Tag Archives: Pro-Life

Polemics

MUST-READ: Only personally opposed to abortion?

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Unborn baby scheming about International Life Chain Sunday
Unborn baby scheming about International Life Chain Sunday

The following is a guest post from commenter Mary to commemorate International Life Chain Sunday. Mary urges all of my readers to take this opportunity to stand up for the pre-born.

In my discussions with people on the topic of abortion, I frequently come across people (including many Christians) who claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion (or words to that effect), but who don’t think that it should be illegal. They believe in “a woman’s right to choose”. This all sounds very fine and magnanimous, couched as it is in the language of generosity, but an analysis of the reasoning behind it shows it to be seriously flawed.

Abortion should be illegal for the following reasons:

  1. Taking of innocent human life without morally sufficient reason should be illegal. Where the rationale comes from for believing this basic premise is another topic, but it is agreed on by all reasonable people – theists and atheists alike. (A morally sufficient reason would be something that saves another innocent human life.)
  2. The pre-born child is human. This is a scientific fact.
  3. The pre-born child is alive. This is a scientific fact.
  4. The pre-born child has committed no crime and can therefore be considered legally innocent.
  5. Taking the life of the pre-born child is to take an innocent, human life.
  6. Taking the life of a pre-born child should be illegal.

Abortion should be illegal for the same reason that murdering a newborn or a 2 year old is illegal. We don’t give women the “right to choose” to kill their newborns and for the same reason we should not give them the “right to choose” to kill their pre-born children either. The only case where we would consider it acceptable to take the life of a newborn would be where it was absolutely necessary to save the life of another innocent human being. The same should be true in the case of a pre-born child. We should give equal value to human lives and value life above the right to comfort and convenience.

Our entire legal system is based on the fact that there are certain limits to choice. If the right to choose were applied across the board we’d have to scrap every law in the books. Laws exist to limit choices that are damaging to others.

Legalized abortion is unfair discrimination of the worst kind on the basis of age and location. The right to life of the pre-born is a human right that should be fought for with passion and integrity. If we do not fight for this right we will be remembered in the same way as those who have failed to stand up for the rights of the oppressed in other areas.

Will we be like German citizens during the Nazi regime who failed to stand up for the rights of Jews, despite being “personally opposed” to Nazism? Will we be like those who failed to stand up for the right to freedom of those oppressed by slavery and Apartheid, despite being “personally opposed” to the same? Or will we be like Dietrich Bonheoffer and William Wilberforce who went beyond personal aversion, even though they weren’t members of the oppressed group, who spoke against oppression and who stood up for what was right, in the face of opposition.

I would like to end with two very apt quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King:

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter

Videos

Alan Shlemon explains a classification system for pro-abortion arguments

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Unborn baby scheming about pro-life arguments
Unborn baby scheming about pro-life arguments

Here’s the main post, which contains: (H/T Life Training Institute)

  • a chart showing how pro-abortion arguments can be classified using disjunctions
  • a 5-minute video of Alan explaining the chart
  • links to ALL of the responses to each type of pro-abortion argument

Alan is a veteran of university campus debates on abortion, so he’s speaking from experience. The guy who introduces him is Scott Klusendorf. Scott is the best pro-life debater in the business. Bar none. Scott is the William Lane Craig of the abortion issue.

Ok. Let’s get started.

Here’s the chart. Open that up and take a look at it.

Then watch this video and refer to the chart:

Then find a pro-abortion person, classify their argument, and use these links to find the appropriate response:

You may already be familiar with these three kinds of responses, but if not, learning them is quite feasible (Trot Out the Toddler, the scientific case that the unborn is human, the S.L.E.D. test, Taking the Roof Off, and responding to the violinist and bodily rights arguments have been explained by Stand to Reason (through Making Abortion Unthinkable) and many others). It’s just a matter of thinking through the flowchart when you’re in a conversation with an abortion-choice advocate, recognizing the position they’re taking, and then responding accordingly. Knowing this, you can respond to every defense they offer for abortion.

Anyone can do this – and you get better at it the more you practice. It’s fun to be a little more confrontational about controversial things – being a good person means taking bold stands on moral issues, and backing up your talk with good arguments and evidence. The more time you put into it, the better you get at it.

News

Pro-life protesters arrested and detained in UK

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Story here in the UK Telegraph. (H/T Suzanne)

Excerpt:

Andy Stephenson, 35, and Kathryn Sloane, 19, both committed Christians, were detained after a peaceful protest outside a publicly-funded abortion clinic.

The Crown Prosecution Service will decide next month whether to press charges against the pair for causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ under the Public Order Act.

[…]The pair were arrested last month as they held a banner aloft outside Wistons abortion clinic in Brighton.

Police were called by a member of staff concerned that patients entering the clinic felt traumatised and upset.

Officers asked Mr Stephenson and Miss Sloane to take down a 7ft by 5ft placard depicting an aborted eight-week-old embryo – which they duly did but only to replace it with another banner showing a 10-week-old foetus.

The pair were arrested and taken to Brighton police station where they were held until three in the morning.

Mr Stephenson, a father-of-two and a carpenter, from Worthing in East Sussex, said: “We went to the clinic because we know what women are going in there for and it seems the obvious place to hold a protest.

“We had no desire to be arrested but we sincerely believe this is a legal form of demonstration.

“We were arrested around midday. We were taken to the local police station where we were treated like common criminals.

“They took our fingerprints and put us in cells – they didn’t interview us until midnight and we weren’t let out until three in the morning.”

The UK is a party dominated by secular humanists on the political left. Their desire for selfish pleasure is so strong that they look upon any attempt to disagree with them or make them feel bad about what they are doing as a punishable offense. Secular humanists are very clear about what they believe. They believe that life is about the pursuit of happy feelings. They have no concept of human rights like the right to free speech in their atheistic worldview. So if you interrupt them in their pursuit of pleasure and draw attention to the destruction they are causing, they will attack you. They believe that the strong have a right to crush and coerce the weak into serving their desires for happiness.

To a secular humanist, everyone else exists as a depersonalized object to be used and thrown away. Other people have no value – and there is no such thing as virtue or a way humans “ought to be”. It’s is very much a Darwinian struggle to use the people around you in order to have the most happiness you can until you die. Morality is is just the fashion of the time and place – it’s not real. There is no standard of conduct. You obey the fashions of your place and time unless you can somehow break the rules and avoid being caught and sanctioned. Ethics is illusory on secular humanism. It’s just traffic laws and personal preferences.

The same people who oppose pro-lifers today would have opposed the abolition of slavery. The situation is identical. Declare a group of weaker, disadvantaged people to be non-persons, and then exploit them. Anyone who is pro-abortion (i.e. – who votes for left-wing parties like the Democrats) is pro-slavery. Period. The principle of abusing and killing the weak for your own happiness is the common denominator between both views. Only in a theistic universe do persons have human rights granted by God, like the right to life, and the right to free speech. In an atheistic universe, rights can be brushed aside by the strong.