s body too” line. I even used to believe that line. But it’s nothing more than a deflection. When you say that it’s not just the mother’s body, you make an assumption you can’t back up about whose life takes precedent.
Most people would say, and I agree, that it’s the morally right thing to do to sacrifice one’s own bodily autonomy to save another human life. However, the key here is that no one is forcing us to do this. It’s morally right to jump into the water to save a person who is drowning; it’s morally wrong to make a law forcing a person to jump in the water to save a person who is drowning, and to inflict legal punishment if they don’t. We may think a person is a cad for refusing to save a life, but that person is not considered a murderer, either legally or morally. In that sense, only God can judge.
In case that’s not enough for you, here’s an example. Let’s say you are in the hospital for surgery of some kind. Before they put you under, the doctor comes in and says, “hey [your name], really sorry to do this but there’s a patient next door urgently in need of a new kidney. If he doesn’t get a new one in the next few hours he will die. I just checked and you’re the only person in a 100-mile radius who is a match. Would you be willing to donate your kidney?”
You’d probably say yes. And if you were considering saying no, you would certainly feel that voice in the back of your head telling you it’s morally wrong to let another person die when you could easily save them. You’d probably carry guilt with you the rest of your life. But - and here’s the kicker - you would not be legally responsible for the other patient’s death. The only punishment would be your own feelings of guilt and possibly the scorn of other people.
New scenario: you’re in the hospital for surgery of some kind, again. After you wake up from your surgery, the doctor comes in and says, “hey [your name], the surgery was a success, but I should let you know. There’s a patient next door who needed a new kidney and you were the only match. So while we were inside you we decided to kill two birds with one stone, take your kidney and give it to the other patient.”
In both cases your kidney is used to save a life. But in the second one your bodily autonomy was infringed upon. It doesn’t matter that a life was saved. It wasn’t your choice to do it and you bear none of the moral responsibility for it. The doctor saved the life, not you, and he did so at your expense. So now there’s a question for any pro-life people who have actually read this whole article and didn’t run away the minute their beliefs were challenged: Do you believe your bodily autonomy should be allowed to be infringed upon without your consent in order to save lives? Think very carefully.
If you believe that it’s wrong to legally force you to save a life by sacrificing your own body, congratulations, you are now pro-abortion. It is wrong to legally force a woman to save her own pregnancy at the risk of her body.
But if you hate abortion enough to say it’s right to force a woman to go through with a pregnancy no matter what, what difference is there between that and forcing a person to donate a kidney?
The truth is, that if abortion is not murder, not immoral, not legally necessary, and that anti-abortion laws contribute to higher abortion rates... then the only thing left to defend anti-abortion laws is the need to sacrifice one’s own bodily autonomy to save another person. And that decision can only be made by the person whose body is being sacrificed. The minute you declare it okay to legally say a person is required to carry a baby to term, you open up the possibility of allowing for any number of government intrusions into your privacy and autonomy for the sake of someone else. And if you’re okay with that, how have you suddenly grown to trust the government to only invade your privacy for a really good reason, pinky promise?
Conclusion:
Because abortion is not murder or immoral in any way, there is no good reason to criminalize it. Not only that, but the criminalization of abortion has the opposite of the intended effect and does harm to women. Therefore, it is not only a foolish idea to criminalize it, but it is immoral to suggest a law which will bring a net negative effect to humanity. In short: abortion should be legal.
So what does this all mean?
I don’t think abortion is a good thing. In my perfect world, nobody gets one. However, I also understand that the best way to reduce them is to allow them freely and provide high-quality sex education and low-cost contraceptives. Please realize no one is getting abortions to be one of the cool kids. I don’t know the origin of this quote but I think it fits:
“No woman wants an abortion the way she wants an ice cream cone or a brand new Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to chew off its own leg.”
The pro-life movement is not truly pro-life. It is a movement born by massive bigots in order to trick a block of conservative Christians into planting white supremacists in government seats. All people involved in the pro-life movement are promulgators of this white supremacy. If you are in this movement, your moral outrage has been used by evil people to do evil things.
So I reject the pro-life movmenet, not just as incorrect, not just as inffective, but as immoral. In order to be truly pro-life, one must push for legislation which supports life at every level, not just life for the unborn. A pro-life person supports a free healthcare system so that pregnant mothers can get care before, during, and after pregnancy without going bankrupt. If not for modern healthcare, I and my mother would have died. My mother had to have a C-section in order to give birth due to complications, and I was put on a machine for the first days of my life. To be anti-healthcare is to say that my parents should not have the right to afford my or my mother’s survival. A pro-life person also supports a child’s feeding and education. A person who thinks school lunches are a waste of taxpayer dollars or that the education system simply brainwashes kids to be liberal is not pro-life because they believe only rich people should be allowed to have food and education. A pro-life person would support the life of anyone regardless of their place of birth or citizenship status. Anyone who pours out water left for struggling migrants south of the border is not pro-life. By extension, anyone who supports that action and the organization that allows it is not pro-life.
The pro-life movement is not pro-life.