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Abortion protects my right to choose. Don’t I have the freedom to choose what to do with my life?
Abortion is not a debate about freedom of “choice”.-- Joseph Sobran recently suggested the following scenario in his nationally syndicated column. Let's imagine proponents of slavery defending their position by arguing, “Please understand, we are not pro-slavery. We do not think that slave-owning should be mandatory for white people. We just think that the question is complex. It is a difficult issue. Slavery should remain one of several options, an alternative. People should have a choice as to whether they will own slaves or not.” What is the problem with this argument? It is, of course, an extreme case of begging the question. It overlooks the issue at stake which is the rights of the third party involved, the slaves.
This is exactly our view of the cry for “choice.” It begs the question of the nature of the third party, the fetus, whose existence depends upon the choice being made. It assumes that the fetus is not human, the very issue in question. “Pro-choice” has a nice ring to it, especially when compared with the opposite, “anti-choice.” But, if we step back, analyze the debate and realize that the question being begged is not resolved, then we will quit talking about “choice” and begin to talk about the fetus. If fetal life is human life, the debate about choice ends immediately. After all, we do not offer harried parents the right to choose to terminate their two year olds, at least not until we determine that they are not human. If fetal life is human life then there is no choice to be made.
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It’s my body and I have the right to do with it anything I please, don’t I?
First of all, we deny that any one has the right to do with his body whatever he pleases. One may not mutilate oneself. Suicide is still illegal in most of the country, and should be. Life is a gift which God gives, and no one has any absolute “right” to do with it whatever he wishes.
But, more serious than this, here, too, the question as to the nature of the unborn is being begged. The “woman's right to her body” argument assumes that the fetus is part of the woman's body which she, then, has a right to eliminate. Leaving aside the question of whether or not a woman or a man has the right to lop off unwanted appendages, the fetus is not a part of the woman's body. It is foreign tissue and one day her body will naturally reject it. At conception it has its own genetic code, at 3 weeks it will have its own heart beat, at about a month and a half it will have its own brain waves. We answer this argument, quite simply, “It is not your body!” Yes, the woman's body must carry and bear the child. But if we are right in our view of the unborn, a woman's rights and choices must be exercised prior to conception since, to paraphrase an old saying, her rights end where the fetal nose begins. If fetal life is human life, this argument begs the question since one's personal rights may never be allowed to terminate the rights, much less the existence, of another.
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Abortion is a religious issue. The country was founded on religious freedom. Why should I be regulated by another’s religious view?
Abortion is not a “religious issue,” or a matter of one side imposing its religion on the other side. We say it is no more a “religious” issue than any other public policy decision. We will only grant that it is a religious issue if others will grant that all public policy, indeed all law, is religious. How is this so? All law arises from, and gives expression to, the values of a people. But values ultimately are unprovable and must be taken by faith. One cannot prove that human life is sacred or, for that matter, that marriage or private property is sacred. These values must be taken by faith and so, by faith, we believe and legislate against murder, adultery, and theft. Law is inherently religious. To single out anti-abortion laws, as such, is a red-herring.
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Abortion is a moral issue. Why should I be regulated by another person’s morality?
Abortion is not a matter of the wrongful imposition of morality. Again, all law imposes morality. For example, what if Joe Bloggs wants to open a cafeteria in which no blacks will be served. Can he? Does he have the right to choose not to serve blacks? No, not in America in the l980's. We have laws against such discrimination, and should, because it is contrary to our nation's values. Can Joe pay a woman half of what he pays a man to do the same job? No, that conflicts with our values too. In fact, America loves enforcing morality with coercion. We compel our citizens to participate in Social Security and all manner of charitable designs without any choice in the matter whatsoever. What amazes us is that the “pro-choice” movement, loaded as it is with people who have been using the state's club to compel civil rights and women's rights and care for the poor, now balk when it comes to protecting the unborn. Again, I believe the question is being begged. Surely, one ought not to have any reservation about stopping abortion and imposing an anti-abortion morality if fetal life is human life. Morality is, should be, and cannot but be legislated.
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Don’t I have a constitutional right to an abortion?
Berkeley law Professor John Noonan said of Roe v. Wade and its companion decision, Doe v. Dolton, that together they “may stand as the most radical decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court.” Chief Justice Rehnquist considers it an exercise of “raw judicial power.” Why? Because it created a right to abortion out of thin air and in doing so overthrew abortion restrictions in all 50 states. Its division of the pregnancy into trimesters is arbitrary legally and medically. The idea of a constitutional right to abort preborn human life not only begs the same old question concerning the nature of fetal life but, frankly, does not exist.
However, not only do the abortionists insist there is such, they allow it to override other important rights. Should a father have some right to the child that has been conceived? The abortionists say no, and maintain that a woman may destroy a couple's preborn child without the knowledge or consent of the father. Should teenagers be set upon by abortionists without the knowledge or consent of their parents? Abortionists maintain they should. Your teenage daughter, who cannot have her ears pierced without parental permission, can undergo a procedure conducted by a total stranger which, because it destroys what we all agree would one day have become a baby, has more than ordinary potential to leave physical and emotional scars for life. What has become of the right, indeed duty, of parents to protect their children? Should abortion be used as a form of birth control? Should a woman should be able to have an abortion because it is bikini season? The “abortion rights” advocates oppose any restrictions upon abortion whatsoever, and are militant in their defense of the right to destroy unborn life at the whim of the mother.
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I can’t afford a baby, financially or emotionally, it will ruin my life. Aren’t my rights and needs more important than those of an unborn baby?
This is one of the more pronounced and effective red herrings. Do women with unwanted pregnancies face extreme difficulties? Of course they do. I understand that U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a man not otherwise known for his moral insight, recently said that the pro-lifers believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth. Comments like this show a total ignorance for the work being done by the those opposed to abortion. Thousands of crisis pregnancy centers, homes for pregnant girls, and homes for unwed mothers have been started in just the last 20 years all across this nation. Tens of thousands of children have been adopted. The pro-life movement has truly put its money where its mouth is. While compassionate toward those with unwanted pregnancies and eager to help, the line that is drawn by the pro-life movement is a reasonable one. It simply says, whatever you must do, you cannot kill your baby. To obscure this point with talk of compassion for the mother and the future unwanted child is to raise a cynical red herring (as though the solution to being unwanted is to be dead) and begs the question once more. If the pro-life position is right then surely we cannot identify ?”compassion” with the destruction of the unborn.
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No one really knows when life begins, do they?
The abortion debate is not about when life begins. George Will called the claim that we cannot know when life begins a “silly” argument, and he is surely right. We all know when life begins. Dr. Hymie Gordon, chief geneticist of the Mayo Clinic, may speak for the medical community in saying, “It is an established fact that human life begins at conception.” Also, Harvard University's Prof M. Matthews-Roth says, “It is scientifically correct to say that individual human life begins at conception.” From the point of conception, from the point the female egg and male sperm unite, there is formed a distinct, unique, human life. It is not the life of the mother. It is not a part of the father. It has a complete, unique, never to be repeated genetic code, and a complete complement of 46 chromosomes. As already noted, within l8 to 25 days it has a heartbeat. At 45 days it has brain waves. At 8 weeks it has fingerprints, a fully formed structure, and all its organs are present. At 9-10 weeks the child can squint, swallow, and move its tongue. At l2-13 weeks it sucks its thumb, recoils from pain, drinks the amniotic fluid and kicks. Fifty percent of all abortions occur after the 8th week, at which point Lennart Nilsson, in his book, A Child Is Born, (which, by the way, is not a pro-life tract and is warmly commended by the Journal of the American Medical Association) says, “Everything that will be found in the fully developed human being has now been established” (p. 71). Over l2,000 abortions per year are performed between the 6th and 9th month when the fetus is fully viable.
One may wish to argue as to when the fetus is a “person,” or when “ensoulment” occurs but these, to me, are unresolvable abstractions and just more red herrings. Whatever you wish to call the result of human conception, it is human: it is not animal, it is not plant, it is not mineral. If it is just “matter,” it is human matter. If it is just “tissue,” it is human tissue. It has never existed before, it will never exist again. It is undeniably distinct, irrepeatable, independent, living human life. If we are to destroy such then surely the burden of proof lies with those who would claim that this form of human life is not sacred and worthy of full protection. If we are to err, let us err on the side of caution!
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What about the handicapped child? Isn’t it better to abort that child than bring him or her into a life of pain?
Some would say that abortion is acceptable if the quality of life of the unborn child does not warrant its live birth. Many of our medical personnel reason this way today. But listen what Professor L.R. Agnew of the UCLA School of Medicine has to say. In speaking with his students, he posed the following question:
“Here is the family history. The father has syphilis, the mother has TB. They have already had four children. The first one is blind, the second one died. Third is deaf, the fourth has TB. The mother is pregnant with her fifth child. The parents are willing to have an abortion if you decide they should. What do you think?” Most of the students decided on abortion. Prof. Agnew said, “Congratulations! You have just murdered Beethoven.”
How many Beethovens have been aborted in our American abortion clinics since Roe vs. Wade? If Beethovens are “one in a million,” then 35 have already been killed. Parents have been counseled to have abortions because of “birth defects.” In many instances, the infants were carried to full term and were born completely normal and healthy babies!
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Unwanted children are always abused. Why bring another unwanted child into the world?
This argument seems to make a great deal of sense. There are sad stories where parents have burned their infant’s feet in boiling water just to hear him shriek. There are stories of children who endure physical beatings and severe abuse. But this seemingly compelling argument is another fallacy. The legitimization of abortion has not decreased the incidence of child abuse, rather the incidences of child abuse have increased exponentially. Instead of deterring child abuse, abortion has increased it.
The logic of abortion enables a mother or father to think, “Why should I care for you now, I could have aborted you!” Further, it is fundamentally illogical to argue that we ought to abort children since they are unwanted and so will be abused. Can we use this line of reasoning on born children? “You have been abused, so now to prevent further child abuse, we will kill you.” The absurdity here is obvious. Since when does someone’s life depend upon someone else wanting them? In a telling study, Dr. Edward Lenoski (U. of S. California) has conclusively shown that 90% of battered children were planned pregnancies!
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But must we not stop the overpopulation of the earth? Does not abortion prevent the world from being over-run by humans?
The answer here is to understand how much we have come to believe the myth of over-population. In the last century, people predicted that the earth would run out of food. It was believed that food production increases arithmetically while the population increases geometrically. But the prediction failed, because men have continued to discover ways of increasing food production. A study done not too long ago claimed that if all the arable land in the world were farmed by American standards we could feed a population 5 times the present population. The study also argued that if the Japanese standards were used, the arable land could feed a population 17 times the present population. We have barely begun to tap the potential of food production in the sea. Genetically enhanced crops will also dramatically increase harvests.
Further, are we really overpopulated? It has been demonstrated that all of the present population of the earth could stand without touching within the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida. Yet that is only a small part of a small state of a country that is but a small part of the Western Hemisphere. Yes, there are food shortages. But this is not due to too many people. It is due to beliefs or practices that prevent the use of readily available food sources. Hinduism, for example, does not allow for the destruction of the pests that destroy crops; it teaches that you may not eat food like beef that is readily available. Famine is most often due to human greed and political instability. It is due to political theories like communism that destroy the productivity of human labor. To solve the food shortages we do not need abortion. Rather, we need the truths of Christianity that have allowed the great advances of Western culture. This is not to advocate that every person must have as large a family as possible, that is a matter of one’s conscience. But we must not control our population growth by murder of the living (genocide) or the abortion of the preborn.
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But does not abortion allow us to harvest organs for the use of very ill people?
Yes it does. Surgeons have implanted parts of an aborted infant’s brain into an Alzheimer patient’s brain. One woman has offered to have an infant for her sick father so that the infant might be aborted and provide him with a needed organ donation. Another woman with kidney disease is planning to have a baby so that she might have an abortion to gain a new kidney for herself. In fact, in Europe one can buy cosmetics that are produced with aborted infants’ collagen as a major ingredient.
Where has modern medicine has taken us? Have we not returned to cannibalism? To harvest organs from a willing donor is one thing, but to kill an innocent human being to cannibalize his body parts is another. For a man to willingly give up his blood, or a kidney, or later his skin and corneas at death is a noble thing. But it is not noble to kill an innocent life in order to steal its life and give it to another. Modern medicine coupled with abortion has brought our culture back to the ethics of the Cannibal. Harvesting organs for the life of one human being can hardly be an argument for the killing of another.
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If abortion is illegal, won’t women have dangerous back-alley abortions?
Pro-abortionists predict there will be a carnage of human life if existing abortion laws are changed. How valid is this argument, which is based ultimately on the "lesser of two evils" principle? The thinking is that though legal abortion may not be entirely desirable, it is more desirable than the alternative. If abortion is outlawed, then women will be forced to place their lives in the hands of unskilled and unscrupulous back-alley butchers.
This argument assumes that if abortion is made illegal a significant number of women will still have them. Instead of being performed by a qualified physician in an antiseptic environment, abortions will be performed in dingy criminal settings or by rank amateurs armed with coat hangers. Though this scenario may seem overly dramatic, it does have historical precedent and is therefore realistic.
The argument rests on fairly sound premise: In all likelihood, if the law prohibits abortion, many women will still seek them and have them in perilous circumstances. Many women would become the victims of gynecological butchery. This is no small horror to contemplate.
More women have died from abortions in the United States since abortion was legalized than in the preceding times of illegal abortion. This is due not to the incompetency of the physicians, but to the huge increase in the number of abortions performed. Pro-life advocates tend to assume that if abortion is once again made illegal, the number of women who die or are permanently injured from abortions will dramatically decrease to pre-Roe v. Wade levels. This assumption takes an enormous leap of faith. If Roe v. Wade were reversed, it is highly unlikely that the number of deaths would revert to what it was before.
Our culture has gone through nearly two decades of legal abortion. Now it is a widely accepted practice, and the strong social taboos that exercised restraint on abortion prior to Roe v. Wade will probably not make a swift or certain comeback. Whether we like it or not, abortion-on-demand is part of the fabric of current experience. Here we see evidence of the original meaning of "you can't legislate morality." This makes the practical consequences of the reversal of abortion law a very serious matter. Whether abortion remains legal or is made illegal, women are going to continue to die from abortions.
The ethical issue at stake, however, is not only the women who are dying or who may die, but also the unborn babies who are killed every year -one and a half million in the United States alone. This remains the focal point of the debate. For those convinced that abortion involves killing living human persons, the continuation of it to protect those who are having the abortions is ethically intolerable. The loss of a woman's life in abortion is a tragic thing; but if abortion is evil, then the life lost is that of the guilty party. The destruction of the unborn baby is the loss of the innocent party. Ideally, we should refrain from abortion altogether, because then neither the woman nor the baby would die. If the practice of abortion is unjust, then the protection of those who engage in the practice is not the duty of the state. Concern for them is certainly the duty of the church, but to protect the criminal in the course of committing a crime is not the responsibility of government.
Again, the argument based on the concern for the harm that will come to women who have illegal abortions presumes that aborting unborn babies is a legitimate practice. In all likelihood, if the pro-abortionist who uses this argument were to be convinced that the unborn are living human persons, this argument from practical expediency would vanish in view of the greater evil of the destruction of babies.
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Isn't it inconsistent to be anti-abortion and pro-capital punishment?
Pro-abortionists repeatedly have charged advocates of pro-life with a hypocritical inconsistency. The argument is that if pro-life advocates are so stirred up about the loss of the life of unborn babies, why are they not equally concerned about the fate of men and women who are executed by the criminal justice system? Even talk show host Larry King made this charge, saying that the would give no credence to pro-life supporters until they became more consistent in their two positions.
There are two responses. The first is to the logic of Larry King's complaint. Even if pro-life advocates are wrong about their view of capital punishment and are utterly inconsistent in their views on the two matters, that does not disqualify their grounds for objection to abortion. A person may hold views on two subjects that are inconsistent, and still may be holding a correct view on one of them. King must allow logically for the possibility of the happy inconsistency. Not one of us is right in all of his or her thinking, and each person has some points of inconsistency. That does not invalidate everything we believe.
Second, are anti-abortion and pro-capital punishment views in fact inconsistent? The biblical view of the overarching sanctity of life is the same principle that leads people to be both anti-abortion and pro-capital punishment. The biblical reason for the institution of capital punishment is that murder is an intolerable violation of the sanctity of life. The murderer who willfully and maliciously takes another person's life thereby forfeits his right to his own life. Whether Mr. King or others agree with this position, its weakness is not one of inconsistency. Advocates of capital punishment cannot rightly be charged with espousing a principle of injustice. If a murderer is killed as a penalty for killing someone else, the punishment is perfectly just. The penalty may not be merciful, but it is not unjust. An injustice would be dealt the murderer if his penalty were more severe than his crime.
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Why should men speak on abortion, it's a woman's issue?
It is a specious argument to say that men shouldn't speak on abortion because it's a women's issue. Some people include it as an extension of the woman's right to privacy. That is, since childbearing is exclusive to women, men have no right to address moral issues connected to it. Such statements as, "If men had to carry babies in pregnancy, there would be no laws against abortion," reflect this radical view.
Recently, I received a letter from a Christian woman who chided me on precisely this point. She maintained that I had no right to speak or write on abortion because I am a man. Since she was a professing Christian I wondered what she would say if the Lord Jesus Christ were to appear and begin speaking about abortion. Would she disqualify Him as well simply on the basis that He is male?
This argument is a crass form of reverse sexism and female chauvinism. It is unworthy of the feminist position, slanderous to men, and trivial in its conception. If we followed this principle to its logical conclusion we would have to dismiss Moses, Paul, Socrates, Plato, Confucius, or any other male teacher of ethics from the discussion. Ultimately, we would have to disqualify eight out of nine of the current justices of the Supreme Court, leaving Sandra Day O'Connor to decide the matter by herself.
More soberly, it is important to realize that the current division over abortion is not simply a division between men and women. Women are at the forefront of the pro-life movement, and advocates of pro-choice have countless men involved in their ranks. A common tactic in debate or discussion is to attack the soundness of an argument by attacking the person who espouses it. If abortion is just, then it doesn't matter who argues for it- male or female, black or white, Asian or European. The argument must be decided on its own merits, not on the personalities involved.
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