Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Here’s the relevant portion of the bill:

(b) A limited services pregnancy center shall not engage

in unfair methods of competition or unfair or deceptive acts

or practices, including the use or employment of any

deception, fraud, false pretense, false promise, or

misrepresentation, or the concealment, suppression, or

omission of any material fact, with the intent that others

rely upon the concealment, suppression, or omission of such

material fact:

(1) to interfere with or prevent an individual from

seeking to gain entry or access to a provider of abortion

or emergency contraception;

(2) to induce an individual to enter or access the

limited services pregnancy center;

(3) in advertising, soliciting, or otherwise offering

pregnancy-related services; or

(4) in conducting, providing, or performing

pregnancy-related services.

That doesn’t look bad or unfair, you might say. Unfair practices are bad, deception is bad, fraud is bad; what’s the big problem?

Here’s the problem: a pro-choice legislature that is so biased against pregnancy centers that it invented a pejorative term for them (yes, these are supposed to be adults) is the arbiter of what counts as true or false for the purposes of “deception” and “fraud.” Would you like an example of just how bad that is? Here it is from the Illinois Legislature:

“The advertisements and information given by these organizations provide grossly inaccurate or misleading information overstating the risks associated with abortion, including conveying untrue claims that abortion causes cancer or infertility and concealing data that shows the risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than the risk of death associated with an abortion” (emphasis mine).

Oh, would you look at that. The Illinois Legislature is trying to codify the false claims of a single debunked study, while accusing pro-lifers who refuse to say it’s true of fraud. That’s right; they are hoping to legally force pregnancy centers to tell misinformation to their clients. 

As a refresher, this false—but often cited—statistic comes from a 2012 study by Raymond and Grimes. The methodology of the study is painfully flawed, and the data is contradicted by higher-quality science. For a very deep explanation of all of this, read our article on why abortion isn’t 14 times safer than childbirth.

Unfortunately, the pro-choice lobby refuses to abandon an unreplicated, faulty study because the claims they get to make from it are just too good to pass up. Why tell the truth when you can just print “abortion is 14 times safer” in the text of your bill and require pregnancy centers to tell that to their clients?

Oh, right, let me back up. The issue with this bill is not just that telling truths that contradict the received pro-choice narrative would be considered fraudulent, but refusing to tell falsehoods to clients would be illegally withholding a “material fact”—even though that “fact” is a fiction!

Let’s do a little comparison. When I read this, I immediately thought of another unfounded claim based on a debunked study. The claim that “abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth” is on the same evidentiary level as the claim that vaccines cause autism.[Tweet this!] There’s a famous study from 1998 that linked autism incidence with the MMR vaccine, which has since been discredited because of methodological errors (both intentional and unintentional).

The fact that it was retracted by The Lancet in 2010 is wholly irrelevant to this analysis. Both articles were initially published, passing through a peer-review process which declined to address their errors. Retraction requires multiple people in positions of authority to exercise intellectual honesty; there is a lot more social incentive to defend the popular pro-choice line at all costs than the unpopular anti-vaccination cause. And the Raymond and Grimes study is only 11 years old; the autism study wasn’t retracted until it was 12 years old. But most importantly, both pro-choice people and anti-vaccination activists are pointing to an overtly flawed study as a basis for false claims and using this appeal to a false authority as a cudgel against their opponents.

Scientifically, the “14 times safer” people are on the same level as the vaccine skeptics. But only one of these two groups has significant political power and is attempting to enforce its erroneous beliefs as law.

Imagine the vaccine skeptics, in 2009, gained control of a state legislature. Imagine that they passed a law, citing the already falsified but not yet retracted autism study, requiring pediatricians to avoid inducing parents to give their children vaccines by misrepresenting or failing to disclose material facts, such as (so the legislature defined it) the link between autism and the MMR vaccine—and the pediatrician would be legally obligated to tell this to every single parent. In this hypothetical world, pediatricians are still “free” to do what they believe is best for their patients, but they are required to tell lies to their patients before giving them vaccines or face the full penalty of the law.

This imaginary world might become very real for the pro-life workers in Illinois. The pro-choice legislature is trying to mandate disinformation, to force honest people to tell lies in order to provide counseling, free ultrasounds, clothing, diapers, and formula to expecting mothers.[Tweet this!]

But the real-world version of our imaginary scenario is actually even worse. Within the text of the law this bill would modify, there is a provision for state attorneys to use the full power of the law against people before they’ve even violated the terms of the law. Take a look at this:

“Whenever the Attorney General or a State’s Attorney has reason to believe that any person is using, has used, or is about to use any method, act or practice declared by this Act to be unlawful, and that proceedings would be in the public interest, he or she may bring an action in the name of the People of the State against such person to restrain by preliminary or permanent injunction the use of such method, act or practice. The Court, in its discretion, may exercise all powers necessary, including but not limited to: injunction; revocation, forfeiture or suspension of any license, charter, franchise, certificate or other evidence of authority of any person to do business in this State; appointment of a receiver; dissolution of domestic corporations or association suspension or termination of the right of foreign corporations or associations to do business in this State; and restitution.”(815 ILCS 505/7(a), emphasis mine).

So it’s not enough for the state to try to compel pregnancy centers to spread pro-choice disinformation as a condition of doing business; this bill would empower Illinois to shut down every pregnancy center in advance based on the accusation that they are about to refuse to lie to their clients.[Tweet this!]

If you live in Illinois , please call the Governor and tell him to veto or decline to sign this bill that seeks to enact disinformation as law and punish citizens who refuse to lie when serving women and families in need.

If you live outside of Illinois, spread the news of what their legislature is attempting. Mobilize other pro-life people you know, share this story on social media and with any media contacts you might have; you can write an op-ed, even if it’s just in your local newspaper. People sometimes think pro-life people exaggerate how bad pro-choice laws and the like are; they need to see for themselves just how Orwellian this would-be law is.

If you’re pro-choice, I expect you to understand what’s at stake when the state believes it can compel its citizens to lie. You have better arguments for your view than the faulty claim that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth. After all, even if abortion is somewhat more dangerous than childbirth, the pro-choice position is that the woman should be free to choose what risks she takes on to pursue her own ends, within reason. You don’t need this false talking point to make your case. Granted, I think your arguments ultimately fail; I’m pro-life, after all. But you have honest arguments you can make, and it’s your duty to use them instead of using state power to dissolve charities, revoke certifications, and fine people if they refuse to nod along with falsehoods.

As a pro-lifer, I don’t want to compel agreement or belief in the pro-life position. I want to compel people not to kill unborn humans, but that doesn’t require anyone to be forced to say they’re pro-life when they’re not. I want to convince, not compel, people to say what I believe to be true about abortion. Illinois wants to compel, not convince, pro-life people to say the falsehood that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth.

Please tweet this article!

• Tweet: Illinois Trying to Shut Down Pregnancy Centers with Compulsory Disinformation
• Tweet: The claim that “abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth” is on the same evidentiary level as the claim that vaccines cause autism.
• Tweet: Both pro-choice people and anti-vaccination activists are pointing to an overtly flawed study as a basis for false claims and using this appeal to a false authority as a cudgel against their opponents.
• Tweet: The pro-choice legislature is trying to mandate disinformation, to force honest people to tell lies in order to provide counseling, free ultrasounds, clothing, diapers, and formula to expecting mothers.
• Tweet: This bill would empower Illinois to shut down every pregnancy center in advance based on the accusation that they are ABOUT to refuse to lie to their clients.
• Tweet: As a pro-lifer, I don’t want to compel agreement or belief in the pro-life position. I want to compel people not to kill unborn humans, but that doesn’t require anyone to be forced to say they’re pro-life when they’re not.
• Tweet: I want to convince, not compel, people to say what I believe to be true about abortion. Illinois wants to compel, not convince, pro-life people to say the falsehood that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth.

The post Illinois Trying to Shut Down Pregnancy Centers with Compulsory Disinformation originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

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The post Illinois Trying to Shut Down Pregnancy Centers with Compulsory Disinformation appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

The Car Crash Analogy

Pro-choice advocates sometimes leverage the preceding thoughts to argue as follows:

P1. You shouldn’t be legally required to donate your kidney in the car crash case.
P2. If you shouldn’t be legally required to donate your kidney in the car crash case, then a pregnant woman shouldn’t be legally required to donate the use of her uterus to the fetus.
C. So, a pregnant woman shouldn’t be legally required to donate the use of her uterus to the fetus.

Call this the Car Crash Argument. Premise P1 is intuitively plausible to many people. Premise P2 is a parity premise: it’s supposed to be plausible because the two types of actions that it mentions—your donation of a kidney and the pregnant woman’s donation of the use of her uterus—are quite similar. In particular, both are acts that save the life of a person (the other driver in one case, the fetus in the other) whose life is in danger because of the potential helper’s voluntary act (the act of driving in one case, sexual intercourse in the other).¹ This similarity is supposed to make it plausible that if one of these acts shouldn’t be legally required, then neither should the other.

The Car Crash Argument, like Judith Thomson’s famous Violinist Argument, is a bodily rights argument. So most of the strategies typically used to rebut Thomson’s argument can also be used against the Car Crash Argument. For example, it might be argued that there is a special duty to assist one’s own biological children. If there is such a special duty, then there’s a relevant difference between the car crash case and the case of pregnancy: only in the latter case is the needy person the potential helper’s own biological child. As another example, it might be argued that it is worse to kill a person than to merely let her die. If killing is worse than letting die, then there’s another relevant difference between the car crash case and the case of pregnancy: only in the latter case is it true that the only way to refrain from assisting the needy person is to kill that person. Both of these potential responses target premise P2 of the Car Crash Argument, as they attempt to direct attention to a difference between the two actions mentioned in this premise that breaks the parity between them.

My preferred response to bodily rights arguments is the “responsibility objection,” so in what follows I’ll offer a response to the Car Crash Argument that draws on some considerations that pertain to the pregnant woman’s responsibility for the fetus’ needy state.

A Response to the Car Crash Argument

I’ll start by noting that there’s an ambiguity in the car crash scenario as I described it above: it’s not clear whether the car accident is your fault. I left this ambiguous on purpose because different pro-choice people who appeal to the car crash analogy fill in the details differently. Some invite us to imagine a version in which the accident is your fault (for example, see page 42 of this piece by a pro-choice philosopher), and others describe a version in which the accident isn’t your fault (for example, see here). I think the difference between these two versions of the case matters, so I’ll give them labels to keep them distinct:

Fault
You’re driving home from work, and because you’re drunk, you run a red light. As a result, you get into a car accident, and the other person is severely injured. He’ll die unless you give him a kidney (you’re the only match).

No Fault
You’re driving home from work. Everyone is driving carefully, but the traffic light malfunctions, giving everybody a green light. As a result, you and another car run into each other. The other driver is severely injured. He’ll die unless you give him a kidney (you’re the only match).

There are two ways of interpreting the Car Crash Argument. On one interpretation, the argument is appealing to Fault. On the other, it’s appealing to No Fault. On both interpretations, the argument faces problems.

First, suppose that the Car Crash Argument is appealing to No Fault. In that case, I argue that premise P2 of the argument is doubtful because there are two relevant differences between No Fault and the case of pregnancy. First, in the case of pregnancy, it’s a foreseeable result of the woman’s voluntary sex act that the fetus will end up needing her uterus in order to survive.² This is because it’s generally known that it’s not that unusual for pregnancy to follow sexual intercourse. In contrast, it’s not a foreseeable result of your act of driving that someone will end up needing your kidney in order to survive, for it’s incredibly rare for such a situation to arise as a result of driving. I’ve never even heard of this actually happening outside of philosophical thought experiments.

When a needy person’s neediness was a foreseeable result of a voluntary action of yours, this makes you more responsible for her neediness than you otherwise would be. And the more responsible you are for a needy person’s neediness, the more fair it is to require you to assist her, all else equal. So, there’s some reason to doubt premise P2. There’s reason to find it more plausible that a pregnant woman should be legally required to donate the use of her uterus than that you should be legally required to donate your kidney.

Here’s the second relevant difference. In the case of pregnancy, the pregnant woman bears a lot more responsibility for the fetus’ needy state than does the fetus himself. After all, the fetus bears no responsibility at all for his own needy state, for he isn’t yet capable of choosing to do things. In contrast, you bear no more responsibility for the other driver’s needy state than the driver himself bears. This is because all of the reasons for thinking that you’re responsible for the driver’s needy state suggest equally-compelling reasons for thinking that the driver is responsible for his own needy state. For example, it may be true that you bear at least a bit of responsibility for the driver’s needy state since you performed a voluntary act (the act of driving) that causally contributed to the driver becoming needy. But if this is so, then it’s also the case that the driver bears some responsibility for his own needy state, for he too performed a voluntary act (again, the act of driving) that causally contributed to his becoming needy.

When person A bears a lot more responsibility for person B’s neediness than does person B, this makes it fairer to require person A to assist person B than it otherwise would be. So we again see that there are some grounds for thinking that it is fairer to require the pregnant woman to provide bodily assistance to her fetus than it is to require you to provide bodily assistance to the car crash victim in the case of No Fault.

I conclude that if we take the Car Crash Argument to be appealing to No Fault, it’s reasonable to doubt premise P2, for there are two relevant differences between the actions mentioned in this premise.

Now suppose that the Car Crash Argument is appealing to Fault. In that case, I think we should reject premise P1. If you’re drunk driving and run into someone, and if you thereby bring it about that she’ll die unless you donate a kidney to her, then you should be legally required to donate your kidney. It seems unfair for you to be allowed to just walk away and allow the victim of your drunk driving to die. To my knowledge, nowhere in the US does the law require you to donate your kidney in this sort of scenario, but it seems reasonable that the law should be changed.

It’s worth noting that even David Boonin, one of the best defenders of the pro-choice bodily rights argument, is inclined to agree that people like the drunk driver should be forced to provide bodily assistance to his victim. Boonin doesn’t consider the car crash case specifically, but he does consider a relevantly similar scenario. Paraphrasing Boonin, his scenario is as follows:

Poisoning
David Shimp knows that if he puts a certain toxin in Robert McFall’s drink, it might cause McFall to get aplastic anemia. Shimp also knows that if McFall gets aplastic anemia, he’ll die unless Shimp donates some of his bone marrow to him. Knowing all of this, Shimp puts the toxin in McFall’s drink anyway, just for the fun of it. Sure enough, McFall gets aplastic anemia.³

Boonin observes that it does seem right to say that Shimp owes McFall some bone marrow, and he suggests (correctly, in my view) that this is so because Shimp wrongfully harmed McFall. And this case is relevantly similar to the case of Fault, in which you’ve wrongfully harmed your victim. So it should also seem right that you owe your spare kidney to the victim of your drunk driving in Fault. And if this is so, there’s reason to think that you should be legally required to give your kidney to your victim.

Here’s a summary of my response to the Car Crash Argument. Either it appeals to Fault or it appeals to No Fault. If it appeals to No Fault, then there are good reasons to reject premise P2. And if it appeals to Fault, then premise P1 can be doubted. Either way, there are good grounds for finding the Car Crash Argument unconvincing.

How the Car Crash Analogy Can Help Pro-Lifers Refine Their Views

The car crash analogy comes up frequently on the Abortiondebate subreddit. Sometimes, the analogy is used to develop something along the lines of the Car Crash Argument. I’ve argued that this use of the analogy is unsuccessful. But there’s a another way that pro-choice advocates sometimes use the analogy that I think is much better. I’ve seen the following sort of discussion unfold many times:

Pro-life: The woman had sex knowing that she might become pregnant as a result. So, she consented to being pregnant. That’s why the fetus has a right to be in her uterus.

Pro-choice: Consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. If you think otherwise, it’s because you’re assuming that it’s in general the case that if you consented to do something, then you’ve thereby consented to all of the possible consequences of doing that thing. And this general principle is false. We know this because it’s surely not true that someone who consents to driving has thereby consented to being in a car accident, and this general principle implies otherwise.⁴

I think the car crash analogy succeeds in showing that it’s not generally true that if you’ve consented to do something, then you’ve thereby consented to all of the possible consequences of doing that thing. So pro-lifers who want to defend the pro-life position by way of showing that the woman has consented to being pregnant should appeal to a general principle that’s different from the one that the pro-choice person attributes to the pro-lifer in the above exchange. Perhaps pro-choice advocates on social media like using the car crash analogy because a lot of pro-lifers have a hard time articulating a general principle that both (i) implies that consenting to sex is sufficient for consenting to pregnancy, and (ii) does not imply something implausible in the car crash case.

A good way to approach developing such a principle is to consider what potentially relevant differences there are between the case of pregnancy and the car crash case. In this article, I’ve directed attention to two such differences that have to do with the pregnant woman’s degree of responsibility for the fetus’ needy state. These differences suggest something like the following principle:

If you perform a voluntary action that has as a foreseeable result that someone will die unless you provide him with bodily assistance, and if you bear a lot more responsibility for his being in his needy state than he does, then your voluntary action counts as (tacit) consent to provide him with that assistance.

This general principle is much better than the one that pro-choice people often attribute to pro-lifers, for it is not easily refuted by either of the versions of the car crash analogy (Fault and No Fault). And this general principle does have the pro-life-friendly implication that the pregnant woman has tacitly consented to provide the fetus with the use of her uterus. For as I have observed, it’s true both that (i) the pregnant woman performed a voluntary act that had as a foreseeable result that the fetal person will die unless she provides him with this bodily assistance, and (ii) the woman bears a lot more responsibility for the fetal person’s being in his needy state than he does.

To sum up, the car crash analogy is used by pro-choice advocates for multiple purposes. One of the main ways this analogy is used is to press the Car Crash Argument, and I’ve explained why I don’t find this argument persuasive. A second way the car crash analogy is used is to challenge a common strategy for establishing that consent to sex is sufficient for consent to pregnancy. I’ve suggested that this use of the car crash analogy helps pro-life advocates to avoid relying on an overly simple principle about when consent to one thing amounts to consent to another.

Endnotes

The post A Response to the Car Crash Analogy appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

There is a new pro-choice argument that has begun to gain popularity. Many pro-life advocates have not heard of it yet, but to change minds on abortion, you need to know how to both identify and graciously refute it.

Estimated reading time: 26 minutes.

When I teach pro-life apologetics, I usually explain that there are two primary disagreements between the pro-life side and the pro-choice side and a bunch of distracting arguments that have grown from misunderstanding the issue at hand.

Most pro-life people are familiar with the first primary disagreement. These are pro-choice arguments that deny the humanity of the unborn child. These arguments about personhood definitions largely dominate the philosophical literature on abortion. People argue about what constitutes a person and then explain how the human embryo does or does not qualify. Notice that this is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Science tells us what is killed during abortion: an embryo or fetus that is living, whole, and human. And philosophy tells us whether or not that human embryo’s life is valuable.

The second disagreement in the abortion debate is centered around bodily rights, in other words, the slogan that we have all heard before: “My body, my choice.” This argument is different from the first disagreement because it isn’t about whether or not abortion is killing a person. Instead, it argues whether the killing can be justified by the woman’s right to her own bodily autonomy.

A pro-choice person could agree with the pro-life community on the first personhood point, but still justify their position by arguing from bodily autonomy. However, it is more likely than the average pro-choice person will disagree with me on both points.

This new argument that I am going to refute today I am calling the “Abortion is Self-Defense Argument” and it doesn’t address either of these first two controversies. In fact, it can be used by someone who agrees with the pro-life position on both points, and that is one of the reasons I believe it seems so convincing on its face.

To watch a video version of this article, click below:

MP3 Podcast Download

The argument in clear terms would sound like this:

I support legal abortion because pregnancy and childbirth are life-threatening. Abortion is much safer than childbirth, and so I believe a woman should be able to choose abortion to protect her own life. It seems wrong to me for the government to legally require people to put their lives at risk to save another. Even if the woman doesn’t die because of the pregnancy, it threatens her health in one way or another. For some women, they will suffer physical ramifications; for others, the pregnancy will threaten their relationships, finances, mental health, or career. Safe, affirming abortion access allows women to choose for themselves. If she wants to continue the pregnancy and do it all, she can, but she shouldn’t have to. She should have the right to defend herself from the pregnancy, which is inherently a risk to her health.

Breaking Down the Argument

Now, the everyday person might not explain their position in such explicit terms, but through our team’s research and development, we have observed the idea of abortion as self-defense buzzing around the pro-choice mind since early 2016. For some people, it is towards the front of their minds, and for others, it is a hidden premise not yet realized. More often than not, it takes a significant amount of dialogue with the person to whom you’re talking before you are both able to identify what exactly they think about abortion and why. This is why we train pro-life advocates with dialogue tips and communication skills to find clarity in the abortion conversation. When you identify this argument, you’ll need to know how to respond persuasively and clearly.

Unfortunately for the pro-life advocate, there are actually six components working together in this argument, each with varying complexity. And while I am going to address each one, for some of them I will refer you to other sources where our team has refuted them, for sake of brevity.

First, we can separate the three levels of severity of this argument which are all being conflated together in my example statement. This really happens more often than not in real life.

Our example pro-choice statement contains three levels of “threats” that women should have the right to defend themselves from:

1. Abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s life at risk.

2. Abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s health at risk.

3. Abortion should be an option because pregnancy threatens her life circumstances, like financial health, relationships, or career success.

The remaining parts of the argument are as follows:

4. An empirical claim (or underlying presupposition) that abortion is safer for the woman than childbirth.

5. The idea that a fetus is an aggressor who is the one responsible for putting the mother’s life, health, finances, and whatever else, at risk.

6. The idea that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy.

I remember this last point about consent to sex not being consent to pregnancy being hotly debated among the students in my college bioethics class and it seems to be one of those cornerstone disagreements in online comment threads where communication can start to break down. Let’s take a closer look at this idea first before we move on to threats versus aggressors and empirical data related to health risks.

Is Consent to Sex Consent to Pregnancy?

Now if you’re talking with someone who is making any or all of these arguments, you need to address the presupposition which many pro-choice people hold: consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. You should respond to this assumption with what pro-life philosophers sometimes call “The Responsibility Objection”. This objection states that when you have consensual sex, you engage in an act that you know might result in the creation of an inherently needy child, to whom you own compensation.

In recent years there has been an increase in education surrounding sexual consent. This is a vital issue for our culture right now and we can all agree that everyone needs to understand what does and does not qualify as consent to sex. One thing that has been given particular emphasis in this education is the idea that consent to sex is ongoing. In other words, a person has the right to say “no” at any time during sexual contact and end that interaction at any point. We should always respect someone else’s “no” immediately and take it very seriously, regardless of whatever has been happening.

I’ve seen some pro-choice advocates take this conceptualization of ongoing consent for sex and try to apply it to pregnancy. They say that pregnancy, like sex, also requires ongoing consent and that the woman should be able to withdraw consent from it at any point in time. The problem with this thinking is that pregnancy is being talked about like it is an action instead of an effect. When you consent to actions you are also consenting to that action’s consequences, even if you consider them to be undesirable.

And when they talk this way I also hear them express incredible frustration at the biological asymmetry between men and women in childbearing. They might say, “If the man can have sex and then just walk away if the woman gets pregnant, then why shouldn’t she have an out too? The whole thing just seems unfair!” It seems like they see abortion as a way to level out the biological imbalance of the sex contract.

I don’t find this sentiment convincing because everyone having consensual sex knows that this is the way the world works before they consent to the sex. They metaphorically agree to the sex contract even if they think the biological imbalance is unfair. Everyone capable of consenting to sex knows where babies come from.

Let me give an example to show why ongoing consent can’t apply to consequences. If you go to a casino, you probably already know that the house always wins. Still, there’s a chance you can use a little money to win a lot, especially if you put your chips on a single number in roulette. In case you’re unfamiliar with the game, in Roulette you place a bet on the table to indicate where you think the ball will land. The more specific you are with your bet the more money you can win. If you bet on a single number, you get 35 to 1 on your bet amount if the ball lands there. So, you place your chips on the number 15 to show that you consent to bet on that spin of the wheel. If the ball lands on 18 that’s bad news for you. You lose your money.

But imagine saying, “Wait! I gave initial consent to bet my money, but I never gave consent to lose it, only to win! Now that I see where the game ended, I withdraw my consent; give me my chips back!”

In real life, the pit boss would probably have security throw you out of the casino for trying to grab at your chips. But if they were going to be patient enough to explain the situation to you they might say something like, “You gave your consent to the bet; you could have withdrawn it anytime before bets were closed. But you knew that the nature of a bet is that you are likely to lose money, not just win it, and that’s the thing you consented to. You can’t just change the rules because you didn’t get the outcome you wanted.”

This is similar to sex. You consent to the act, knowing what the possible outcomes are, and you could’ve withdrawn the consent at any point. You can’t now refuse to consent to the outcome because it’s not what you wanted.

But what about the biological asymmetry in pregnancy? What about the fact that guys can leave and women can’t? Well, let’s change the scenario above. I’m betting at the roulette wheel, along with my boyfriend. The table has a rule in place where men are allowed to pick up their chips after the wheel has spun, and both of us know about this rule. We both let it ride on 27, but it comes up zero.

My boyfriend picks up his chips and leaves the table; he doesn’t lose anything, but I lose my entire bet. “That’s not fair!” I say to the operator. He tells me, “Of course it’s not fair, but this is a casino; it’s not supposed to be fair, and you knew all about this before you placed your bet.”

The pit boss is sympathetic to me though and tells me that I can get my money back if I kill one of the other players at the table.

I knew the game was unfair and the man could walk away, and I played anyway; it would be wrong for me to kill another person at the casino to avoid the consequence of the bet I consented to. Similarly, everyone knows the man can walk away if the woman gets pregnant. It’s not fair, but it was known when consent for sex took place. It’s part of what was consented to, and it’s not a sufficient justification to kill another person. We need to hold men accountable for their actions and start enforcing those child support laws the way they should be, not kill our own child because he walked away.

The Difference between a Threat and an Aggressor

Sometimes abortion-choice advocates describe the human embryo as an aggressor. Sometimes we will even hear gestation described as violence. Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, says,

Abortion is in my opinion…a form of killing. It is a form of killing that we need to be able to defend…the violence that, innocently, a fetus metes out vis-a-vis a gestator… is an unacceptable violence for someone that doesn’t want to do gestational work. The violence that that gestator metes out to essentially go on strike or exit that workplace is acceptable violence.

Let’s leave aside for a moment how ridiculous it is to say it’s just as “violent” for the fetus to merely exist as it is to violently kill that fetus. Framing the fetus as a violent aggressor, even an innocent one, is a misleading description of what happens in pregnancy. Aggressors directly put others in danger; threats put others in danger only indirectly, by proximity or circumstance. For example, if I drop a bowling ball out of a tall building, I’m an aggressor towards the person walking below; the bowling ball is only a threat. While circumstances of pregnancy might add to complications or risks for the mother, a fetus never directly causes the mother harm. While aggressors are often blameworthy in their actions and liable to punishment, this isn’t true of threats. You can’t use disproportionate force to repel a threat without yourself becoming an aggressor. Even if radical feminists like Sophie Lewis think it’s fair to compare the fetus to a slaveholder, that’s not what the fetus is actually like, and so you can’t justify lethal force to defend yourself against the threat of inconvenience or difficulty; but I’ll talk more about this later.

Considering Levels of Responsibility

I want to offer a thought-exercise to help us think about the threat that the human fetus poses to the woman’s health and life during pregnancy. My thought-experiment has two variations because I want to account for the different circumstances of pregnancy. For those who are convinced by the responsibility objection, we have two different levels of responsibility when it comes to pregnancy: women who are pregnant after consensual sex and women who are pregnant after rape. And even if we ultimately believe that abortion is wrong in all cases for any reason, these levels of responsibility can affect our intuition in thought-experiments and intuition of the people we talk with about abortion.

Now, I have talked with pro-choice people who are somewhat convinced by the responsibility objection but think differently about it than I do. For example, they may believe that women who become pregnant after using contraceptive methods have a different level of responsibility for the pregnancy than women who had reasonable access to birth control but willingly chose not to use it while having consensual sex. In other words, I’ve talked with pro-choice people who would sort pregnant women into two responsibility categories: women pregnant after sex without birth control and women pregnant after sex with birth control or after rape.

I’ve also talked with people who are completely unconvinced by the responsibility objection altogether. They believe consent to sex never requires consent to pregnancy, and that the human fetus is always trespassing without consent. They might even say women have no obligation to care for the fetus, even if she was purposefully trying to get pregnant with fertility treatments or something. Because of these varying positions, I want to offer two variations to my thought-experiment that will account for different intuitions regarding responsibility. If you find the responsibility objection convincing, like I do, then you would believe only women pregnant after rape are in the second variation of the story.

Variation One: The Unlocked Boat

Let’s imagine that I have a really nice boat. I don’t mean like a fishing boat for a small lake or even a speed boat for water skiing. I’m talking about the rap music video yacht that has a nice bar and seating. Let’s imagine that I’m kind of a relaxed and laid back person who doesn’t really dwell on worst-case scenarios and even though in this fantasy world it is really common for people to wander on boats at the dock, I like the convenience of leaving my boat unlocked.

So one day, a small child gets lost at the docks, he’s just playing and wandering around and loses his way. He climbs on my boat and hides in a closet. Then I unknowingly later that day take my boat out on the water and it isn’t until we are miles from shore that I discover he is on my boat! And here’s the biggest problem: not only is he getting a free joy ride on my yacht, I know he is carrying a disease that could make me sick. He isn’t sick, he is perfectly okay, but he is a carrier of a disease that mirrors pregnancy in every way. There’s a chance I could have nausea, temporary diabetes, back pain, swollen feet, and I could even die. This disease has every symptom or threat to my life and health that pregnancy carries, with the same likelihoods. And let’s say I know that the only way to defend myself from catching the pregnancy disease is to kill the child. There is no other option, I can’t just stick him on the lifeboat or drive back to the docks. Let’s say I need to either take my chances or kill him. Would that be justified self-defense?

After all, I could die! Someone could say to me “Well, you did leave your boat unlocked and knew that this might happen! You can’t kill the innocent child, even if he is a threat!” Is that really fair though? We will come back to this question, but first let’s consider the second variation.

Variation Two: The Locked Boat

If we change the thought-experiment slightly, we could say that instead of being the kind of person that leaves my boat unlocked, instead, I am the opposite. I hear about this problem happening to other people and I really am against children coming on my boat. I am careful to lock it every single time it is parked at the dock and I even put a sign that says “NO TRESPASSING!” in big red letters. Unfortunately, there is an adult human trafficker who has kidnapped a child and he decides to hide the little boy on my boat. He trespasses against my will, breaks my locks, and puts the kidnapped child in my closet. The next day I take my boat out on the water, and miles from shore I discover the kidnapped little boy. He is a carrier of the pregnancy disease just as in the first scenario. Even though I took all the precautions I possibly could, I am still stuck with the same choice. Do I endure the pregnancy disease? Or can I kill the child to protect myself?

Evaluating Culpability

I think most people would agree that there is a different level of culpability between the two scenarios, or at the very least, you have more sympathy for me in the second story. But does it really matter? I mean, shouldn’t we have the right to protect ourselves, even if it means killing someone if our life is at risk? Maybe you think that self-defense would be justified even if you won’t die but if you will become very seriously ill.

I will respond to that in a moment, but it is necessary to pause and acknowledge that someone who responds to this thought-experiment by saying that abortion is different than my story because embryos aren’t the same value as small children or because they are dependent on the woman’s bodily resources is making a different argument than the pure self-defense argument I am refuting in this article. I would respond differently to those two objections. I am isolating this one part of the argument, not addressing everything.

I argue that whether or not I am justified in killing the child carrying the disease depends on how significant of a threat he is to my life. If there is a 75% chance I will die, then I think morally permissible options are very different from a 10% chance. When abortion-choice advocates make this argument, they use fear-mongering language about maternal mortality rates on the rise.

In May 2019 Dr. Hern, a late-term abortion specialist, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times. The title of his article is “Pregnancy Kills. Abortion Saves Lives.” subtitle “Every pregnancy poses a ‘serious health risk’ to the mother.” He writes: “pregnancy is a life-threatening condition. Women die from being pregnant.” Later he says, “pregnancy is dangerous, abortion can be lifesaving.” He certainly makes it sound like a pretty significant threat. What do the statistics on maternal mortality and maternal morbidity tell us about how significant this threat is?

How the Numbers Affect Our Intuition

To say that killing another innocent person is justified by self-defense, there needs to be some sort of legitimate risk to your life and probably there need to be no other safe alternatives. How do we determine what constitutes a legitimate risk to your life? Should you need to know it is a 50/50 chance that you will live or die? Maybe a 10% likelihood of death? Our intuitions might vary on where the line should be and it probably depends on other factors as well. That exact line might move case by case and I don’t think we need to answer this question before we decide whether or not abortion can be considered self-defense, because of the risk to the woman’s life that pregnancy poses doesn’t even come close to reasonable. It isn’t even a 1% risk. In the United States in 2016, a pregnant woman had a 0.017% chance of dying because of a pregnancy-related complication. You actually have a higher risk of death from getting your appendix removed, which is 0.21% chance for patients under 60 years old.

Like many people, I fully support non-violent efforts to reduce maternal mortality. I don’t want any women to die from childbirth, even if it is a low risk. And of course developing nations have a higher risk of maternal mortality than the United States. Let’s look at Ghana as an example because it is one of the most dangerous places to give birth in the world. In 2017, the maternal mortality rate in Ghana was 0.31%. How much should your life be at risk for you to call it self-defense to kill your unborn child? My answer is at least higher than 1%.

Maternal Morbidity

What if we look at the second version of the self-defense argument, “Abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s health at risk.” Dr. Hern, in his New York Times article mentioned earlier, says:

But pregnancy itself poses a “serious health risk”—including the risk of dying and losing all bodily functions. A woman’s life and health are at risk from the moment that a pregnancy exists in her body, whether she wants to be pregnant or not.

We can look at severe maternal morbidity rates, referred to as SMM, which are identified by the CDC using delivery hospitalization codes. Examples include eclampsia, amniotic fluid embolism, severe anesthesia complications, and sepsis. According to the CDC, SMM affected about 50,000 women in the United States in 2014 and this burden has been steadily increasing every year. In response to this trend, the CDC says, “It is not entirely clear why SMM is increasing, but changes in the overall health of the population of women giving birth may be contributing to increases in complications. For example, increases in maternal age, pre-pregnancy obesity, preexisting chronic medical conditions, and cesarean delivery have been documented.”

We cannot compare the number of pregnancies with the rate of severe maternal morbidity, because the number of pregnancies is not tracked in the United States. We can only compare the number of live births. Again, using CDC as our source, there were 3,985,924 births in the United States in 2014. This means that in 2014 women had a less than 1.3% chance of having severe, non-fatal pregnancy-related complications. A higher risk than our life-threatening risk of 0.017% Does that justify killing a child to spare ourselves?

I think we need to have a higher than .02% chance of dying and a higher than a 1.3% chance of serious health risks to kill another person and call it self-defense. If you look at these numbers and still want to make the self-defense argument, first of all, you’re a dangerous person to be around during flu season; and second, you need to defend the other part of the empirical claim, that abortion is safer than childbirth. If you cannot, then how can it be considered self-defense?

Is Abortion is Safer Than Childbirth?

If you want to say that abortion is a viable means of protecting yourself from the dangers of childbirth, you must be able to show that abortion is empirically safer. Abortion-choice advocates often make the claim that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth, but there’s only one source that this widely cited statistic comes from. It’s a journal article from pro-choice researchers Elizabeth Raymond and David Grimes in 2012.

The study has a bad methodology and weak evidence. It’s poorly researched, poorly argued, and it doesn’t even support its conclusion. ERI speaking fellow John Ferrer thoroughly dissects the problems in his article Is Abortion 14 Times Safer Than Childbirth? Namely, it uses critically different data sets that don’t compare with each other and differ in scope; it uses inflation, false equivalence, and third-variable fallacies to manipulate statistics; and it is uncorroborated because no other scholars have been able to reproduce the results.

Without reliable empirical data, we cannot confidently say whether abortion is actually safer and if it is by how wide a margin. There is no conclusive evidence that abortion is safer than childbirth at all, which is a major problem with the bedrock assumptions of the self-defense argument for abortion. Even if it were safer, it would have to make enough of a difference to justify killing another person. If abortion were miraculously risk-free, it still would not make that kind of difference.

Why the Self-Defense Argument Fails

Now that we have some more clarity on the empirical data and I’ve made my case for responsibility as it pertains to pregnancy, I want to revisit the three types of threats that are given for why women should have the right to defend themselves with abortion:

• Abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s life at risk.
• Abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s health at risk.
• Abortion should be an option because of pregnancy threatens her life circumstances, like financial health, relationships, or career success.

First, I have shown that there is insufficient empirical data to say that the risks of childbirth to the life of the pregnant woman are high enough to call abortion self-defense nor does it show that abortion is a significantly safer alternative. In no other situation would a sound person say it is okay to kill another person if your life is at risk when that risk is less than 1%. Looking at the available statistics, I have no choice but to say that the assertion that “abortion should be an option because pregnancy put’s a woman’s life at risk” is nothing more than scary rhetoric without sufficient evidence.

If we look at the risks to the woman’s health during pregnancy, we are faced with the very same problems. Does having about a 1% chance of health complications make it okay to kill someone? Given the data, is it fair to call this level of threat “a serious health risk,” to use the words of Dr. Hern? And are we comfortable applying that answer consistently across the board in other situations where a person puts your own health at risk? What’s more, the very idea that you’re justified in killing another person to protect yourself rests on common sense that you must actually be protecting yourself by killing them, but we don’t have all the available data to know if that is true with abortion and childbirth or if it is true, by how wide a margin?

At last, we arrive at this argument’s final straw: “Abortion should be an option because of things like her financial health, relationships, or career success.” I think that it may sound weird to some people to frame this part of the argument in terms of self-defense but I believe that is how abortion-choice advocates feel about the woman’s decision to abort—like she has the right to defend her own goals, financial circumstances, and relationships from the unwanted child who poses a significant threat to all these things. And I think it is incredibly unhelpful to the public conversation to simply scoff at this perception or be dismissive about how much responsibility raising a child is. Having a baby changes your life forever. And many women who become pregnant have abortions because they do not want that change. A study published in 2005 peer-reviewed research journal, gathered quantitative and qualitative data for why women in the United States have abortions. Their results showed that:

The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%). Nearly four in 10 women said they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third were not ready to have a child.

From this data, we can see that this last kind of threat, the threat to the life she wants, is the most frequent real-world reason women in the United States are seeking abortions. Abortion-choice advocates know this and believe that these reasons justify abortion. Pro-life advocates do not. Why is there such a divide between the two sides? Well, I can tell you that the popular narrative is that people like me want to control women’s sexual choices and punish them for having sex with a baby, or that we don’t care about women in tough situations, or that we are religious zealots that want to take a strong-arm approach to proselytize the unwilling.

But this strawman story really starts to crumble in my conversations with real people when I ask them if they are willing to kill people for these same reasons that they believe makes it okay to kill the human embryo during an abortion. If we substitute a two-year-old child into any of these tough circumstances, suddenly my pro-choice friends object to the killing. If the mother of a two-year-old child is struggling financially, no one would support her choice to kill the child because it would significantly help her budget. What if I said the child is threatening her financial health and the mother wants to kill her so she can have a better quality of life? It doesn’t really help the justification seem any more plausible. When we make the substitute, my pro-choice friends and I can agree that raising a child in poverty is incredibly challenging and that a violent solution isn’t an ethical one.

We agree about the ethics when the hypothetical is the mother of a toddler but not the mother of a human embryo because we disagree about the moral status of the unborn. In other words, the argument “abortion should be an option because of pregnancy threatens her life circumstances, like financial health, relationships, or career success” isn’t a self-defense argument at all. It is actually a personhood argument dressed up in confusing language. But it feels a lot more comfortable to discuss the circumstances of abortion rather than the ethics of abortion. It is easier to say “If you really wanted to stop abortion, then you wouldn’t try to make it illegal, you would be helping all these people in tough circumstances” than engage with the question, “Does abortion kill a human person with a valuable life?”

The “abortion as self-defense” argument fails on each of its points. It conflates consenting to actions with being able to consent to effects. It fails to consider individual choice and responsibility. It bases its claims on unverified rhetoric about the safety of abortion. Two of its arguments pretend that risks are much greater in order to justify killing, and the last one is just a personhood argument in denial. This argument seems powerful, but you now have the tools to deconstruct and refute it.

ADDENDUM: An Alternative Way of Framing The Discussion

Sometimes, we can enhance the clarity of our critique of an argument by presenting the argument in such a way that it is clearly logically valid—that is, in such a way that its conclusion must be true if all of its premises are true. Once we formulate the argument so that it is logically valid, we know that the only way to refute it is to show that one or more of its premises are false. In what follows, I present logically valid formulations of the three versions of the self-defense argument. I also note which premises of these arguments are undermined by which sections of this article.

The Argument from Self-Defense in the Case of Threat to Life 

As we have seen, one kind of self-defense argument for the pro-choice position appeals to the idea that abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s life at risk. Here is a reconstruction of this argument:

1. If a person A is an aggressor against a person B and is thereby responsible for posing a legitimate risk to B’s life, and if B has not consented to A’s posing this legitimate risk, then it is morally permissible for B to defend her life by using lethal force against A (and it should be legal for B to do so).
2. The human fetus is an aggressor against the woman in which he/she exists and is thereby responsible for posing a legitimate risk to the woman’s life. 
3. The pregnant woman has not consented to the human fetus’ posing this legitimate risk to her life.
4. Therefore, it is morally permissible for the pregnant woman to defend her life by using lethal force against the human fetus (and it should be legal for the pregnant woman to do so).

The foregoing discussion provides strong reason to think that some of the premises of this argument are false. For example, premise (3) is undermined by the section ‘Is Consent to Sex Consent to Pregnancy,’ which argues that (except in cases of rape) a pregnant woman has consented to the consequences of sex, including the human fetus’ posing a legitimate risk to her life. Premise (2) is undermined by the section ‘The Difference Between a Threat and an Aggressor,’ which argues that the human fetus is not an ‘aggressor,’ but is rather merely a ‘threat.’ Premise (2) is also undermined by the section ‘How the Numbers Affect Our Intuition,’ which argues that even though the fetus normally poses some risk to the woman’s life, this risk does not rise to the level of a ‘legitimate’ risk. 

The Argument from Self-Defense in the Case of Threat to Health

The second version of the self-defense argument appeals to the idea that abortion should be an option because pregnancy puts a woman’s health at risk. This argument goes as follows:

1. If a person A is an aggressor against a person B and is thereby responsible for posing a legitimate risk to B’s health, and if B has not consented to A’s posing this legitimate risk, then it is morally permissible for B to defend her health by using lethal force against A (and it should be legal for B to do so).
2. The human fetus is an aggressor against the woman in which he/she exists and is thereby responsible for posing a legitimate risk to the woman’s health. 
3. The pregnant woman has not consented to the human fetus’ posing this legitimate risk to her health.
4. Therefore, it is morally permissible for the pregnant woman to defend her health by using lethal force against the human fetus (and it should be legal for the pregnant woman to do so).

The foregoing discussion undermines some of the premises of this second argument, as well. For example, premise (3) is undermined by the section ‘Is Consent to Sex Consent to Pregnancy,’ which argues that (except in cases of rape) a pregnant woman has consented to the consequences of sex, including the human fetus’ posing a legitimate risk to her health. Premise (2) is undermined by the section ‘The Difference Between a Threat and an Aggressor.’ Premise (2) is also undermined by the section ‘Maternal Morbidity,’ which argues that even though the fetus normally poses some risk to the woman’s health, this risk does not rise to the level of a ‘legitimate’ risk. 

The Argument from Self-Defense in the Case of Threat to Life Circumstances

The third and final version of the self-defense argument appeals to the notion that abortion should be an option because pregnancy threatens the pregnant woman’s life circumstances, such as her financial health, relationships, or career success. Here is a way of understanding this argument:

1. If a person A is an aggressor against a person B and is thereby responsible for posing a legitimate risk to B’s life circumstances, and if B has not consented to A’s posing this legitimate risk, then it is morally permissible for B to defend her life circumstances by using lethal force against A (and it should be legal for B to do so).
2. The human fetus is an aggressor against the woman in which he/she exists and is thereby responsible for posing a legitimate risk to the woman’s life circumstances. 
3. The pregnant woman has not consented to the human fetus’ posing this legitimate risk to her life circumstances.
4. Therefore, it is morally permissible for the pregnant woman to defend her life circumstances by using lethal force against the human fetus (and it should be legal for the pregnant woman to do so).

The foregoing discussion provides strong reason to think that this third version of the argument is also unsuccessful. For example, premise (3) is undermined by the section ‘Is Consent to Sex Consent to Pregnancy,’ which argues that (except in cases of rape) a pregnant woman has consented to the consequences of sex, including the human fetus’ posing a legitimate risk to her life circumstances. Premise (2) is undermined by the section ‘The Difference Between a Threat an an Aggressor,’ which argues that the human fetus is not an ‘aggressor,’ but rather is at most a ‘threat.’ And premise (1) is undermined by the section ‘Why the Self-Defense Argument Fails,’ which points out that premise (1) is false since it has the mistaken implication that it is permissible for a mother of a two-year-old to use lethal force against her child in order to protect her life circumstances.

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Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

Not all pro-choice people are extremists.

A 2013 Gallup poll found that 80% of Americans believe abortion should be illegal in the third trimester. A 2012 Lozier Institute poll found that 77% of their respondents believed sex-selective abortions should be against the law. Most people, even pro-choice people, believe there are circumstances when abortion should not be legal.

But almost all pro-choice people use extremist arguments.

What is an extremist argument?

By “extremist arguments,” I don’t mean “arguments that extremists often use;” I mean arguments that necessarily lead to an extremist position. I am not saying that having an extremist position means you must take extremist or violent action. I am just saying if you make an argument that logically requires an extremist position and you don’t take that extremist position, you’re being inconsistent.

For instance, suppose someone said, “Having dark skin makes you a non-person, but I really like lots of people with dark skin and I think people ought to be nice to them.” They’re advocating for being nice, but “having dark skin makes you a non-person” is an extremist argument. The logical conclusion of that argument is that anyone who has dark skin should not be legally protected, that it is morally justified to enslave or kill such people. It doesn’t matter how kind, compassionate, or well-meaning the person is who says it; the argument is extremist.

People are welcome to try to justify abortion with extremist arguments, but they should expect to be gently challenged to hold a consistent view. If you’re making an extremist argument, you should be consistent and hold the extremist view that comes with it.

Pro-life people can make extremist arguments too. For instance, if a pacifist pro-life person said, “Abortion is wrong because it is always wrong to take any human life,” then that person would be forced to oppose even killing in self-defense or defense of others. That would be an extremist argument because it necessitates an extremist view.

Describing views (and the arguments that necessitate them) as extremist is intended to be descriptive, not pejorative. Consider the pacifist example. I personally know several extremely virtuous people who have advocated for that view and my intent is not to mock them. It’s also, of course, possible that an extremist view could be true. Describing an argument as extremist doesn’t mean it’s false. I just want people to be consistent. If you use an extremist argument, then accept the implications of it, don’t ignore them because they make you uncomfortable.

Many pro-choice people attempt (unsuccessfully) to paint pro-life claims that unborn babies have a right to live as extremist. The key here is whether the premise must lead to the extremist position. For instance, the claim that it is always wrong to kill innocent human beings does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the death penalty is immoral. Whatever the correct view is on that issue, it should be obvious that it can be logically consistent to oppose the killing of the innocent and be in favor of the killing of people guilty of murder. Similarly, saying that unborn babies have a right to live does not necessarily lead to a conclusion like, “Women should be second-class citizens.” It can be logically consistent to believe one without believing the other.

Move Over Personhood, Bodily Rights Is the Reason People Are Pro-Choice

Sarah Wade dialogues in front of ERI’s poll table at Aquinas College.

Last month ERI had our most recent outreach event at Aquinas College in Michigan. We set up a poll table that asked the question “Should Abortion Remain Legal?” and set out pads of paper for students to sign “Yes,” “No,” or “It Depends.” Here are all of the comments, completely unedited, from the students who signed “Yes” (at least, the ones who left comments):

1. Reproductive Freedom
2. My uterus pls.
3. Bodily autonomy
4. Freedom [unintelligible]
5. Every case is different
6. No one can understand the complexity of another’s
7. My body, my choice/life
8. Freedom of women’s health & choice
9. It’s a choice
10. Just like people cannot be forced to give blood for their children, they should be forced to give life.
11. I like that ^
12. It’s the women’s right to choose
13. Yes!
14. Motherhood is a choice, I believe in the agency of the person who’s putting their life at risk
15. Bodily autonomy
16. Bodily autonomy + viability beginning at birth!
17. Ban on abortion disproportionately affects poorer communities
18. None
19. Not my right to say
20. Mother’s choice
21. My body, my choice
22. “Choice”
23. Not your body, my body
24. My choice
25. Keep it clean + safe.
26. Making them illegall won’t stop them, just lead to more deaths. Keep it clean + safe.
27. Serious women’s health issue women should be able to choose how to use their body
28. Everyone has a reason, + we are not one to judge bodily autonomy
29. If it’s not legal, people will do it anyway
30. It’s a woman’s own body
31. My vagina my right

For those of you keeping score, that’s fourteen out of thirty-one comments with explicit references to bodily autonomy, six that vaguely point to “choice” or “freedom,” three concerned about illegal abortions, three that don’t think it’s their right to judge another person’s situation, one vague “Yes!”, one vague “None,” one “Motherhood is a choice, I believe in the agency of the person who’s putting their life at risk,” and one “Ban on abortion disproportionately affects poorer communities.” Those last two are different enough that I don’t want to lump them in with the others.

Notice the number of statements about the belief that the unborn is not a human person: zero. Our polls aren’t scientific, but every time we do them the results look just like this. People do justify their views about abortion by arguing against the humanity of the unborn, so we still need to talk about that, but I don’t think it’s the driving force behind why most people are pro-choice. The more I talk with pro-choice students, the more convinced I become that at the end of the day, they are pro-choice because of bodily rights. If you are not prepared to recognize and engage bodily rights arguments in a persuasive way, then you shouldn’t be surprised on the occasions when you don’t change pro-choice minds.

Why Bodily Rights Arguments for Abortion Logically Necessitate Extremism

Bodily rights arguments for abortion are always extremist arguments, at least in the way people present them. No bodily rights argument that I have ever seen (or even heard of any pro-choice advocate making) leaves room for exceptions. But the majority of these people believe there should be times when abortion should be illegal.

Almost all pro-choice people make bodily rights arguments, but most of these people, well-meaning or not, are flagrantly inconsistent.[Tweet that] Usually there’s a stage in pregnancy they’re uncomfortable with, and often there are reasons for abortion that they don’t agree with. I frequently hear, “You shouldn’t be able to have an abortion for sex-selection,” or “There should be a limit on how many abortions someone can get,” or “They shouldn’t be able to use it for birth control.”

This is clearly not a well-thought out position. It’s the position of someone that has some of their moral intuitions intact, like about how awful late-term abortion is, but they haven’t thought beyond the talking point they’re using to justify other abortions.

There is no way to consistently argue that a) first trimester abortions should be legal because “it’s a woman’s right to decide what to do with her body,” AND b) second-trimester abortions should not be legal. If the thing that justifies abortion in the first trimester is women’s bodily autonomy, then abortion continues to be justified in the second and third trimester because the fetus still resides inside her body. The same principle applies to distasteful reasons for abortions. You may not like sex-selective abortions, but you can’t oppose them while simultaneously supporting early abortions with bodily rights arguments.

The violinist argument falls into the same problem. If you’re justifying abortion by arguing that women have the right to abort just like you have the right to unplug from a violinist, then you can’t make exceptions. If I want to unplug from the violinist because the violinist is African-American and I’m a racist, I still have the right to unplug. If I want to unplug eight months into the procedure, I still have the right to unplug. Similarly, if someone wants an abortion at eight months, or because of sex-selection or even racism, you can’t deny it to her if you’re justifying the other abortions through bodily autonomy.

The only reasonable way to justify a pro-choice position with exceptions is to argue that the unborn is not a human person early in pregnancy but becomes a person later in pregnancy. I’m not saying that’s a good position, but it can at least be logically consistent. If you become a person when you can feel pain, then it makes sense to oppose abortion after a fetus can feel pain. The problem comes if you are justifying abortion by making a bodily rights argument. As soon as you do that, you have thrown open the door to accepting all abortions, and the only question is whether you’re consistent enough to recognize it.

How to Turn the Tables

In an earlier blog post, I described how powerful it is to turn the tables on pro-choice rhetoric. This is another great example of a time to do that. I don’t have a good example of a specific story where I did this, so what follows is merely an estimation of the type of conversation I’ve had many times. This is just for the sake of illustrating the idea, these are not direct quotations from a specific conversation:

Tim: Why are you pro-choice?

Jane: My body, my choice. It’s nobody else’s business what I do with my own body.

Tim: I’d like to understand your view better. Do you think there are any circumstances when a woman shouldn’t be allowed to get an abortion?

Jane: What do you mean?

Tim: I’ll give you a common example. Most people are pretty uncomfortable with abortions at like, eight months. What do you think?

20-week fetus.

Jane: Oh, I’m definitely not for that. I’m only for abortion in the first twenty weeks.

Tim: Really? I’m confused. At twenty-two weeks, isn’t it her body, her choice? How is it anyone else’s business what she does with her own body?

Jane: Well, I get what you mean, but after twenty weeks it’s too late. The baby is too developed.

Tim: I want to understand your view but I’m struggling. Based on what you just said, it seems like you aren’t really justifying abortion with bodily rights. It seems like you’re justifying abortion by claiming that a fetus doesn’t count as a human person until twenty weeks. The bodily rights claim isn’t sufficient by itself to justify abortion because as soon as you think the fetus is human, you don’t think abortion is justified.

Jane: Yeah, I think both at the same time. In the first twenty weeks it isn’t a person, AND women should have the rights over their bodies.

Tim: I actually think you don’t need the bodily rights argument. If the fetus isn’t a person, I think abortion is obviously justified, don’t you?

Jane: Yeah, I guess so. Bodily autonomy just matters a lot to me.

Tim: That makes sense. I think bodily autonomy is really important too. It seems like our main disagreement isn’t about bodily autonomy though, it seems like we need to determine if the fetus is a human person.

Notice how vacuous the pro-choice rhetoric is if they have exceptions. “It’s nobody else’s business what I do with my own body (but only in the circumstances I’m comfortable with)!”

You should also notice that the extremely common arguments about back-alley abortions have the exact same problem. If you’re going to justify first-trimester abortion by arguing that it’s better to keep abortions legal so women don’t seek them illegally, then how can you justify making any abortion illegal? If you make an abortion illegal, a woman might seek it anyway and do it unsafely.

When people make extremist arguments, like bodily rights arguments and back-alley abortion arguments, I’m not recommending that you treat them rudely or call them names. I’m not saying to scream at them that they’re extremists. Please don’t do that. I’m suggesting that you help them to understand the logic of their argument. Help them to see that they only have two options: either 1) embrace the extremist position, or 2) reject the extremist argument.

But What If We Make People Even More Pro-Choice?

There is a clear risk to this strategy. Sometimes they’ll just embrace their extremism and then they’ll walk away even more pro-choice than before! My colleague Jacob Nels shared this story with me of a conversation he had at our other recent outreach day in Michigan, this time at Grand Valley State University.

Jacob Nels speaking to a Grand Valley State professor.

I engaged a young female professor in a dialogue by asking her:

Jacob: Excuse me, ma’am. Would you take a moment to sign our poll? Should 20-week abortions be legal?

She signed: No.

Jacob: Thanks for signing our poll. Would you mind telling me why you answered no?

Professor: Once it goes that far along, abortions shouldn’t happen.

Jacob: Okay. Would you help me understand where the line is for you and why?

I showed her fetal development pictures in the ERI brochure.

These are the first two pages on the inside of the ERI Outreach Brochure.

Jacob: Could you point out when in human development abortion is not okay?

Professor: I’m not really sure.

After a few more minutes of conversation, she said:

Professor: Women should have the right to do what they want with their body.

Jacob: It sounds like you are saying that you believe women should have a right to complete bodily autonomy, and you do still believe the unborn is a human person. So, is it your belief that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy supersedes the life of the fetus?

Professor: Yes.

Jacob: Could you clarify that for me? It seems like your statement that women should have complete bodily autonomy is in direct conflict with your answer to our poll that 20-week abortions should not be legal. Have you ever seen a picture of a 20-week abortion?

Professor: No, I haven’t.

Jacob: I have one here. May I show it to you?

She agreed and looked at the picture. Click here to see the page Jacob showed her from our brochure. Warning: It is extremely graphic.

Professor: Oh, this is really bad!

Jacob: Yeah it is, but in order to be consistent with your belief in bodily autonomy, then this procedure would have to be okay.

Professor: Yeah, I guess you’re right. I have to get going to class, but can I change my vote?

Jacob’s heart sank as he watched her switch her vote from “No” to “Yes – 20-week abortions should be legal.” She left and didn’t come back.

So Jacob reasonably asks, “Isn’t this a dangerous approach? Aren’t we going to help some people become more pro-choice?”

I have run into the same problem when I’ve responded to pro-choice arguments for personhood by pointing out that the other person’s understanding of personhood would either include animals like squirrels or exclude newborn humans. Sometimes they react by abandoning their pro-choice argument but other times they double down and say, “Fine! Then it’s okay to kill newborns,” or “Fine! Then squirrels are people too.”

When people react that way, in one sense it is like they become more pro-choice. But they won’t be more comfortably pro-choice. There is a type of pro-choice view that many pro-choice people hold. It’s a view that feels really moderate, reasonable, and compassionate. They know they’re uncomfortable with late-term abortion, but they also know they want first trimester abortions legal so they just start believing both things. They get comfortable with these beliefs.

My goal is to graciously drive the comfortable pro-choice position into extinction.

It is frustrating to see people bite the bullet on awful, extremist views. I have watched pro-choice students go as far as to say that parents should have the legal right to kill their ten-year-olds, because that was what it took for them to remain pro-choice about abortion. But I actually think that leaves them better off. I would rather they walk away knowing that they had to agree to something truly horrific in order to remain pro-choice. One of the best ways to help someone to change her mind about abortion is to make her experience cognitive dissonance.

If a person’s only options are 1) pro-life or 2) horrifically pro-choice, most people have enough decency to eventually choose the former. I’m cautiously optimistic that many of the college students I have seen agree to awful conclusions will grow up eventually and recognize that squirrels aren’t people, rape is actually wrong (not just distasteful), and that a newborn child has the right to live. Some won’t, but I’m honestly more interested in pulling the moderates to our side than I am worried about helping the most hardcore pro-choice people become even more extreme.

If thousands of comfortable pro-choice people have to choose between the extremism that their arguments demand and the voices of their consciences, then many of them will become pro-life.

Please tweet this article!

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• Tweet: Move over personhood, bodily rights is the reason people are pro-choice.
• Tweet: Why bodily rights arguments for abortion logically necessitate extremism.
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The post “Bodily Rights Arguments Necessitate Extremism” originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Click here to subscribe via email and get exclusive access to a FREE MP3 of Josh Brahm’s speech, “Nine Faulty Pro-Life Arguments and Tactics.”

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