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

by Trent Horn

The “organ use” objection

The uterus’s purpose seems clear: to support the life of an unborn child. Otherwise, why is it even inside the body at all? If the uterus is designed to sustain an unborn child’s life, don’t unborn children have a right to receive nutrition and shelter through the one organ designed to provide them with that ordinary care?210

Unlike in the violinist case, where I fail to save someone who is dying, abortion involves separating a healthy child from what it requires to live. Abortion is not an act of “failing to save” but is an act of killing that deprives a child of its right to live safely.211 It is on par with putting your infant out in a snowstorm that directly kills him, not just “fails to save (him) from an environment in which (he) cannot survive.”

An autonomist may object that pregnancy is not “ordinary care,” because it causes the woman’s body to undergo extraordinary and uncomfortable transformation. But it is a transformation toward which women’s bodies are naturally ordered. Puberty also involves large-scale and uncomfortable changes to the body, but no one says puberty is an “extraordinary” event on par with organ donation. Likewise, throughout all of human history, fertility and pregnancy were considered ordinary events, and anyone reading this page was involved in such an event. Providing shelter and nutrition in the womb is simply an ordinary amount of care (even if at times it can be painful or uncomfortable) that we expect parents to provide to their unborn children.

The consent a...

There are two fundamental problems with McDonagh’s argument. First, we consent to actions such as buying a lottery ticket or engaging in sexual intercourse, while we accept the consequences of those actions, such as winning the lottery or becoming pregnant. We can consent to actions, because they are within our control, but the consequences of those actions lie outside of our control and so don’t involve consent.213 True, we might engage in actions based on those consequences, such as giving away our lottery money or having an abortion, but those actions can then be judged as being right or wrong. I might consent to drinking and driving, and a consequence of that may be that I hit a pedestrian. I can’t say, “Well, I never consented to helping this poor fellow, so I’m just going to drive away now.” My duty to help him is a consequence that followed from the drinking I consented to. Likewise, when a man and woman consent to sexual behavior, their duty to help the child they create is a consequence they either rightfully accept or wrongfully reject.

Second, if McDonagh is right about pregnancy requiring consent, it follows that pregnancy that occurs without consent would be an evil, like rape, that should be stopped. Imagine doctors are attending to an unconscious woman and discover she’s pregnant. Let’s say neither the woman nor her friends or family knew she was pregnant. In this case, it seems that in the absence of consent, the doctors should abort the child. After all, if we found a man having sex with an unconscious woman, we would stop him, since the woman is incapable of consenting. Most pro-choice advocates would agree that an abortion should not be done without the woman’s consent. If these advocates were consistent, it is not abortion that should require active consent but pregnancy itself. It makes more sense to say that pregnancy is not an activity to which women consent but a duty to which they are obligated, just as the law obligates a father not to abandon his children, at least not financially.214

The autonomist’s main concern: If abortion is outlawed, people will lose the right to control their bodies and will have their autonomy violated. Your objective: Show unborn children have rights to their own bodies that abortion violates. Highlight the difference between prohibiting abortion and requiring organ donation.

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.”

The main question we must focus on when pro-choice advocates bring up this objection is, “Should we make it legal to kill an innocent person so that it is safer for the killer?” If the answer is no, then we must reject the argument from unsafe abortions.

Pro-choice advocates sometimes say, “Even if you outlaw abortion, it will still happen but just be more dangerous.” First, as we’ve seen, abortion is equally dangerous for the child whether it’s legal or illegal, and so justice demands the child be protected from this procedure. Second, any activity that is banned will still happen illegally, be it abortion, rape, robbery, or any other crime. Laws can’t stop all crime, but they can reduce the frequency with which these crimes are committed.

The number of U.S. women who died from illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade is also exaggerated. I once attended a debate at which the pro-choice advocate used the well-worn statistic that, prior to Roe v. Wade, 5,000 to 10,000 women in the U.S. died every year from illegal abortions.221 During the question and answer period, I said, “According to the Centers for Disease Control, only 39 women in the U.S. died from illegal abortion deaths in 1972, and 24 women died from legal abortions in that year.222 Yet you claimed that, prior to Roe v. Wade, 5,000 to 10,000 women died every year from illegal abortions in the United States. Do you have a source for this exaggerated claim?”

Finally, every year thousands of women in the United States are unable to get an abortion because it is too expensive. Sometimes abortion providers simply refuse to perform abortions for women who are too far along in their pregnancies.226 But the vast majority of these women do not break the law in order to pay for their abortions, nor do they try to perform an abortion on themselves.227 Instead, they give birth to their child. If most women do not break the law to obtain expensive or hard-to-get abortions, then shouldn’t we expect that, in general, women would not break the law in order to obtain illegal abortions?

How would I answer the question, “What punishment should a woman receive who obtained an illegal abortion?” I would say, “It depends.” I don’t think we can simply say the woman has suffered enough from the abortion itself and doesn’t need to be punished. We would never say a mother who drowned her children in the bathtub had suffered enough from watching them die and so didn’t need to be punished. If she knew it was wrong and chose to do it anyway, then a punishment would be deserved.

After all, isn’t it unfair that in many states men or women who kill a wanted fetus are legally punished? Most people did not consider it outrageous when Scott Peterson was convicted in 2004 of two counts of murder for the death of his wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner. So why wouldn’t we charge Laci with committing a crime if she were to kill her own child under the same circumstances? It is precisely the question of circumstances that makes it difficult to answer whether or not women should be punished for obtaining illegal abortions.

When I am asked about how women who choose illegal abortions should be punished, I reframe the question in order to get at the moral logic that hides behind our conflicting emotions. The larger question we should ask is, “What punishment should women receive when they kill any of their children, born and unborn?”

One example I use comes from Virginia, where in 2009 the local district attorney refused to prosecute a woman who gave birth to her child in a hotel room and then smothered the child. An investigator from the local sheriff’s office said that because the umbilical cord was still attached what the mother did was no different than a late-term abortion. She said: I believe everyone was upset, except for the person who should have been upset, the mother. In the state of Virginia as long as the umbilical cord is attached and the placenta is still in the mother, if the baby comes out alive the mother can do whatever she wants to with that baby to kill it. And in the state of Virginia, it’s no crime. . . . Simply because the mother was there, and the baby had not taken its own identity allegedly at this point, it makes the baby not its own person.231 If we can agree that this woman should have been punished for what was undoubtedly infanticide, then we should ask, “What should the punishment be if she had killed the baby five minutes earlier while it was in her womb?” I don’t think such a short difference in time and location would change our intuitions about the matter. What about five weeks earlier? Or five months earlier? What should the punishment be for a woman who chooses abortion?

punishments for crimes are complex matters but protecting the innocent is simple, and the unborn should simply be protected under the law. Punishments for crimes are not uniform because they are based on the killer’s intent and the circumstances involved and not just on the kind of crime committed. Not every homicide is considered first-degree murder, and punishment for homicide can vary from the death penalty to probation.

In regard to in vitro fertilization, if more people were aware that the embryos killed in IVF clinics are whole human beings, they may be more apt to want IVF banned, especially since it can contribute to an abortion mentality. In her New York Times article “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy,” Ruth Padawer interviewed a woman who aborted one of her twins in order to facilitate an IVF procedure. The woman says: If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.235

Finally, concerned pro-choice advocates who claim that treating the unborn as persons would spell the collapse of civilization seem ignorant of history. Abortion was illegal in the United States through most of our history, and during that time there were no miscarriage investigation squads, no secret police monitoring pregnant women, and no government officials counting fetuses in censuses. There were only law enforcement officers who would arrest rogue abortion providers, which seems rational if the unborn are human beings whom abortion kills.

Is it moral to abort anencephalic children? Consider the case of a two-year-old who tragically finds his dad’s gun and blows off the top of his head.239 As he lies in the hospital dying from his injuries (which would mirror the plight of an anencephalic child), we would certainly do everything we could to ease this child’s suffering, but most people wouldn’t condone killing the child.240

When the young college woman I described at the beginning of this chapter told me she had been raped and had chosen abortion, I engaged her in a form of non-confrontational dialogue. “Wow, that’s awful,” I said. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. I’m guessing the guy who did it wasn’t caught, either.” She said he wasn’t. I continued, “Honestly, I think that is one of the things that makes rape such an awful crime. Not only does it hurt the woman, but the rapist usually gets away with it. Or if he’s caught he gets a slap on the wrist. Sometimes we as a culture even blame women for being raped, and that’s inexcusable. But I think that just as the woman who has been raped is an innocent victim who needs our help, the child who is created is also an innocent victim and needs our help. The only person who deserves punishment is the rapist.

If, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already, she may be treated with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization.249

Here’s how I usually use TOAT in this case. Imagine a woman has sexual relations with her husband, and the next day a stranger rapes her. Several weeks later she discovers she’s pregnant but doesn’t know if her husband or the rapist fathered the child. A DNA test reveals the husband is the child’s father. The woman gives birth, and three months later the doctors call back while she is home alone with the baby. They inform her that they made a mistake and that the rapist is actually the baby’s father. The woman is devastated and can’t stand to have this “thing” grow up who one day might become a rapist himself. Should she be allowed to kill this product of rape while it sleeps in the crib? If not, then why not? Shouldn’t we forbid killing the product of rape in the womb for the same reason we forbid killing the product of rape in the crib: that both are innocent human beings?250

In the second case, in very early pregnancy when there is essentially no hope the child can be saved, it is permissible for doctors to perform a lifesaving operation on the mother with the indirect result being the death of the child. According to the U.S. Catholic bishops’ directives for Catholic hospitals, “Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child.”254 The most notable example of this case is an ectopic pregnancy that occurs when the embryo implants in some place other than the uterus, which in almost all cases ends up being in the fallopian tube. Unlike in late pregnancy, the child cannot be removed and safely placed somewhere else, such as an incubator. Any removal of the child will result in his death. In these cases it is morally acceptable to remove the damaged section of the fallopian tube where the child implanted.255

However, Catholics would not take part in an abortion in which the child’s death is directly caused as a means to save the mother’s life, because we do not believe innocent people should be killed for that reason.257 For example, it would be wrong for a mother to kill her born child (even if that child were going to die anyway) because the mother needed a heart transplant, and her child had the only compatible donor match. In this case, the child’s death is direct and serves as a means to save the mother and so is immoral; whereas, in the case of ectopic pregnancy, a doctor treats the damaged fallopian tube and the child dies indirectly, which is not immoral. The child’s death is not used as a means to save his mother but is a side effect of removing some of his mother’s damaged tissue.

Finally, while some people who bring up the hard cases are genuinely conflicted, others are what Scott Klusendorf calls “crusaders.” 259 They aren’t conflicted at all; they think all or nearly all abortions should be legal. They merely bring up these cases in order to make the pro-life position look bad. When talking to a crusader, Klusendorf suggests, you should say something like following: “Let’s say you’re right about these hard cases. If I am willing to join you in making these abortions legal, will you join me in making the ninety percent of abortions that are done for social or economic reasons illegal?” The crusader will probably reject this offer, to which the pro-life advocate can respond, “So, you want all abortions to be legal and not just these hard cases? Then why don’t we focus on the real issue at hand, which is whether abortion should, in general, be legal or illegal? Do you think we should kill unborn human beings just because they are unwanted?”

The conflicted’s main concern: Hard cases justify abortion. Your objective: Empathize with their concern and show how both mother and child should be cared for in the same way one would care for a mother and infant in a similar circumstance.

Do you see, though, that if she is pregnant then she already is a mother? Just as the woman was an innocent victim caught up in circumstances beyond her control, her child is an innocent victim caught up in circumstances beyond his or her control. If we wouldn’t punish the mother, or kill even the rapist, why do we kill the innocent unborn child?

The doctors are treating the mother’s condition, and a side effect is the death of a child we can’t save anyway. But the important point is, we are trying to save the mother, not trying to kill the child.

At a pro-life outreach in Pasadena, California, I asked a passerby what he thought of our exhibit. He shouted, “How many of these children have you adopted?” I paused for a moment, unsure how to answer. “I didn’t think so!” he shouted. This man was making an ad hominem argument, which in Latin means “against the man.” Instead of attacking an argument, an ad hominem argument attacks the person making the argument. It’s a logical fallacy. The man’s implicit argument was that abortion should be legal because those like me who opposed it were bad people for not adopting unwanted, unborn children.

I recommend four steps for answering an ad hominem argument. First, correct misunderstandings of the pro-life position. Some people tell me that if I’m pro-life then I’m inconsistent for not being a vegetarian. Or they say that if I think it’s always wrong to kill humans, then I should be against all wars. But those positions are not essential to the pro-life worldview. The pro-life position is that all human beings are persons with a right to life, and therefore it is generally wrong to kill those human beings. However, cows and pigs are not members of a rational kind (or persons), and so they do not have a right to life. In regard to war, killing someone can be a moral act, even if the person has a right to life. The same applies to killing in self-defense. The pro-life position holds only that we must not violate someone’s right to life. Since the unborn do not pose a threat to anyone’s life, self-defense is not a justification of abortion.261 By clearing up these misunderstandings you can make charges of inconsistency evaporate.

To demonstrate this, admit for the sake of the argument that you are as bad as the fighter says you are. You can even maintain you are worse than what the critic claims. After admitting to being an awful person, simply ask how your badness justifies killing the unborn by abortion. For example, let’s say I had a chance to stand up for myself against the man at the Pasadena college, whom I’ll call John: John: How many children have you adopted? Me: How does that relate to whether abortion should be legal? John: You say abortion should be illegal and people should adopt unwanted children, but if you haven’t adopted any children, then you’re a hypocrite. Me: Let’s say you’re right that I am a hypocrite who will never adopt children. Let’s say further that I hate children, and I’m just an all-around bad guy. How do any of these character defects justify keeping it legal to kill children through abortion? John: They’re not children, they’re fetuses! (Now we’re back to the one question that matters most: “What are the unborn?”)

1. Why don’t you adopt unwanted children? “Okay, you think we should help children who are in trouble. Then why don’t you support helping unborn children by outlawing abortion?” 2. You must be a Christian or a Republican. “So it is unfair for one group of people to impose their personal beliefs on everyone else. Why is it okay for you to impose your personal belief on unborn children that their lives begin at birth?” 3. You only care about fetuses. “So it’s wrong to care only about one group of people? Do you only care about born humans? Do unborn humans have the same value as medical waste?” 4. You’re a man; you have no say in this. “You seem to be saying that unless a moral issue affects you directly, you shouldn’t comment on it. Many pro-choice advocates, such as men and post-menopausal women, will never be pregnant. Should they not comment on abortion? Should we throw out Roe v. Wade? Nine male judges decided it. Since I’m not a child, I’ll never be a victim of child abuse. Does that mean I should not support laws that make child abuse illegal?

The only question that matters is if the unborn are human beings. The character of the person aborting these children doesn’t change the wrongness of the act.

Pro-lifers care only about fetuses

If this were the nineteenth century, I would not have to guarantee slave owners that I could provide jobs for slaves in order to justify ending slavery. Slavery was wrong because it exploited human beings. Even if no abolitionists had hired ex-slaves, that would not mean it was okay to keep slavery legal.

Similarly, even if we could not care for children at risk of being aborted, it wouldn’t follow that it would be okay to kill them. Imagine firefighters being dispatched to a house fire where a family is trapped inside and the town mayor asks the firefighters, “If you save these people, where are they going to live, and who’s going to take care of them? If you won’t take responsibility for them, then we should just let them burn.” But firefighters aren’t responsible for feeding and sheltering fire victims; that is the responsibility of other groups like the Red Cross. Likewise, pro-life advocates are not responsible for feeding and sheltering children who would have been aborted; that is a job for social services and other charities that focus on providing people with a decent quality of life. Pro-life advocates have a responsibility only to ensure that people are allowed to live, though many pro-life advocates do support charities that help people attain a decent quality of life.

When people claim that as a pro-lifer I don’t care about born children and my only goal is to “get the fetus born,” I don’t necessarily disagree with them. “Do anything to get the fetus born” is identical in this case to “Do anything to stop the fetal human from being dismembered.” So even if this were true (which it isn’t), I would have no problem saying my only goal is to “get the fetus born.” After all, we wouldn’t fault a firefighter who didn’t provide free housing to fire victims because his only goal was “to save lives and put the fire out.”

Aside from being irrelevant, this argument assumes incorrectly that pro-life advocates don’t care about born children. Many pro-life pregnancy centers provide parenting classes and baby supplies, and some have medical staff that can perform prenatal care. Pro-life advocates also operate maternity homes where poor or homeless pregnant women can stay for free, sometimes up to a year after the baby is born. As pro-life advocate Helen Alvaré points out: Pregnancy resource centers devote significant resources to supporting women who have already decided to have an abortion, but abortion advocates offer no similar support to women who wish to continue their pregnancies. Indeed, they often devote their resources to shutting down the services provided by pro-lifers. NARAL Pro-Choice America reports spending $20,000 on “crisis pregnancy centers” in Maryland in order to “investigate” and publicly smear such centers for demonstrating a bias for life. 265 These smear campaigns are ironic, because abortion clinics often rely on pro-life centers to do the work they won’t do. At a pregnancy center in Arizona I met a young woman who had just come from Planned Parenthood. She told me that she went there saying she wanted to keep her baby and asked them what resources they could provide her. Planned Parenthood personnel said they didn’t have any and sent her instead to the local pro-life pregnancy resource center.

But being “for all life” is a vague and confusing concept. Even if these critics argue that we should be “for all human life,” would that mean pro-life advocates are obliged to solve every problem that affects human life from conception to natural death? Do pro-life advocates have to solve hunger, war, disease, human trafficking, poverty, discrimination, illiteracy, and slow Internet connections?

Friedman’s article shows that the terms pro-life and pro-choice are hopelessly vague. The goal of the pro-life movement is to secure the right to life of all human beings from conception to natural death. That means it should be illegal to intentionally kill an innocent human being, regardless of that human being’s level of function or location.

It’s not the responsibility of the pro-life movement to stop crimes, even crimes that take human life, such as mass shootings. The victims of those crimes have a right to life, and it is the job of law enforcement to protect that right. The pro-life movement’s job is also not to secure the best possible life for all humans, because such a goal is impossible for one movement. All movements that care about doing good limit their scope of activities, because if they try to do everything, they accomplish nothing.

Even the pro-choice movement doesn’t try to protect all “choices.” Many pro-choice advocates oppose the choice not to join a labor union, the choice to own a firearm, or the choice not to hire a person because of his sexual behavior. Just as pro-choice advocates can restrict their definition of choice to mean “access to legal contraception and abortion,” pro-life advocates should r...

The Catholic Church has held that under some circumstances the death penalty can be a moral choice, and war can be just.268 These acts are evil in circumstance or degree but not evil in and of themselves. Other acts, such as rape or abortion, are intrinsically evil and can never be tolerated.

Let’s suppose that this objection is correct, and pro-life advocates simply did not care about unborn children who are miscarried. Even if pro-life advocates were massive hypocrites, that would not disprove the pro-life position. Imagine if the U.S. surgeon general launched a public campaign about how cigarettes cause lung cancer and was caught smoking. Would his hypocrisy mean cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer? Likewise, hypocrisy on the part of pro-lifers does nothing to refute the scientific and philosophical evidence for the humanity of the unborn.

Furthermore, this objection misunderstands the goal of the pro-life movement. It is not to save as many human lives as possible; it’s to secure the right to life for all human beings. Pro-life advocates simply do not have the resources to provide medical treatment for embryos or to research ways to reduce miscarriages. If pro-life advocates could restore the right to life of unborn children, it would impel the government to fund research that could remedy the health problems that affect this particular group of people.

Even if this were not possible, abortion can’t be justified simply because pro-life advocates do not work to reduce natural miscarriages. Is it not appropriate to confront the man-made threats to human life before confronting the abundance of natural threats? Would we tell gun-control advocates who work to stop elementary-school shootings that they don’t really care about elementary school stud...

The fire in the IVF clinic

Let’s imagine the scenario involved five homeless people and the president of the United States. While all six have an equal right to life, the loss of the president may be more devastating to the country, and so I may choose to save him and let the five homeless men die as a result. However, my choice not to save the five homeless people wouldn’t be the same as my choice in another circumstance to directly kill them and harvest their organs in order to save a terminally ill president.