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What is the pro-life goal?

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Is the pro-life movement so blinders-on focused on the plight of single-celled zygotes that they haven’t noticed where their bus is going? Their destination isn’t a play pen with laughing babies but an illegal abortion clinic with teenage girls afraid of the procedure and terrified that they’ll be reported to police by some Christian busybody.

Personal responsibility

But first, let’s look at one more reaction to the tweet that started this set of articles (part 1).

How about the concept of personal responsibility? I am stunned at how Americans no longer want to be responsible for themselves or their actions. From abortion to free everything, we’ve become a nation of irresponsible freeloaders.

Are you a freeloader if you get food from a church food bank or take other forms of church charity? If church members can give charity to needy people who aren’t freeloaders but need a little temporary help, why can’t taxpayers do the same thing through government programs?

I presume part of this complaint is that a pregnant woman must take responsibility for her actions. Yes, and she might take responsibility by getting an abortion.

Consider a parallel medical need, someone injured in a car accident. The person who drives a car knows there’s some chance of an accident, but the emergency room personnel don’t disqualify them even if they were irresponsible. Similarly, a woman who has sex knows there’s a risk of pregnancy, but the abortion clinic doesn’t disqualify her either.

(While we’re talking about responsibility, note the irresponsibility of U.S. churches who hide behind a loophole that allows them, and only them, to accept nonprofit status but not open their financial records to prove to the American public that they’re using that financial benefit wisely. Only two percent of U.S. churches file the IRS 990 financial disclosure form. Do they have something to hide? That’s what the rest of us are thinking, and Christian churches should push for the removal of this embarrassing loophole. More about churches and hidden finances here.)

Trying to illustrate how taking responsibility works, one Twitter reply showed a meme of a pair of pants with the caption, “Used as directed, prevents 100% of all unwanted pregnancies and STDs, with zero nasty side effects!”

Not really. “Keep your pants on” is an effective contraceptive in the same way “Don’t eat so much” is a practical weight-loss diet and “Just stop smoking” is valuable advice for someone trying to quit.

Christians, don’t focus on making abortion illegal. Focus instead on making it unnecessary.

What is the pro-life goal, really?

The pro-life goal is to replace Planned Parenthood with Kermit Gosnell, the illegal abortion clinic doctor who was convicted in 2013 of the murders of three infants delivered alive plus the manslaughter of one patient. As Chris Charbonneau observed, you can’t eliminate abortion; all you can do is make it more dangerous. With legal avenues gone but the demand still there, abortions will just be illegal. We’re not in the dark about what will happen since we’ve already been here. Before the Roe decision in 1973, the per capita abortion rate was higher than it is today.

Demand is the key to a sensible abortion policy, not prohibition. We must focus on reducing the demand, which means reducing unwanted pregnancies.

I’m about to explain the unsurprising route to reducing unwanted pregnancies but first I want to check in with any pro-life Christians. Do you really think of abortion as murder? Do you think of the 930,000 annual abortions in the U.S. as a holocaust? If so, keep that thought in mind as we continue.

The first step to reduce unwanted pregnancies is comprehensive sex education in schools. Sex can’t be taboo if we expect students to really understand where babies come from, how consent works, how contraceptives work, sexually-transmitted infections, the myths surrounding sex, and so on. Second, contraceptives (especially the most reliable kind, the Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives) should be subsidized and easily available.

At this point in the discussion, many conservative Christians push back. There’ll be no 12-year-olds putting condoms on bananas if they have anything to say about it! But prudery is no excuse when we’re talking about murder—right, my Christian friends? You did say that what we’re trying to avoid is murder, right? Of course sex ed must be age appropriate, but children must learn the facts early enough so they’re comfortable with them before they need them.

Based on what I’ve seen, conservative politicians have no interest in seeing the abortion question resolved. They benefit from an ongoing fight where they can say, “The sky is falling! Vote for me!” This means that they would be the last ones pointing out how the differences could be resolved. Following a conservative politician’s advice on how to respond to abortion is like getting advice from a crisis pregnancy center on how to respond to an unwanted pregnancy.

Christians, don’t focus on making abortion illegal. Focus instead on making it unnecessary. You’ll make a lot more progress working with pro-choice advocates on the common goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.

See more: Most US abortions are due to the pro-life movement

Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy
contravenes enumerated rights in the Constitution,
namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition
against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy,
as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.
— Prof. Michele Goodwin, New York Times

Pro-life Christians as civil rights trailblazers?

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Take a look at how a pro-life advocate wrapped up his argument. I don’t know when I’ve been talked down to so overtly.

This is from “All Human Beings Are Valuable” by Tim Barnett (part 1 of my response to his article is here).

The debate isn’t over when life begins. That’s settled science. The debate is over when life is valuable. You see, pro-lifers argue that every human being, regardless of race, or gender, or size, or age, or ability, is valuable simply because they’re a member of the valuable human race. You don’t earn your right to life by having certain characteristics like the correct race, or gender, or size, or ability, or age. No. You have it in virtue of being human….

Folks, we’ve been here before. The Nazis referred to some humans as life unworthy of life. Does this sound familiar? Pro-life proponents, religious or not, believe all humans have a right to life, including unborn humans.

Wow. Just … wow. Do I laugh? Do I cry? Do I grab a barf bag?

I didn’t realize that conservative Christianity was the engine behind every U.S. civil rights improvement. With Barnett representing conservative Christianity, I now imagine him standing behind President Johnson as he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I see him arm in arm with African-American civil rights leaders in Selma in 1965. I’ll mentally place him at every major civil rights milestone since. I’m picturing him today as the Pride parade marshal sitting in the back of a convertible, draped in a rainbow flag and waving to admirers.

Yes, Martin Luther King was a Christian pastor, but modern evangelical Christianity doesn’t trace its civil rights roots back through Dr. King. Yes, a century ago Christians were at the forefront of social change—prison reform, child labor laws and compulsory public education, women’s suffrage, pure food laws, and more—but social improvements like these are of no interest to today’s Evangelicals. And yes, William Wilberforce was a Christian who led the anti-slavery movement in Britain in the early 1800s, but Southern pastors of that time had easy work making a godly pro-slavery argument based on the Bible.

A cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter.

Last time I checked, conservative Christianity was not leading the civil rights parade. Obergefell (same-sex marriage becomes legal nationwide), Loving v. Virginia (ditto mixed-race marriage), the racist policies of Bob Jones University—conservative Christianity seems to always be dragging its heels, forever on the wrong side of history for every civil rights issue. Conservative Christianity’s political wing, the Republican party, is right now behind gerrymandered districts and laws designed to disenfranchise people of color. We mustn’t forget that “conservative” means resistant to change.

Pro-life Christians, check back with us after conservative Christianity builds a track record of positive change aimed at improving lives. Until then, don’t compare us to Nazis or lecture us about the superiority of your moral position.

That’s not to reject the idea that all lives matter, but the lives we’re talking about are those you don’t need a microscope to see.

See also: Why Is Christianity Conservative? Shouldn’t it Be Leading the Charge for Change?

Summary

We’ve covered a lot in these two articles (part 1 here). Here are some takeaways.

  • The “But my argument isn’t religious, it’s scientific!” argument is bullshit if they’ve redefined words to support a predefined conclusion against abortion. That kind of biased thinking is how religion works, not science.
  • The attempt to reclassify these pro-life arguments as scientific rather than religious fails. With their argument back in the Religion bin, the conflicting religious opinions from Judaism, the Satanic Temple, and more are back in play. That means that the zero-tolerance Christian pro-life argument has no more standing than the Jewish argument that abortion is part of a complete program of health care.
  • The redefinition of “human being” to encompass zygote (single cell) to newborn and everything in between fails as a thought experiment, it isn’t common usage, and it fails as a dictionary definition. The spectrum argument shows that the focus is logically placed on the enormous difference between zygote and newborn, not the uninteresting similarity.
  • The spectrum argument is useful when it forces the anti-choice Christian to confront the many differences between zygote and newborn by naming that spectrum. Simply putting a name on it makes plain that, no, a single microscopic cell and an eight-pound newborn are not the same thing.
  • The example of self-righteous bluster for the moral high ground above may help prepare you for seeing it in your own discussions.

A Steinway piano takes as long to complete as a human baby. It’s not a piano on day one; at best it’s a stack of lumber. It’s only a finished piano when it comes out of the factory. In the same way, a cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter. And a fetus is not a baby.

Pro-lifers claim to be defending life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell and forcing that on society by law doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

See also: Five Emotional Pro-Choice Arguments

What harm would it do if a man told a good strong lie
for the sake of the good and for the Christian church
… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie,
such lies would not be against God,
He would accept them.
— Martin Luther