Responses:
The Constitution says that people have to be “born or naturalized in the United States” to have rights. A fetus is not born.
Clearly, the right to life is extended to people beyond those who were born or naturalized in the United States. For example, it is not legal to murder a foreign visitor to the United States despite the fact that this person was neither born nor naturalized here.
By English Common Law, abortion was legal when our Constitution was written.
Whether abortion was legal or not at that time is both debatable and irrelevant. We have many laws that didn’t exist then and we’ve eliminated many that did. For example, at that time it was legal to own slaves and illegal for women to vote.
There is no consensus for outlawing abortion. Most Americans are pro-choice.
The pro-choice position is that abortion should be legal on demand through all nine months of pregnancy. There has never been even one poll which showed majority support for that position. The most that can be said is that a majority of people may support abortion in the extremely rare “hard-case” situations. Since even abortion industry studies show that virtually no abortions are done for these reasons, it is clear that most Americans do not support the vast majority of abortions that are actually performed.
This “pro-choice majority” lie is nothing more than political spin and the abortion industry’s own actions prove it. Anyone who believes their viewpoint has majority support will steer their battles toward the legislatures where majorities rule. But the abortion lobby has spent over 30 years doing whatever it takes to keep abortion out of the legislatures and in the courts. Only people who know they can’t win in the legislatures would do that.
Let’s also not forget that, in 1850, there was no consensus in America for outlawing slavery or allowing women to vote. There was also a time when consensus was that the earth is flat. In fact, world history is littered with examples where “consensus” simply meant that most of the fools were on one side. Moreover, if consensus is what should drive abortion policy, that’s one more reason to overturn Roe. In 1973, there certainly was no consensus for legalizing abortion on demand.
I am pro-life, but I think abortion should be allowed in certain situations.
Some people call themselves pro-life, despite saying abortion should be allowed in some cases. The most common are when the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or health, when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, or when the unborn child is disabled. Other people even call themselves pro-life simply because they say that elective abortion should be legal only during the first trimester.
To see how intellectually dishonest these positions are, paraphrase them. For example, “I am pro-life, but it’s okay to kill babies who were conceived in rape” or, “I am pro-life, but it’s okay to kill children with Down’s syndrome” or, “I am pro-life, but it’s okay to kill babies during the earliest stages of their lives,” etc. When paraphrased like this, the “pro-life with exceptions” philosophy always contradicts itself. It is as irrational as saying, “Everyone has a right to be free, but slavery should be legal in certain situations.”
To be accurate, when someone says that they are “pro-life with exceptions” what they are really saying is that they support the “choice” to kill some babies (those conceived in rape, those who are handicapped, etc.) but oppose the “choice” to kill others. In other words, the only honest way to define their position is, “pro-choice with exceptions.”
Why should abortion be illegal if the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life?
The moment we agree that there are some circumstances in which it is permissible to intentionally kill a child, we have, in effect, adopted the pro-choice position. This is something understood even by the leader of the most prolific baby killing machine the world has ever known. On August 4, 2004, Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt was on KABC radio in Los Angeles and said this about pro-lifers, “…if you press them, they will almost always say that they believe in any case that the life of the woman – if a woman’s life is at stake – that it should take precedent… so they’re already, to some degree, pro-choice they just don’t know it.”
On the legal front, some scholars have suggested that if the law ever prohibited abortion except to save the life of the mother, if a woman claimed she would commit suicide if denied an abortion, that would satisfy the legal definition of a threat to her life.
From the pro-life perspective, when the public is shown that a legitimate argument can be made against abortion even in this situation, it becomes easier for them to understand why there should be no exceptions under any circumstances. After all, this is the “gold-standard” for exceptions.
Defending this position starts with recognizing that with modern medicine the chances that continuing a pregnancy to term might kill the mom are extraordinarily rare. However, in those cases where that possibility might exist, the crucial issue is intent.
For Example…
If a car wreck has trapped two passengers in such a way that saving one might take the life of the other, the emergency personnel on the scene would never intentionally kill one to get the other one out. Instead, they would do everything possible to save both. If in that process one loses its life, that would be seen as a regrettable, but unavoidable, outcome. That dynamic applies when a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. The woman’s physician should be directed to do everything possible to save both mother and baby. If in that effort the child dies, that should be considered an unavoidable, thus lawful, outcome. However, it is as morally indefensible to kill the baby to save the mother as it would be to kill the mother to save the baby.
In short, the “no-exceptions” position is not that the baby’s rights are superior to the moms, but that they are equal. It is a position that protects women without caving in to the irrational and morally bankrupt view that it is sometimes “necessary” to kill their children.
How can you tell a woman whose fetus is handicapped that she has to have it?
To begin with, when a woman is pregnant she has no choice but to “have the baby.” The question is whether she will have a live baby or a dead one. Also, doctors sometimes make mistakes and it is not uncommon for women to give birth to healthy babies after being told that their unborn children had problems.
Most importantly, however, is that people with disabilities are not less valuable than those without, and no one has the right to decide that their lives are not worth living or protecting – not even their mothers.
One of the most incredible aspects of the abortion lobby’s approach to the disabled is that they try to sell it as compassionate. What is often overlooked in all this is the fact that the “choice” they offer is not between a life with handicaps or one without, but between a life with handicaps or no life at all. When abortion apologists call that compassion, let’s recognize for whom this compassion is being shown. Make no mistake, abortions on the disabled are done for us, not them.
Now, if that is not true, and if we truly believe in this “better-dead-than-disabled” philosophy, why limit our compassion to the unborn? Perhaps, as the following people are suggesting, “the right to choose” should be extended beyond the womb.
These quotes, and many more like them, come from people with very well-established pro-choice credentials.
Regrettably, attitudes like theirs are now commonplace within the so-called “bio-ethics” community and they force us to consider how long it will be until the right to kill an imperfect child becomes the responsibility to do so. At a 1986 symposium called, “Prenatal Diagnosis and Its Impact on Society” Dr. James Sorenson, a Professor of Socio-Medical Sciences at Boston University, observed that, “American opinion is rapidly moving toward the position where parents who have an abnormal child may be considered irresponsible.” To see that this observation is not at all farfetched, compare his quote to the issue of family size.
In the past, it was common for Americans to have large families. But now, the prevailing attitude is that couples who have more than one or two children are being selfish and irresponsible. In fact, it is not unheard of for people who have four or five children to be publicly confronted by total strangers. That is true even for those couples who want – and can easily afford – a large family.
This attitude was created by the view that large families are no longer “necessary” and that they use up too many public services and resources.
The problem is, those same things could also be said about the handicapped.
Today, there are studies indicating that 90% of all unborn children who are diagnosed with Down syndrome are executed in the womb. Clearly, we have come to the point that when pre-natal testing reveals a less-than-perfect baby, abortion is the default position. In fact, women in this situation often say they feel they actually have to justify not having an abortion. It now seems that when people hear of a handicapped child being born, for many their first thought is, “Didn’t the mother know about this when she was pregnant?” If that is where we are – and I am convinced it is – then Sorenson’s prediction has already come true.
Finally, if it is compassionate to execute an unborn child who might have a disability and might live an unpleasant life, it would be even more compassionate to execute a five-year-old who we know is disabled and who we know is living an unpleasant life. In other words, while the quotes given earlier suggest extending the “right to choose” only a short time past birth, if the underlying principle is sound, why should we stop there? Again, why put arbitrary limits on our compassion?
Remember, when the Nazis set out to create the “Master Race,” they began by executing the handicapped and selling it as compassion. If America is going to embrace that same philosophy, executing the born makes as much sense as executing the unborn.
Why should a woman who was the victim of rape or incest have to bear a child?
When pregnancy occurs as a result of rape or incest, the baby is not only the child of the rapist but of the woman as well. Today, it is not unusual for rape victims who aborted their children to say they have come to grips with having been the victim of someone else’s violence, but cannot accept that they inflicted violence on their own baby. On the other hand, you never hear a rape victim who did not have an abortion later say she wished she had. In fact, they often see the baby as the only good thing that came from the situation.
There are those who argue that this baby would be a constant reminder of the rape.
When adoption is suggested, the response is that many women are not emotionally able to carry a child for nine months and then give it to someone else to raise. In other words, we’re asked to believe that the kind of woman who would be traumatized by placing her child with a loving family, would be happier if her baby was brutally ripped to shreds, thrown in a dumpster and hauled off to a landfill.
Even if we bought into that, let’s imagine that a woman was kidnapped and held for two years during which time she gave birth to her captor’s son. When rescued, the woman says the baby is a constant reminder of her ordeal but that she could not stand to give him up to someone else to raise. Would we allow her to have him killed? After all, the dynamics used to justify abortion also exist in this situation.
Other people rationalize abortion for rape and incest because the pregnancy was beyond the woman’s control.
That too is illogical. Allowing a victim of violence and brutality to inflict violence and brutality upon her own child will not return the control that the rapist stole from her, nor will it address the physical or psychological damage that was done to her.
Finally, we must never forget that the unborn child created through an act of violence is no less a living human being than the one created through an act of love. And just as we would not discriminate against a five-year-old who was conceived in rape or incest, neither should we discriminate against an unborn child who was so conceived.
If abortion is illegal, what should the penalty be for a woman who has one?
Laws prohibiting abortion target the abortionist, not the woman. This is evidenced by the fact that, before Roe v. Wade, American women were never indicted for having illegal abortions. For several pragmatic reasons, that same approach should be adopted when abortion is again illegal.
First, except in the extremely unlikely event that a woman is actually caught in the act of having an illegal abortion, a conviction would be virtually impossible.
Second, the woman is the best source of information needed to bring charges against the abortionist. If she also faced prosecution, she would not cooperate with the authorities, thus keeping them from getting the evidence needed to convict the abortionist. That would leave him free to kill again.
This doesn’t excuse the woman for having participated in an illegal act which took the life of her child. It simply recognizes that the public interest is best served by removing the abortionist from society, and that legal sanctions against the woman would reduce the chances of that happening. It’s no different than the authorities giving immunity to a small-time drug user in exchange for information on a big-time drug dealer.
Remember, the goal of the pro-life movement is to stop abortion.
Imprisoning a woman who had an illegal abortion would prevent nothing since her child is already dead. However, imprisoning the abortionist might save thousands of babies in the future.
The point is, jail is exactly where every abortionist deserves to be. If giving women a pass on prosecution is the best way to make that happen, that is a deal worth making. As for the pro-life movement, we just don’t know of a practical incentive for jailing women who submit to abortions. The really odd thing is, it always seems to be someone from the pro-choice crowd who argues that they should be. So I have a suggestion. If these people think it’s unfair for abortionists to go to jail but not their customers, they need to be the ones lobbying for legislation to put women in jail.
No woman ever wanted an abortion. They only do it when they have good reasons.
If it’s true that no woman ever wanted an abortion, why is abortion the pro-choice mob’s inevitable solution for women with unplanned pregnancies? It’s like saying no woman wants to commit suicide so we’ll help her out by selling her a pistol. The question is, if the abortion lobby cares so much about women, why aren’t they helping them not do what everyone agrees they don’t want to do? Is it because they’re in the pistol business?
As for the reasons women have abortions, that’s irrelevant. If the unborn are not living human beings, no justification for abortion is necessary. If they are living human beings, no justification for abortion is possible.
Outlawing abortion will impose an unequal burden on poor women. Wealthy women will just go to other countries.
This nonsensical argument is like saying we should not have drug laws since the rich can get them in other countries. Governments cannot shirk their responsibilities on the basis of what other governments do. If Canada legalizes cocaine use, or prostitution, or incest, that does not mean we have to do so as well. If it does, then we need to abolish our entire legislative process since virtually everything we make illegal is legal somewhere else.
Also, we are not limited to passing only those laws that we know beforehand will be evenly applied across all socio-economic groups. We know that laws against robbery and drugs impact the poor more than the rich, while insider trading, stock manipulation, and tax evasion laws impact the rich more than the poor. Yet we enforce all of them.
Now, if the point of this is that prohibiting abortion is discriminatory, that is correct. When abortion is illegal, a child is safer in the womb of a poor woman than a rich one, since wealthy parents can afford to take their children outside the country to be killed.
This is the toughest decision a woman will ever make. No one has a right to interfere.
Murdering your child should be a tough decision. Just imagine how cold-blooded a woman would have to be to say it was no big deal. But simply because a decision is tough, does not mean it is either morally defensible or beyond the legitimate interest of the law. If a man is thinking about killing his 10-year-old daughter to collect on an insurance policy, it may be the toughest decision he ever had to make but that doesn’t mean it should be legal.
Of course, the real question is, why is abortion the toughest decision a woman will ever make? Perhaps it’s because within every woman who submits to an abortion, is the realization she is murdering her own baby.
Why shouldn’t a woman whose baby is going to die anyway have an abortion?
Doctors are not always right when they make this diagnosis, but even when they are, there is an enormous moral distinction between the natural death of a child and the intentional killing of one. It is the same as the distinction between a man dying from a heart attack or being killed in a holdup.
The question is, once we have adopted this “going-to-die-anyway” standard, why apply it only to the unborn? If a man is charged with murder, shouldn’t we drop the charges if we discover that the victim already had a fatal disease? Or when certain medical experiments are too dangerous to be attempted under normal circumstances, why shouldn’t we force prisoners on death row to participate since they’re going to die anyway?
I don’t like surgical abortions, but there’s nothing wrong with the abortion pill.
This is like a man who poisoned his wife trying to portray himself as morally superior to the man who bludgeoned his wife with an ax. In the case of abortion, it may be more aesthetically pleasing to kill children with chemicals than with scalpels, but the victims are just as dead and the abortionists are still cowardly and cold-blooded hired serial killers.
Regarding the “abortion pill” RU-486, there is a chilling association between the German holocaust and America’s holocaust.
When the Nazis converted from shooting their victims to gassing them, the chemical they chose was called Zyklon B which had been developed and manufactured by a company named I.G. Farben.
After the war, I.G. Farben changed its name to Hoechst AG. Today, Hoechst is a pharmaceutical giant with subsidiaries all over the world, including the United States. One of those subsidiaries is a French company named Roussel Uclaf, the developer of RU-486. In other words, the same corporation that created Zyklon B for Germany’s death camps, later created RU-486 for America’s death camps.
What about a woman who can’t afford another child or isn’t ready to be a mom?
To begin with, when a woman is pregnant whether she is ready or not, she already is a mom. At that point, her only “choice” is to be the mother of a living baby or a dead one.
Second, poverty is not a justification for killing your children. No one would excuse a father for killing his five-year-old daughter because he could no longer afford her.
Additionally, the abortion industry’s own statistics prove that almost every abortion it sells has nothing to do with poverty, but is instead sold to a woman who simply doesn’t want to be pregnant.
An interesting observation about the relationship between poverty and abortion, is that poor women are rarely the ones agitating for abortion. Instead, it always seems to be rich, white, elitist gadflies and liberal social engineers who become so distressed about poor women having access to abortion.
How can you deny women health care?
Just because a procedure is performed in a medical facility doesn’t automatically make it health care. Breast augmentation would be a good example of that.
Health care relates to the treatment of disease, injury or illness. Since pregnancy is none of those, abortion cannot be accurately labeled health care. In fact, abortion has the same relationship to health care and medicine that prostitution has to love and romance.
If abortion is outlawed women will again be killed in back-alley abortions.
Virtually every study on this subject has concluded that deaths and injuries due to illegal abortion have been wildly exaggerated and that the vast majority of illegal abortions were done by licensed doctors who were simply breaking the law.
Not only are abortion apologists lying when they say that thousands of women used to die every year from back-alley, coat-hanger abortions, but their own research proves it.
Figures released in 1986 by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) show that in the 15 years prior to the legalization of abortion, the average number of women dying from illegal abortion in the entire United States was 136 per year and dropping. Obviously, it is a tragedy when even one young woman loses her life in this way.
However, there is a way to protect women against illegal abortions without butchering millions of defenseless children.
The first thing to keep in mind is that pro-lifers don’t do abortions. If abortion were outlawed today and illegal abortionists started springing up next week, every one of them would be someone who is pro-choice. In fact, every woman who was ever killed or maimed during an abortion – whether it was legal or illegal – was killed or maimed by someone who was pro-choice. In other words, when the abortion lobby says, “If abortion is made illegal, women will die,” what they’re actually saying is, “If you stop us from killing babies, we’re going to start killing women.”
So clearly, the solution to the back-alley abortion problem is for the pro-choice gang to agree not to do them. They could also help us pass legislation requiring that, (a) people who commit illegal abortions are to be prosecuted under the same homicide statutes that apply to any other hired killer and, (b) anyone who coerces a woman to have an illegal abortion, or helps to arrange an illegal abortion, is to be charged as an accessory to homicide.
Of course, these people are never going to agree to this because they never cared about this issue to begin with. They simply wanted to make it look like we are responsible for the pregnant women they are threatening to kill. The fact is, every time one of these radical pro-choice fanatics screams about dirty coat-hangers and back-alley abortions, the blood is on their hands – not ours.
Also, if the motivation for legalized abortion really is to save the lives of women, why don’t we legalize rape?
After all, it is not uncommon for a woman to be killed by a rapist to keep her from identifying him to the authorities. Legalizing rape would save those women by taking away that motivation. We could also set up rape clinics where rapists could take their victims. These centers could offer clean rooms, condom machines, emergency contraception, and perhaps even doctors on staff in case the rapist injures his victim. We could even issue licenses to rapists requiring them to undergo routine testing for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Remember, the pro-choice argument is that women are going to have abortions regardless of what the law says, and that keeping abortion legal will make sure they occur in a clean and safe environment. Those dynamics also apply to rape. Keeping rape illegal has not prevented women from being raped, so why not at least try to prevent back-alley rapes? As ridiculous as this suggestion is, if the goal is saving women’s lives, it makes as much sense as legalized abortion.
Late-term abortions are not done unless the woman’s life is in danger or the baby is already dead or couldn’t survive.
In April of 1995, George Tiller – the notorious late-term abortionist from Wichita, Kansas – spoke at the National Abortion Federation’s 19th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, where he stated, “We have some experience with late terminations, about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past five years.”
Tiller admits that of the 10,000 children he killed between 24 and 36 weeks in a five year period, 8% had fetal anomalies. And we cannot assume that the other 92% were to protect the lives of the mothers, since modern medical technology makes it extremely rare for pregnancy to be life-threatening, and since abortions to protect the lives or health of the mothers are done earlier in the pregnancies.
Tiller’s admissions were confirmed at the National Abortion Federation’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco in 1996. Martin Haskell – the Ohio abortionist who invented partial-birth (D&X) abortion – stated, “Two of the criticisms that I’ve been hearing lately about how our side is structuring its debate is that, one, we seem to be taking a position that – in the case of the D&X – that the fetuses are dead at the beginning of the procedure, which is generally not the case. The second criticism has been that we are really skewing the debate to a very small percentage of women that have fetal anomalies or some other problem that really need the procedure verses the 90% who it’s elected, at least through the 20 to 24 week time period, and then as you get on towards 28 weeks it becomes closer to a hundred percent. But these seem to be very uncomfortable issues for people on our side of the debate to deal with.”
Haskell is admitting that his pro-choice colleagues have been lying about the babies in late-term abortions being dead before the procedures start, and lying about women having these procedures for health reasons. He even admits that as the pregnancies got further along, the percentage that were elective increased, with 28-week and later abortions being virtually 100% elective.
What about a 14-year-old girl who finds herself pregnant?
No 14-year-old girl ever “found” herself pregnant. She got pregnant. This deceptive rhetoric is intended to rationalize abortion by projecting women as victims of their pregnancies rather than participants in them.
The answer to abortion is not in making it against the law but in changing hearts. You cannot legislate morality.
The answer to all of humanity’s problems is in changing hearts. In fact, we wouldn’t need any laws if everyone would always do what is right instead of what is wrong. But until that day comes, the role of the law is not to change hearts but to restrain the heartless. As Martin Luther King once pointed out, the law could not make people love him but it could keep people from lynching him.
Regarding abortion, our government has no right to allow its victims to be slaughtered waiting for the killers to have a change of heart. Besides, if abortion is not murder we do not need a change of heart. If it is murder, the law has no right to allow the heartless to do it.
While it is true that the law can’t make an immoral person moral, to say that we don’t legislate morality is idiotic. Every law passed is someone’s idea of right and wrong. The law is the mechanism society uses to decide which behaviors it will and will not tolerate. If those decisions are not going to be based on morality, what should they be based on?
You have no right to tell others what to believe. You people are just anti-choice extremists.
Given that “choice” is now defined as the right to butcher defenseless children by the millions, we are indeed anti-choice. If that also makes us extremists, so be it.
However, to contend that we are trying to tell people what to believe is absurd. Laws are passed to control behavior, not thought. Laws which prohibit armed robbery are not at all concerned about what people think about armed robbery, as long as they don’t commit them. That is how we view abortion. We don’t really care what people think about the unborn, as long as they don’t kill them.
I am personally opposed to abortion, but I can’t inflict my beliefs on others.
The only basis for being opposed to abortion is the recognition that it is the killing of a child. Therefore, when someone takes this “personally opposed” position, what they are saying is, “I understand that abortion is the intentional slaughter of defenseless children, but I’m not going to do anything to stop it.”
That raises the question: which other innocent human beings do they think it should be legal to kill? Also, are they equally tolerant on other issues? Presumably, they are also “personally opposed” to rape, armed robbery, racial discrimination, and wife-beating. Do they have a problem inflicting their personal beliefs regarding these issues as well?
It is especially fraudulent for politicians to take this position.
Inflicting their views on others is precisely what legislators are elected to do and every vote they make does just that. Further, if a politician is not going to be guided by his own personal views, then (a) why would he bother to tell us what his personal views are, and (b) exactly whose personal views is he going to be guided by?
Politicians who say they are Christians but that they won’t impose their religious beliefs on others are also frauds. If some guy claimed to be a Christian while owning a chain of triple-X theaters and porn shops, no one would believe that he is sincere about his faith. That also applies to politicians. When a person says that if their faith collides with their politics, it is their faith they will abandon, what they are actually saying is that God can’t trust them. So why should we?
Of course, when it comes to this “forcing beliefs” issue, the most important point is that 45 to 50 million dead babies have had the pro-choice mob’s beliefs forced on them.
Someone can be opposed to abortion but still be pro-choice.
This is an outright lie. The only people in this country who are truly opposed to abortion are those who are calling for the unborn to be protected by law. This is simply the rhetoric of people who want to have their cake and eat it too. On one hand, they recognize, and want for themselves, the moral superiority of the pro-life position. On the other hand, they lack the character and courage to fight for it.
This position is similar to the “personally opposed” one discussed above. Again, there is no reason to be opposed to abortion except the recognition that it is the killing of a child. So what these people are really saying is, “I would never kill my baby, but I wouldn’t stop someone else from killing their baby.”
To see how truly asinine that is, imagine someone who says, “I would never own a slave, but I wouldn’t stop someone else from owning one.” Could we honestly conclude that such a person is opposed to slavery?
This is a religious issue and you have no right to force your beliefs on other people. Keep your Rosaries off my ovaries!
A person does not have to be religious to say it’s wrong to murder a child, any more than they have to be religious to say it’s wrong to steal money. Just because many pro-lifers are motivated by religious beliefs does not make abortion a religious issue. Remember, the civil rights movement was often led by pastors and headquartered in churches, but that didn’t make civil rights a religious issue.
To say that abortion should be off limits to the law because most pro-life people are Christians, is as illogical as saying we should do away with laws against theft because one of the Ten Commandments is, “Thou shalt not steal.” If we are going to start rejecting laws simply because they are supported by religion, given that there is hardly anything illegal which is not also prohibited by Scripture, then we will have to do away with all of our laws.
As for the ovary issue, we pro-lifers are as indifferent to our opponents’ ovaries, as we are to their spleens, gall bladders, and tonsils.