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

by Trent Horn

Now, imagine someone makes the following argument: Some immigrant communities in the United States still practice female genital mutilation, and since it is illegal, it doesn’t happen in sanitary hospitals. Instead, family members will take these girls to back alleys where untrained mutilators could cause more injury or even kill the girls. Shouldn’t we keep FGM legal so that it is safer for these girls who have to undergo it? For most people the answer is, “No, we should not allow female genital mutilation to be legal. Women shouldn’t be mutilated in either sterile or unsterile facilities.” So we’ve agreed, applied, and now we ask why. “Why shouldn’t it be legal?” Most people, especially feminists and human-rights advocates will say, “Because it’s a brutal act of violence. It harms young girls for life. It’s degrading and disgusting!” We agreed, applied, asked why, and now ah! We might say, “Okay, so it isn’t about safety, since we would never legalize a medical procedure designed to mutilate an innocent girl so that it is ‘safer’ to perform. If these little girls are human beings, then we can’t make it legal to ‘safely’ mutilate their genitals. In the same way, if unborn children are human beings, we shouldn’t make it legal to ‘safely’ mutilate their entire bodies by abortion.”