Tell me if this story sounds familiar— you’re going about your day, maybe tapping through your friends’ Instagram stories or scrolling through funny cat videos on TikTok, when you see a headline in bold print:
“PRO-LIFE LAW CAUSES HORRIFIC CHAIN OF EVENTS”
You’re strongly pro-life. You’ve taken the Equipped for Life Course, led a pro-life student or church group, or even currently work full time for an anti-abortion organization. But, you read the details, and for at least a moment, everything you believe starts to tilt. You’re no longer sure if you’re on the right side of this issue.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
The first thing I want you to know is that this gut response is normal. It’s okay, and it reflects that you have empathy not only for the unborn, but for the person carrying them. As we mention in our pieces on avoiding Fetus Tunnel Vision, this empathy is a good thing.
I most recently had this foundation-tilting experience upon hearing about Adriana Smith, the woman who was tragically declared brain dead after medical providers failed to diagnose multiple blood clots in her brain. Smith was 9 weeks pregnant at the time of brain death, and a pre-Dobbs Georgia law prevents her from being removed from life support while there’s any hope that her unborn child might survive.
The purpose of this article is not to present all of the details of this specific case or explain how media reporting has been misleading. Our friends at Secular Pro-Life have already done a fantastic job at that, and I recommend that you take a look at their coverage if you’re wanting to learn more. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to discuss what it means to be pro-life when you’re presented with a horrific edge case such as this one.
As someone who is deeply attached to the pro-life cause, there’s often an immediate impulse to get the “right” answer when presented with a rare situation such as Smith’s. Yes, Adriana Smith is a person deserving of dignity, and it is incredibly tragic that she died, but why not save the baby if we can? Can’t it be as simple as that?
Maybe it could be that simple, but I have to admit that I find myself incredibly uncertain as I hear Smith’s mother describe the last three months.
“It’s torture for me. I come here and I see my daughter breathing, by the ventilator, but she’s not there.”
Doctors have discovered fluid on the baby’s brain, and he’s going to have been incubating in a body on life support for far longer than known successful cases of live birth after maternal brain death. Everything is awful and uncertain, and there’s still a long way to go until the baby reaches 32 weeks. All the while, medical expenses pile up.
I simply cannot wrap my head around the trauma of this situation as I clumsily try to reason my way through questions about “unplugging” vs. direct killing, how the tremendous burden on this family measures against the baby’s chance of survival, and how ethics and our laws intersect. A similar thing happens to me every time I hear about a medical team struggling to decide exactly how and when they should intervene when the mother is in danger. A lot of the more publicized cases may be clear medical malpractice, but in the less publicized cases— maybe ones you’ve experienced in your own community where doctors did intervene early— one might struggle with whether or not there was anything that could’ve been done to save both.
The question all of the above leads me to is this: can you be pro-life if you won’t definitively choose a “side” or are unable to confidently say what should be done in these edge cases?
I think the answer is yes. If you are against legalized elective abortion— violent and direct killing of unborn children for no compelling medical reason—you’re far more pro-life than you are pro-choice, and I want you on my team even if we can’t all agree on the extra-hard, extra-rare cases. These horrific edge cases matter, and deserve to be discussed, but they shouldn’t keep us from working together to end elective abortion.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe in objective morality. I believe that there is a right answer and a wrong answer to all of these cases, and that the unborn deserve real consideration. I am more than open to the idea that Smith’s son deserves the chance he’s getting, even at great cost. However, human judgement is often flawed, and the vast majority of us aren’t seasoned philosophers who can quickly do the moral math. Because of this, we need to give ourselves and our fellow advocates grace when confronted with these hard cases.
Here’s the bottom line: This isn’t a purity test. It’s friends standing side by side doing their best to reason through something immensely difficult. Don’t be afraid of demonstrating intellectual humility and empathy. It won’t get your “pro-life card” revoked, and I’m convinced that this posture will make you far more relatable and reasonable to your pro-choice friends than twisting yourself into knots to avoid giving up an inch of ground.
The post Is It Okay to Find Edge Cases Challenging? 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.”