Being Pro-Life isn’t always easy. Maybe you’ve had tough conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. In those moments, it’s easy to feel unsure of how to clearly explain what you believe and why. Facing emotionally-heavy arguments can be hard, especially when they defend something as serious as taking the Life of an innocent human.
Here are five arguments people often use to promote abortion, and some points you can use to respond with the truth.
1. “The fetus isn’t a person yet.”
Some argue that personhood begins at birth, but a unique person is actually present at fertilization. At that moment, your DNA has determined your sex, eye color, hair color, whether you will go bald in 40 years, how tall you will be, and a huge number of other things that make you who you are. Claiming that personhood begins at birth is completely arbitrary. If this is true, we must ask how did a “clump of cells” (as many pro-choice people say) magically turn into a person by passing a few inches through the birth canal? It’s the same baby, just in a different location and environment.
Drawing the line at the heartbeat (which can begin as soon as 18 days after fertilization) is arbitrary. Why should this muscle’s functioning determine your personhood? Are people under cardiac arrest not people? As popular as the heartbeat argument is, it is based on emotion and intuition, not science or consistent reason.
2. “My body, my choice.”
When it comes to abortion, it is not only the woman’s body that is involved. The baby inside of a mother is a completely separate person, with his or her own genetic code and his or her own intrinsic value.
This argument from abortion proponents usually is referring to the disproportionate burden that pregnancy and parenting are on women.
As a society, we would never dream of legalizing all murder based on “This person is too much of a burden, so it’s my choice if I want to kill him/her and the government can’t tell me not to.” One of the main roles of government is to stop people from hurting each other, which creates an environment where both the mother and child can thrive. This may mean promoting adoption as a way to remove the significant responsibility of parenting, while protecting innocent human Life.
3. “It’s more compassionate to abort a child than let him/her face hardships.”
It is kind to not want people to suffer, however, what is not kind is to kill them in order to prevent any possible suffering.
A founding principle of our nation is that all people are created equal, no matter their age, gender, race, class, or ability. The consequences of violating this principle can be tragic.
Being a single mom, without support of family or their partner, is a truly difficult situation. However, are babies born of single moms not valuable? Are those mothers not deserving of the joy of raising their children? Absolutely not! Some very successful people have been raised by single mothers: Demi Moore, Selena Gomez, Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, and many others. While not perfect, mothers also have the opportunity to create an adoption plan that will allow their precious baby to be cared for by one of the millions of couples waiting to adopt an infant into their home.
The child born into poverty deserves a chance at Life as well. It would be truly evil to eliminate the poor in order to “spare them suffering!”
The child who might be born with a disability, whether physical or mental, deserves Life. Most people know someone with some sort of disability; are we here to say they don’t deserve to live? Killing preborn children because of a diagnosis could lead us into a nightmare like Iceland, which claims it has eliminated Down syndrome — by aborting every child they suspect might have it. This is deadly discrimination and has no place in a moral society.
4. “What about rape and incest?”
Survivors of rape and incest need resources of healing, support, and justice; not another traumatic event that will kill an innocent life.
Rape and incest account for less than 1.5% of abortions in the United States. If they say that 1.5% of cases should justify legalizing abortion in every case, it proves they are just using sexual assault survivors as a rhetorical tool against you, which does not show the highest respect for these victims or their children.
Another important point here is that it is unjust to condemn an unborn child with the death penalty because of the horrendous crimes of that baby’s father. Justice means punishment for the wrongdoer and support for the victims.
5. “Banning abortion will cause women to die.”
First, this claim comes from the media, not the law. Journalists say that pregnant women are dying because abortion bans block doctors from acting if her life is in danger. Every Pro-Life policy in the country allows physicians to save a mother, even if it may risk the life of her preborn child.
Opponents try to make two very different situations sound the same: killing the baby on purpose versus trying to save the mother. In an emergency, physicians might deliver early and the child might die as a consequence, but that’s not the same as poisoning or dismembering the living baby, as is the case with elective abortion. The legal and moral difference here is intent.
Pro-Life laws help women! Data shows that deaths among pregnant mothers decreased in the time that Texas placed the strictest limits on abortion (2021-2022).
Some people claim that banning abortion will cause women to turn to dangerous, illegal methods. Even so, that doesn’t mean we should legalize something that hurts other people. We have laws against murder and theft, but some people still murder and steal. That doesn’t mean we should legalize murder and theft.
When the government makes laws protecting women and children and prosecutes abortionists, it deters people from committing abortions. Yes, some of these tragedies still occur underground, but millions of children are spared a horrible, bloody death in a “safe” abortion clinic.
Just because there are some people who would break the law, does not mean society should set aside protecting the unborn. A culture that fights evil as best it can is better than one that legalizes and institutionalizes it.
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