Johnz Thomaz
Any time there is an opening on the Supreme Court, abortion becomes a hot topic. I wanted to address some of the common arguments in favor of abortion. (I don’t think I am strawmanning here. These are actual common arguments.)
Let me know if I missed any common “pro-choice” arguments.
1. “My Body My Choice”
This isn’t even an argument. It’s just an emotional statement with no logical grounding, but it’s so common, it needs to be addressed. Every single law is about regulating bodies. Every one of them. From the flag code, which states how you should use your body to fold the American flag; to income taxes, which say that if you use your body to perform productive labor, you will be fined by the state; to laws against rape, which say you cannot use your body to force sexual relations with another person. So, the “my body; my choice” argument is meaningless drivel. In a just society, you cannot choose to use your body to violate the rights of another human, and you certainly cannot choose to use your body to murder a baby.
2. “If you don’t have a uterus, then you can’t have an opinion”
Logic does not have a gender, and is not based on human anatomy. Just like 2+2 does not stop equaling four if a different person is doing the arithmetic, so also does a logical argument not lose its force when made by a man rather than a woman.
It would be silly to say something like: “If you don’t have a penis, you can’t regulate what men can do with penises. Therefore, women should not be able to regulate rape.” The fact that a man is using his penis to violate another individual’s rights is a concern for all of society, not just men or women. The fact that some people murder babies is a concern for all of society, not just women.
3. “It’s not really a baby. It’s a fetus or embryo.”
This one I will grant. A baby could be defined as a newborn or infant, which would not include an embryo or fetus. However, terms like “embryo,” “fetus,” “newborn,” “infant,” “toddler,” “child,” “adolescent,” and “adult” are merely words used to describe different stages of an organism’s life cycle. If you say that it is OK for a human to kill another human, simply because that human is in a different stage of its life cycle than you are, then it should also be acceptable for an adult to kill an adolescent.
Murdering people is wrong, regardless of their stage of development.
4. “You are restricting my reproductive rights.”
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt in debates, but I really don’t know how someone can make this argument, if they gave more than six seconds of thought about what they are saying. Limiting abortion does not limit anyone’s right to reproduce. If you want to reproduce, you can, regardless of whether abortion is legal or illegal. If you don’t want to reproduce, the legality of abortion doesn’t change your rights to make that determination. It’s complete silliness to suggest that someone who wants to prevent a person from murdering a baby is somehow “restricting reproductive rights.” (Kudos to those who created the alliteration for that argument, though. The repeated Rs make it sound appealing, even though it’s completely irrational.)
5. “There are no laws that regulate men’s bodies.”
This isn’t really a logical argument, but merely a claim to fact. And, as a claim to fact, it can be tested. 93% of the prison population is male, and since any crime that lands one in prison must be committed with the body, as we do not yet have thought police, and we still have (somewhat) freedom of religion, the statement is clearly false. Men are imprisoned far more often than women for doing things with their own bodies. Grant it, this often involves men using their own bodies to violate the rights of other people, and they are justifiably punished, just as a woman who uses her body to kill her own child should be punished.
6. “Unless you are willing to financially support every unwanted baby, then you must support abortion.”
This is completely absurd. It’s like saying, “Unless you will adopt every troubled teen, then you must support school shootings.” Just because I don’t want someone to murder or to be murdered does not mean I am obligated to provide anything for that person. This is an example of a false dichotomy. I can logically say that it’s best if parents care for their own children, and also hold that they should not kill their own children. These positions are perfectly capable of being held simultaneously and consistently.
7. “If you make abortion illegal, abortions are going to happen anyway. They will just be more dangerous.”
This could be said about a lot of things. For example, we make it illegal to hire a hitman to kill another adult. Presumably, a trained assassin is going to be better able to kill another adult than an amateur would be. And since adults killing adults is going to happen anyway, shouldn’t we allow people to hire hitmen, so that there will be less collateral damage? This of course, would not be ideal. Yes, murder is still going to take place, even when outlawed, but that doesn’t justify the legalization of murder.
8. “You want a rape victim to carry the baby of her rapist!”
Actually, I don’t. I don’t want people to be raped. But, when they are raped, in the extremely rare case that it produces a baby, then we need to ask who should get the death penalty for the rape? The child of the victim, the child of the rapist, the rapist, or none of these people? Since we don’t give the death penalty to the rapist in most cases, then it’s hard to say that we should give it to his children, who were not involved in committing the rape. And it certainly would not make sense that the child of the victim would be sentenced to the death penalty. In what just society would the child of the victim, or even the child of the perpetrator, deserve a more severe punishment than the perpetrator himself?
I also find it interesting that people jump right to this argument, which is a very rare case for abortion. It would be like if someone were suggesting that theft be outlawed, and another person saying, “You can’t outlaw theft. What if someone needs to steal a loaf of bread to feed his starving family?” It’s ok to have the conversation about stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family, but first, you should establish that in general, stealing is wrong. Once the general is established, you could begin looking at specifics. We do the opposite in the abortion debate. We ignore the general, and focus on the specifics right away.
9. “The woman owns her body, and the baby is trespassing.”
You cannot invite someone onto your property, and then shoot them for trespassing. The act of sex is an invitation for a new life to be created. Saying that an invited guest is trespassing, and should therefore be murdered for it, is a perversion of property rights.
10. “If you really cared about kids’ lives, you would want guns to be outlawed.”
This is another false dichotomy argument. You can logically hold the belief that one should not murder babies, while simultaneously and consistently holding the belief that people have a right to have guns. No pro-lifer is arguing that a doctor should not be allowed to have forceps and scissors, even though those tools might be used to commit an abortion. They want the commission of abortion to be illegal, not the tools used to commit abortion. Similarly, most pro-second amendment people want murder to be illegal, not the tool used to commit murder.
11. “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be subsidized.”
This claim is completely unprovable and mere conjecture. But, we can tell by voting patterns that women are more likely to vote for subsidizing general health care than men are, so I can’t imagine that men would be more likely to want subsidized baby-murder than women would. I see no basis in reality for this conjecture, but since it is only conjecture, it cannot be proven or disproven.
12. “If you care about unborn babies but not poor kids, then you aren’t really pro-life.”
I don’t know a single pro-life person who says that poor kids should be allowed to be murdered, with no repercussions for the murderers. This is a veiled version of the “Unless you are willing to financially support every unwanted baby, then you must support abortion” false dichotomy addressed previously.
13. “Aren’t you a libertarian? Libertarians should not be telling others what they can and cannot do with their bodies.”
I am a libertarian; therefore, I believe in the Non-Aggression Principle. The entire basis of libertarianism is the Non-Aggression Principle, which says that people cannot use their bodies to initiate aggression against other humans. And since embryos and fetuses are humans at a different stage of development, they cannot be aggressed against according to basic libertarian principles.
14. “You should outlaw menstruation and male masturbation, too, because it’s the same as abortion.”
No, it’s not. Sperm cells or egg cells are not the same as a fertilized egg. A new human DNA strand is formed at the moment of conception. Before conception, there is no human to murder. After conception, there is.
15. “If you outlaw abortion, then you should also outlaw Viagra.”
This is a non-sequitur. One half of the argument in no way logically stems from the other half. Murdering babies has nothing to do with erectile dysfunction.
