good post- refreshing to hear this point. To be quite frank, while I am certainly pro-life (likely excepting mom’s life situations), I very rarely want to even discuss abortion. In high school, I took an amazing class that was basically a bunch of AP & GT kids debating current events and heavy political issues. I learned a lot. The biggest thing was that very rarely does debating ever sway opinions. The bottom line is whether or not the ‘fetus/child’ is seen as alive- like you said. If the other person flat out doesn’t think so- there’s no point arguing past that point. It usually gets emotional and nasty- very quickly. I’m tired of hearing people angsting and screaming (usually with heavy religious backing) about their cause- I don’t think it’s productive.

I really like that you bring up why it shouldn’t be argued as religious. There are a lot of things I don’t agree with that I can’t fault non-Christians for. If my reasoning for something stems off of my faith, how can I ask or expect a non-Christian to do the same? (Unless of course it’s not based in religion.) When we make pro-life synonymous with Christian, people immediately feel as if religious beliefs/practices are being thrust upon them. Abortion arguments should have nothing to do with religion- it’s about the sanctity of life, about murder, and about morality. I believe we most certainly can tie these things in with religion- but I agree that we shouldn’t be making it all about religion.

Hope that was coherent… it’s late, and I wanted to comment. Good post- even if I’m a little late to the party.

So it’s not wrong to use these Biblical passages in church to oppose abortion. But that argument only applies to those who already believe in the authority of the Bible. Since science is on our side and is something that most abortion-defenders claim to respect, that’s where our argument should focus.

I can see why that was a bit confusing and I probably should have explained myself better. I’m not saying we shouldn’t address the topic of abortion in church, but that we shouldn’t use arguments that make the “abortion is murder” concept out to be a moral/religious judgment rather than a factual issue. It’s not that the church shouldn’t decry the immorality of legalizing abortion, but that it should be careful to explain why it believes abortion is immoral. A lot of people outside the church look at its opposition as purely driven by religious beliefs, when really it should be driven by the recognition that abortion is the taking of a living human’s life, and is therefore murder by the current definition of the term. The Bible doesn’t explicitly say “abortion is a sin,” so our focus should be on why abortion is murder, not on why abortion is a sin (because, again, society already considers murder to be wrong, it just doesn’t necessarily consider abortion to be murder, so that’s where the contention lies, and that’s ultimately an issue of scientific fact and our definition of murder).

Of course, as Alex pointed out, there are some who acknowledge that abortion is the taking of a living human’s life and are still ok with it because they consider that life less valuable than others, which is where my “parasite” argument could potentially be used to defend abortion. But my point here is that such a debate may be unnecessary in outlawing abortion because of my belief/hope that most people are not willing to knowingly make such a judgment call about certain human lives being more valuable than others, because that gets into the same sort of judgments that led to the Holocaust. I hope I’m not wrong, and if I am, then that does become a moral issue that the church should argue against on Biblical grounds.

Thanks again for the comment!

Brian

Just wanted to say that your argument of “murder is wrong, abortion is murder, so abortion is wrong” is a great one! I just have a few comments/questions:

This sentence confused me: “The moment the church starts making a religious issue out of abortion, we’ve conceded the idea that it is a judgment call that’s determined by personal beliefs.” So are you saying that once we talk about something in church, it’s a religious issue? The abortion issue has many sides: it is a moral/religious issue as well as a civil rights issue.

While I see what you mean with your second point, I would be careful about referring to the unborn child as “essentially a parasite.” That could give the pro-abortion side the excuse of “well, if it’s only a ‘parasite’ then it’s okay to kill it because it’s so insignificant.”

Also, this may be the answer you are looking for in regards to your query on your previous abortion post (about whether abortion is justified in the case of saving the life of the mother): according to Dr. Bernard Nathanson (who used to be an abortionist but is now staunchly pro-life) said that with today’s technology, there is no medical reason to have an abortion in order to save the mother’s life. Praise God that technology is working for good!

God Bless,

~Malori

I think you make a really good observation about why pregnancy is viewed differently now. As you say, it doesn’t really affect the morality of it, but it does explain a lot.

I also completely agree with your comment about how this debate should be conducted, which is essentially what I meant by getting away from emotional appeals and focusing on what we really disagree on, which is when life begins, or when life begins to “matter.”

I don’t think when the soul “begins” really has anything to do with it. Most secular people deny the existence of a soul at any point, and still agree that murdering your neighbor is wrong. And my point is really that this shouldn’t be a moral belief issue at all if we all agree that killing a human being is murder, and is wrong. In order to defend abortion, you have to introduce the concept of a “scale of humanness,” as you mention, which I don’t think is what a lot of pro-choice people intend.

I agree with your point about the danger of basing morals off of mere logical arguments, but that wasn’t what I was intending to do. I was merely arguing for the humanness and aliveness of a fetus. The moral judgment has already been made by a society which views the killing of an innocent human being to be murder. If society wants to amend their definition of murder to exclude living human beings of certain ages, then that’s a moral judgment. Whether killing an unborn living human being falls under the current definition of murder isn’t.

If someone is willing to say that at certain stages of life a human being doesn’t have the right to live, then I can’t argue facts with that person. They’ve made a personal judgment about the value of human life at its earliest stages. But I don’t think most pro-choice people think of it that way…they refer to the unborn baby as a fetus and convince themselves that it’s not human at all, and therefore they don’t think they’re compromising on the definition of murder. The debate really needs to start with what is factually true, which is that unborn children are living humans from essentially conception, and then discuss the real issue which is when a human being has the right to live. Anyone who defends abortions should be aware that they are denying the right of certain human beings to live, not that they’re defending the right of a woman to remove some unwanted tissue.

All I’m saying is that an honest discussion of what abortion really is would force its defenders to come to grips with what they’re really doing – making Hitler-esque judgments about the value of certain humans compared to others. Since I don’t think most pro-choicers have any intention of doing that, I think this approach would be far more effective in outlawing abortion. If, on the other hand, our society does knowingly decide that human beings don’t deserve to live unless they are functioning at a certain level, THEN the church has every right to argue against that devaluation of life which is clearly Biblically immoral.

Interesting posts. I’ll start off by saying that the “it’s my body” argument has also always struck me as very weak. In addition to the simple fact that the baby’s dna!=Mommy’s dna, it fails to see what the real point of abortion is. While in some cases (ie life of mother), it’s really about a woman being able to control her body. In most cases it is more about her wanting to control her future. Abortion is not meant to spare a woman from 9 months of pregnancy, rather the 18 years of parenting.

Funnily enough, case law seems to recognize this, as a woman’s mental and economic health can be used to justify abortion beyond the first trimester. In practice that means that the US has one of the most liberal policies on abortion in the developed world.

I think what drives the notion that a woman needs access to abortion to control her own body is chance. We all know that no form of birth control is 100% effective. If there was one, there would be no need for abortion. Alternatively, back when the only method’s out there were the rhythm method and Onan’s method, sex had such a high chance of pregnancy that it only seemed natural that pregancy was caused by sex. However, now that we have 99+% birth control we don’t feel the connection at a visceral level.

Sure we all understand where babies come from, but on an emotional level we don’t associate sex as deeply with reproduction. Whereas in the olden days unwanted pregnancy was seen as a result of poor choices, it is now seen as something unforeseeable akin to getting struck by lightning. When it’s seen like that, people feel it unfair if they have to deal with the consequences. I don’t think that this is relevant to the morality of it, but it helps with understanding of why thought has changed so much on the issue.

Your post talks alot about how to effect change among pro-choice people. I consider myself moderately pro-life (no abortions past first trimester except for the mother’s life.) And I think what cements people in their beliefs isn’t the religious aspect but the stridency with which people argue. The whole abortion debate seems to be both sides trying to sway the other by proving that they are vile people with despicable ideas. The best way IMO to make progress is to realize that those you are arguing with have the same intentions as you do. They’re just trying to figure out what is right and wrong.

The big thing that I disagree with in this post is your emphasis on creating a logical case for why abortion is murder. In a religious argument, that distinction can exist. We can debate the point at which a clump of cells is imbued with a soul. (although I think that debate is unlikely to be fruitful) In a more secular spat, though, it won’t hold up.

For one very few hold moral beliefs based off of logic. IMO this is a very good thing. It’s pretty easy to make a seemingly logically-sound argument for just about anything. It’d be a sad world if all that was required for society to say accept pedophilia was a particularly eloquent spokesman. Instead our morals come from what God has written in our hearts (or from an atheistic perspective what is coded in our DNA and culture). This isn’t to say that there is no place for logic. We just need to be careful of assuming that the truth comes from taking axiom 1 and 2 and running them through a couple statements.

The other reason is that a secular definition of personhood is not as cut and dry as a religious one. While a fetus might be a human based off of some technical scientific definition, this isn’t necessarily very relevant as far as right and wrong go. In an secular ethical system what constitutes a human is more of a scale than a yes/no proposition.

Luckily, as far as I’m concerned the religious and secular arguments suggest the same thing, that at some point during a pregnancy it becomes immoral to kill a fetus. We can’t pin down this point, so it is better to err on the safe side. Unfortunately, the way abortion law is in the US makes it impossible for any meaningful compromise. As long as the issue is dictated by the courts, we won’t see any sensible compromise.