Abortion

Abortion is absolutely morally unjust. This can be logically proven without reference to the Divine.

Premise One: Except to defend the life of another human, it is always morally wrong to take the life of an innocent human being.

This is accepted as fact by almost all people. Out of the few people who reject this, most are in prison.

There are times when it is just to take a human life. One may kill to defend themselves, another, or in war, their nation. The state may kill criminals (they are not innocent). But it is wrong to kill one unprovoked and it is wrong to kill an innocent man, even if it will do the community good (by deterring others from crime for example). Punishing one for the good of others leads to much injustice and was the rational for the killing of Christ (better that one man may die than the community suffer).

Premise Two: Babies are innocent human beings.

This too is uncontroversial. A few outliers may say babies are born with original sin and damned if they are not baptized. But this view is so disregarded it does not merit the cost of time to explain and debunk it.

Premise Three: Life begins at conception.

This is the most controversial premise, so I will treat it in depth in just a moment.

Conclusion: Human babies within the womb are innocent human beings. Abortion takes their life, therefore abortion is morally wrong.

Life begins at conception. This is either true or untrue or we don’t know if it is true. If it is true then abortion is immoral. If it is untrue we must ask the question: when does life begin?

Does life begin when a human reaches a certain size? If so, what is that size? When a baby is one pound? Ten? One-hundred? And does a certain size give babies value absolutely or does value increase with size? If it is the latter then it is true that tall people are more valuable than short and midgets least valuable of all. If it is the former how do we determine at what size babies have human value? This is an unworkable standard.

What about intelligence? Must babies reach some threshold of intelligence to be deemed human? If so, what threshold is that? When a person can talk? And until then we can kill them because they are not human? Are people who don’t reach that threshold sub-human? This too is an unworkable standard.

Say we say that it is development; a baby is not human until it is wholly developed. What does that mean? Are people with birth defects not human? And when does human development end? When a child can walk? Puberty? Around age twenty when one physically stops growing? Or never, for mental development can last to the end of some men’s lives. Children develop at different ages; are we willing to say that of two children of the same age one is human and the other not given their level of development? This standard fails as well.

The last and seemingly strongest standard is independence. We say life begins when a child emerges from the room and becomes independent of its mother. But really, how different is the situation of a new born baby from a child in the womb? While in the womb the child had its own heart beat. Yes it relied on its mother for food, but outside of the womb it will die in a matter of hours without its mother and her food. Either way it is completely dependent on its mother for some time.

Is a six month baby inside of the womb not human, but a six month baby outside of the womb human? Really, what is the difference between them? They are both small, in the process of physical and intellectual development, and dependent on their mother. This standard fails like the other standards. The fact is every biological book in the world up until a century ago recognized that life begins at conception—there is no other workable standard.

The question remains, what if we don’t know? What if we honestly cannot know when life begins? If that is the case, the argument goes, we have no right to call abortion immoral.

On the contrary, this is an even stronger case for the injustice of abortion. Say I am driving down the road and I see what looks like the outline of a man standing in the middle of the road. It is dark and foggy, so I have no way of knowing whether or not it is a man or just an empty cloak. Now I have plenty of time to stop, but I choose to continue, saying to myself: I cannot know whether or not this is a man so I have no moral duty to stop. If I did in fact kill this man, my excuse would not hold up in a court of law. In the very least I would be guilty of first degree reckless homicide. This is no different than the case with abortion. If our behavior creates risk of likely death to another human being we have a moral duty to stop it.

There is no workable standard but conception to judge the beginning of life. And even if we cannot know when life begins, abortion is still unjust.

Two great objections are: what about in the case of a rape and what about if abortion is needed to save a woman’s life?

In the first case: do two wrongs make a right? Will killing a baby undo the harm done? And doesn’t our disrespect for life invite more acts of violent crime? In the case with a dying mom, the mom’s life is in our God’s hands, the baby’s is in ours—I think it is best to leave the whole thing in God’s hands and not play God by proactively killing one of the parties. Still, both of these are such fringe cases that really have no real bearing on the debate.

So why is abortion legal? Pure and utter selfishness. Abortion isn’t defended because it is logical or just. As I have briefly shown, it logically unjust. People don’t like to be told they are doing wrong. The prophets spoke truth, Christ spoke truth—look what happened to them! The people killed them so they could continue their wrongdoing uninterrupted. Like our ancestors before us we sacrifice the lives of our young ones for our own selfish well being. They killed their newly born so they would have bountiful harvests—we kill our unborn because they may get in the way of our careers or our fun. Should some young girl give up her dreams for her child? YES! First off we wouldn’t have so many abortions without the false notion that unrestrained sexual activity is a right. Second, inherit in the institution of parenthood is a duty to sacrifice on behalf of one’s children. How corrupted is our nature that women have been socialized to discard their motherly instinct and murder the very child they are to protect?

Abortion is the gravest injustice of our age. Thirty million innocent individuals have been murdered in this country alone. And for what reason? A false notion of freedom? The idea that a woman’s body is her own? A being with a separate heart beat and cerebral functions is not part of a woman’s body. This is selfishness at its basest. We sacrifice the most innocent in our culture so that our lives may go on, inconvenienced.