A very good read to make sure that you can handle the obvious ones, from Neil Shenvi, Ph.D.

Here are the objections:

• “Women have a right to do what they want with their own bodies.”
• “The government has no right to make laws telling a woman she can’t have an abortion”
• “The unborn is not a human being, it is just a mass of cells.”
• “Until the fetus has a heart and brain, it is not a human being.”
• “It is moral to kill a fetus as long as it feels no pain.”
• “No one should be forced to carry and raise the child of their rapist.”
• “Making abortion illegal will not decrease abortion; it will only make drive it underground and make it less safe.”
• “Laws should not be based on religion”
• “If you are opposed to abortion, don’t have one.”
• “We should combat abortion by reducing poverty, not by making it illegal.”
• “Most people (i.e., men) who are against abortion will never even become pregnant.”

And here’s the detail on one of them:

“Women have a right to do what they want with their own bodies.”

The fundamental problem with this objection is that it assumes that laws against abortion are primarily concerned with what a woman can and cannot do to her own body. But they are not. Why? Ask yourself a simple question: how many brains does a woman have? One. But how many brains does a pregnant woman have? Still one. The woman’s body is not the issue in abortion: the baby’s body is. The developing fetus has a complete set of human DNA different than the mother’s. It has its own circulatory system, its own brain, its own fingers and toes and arms and legs. If it is a male, it even has a different gender than the mother. Therefore, the fetus is clearly not just ‘part of the woman’s body’. Laws against abortion aren’t telling a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body; they are telling a woman what she can and cannot do with someone else’s body.

Read them all, and pass them along.

You can find more answers to pro-choice questions here, from Dr. Francis Beckwith. These are the early versions to some of the arguments that later ended up in his academic book on pro-life apologetics entitled “Defending Life“, published by Cambridge University Press. The best introductory book on pro-life arguments is Scott Klusendorf’s “The Case for Life“.  I really recommend that one, because he is the top pro-life debater in the world, and he speaks from that experience of dealing with pro-choice arguments in public debates.

Further study

Learn about the pro-life case:

• How to take an incremental approach to the abortion problem
• Audio: Scott Klusendorf’s 35-minute case for the pro-life position
• Audio: A 55-minute discussion featuring Greg Koukl and Scott Klusendorf
• A comparison of embryonic and adult stem cell research
• Objective truth in the abortion debate – a pro-life training video
• Alan Shlemon explains a classification system for pro-abortion arguments
• What is the best single book on the pro-life position?