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.
Recently, some pro-choice people and organizations have moved away from focusing on bodily autonomy as grounding a right to an abortion and instead frame the issue as one of “reproductive freedom.” This might sound like a rhetorically powerful move—who could be against freedom? However, it is a self-defeating strategy that comes at the cost of the pro-choice movement’s best slogan: “my body, my choice.”
“There’s a burning fertility clinic, and you see a briefcase with 1000 frozen embryos and a toddler; you can only save one.” Yep, it’s the burning IVF lab thought experiment, intended as a mic-drop to prove that pro-life people don’t really believe the embryo is an equal human being. In this Quick Response video, Emily Albrecht explains why this thought experiment isn’t the “gotcha” many pro-choice people believe it to be, even if the pro-lifer would choose to save the toddler.
Recently, we’ve gotten comments asking us to address whether or not “selective reduction” is an ethical practice (or perhaps more to the point, to explain why it is not). On one hand, this makes sense; we don’t have material specifically addressing selective reduction or assisted reproductive technologies, and it’s worth talking about those things in detail. On the other hand, I’m a bit surprised, because selective reduction is just an abortion being performed in a specific context that still fails to provide a justification for killing.
Judith Jarvis Thomson is famous for the Violinist argument from her paper “In Defense of Abortion,” but she actually begins it with another well-known analogy: since an acorn isn’t an oak tree, a fetus shouldn’t be considered a child. Emily Albrecht explains why Thomson’s acorn analogy, while popular, is a fallacious argument that isn’t a problem for the pro-life position.
This quick response video addresses one of the most challenging pro-choice dialogue points, what we call the “human-plus” argument: that you need something like human nature, plus another feature like sentience or consciousness, in order to have personhood.
As Emily Albrecht explains, the human-plus argument isn’t challenging to respond to because it’s a good argument, but because it’s a bad one; human-plus is ad hoc, adding extra requirements just to exclude the unborn, and it’s hard to get people to realize why this is a problem. This video walks you through what we’ve found to be most effective when trying to help someone avoid being ad hoc in a dialogue about abortion.