Category Archives: Pro-Life Philosophy

These articles tend to be more substantive than our other pieces. Some pro-life arguments are more persuasive to pro-choice people than other arguments. We aim to teach arguments that are both persuasive and philosophically sound.

Posted on

Were Horton’s Friends Guilty of Attempted Murder?

by

Photo: A milk thistle blooming in summer

Have you read Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who? If you’re pro-life, you might have quoted its most famous line: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” But the story as a whole is…kind of intense. Horton the elephant is in the middle of a relaxing swim, when he hears a very soft voice calling for help. He looks around, but all he sees is a small speck of dust, and he realizes he’s actually hearing a microscopically tiny person (a Who, as it turns out) on the speck calling for his help. The speck is floating toward the water, and the tiny person is afraid he’ll drown. So Horton carefully picks up the speck and places it on a soft clover—because, as Horton says, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Posted on

Is This Pro-Choice Thought Experiment Cheating?

by

Imagine you wake up one day and find yourself in a hospital bed. You have no idea how you got there, and there are cords running out of your body and into the body of a person who’s lying back to back with you on the bed. You understandably start to freak out a little. A doctor rushes in and explains: “It’s okay, you’re safe. Here’s what happened. That man on the hospital bed with you is a world-famous violinist who has a rare, typically deadly disease. He needs to be hooked up to someone’s kidneys so they can filter his blood, and it turns out you’re the only match in the world. So the Society of Music Lovers, which is obsessed with this guy and really doesn’t want him to die, kidnapped you, brought you here, and hooked you up.”

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Posted on

Yes, Abby Johnson, We Do Care About Ending Abortion

by

Abby Johnson said in a recent interview that organizations like ERI (and like most other pro-life organizations) that do want to prosecute doctors who perform abortions but do not want to prosecute women who have abortions must not really want to end abortion. Her exact words were, “I just find it hard anymore to pretend that these groups actually are interested in ending abortion.” She’s wrong. Let’s talk about it.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Posted on

The Pro-Life Message I Wish I’d Heard in High School

by

I don’t know about you, but there was a time in my life when I was absolutely terrified to tell anyone that I was pro-life.

Let me back up.

I grew up Catholic, went to K-12 Catholic school, the whole nine-yards. I knew that I was supposed to be pro-life, and I was pro-life, but I had spent maybe five minutes of my entire life thinking deeply about abortion. So when I went off to college, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

I went to St. Olaf College, where in the fall of 2016, the students staged a massive protest against our local pro-life pregnancy center. The pregnancy center was hosting their annual fundraising banquet in the ballrooms of our student union, and when the students found out, they lined the hallways waving signs, trying to stop community members from entering and raising money to provide free resources to pregnant and parenting families.

Yeah, it took me about two seconds to realize that publicly identifying as pro-life was social suicide.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Posted on

Team Thinking: When Loyalty Goes Bad

by

If you’re an American, it’s almost guaranteed that you know someone who cares a lot about football. (Maybe that someone is you!) Imagine watching that person watch their favorite team play their biggest rival. The quarterback makes a pass, both a receiver and a defender jump up toward the ball, their bodies collide, and the ball falls to the ground. Is it pass interference? You know for sure what your friend’s answer is going to be even before they inevitably yell it at the top of their lungs—if the defender’s on their rival’s team, then obviously it’s pass interference, and if the defender’s on their team, then obviously it’s perfectly fine.

Now, clearly this is irrational. Just because a defender is on your favorite team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him to commit pass interference, and just because a defender is on your rival team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him not to commit pass interference. But the irrationality isn’t a big deal. We do lots of really dogmatic and irrational things when it comes to sports, and it’s fun and exciting and not a big problem, because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t actually matter who wins a football game (sorry).

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes