Persuasive Pro Life: How to Talk about Our Culture's Toughest Issue

by Trent Horn

If pro-choice advocates are correct and abortion is merely harmless surgery, then pro-lifers oppress women and falsely accuse them of homicide. But if pro-life advocates are correct and abortion ends the life of a human being, then pro-choicers are guilty of defending the killing of millions of people.

1. How many abortions take place each year? Approximately 1.06 million abortions occur annually in the United States. This translates to about 2,800 abortions every day.9 2. Who has abortions? Fifty percent of women who have an abortion have had a previous one.10 About 30 percent of

women by age 45 will have at least one abortion.11 The most common age of women who have abortions is between 20 and 29. Protestants obtain 37 percent of abortions, Catholics 28 percent. Pro-choice researchers point out, “While the Catholic Church has strong proscriptions against abortion, the relative abortion rate for Catholic women was no different from that for all women.”12 However, these sources do not describe how frequently the women surveyed attend religious services, and so they may identify with these religious groups but not fully believe what the groups teach as doctrine. 3. Why do women have abortions? The most common reasons women give for having an abortion are social and economic. They include “having a baby would dramatically change my life” (74 percent), “I can’t afford a baby now” (73 percent), “I don’t want to be a single mother or am having relationship problems” (48 percent), and “I have completed my childbearing” (38

percent). Twelve percent of women said their abortion was related to a health problem, and 1.5 percent said they w...

The last two questions—What is abortion? When is it legal?—can’t be answered in a few sentences, but they are two of the most important questions that a pro-life advocate needs to be able to answer.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, abortion is “the expulsion or removal from the womb of a developing embryo or fetus in the period before it is capable of independent survival.”14

The term fertilized egg is especially inaccurate, because once fertilization is complete the egg ceases to exist and what remains is a new human organism. The concept of a fertilized egg is as nonsensical as a married bachelor.

When I talk about the being who is aborted, I use the terms fetus (or embryo if the child is younger than eight weeks), unborn child, and human being interchangeably because those terms accurately describe what I am talking about.15 The term I prefer to use, especially when talking to pro-choice advocates, is the unborn, because it is a neutral term that even the media use when describing humans before birth.16

In his encyclical The Gospel of Life, the pontiff wrote: The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. . . . The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. To the same Father and his mercy you can with sure hope entrust your child.17

In response to this clever use of semantics, the pro-life advocate can simply say, “Alright, drugs like Plan B may not be able to cause what you define as an abortion. They just have the potential to kill tiny human beings by keeping them from implanting in the womb. Is that somehow better than abortion?”

suction abortion should be provided.”27 This procedure is also called menstrual extraction, vacuum aspiration, or suction curettage, and it is used in approximately 75 percent of abortions in the United States.28

Dilation and evacuation (or D&E) is a form of surgical abortion that is performed during the second trimester of pregnancy when the fetus is too big to fit through the suction tube. The fetus is dismembered and removed from the uterus piece by piece. It accounts for approximately 8 percent of all abortions in the United States.30

some abortionists used a procedure that ended the fetus’s life after it was partially outside of the woman’s body. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) calls this technique dilation and extraction (D&X), though the more common term is partial-birth abortion.33

While the majority of abortions (89 percent) occur during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, a significant number of late-term abortions still occur. Defenders of legal abortion claim that late-term abortions (those that typically take place after a fetus is twenty weeks old) account for only about one percent of all abortions. Let’s assume that’s true. Since 1.06 million abortions occur each year in the U.S., that still means about 10,000 late-term abortions occur annually. To put that into perspective, about 8,900 people were murdered in the U.S. in 2012 through the use of firearms.46

Defenders of legal abortion succeed when abortion is obscured, the facts are hidden, and the discussion is centered on anything but the actual abortion procedure. Social movements such as the civil rights movement succeeded because the victims decided they would not be victims anymore. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “[F]reedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” The problem with abortion is that the victims can’t become angry and demand change. They can’t do anything to help themselves. Instead, advocates have to demand justice on their behalf,

1. Don’t be weird. 2. Make your evidence bulletproof. 3. Use questions instead of statements. 4. Actually listen. 5. Agree whenever possible.

I have found that there are four questions that are essential to any good conversation, including those regarding abortion:58 1. “What do you believe?” Too often we assume what someone else believes based on their income, their race, their gender, their religion (or lack of religion), or some other external factor. Never assume what someone believes. Instead just ask. 2. “Why do you think that’s true?” or “How did you come to believe that?” How a person arrived at a belief, or why he thinks it’s true, can be even more interesting than what he actually believes. It’s vital to discover this so that you can help the person see where his thinking went wrong if he happens to have a false belief. 3. “What did you mean by [fill in the blank]?” If we don’t stop and define the words in our conversations, we run the risk of misunderstanding the other person. Here are just a few words whose meanings can vary dramatically between people when they talk about abortion: life, choice, rights, fetus, person, human, and even abortion. By carefully defining the words being used, you will be able to talk to people you disagree with instead of talking past them. 4. “What would you say to someone who says [fill in the blank]?” After you learn what the other person believes and why he believes it, you may want to challenge his belief and show him it’s false. It is not disrespectful to challenge the truth of someone’s beliefs. You can respect a person and be kind to him without respecting any par...

To help your conversations on abortion, I recommend asking one of these ten “dumb questions.” 1. What is abortion? 2. What is a child? 3. What is a human? 4. What is pregnancy? 5. What’s wrong with being pro-abortion? 6. Why is it wrong to kill a newborn baby? 7. What does abortion do to the fetus? 8. Is there a difference between a condom and an abortion? (If so, then what is it?) 9. Why is abortion a sad or difficult choice? 10. What is so upsetting about pictures of abortion?

Here are some questions Wagner considers to be the most helpful when trying to find common ground on the issue of abortion. 1. “What do you think about late-term abortions?” (If you think they should be illegal, then where would you draw the line? Why did you pick that stage of development to outlaw abortions?) 2. “Do you believe men should have the choice to abort their fetuses?” (Do you think men should be charged with the murder of a human being if they kill a pregnant woman’s fetus? Do you think the punishment should change if the fetus was unwanted? 3. “What do you think about aborting a fetus simply because she is female?” (Do you think a feminist can support abortion against female fetuses?) 4. “Would you prefer there were fewer abortions?” (Why? What is it about abortion that you find unpleasant?) 5. Should abortion be legal through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason? (If not, why not? Where do you think the cutoff should be, and why do you draw the line there?)

My favorite articulation of TOAT was created by my former JFA colleague Steve Wagner, which he calls “the four A’s.” They are Agree, Apply, Ask Why, and Ah! Here’s how they work.

If pro-lifers merely disliked abortion in the same way they dislike other nuisances, then it would make sense to tolerate abortion. This is the thinking behind the pro-choice slogan, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one!” However, abortion is not a nuisance to be disliked but an act of evil that dismembers tiny human beings. It must be stopped. To pro-life advocates, this slogan is as silly as saying, “Don’t like slavery? Don’t enslave anyone!” Even most pro-choice advocates agree that there are things we should not merely tolerate. I remember once engaging a group of pro-choice students who said that the government should not take away the choice to have an abortion. I told them that I too believed that the government shouldn’t be allowed to meddle with most of our private choices (agree). I asked them if the government should take away an employer’s choice to fire someone because of his sexual orientation (apply). They said of course, so I asked why should the government be allowed to do that. The students sensed where I was going with my argument and said, “Well, that’s different because that choice harms someone. We shouldn’t tolerate their intolerance.” I smiled and responded, “Does the choice to abort harm the unborn child? I mean, isn’t abortion the ultimate act of intolerance because it does not tolerate a baby’s presence in the womb?”

However, pro-life advocates can also be guilty of being distractors who turn the conversation away from the key question “What are the unborn?” Here are the top seven arguments pro-life advocates should not use as their main argument against legal abortion: 1. “Would you have aborted Beethoven?” 2. “What if you had been aborted?” 3. “Abortion tortures babies.” 4. “The Bible [or the Church] says abortion is wrong.” 5. “What about adoption?” 6. “Abortion hurts society.” 7. “Abortion hurts women.”

My favorite argument for the humanity of the unborn is based on Steve Wagner’s “10-second pro-life apologist.”109 Steve was once flustered that he could not defend his pro-life beliefs in a conversation that took him by surprise, so he went home and crafted a 10-second sound bite that goes like this: If it’s growing, isn’t it alive? If it has human parents, isn’t it human? And human beings like you and me are valuable, aren’t we?

Scientists generally agree that if something is growing by cellular reproduction, converting food into energy (metabolism), and responding to stimuli, it is alive.

“Fetus is a Latin word that means little one. According to most medical dictionaries, among humans, fetus refers to a human being from the eighth week of life until birth. An embryo is a human being from conception until the seventh week of life. The words embryo and fetus are like toddler or teenager—they are stages of development in the life of a human being. So isn’t a fetus by definition human?”113

Sperm, egg, fetuses, and toddlers are all human in the adjective sense of the word, since they possess human DNA. Unlike sperm and egg, however, fetuses and toddlers are also human in the noun sense of the word. A fetus is a human and a toddler is a human, while an individual sperm cell or egg cell is not a human. This is similar to how we might say apple pie and the president are both American, while the president of the United States is an American, and the apple pie is not. If a cell of a male gynecologist’s skin, which has a complete set of human DNA, winds up inside a woman’s uterus as the result of a medical procedure, we don’t say that the woman is pregnant or that she is carrying a human being inside of her. On the other hand, if the human DNA inside of her is an organism that is using its genetic instructions to grow and develop, then the woman most definitely has a child inside of her, and she is (or soon will be) pregnant.114

If I can give this living thing time, nutrition, and a proper environment, and it is able to develop toward becoming a mature member of its species, then it is an organism and not a mere body part.

A student of history will remember that, during the Holocaust, Jews were called parasites, and this was used as a rationale for exterminating them.124 Does the critic really want to invoke this same kind of argument against another group of human beings?

Some pro-choice advocates claim that life can’t begin at conception because pregnancy begins when the embryo implants in the uterus. How can a woman have a “life” inside of her before she is even pregnant? But pregnancy is a condition associated with the woman’s body, not the unborn child’s. This reply doesn’t answer the question of when the child comes into existence. Even pro-choice philosophers such as David Boonin admit that defining pregnancy as beginning at implantation does nothing to disprove the pro-life advocate’s case that human beings begin to exist at conception.

Pro-choice advocates who think the embryo is “constructed” believe that the philosophical concept of a “person” or a “human being” emerges once the unborn child reaches a certain level of biological complexity. This is similar to saying that a car begins to exist once its construction reaches a certain level of complexity, such as when you can drive the finished product. Although people may disagree on when a car becomes a car during construction (Does it need an engine? An outer body shell? An air freshener?), hardly anyone would say that when the first nut and bolt are screwed together a “car” exists. The concept of a car includes things like “capable of being driven” or “a metal vehicle with four wheels.” Nuts and bolts make up a potential car, not an actual one. Likewise, pro-choice advocates usually don’t consider a two-celled embryo a human being, because for them the concept of a human being includes things like “being born” or “capable of thinking or feeling.” In their view, a two-celled embryo is a potential human being, not an actual one. Stith argues in response to this view that human beings are not objects that are constructed but organisms that develop and retain their identity through change.

From a biological perspective, a human being is a member of the species homo sapiens. An embryo or fetus does not become human as it gets older any more than a Polaroid picture becomes more of a Polaroid picture as it gets older. Rather, it just develops, or unveils what it was from the beginning of its existence.137

If he defaults to his skepticism and says that we should keep abortion legal because we don’t know if the fetus is human, you should say that this is actually a very good reason to make abortion illegal! After all, we wouldn’t blow up a building if we thought there could still be people inside of it. Likewise, we should not destroy the contents of the womb if there could be a person in there as well.

The philosopher Stephen Schwartz has argued that there are only four differences between born and unborn humans, and none of the differences justifies depriving unborn humans of the right to life.143 Schwartz uses the acronym SLED to summarize these differences: Size Level of development Environment Degree of dependency

A critic might argue that all four SLED criteria are necessary for personhood, and since the unborn do not possess the necessary size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency, they are not persons. But if each of these criteria is invalid on its own, adding them up does not make the critic’s case stronger. Philosopher Christopher Kaczor writes, “An invalid or unsound argument counts for nothing. Such an argument is a philosophical zero, and even an infinite number of zeros never adds up to more than zero.”152 The critic has to present a good argument against the personhood of unborn children, not just many bad arguments.

However, a heartbeat is not a necessary condition for life, because bacteria, plants, and early embryos are alive even though they do not have hearts. Pro-life advocates should point out that the unborn meet all the necessary conditions for a thing to be alive, including growth by cellular reproduction and response to stimuli.

Stephen Schwartz says that the brain-dead and the unborn are not similar in any relevant way, because the brain-dead are former persons who are “no more,” while the unborn are actual persons who are “not yet” fully developed. He writes, “We throw out food that has lost its nourishing power, that has it ‘no more’: we do not, however, throw out food that has ‘not yet’ developed its nourishing power. We wait, and give it a chance. This is what we must do with human beings in their embryonic stage.”

When disqualifiers tell me, “I’m pro-choice because the fetus is not viable,” I respond, “I’m pro-life for the same reason. If you take the unborn child out of the womb, that kills the child, and I don’t think we should put human beings in places where they aren’t ‘viable,’ or places that would kill them.”

1. When any pragmatic reason to justify abortion is presented that does not answer the question “What are the unborn?”, use Trot Out a Toddler to bring the conversation back to the main issue: “What are the unborn?” 2. If the person is skeptical that we can know if the unborn are “human,” explain the difference between the scientific concept of human (species membership) and the philosophical concept (a being worthy of a right to life). Use the 10-second apologist to show that the unborn are biologically human, or members of our species. 3. If the person says the unborn are different and therefore they are not people, identify which part of the SLED acronym the difference belongs to. Then ask him why this difference matters and provide examples of born people who also differ in the same way. Make him defend his view of what a “person” is and show how his definition leads to absurd results. 4. Finally, share with the person how the pro-life view treats all human beings equally and is therefore superior to the pro-choice view.

Engaging the disqualifier

The sovereign zone argument

The “right to refuse” argument

“Violinist Argument.”

Thomson rejected a version of the sovereign zone argument and wrote, “No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it.”

But pro-life advocates should point out to autonomists that we, too, believe in the right to control our bodies. We also believe in the right to refuse to donate organs or tissues to other people. After building common ground with these statements, the pro-life advocate must show that the moral rules surrounding the right to refuse to donate one’s body as life support for a sick human do not apply to the case of aborting a healthy human being in the womb. It’s helpful to highlight the following differences between Thomson’s violinist thought experiment (or other cases of organ donation) and cases of pregnancy.197 The “responsibility” objection The “parental obligation” objection The “organ use” objection

The “responsibility” objection

“Reverse Violinist.”

Imagine you wake up in a hospital to discover that your kidneys have been connected to Thomson’s unconscious violinist. You decide that the violinist has no right to use your kidneys, and you unplug yourself and start to walk out of the room. The director of the hospital sees you and shouts, “Oh, no! You have to plug yourself back in or you will die!” Feeling lightheaded and nauseous, you struggle back to the bed and replug yourself into the violinist. The hospital director explains to you that the violinist is a member of the Society of Musical Pranksters. The pranksters go around plugging their member’s kidneys into sleeping or unconscious innocent people for the “thrill” of the experience. They take precautions to make sure no damage is done and that the members can be unplugged in a few minutes, but every now and then the bond sticks and the connection damages the innocent person’s kidneys. This forces that person to rely on the use of the prankster’s body for nine months until his own kidneys heal. After hearing this, the stress of the situation causes you to pass out just as the violinist wakes up. The violinist decides that you have no right to use his body without his consent, and he unplugs from you. He walks out of the hospital, you die from kidney failure, and your lifeless body is disposed of in the hospital incinerator.

The “parental obligation” objection

On further investigation, though, the two cases are different in two important ways. First, the woman who was kidnapped for her kidneys is not the parent of the stranger who is in need. The woman pregnant from rape, however, is the parent of the fetus who is in need. Similar to the responsibility objection, the parental obligation objection states that parents have greater duties toward their children than I have toward an unrelated violinist. When a man fathers a child, he is expected to care for the child even if he no longer wants to be a father. The man is expected to use his body to work and earn money in order to make child-support payments. This is the case even if he openly claims he no longer wants to be a parent to the children he has created. Simply put, he is a father whether or not he wants to be. The courts have ruled that even fathers who were sexually assaulted and never consented to sex must still pay child support for the children they help create.205 If fathers are expected to shoulder significant burdens to provide for the children they create, shouldn’t mothers be expected to provide child support in the form of maintaining a safe environment in the womb, even if they did not cause the child to come into existence?

Finally, when we say infants or fetuses have a right to life, what does that mean? For adults like you or me, a right to life usually means a right to be left alone and not to have anyone try to hurt or kill us. But children are different. Leaving an infant or fetus “alone” actually violates its right to life, because such an act kills it. If young humans such as infants and fetuses have a right to life, then which born humans have the corresponding duty to take care of them? The logical conclusion would be the parents, who created those children whether or not they willed to.