*Note: I wrote this post quite quickly, in my limited free time over the past couple of days, so it’s not as polished as I’d like it to be. But I wanted to publish it as soon as possible in the hopes that it might help bring some clarity to the chaos which has been unleashed after the leaking of the Supreme Court’s plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. If you’d like clarification on any of the points I make here, though, feel free to contact me as always.

I want to begin by saying that if you’ve had an abortion, I am not condemning you. Many women who procure abortions are coerced into it to some degree; and even if they’re not directly manipulated by the people in their lives, they’ve certainly been manipulated by the political propaganda that saturates the public discussion surrounding this issue. The bottom line is that I cannot judge anyone’s heart. While we can look at certain actions and say “that action is wrong”, we simply cannot know how culpable an individual is when they commit the action. This is the principle behind the phrase “Love the sinner, hate the sin”.

So, know that while I absolutely hate abortion, I love you — whether or not you’ve had an abortion. Please don’t read any judgment or condemnation into what I say here. This post is about the arguments being made and the philosophical principles which underlie them, it’s not about judging the personal character of anyone who has had an abortion.

Now, part of what makes the abortion debate so difficult is that on the surface it’s about different things for different people. The pro-abortion side tends to view it as an issue of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, healthcare, and privacy; the anti-abortion side tends to see it as a human rights issue, as a matter of protecting the child’s right to life. For this reason, simply arguing over whether abortion should be legal or not is mostly fruitless; unless you get down to the fundamental philosophical questions which underlie this debate, the conversation will never progress anywhere meaningful.

So, what is the abortion debate really about? It seems to me that it can be reduced down to these two questions:

1. What makes human life valuable?
2. Which is more important: love or power?

Let’s look at them one at a time.

What Makes Human Life Valuable?

“It’s just a clump of cells.”

Those arguing in favor of abortion will often repeat this and other platitudes to try to make the point that the life of the child in the womb is not valuable in the same way that your life or my life is valuable. Some will go so far as to say that the child isn’t human, but this is a scientifically and logically incoherent claim. Biology tells us that (1) the reproductive offspring of two members of a species is necessarily a member of that same species, and (2) an organism which is a member of one species cannot transform into a member of another species.

It follows, then, that when two humans reproduce, their offspring is necessarily another human — it’s not a dog or a cat or a hamster. It also follows that the offspring of two humans isn’t some other species initially and then transforms into a human at some later point in his or her development — the child is human from conception. So when someone claims that a fetus isn’t human, they’re objectively wrong, plain and simple.

What these people often really mean, though, and simply lack the conceptual framework to articulate correctly, is that they believe the child isn’t a person. Personhood is a philosophical category of being — but one which has no concrete definition, so in my opinion it’s a useless term to try to use in the abortion debate. Rather than arguing over whether a fetus is a person, or when personhood begins, it’s better for both sides to focus instead on the question of what makes human life valuable, since it’s asking the same essential question without the confusing jargon. As we’ve established, a child in utero is undeniably a human — and it should go without saying that this human is, indeed, alive — so the real question is whether a human life in this particular situation is valuable, which requires us to examine what specific conditions we believe must be met in order for a human life to be valuable.

The problem, though, with placing any conditions on when a human life is valuable, is that if we are allowed to decide which human lives are valuable, then the question of which human lives are valuable will always be subject to change — determined either by popular opinion, or by whoever holds the most power at a given moment.

Frankly, it baffles me that this isn’t plainly obvious to everyone. To use a political example, it’s a lot like when people will push to give the executive branch of government more power because the current President is a member of their political party — but you’re giving the President the power to make decisions which you wouldn’t want your opponents to have the power to make. You may think it’s a good idea now because “your side” is in power, but eventually someone else will hold the power, someone you oppose, so you have to ask yourself whether you’d want your opponents to have the same amount of power in the future that you want to give “your side” right now.

Determining what makes human life valuable works much the same way. If you argue that certain conditions must be met in order for the life of a human being to be valuable, it doesn’t actually matter what you argue those conditions are; what you’re really arguing is simply that we have the power to decide what makes a human life valuable. You may think that it’s a good idea for you to be the one to determine what the conditions are for valuing a human life (because you obviously know better than everyone else, right?) but you need to ask yourself whether you think it would be a good idea for others to be able to make that determination. Would it be okay for a racist to determine what makes human life valuable? They’d very likely pick different conditions than you would; yet, as much as you may disagree with their conditions, you’ve already conceded that they do indeed have the power to decide what makes a human life valuable — and who are you to tell them that their conditions are wrong and yours are right? You’ve consented to operating within the framework of “might makes right”, so you would have no moral ground to stand on in arguing against the racists. Unless you assert that every single human life is equally and unconditionally valuable, you’re allowing for the justification of things like racism, sexism, ageism, any form of discrimination, slavery, genocide, and more, when people who support these evils hold either the power or the majority opinion to enforce these ideas.

Think about it: if you believe that the value of human life is conditional, then it cannot be assumed that the Holocaust was morally wrong. Nazis who argue that Jews aren’t people, and pro-abortion individuals who argue that human children in utero aren’t people, are making the very same argument: “A human being’s life is only valuable if he or she meets the conditions which I’ve determined he or she must meet, and if these conditions are not met then we can do anything we want to that human being, including torture, mutilation, and homicide.”

The only difference is that you are choosing to value different characteristics than the Nazis were; but at the end of the day, both you and the Nazis are looking at a group of human beings and saying: “They’re not people, their lives aren’t valuable like yours and mine are, so we can do whatever we want to them.” I realize that Nazi comparisons are cliche in politics and often used in silly ways just for the sake of eliciting emotional reactions, but this is one instance in which it is a legitimate comparison, because — philosophically-speaking — the pro-abortion crowd is actually making the same argument that the Nazis were making (and the same argument that the supporters of slavery were making, and the same argument which has been used countless times throughout history to justify various other atrocities).

This is precisely why, for those who oppose abortion, there are no conditions — every human life is equally valuable, full stop. A human being’s size, location, stage of development, cognitive ability, or level of independence, have no effect on the value of his or her life, nor do race, ethnicity, sex, age, religion, nationality, skin color, class, or any other characteristic. This is the only position which holds to a consistent life ethic, and it’s the only position which provides a legitimate logical defense against atrocities like slavery and genocide.

Now, it should be understood that this by no means settles the abortion debate. Even if you rightfully acknowledge that every human life is equally and unconditionally valuable, and therefore the life of a child in utero is no less valuable than anyone else’s life, there is still an ethical debate to be had over whether we can justify ending this child’s life under certain circumstances. It can be permissible to kill another human being in certain cases, even if we recognize that all lives are equally valuable. For example, it is virtually universally agreed upon that killing someone who is immediately and deliberately threatening your own life is morally justified — not because their life is less valuable than yours, but because the circumstances allow for it.

So, once we agree that every human life is equally valuable, the question then becomes: do the circumstances of an unwanted pregnancy allow for the killing of the child to be morally justifiable? To answer this question, we must begin by asking a different question…

Which Is More Important: Love or Power?

“My body, my choice.”

Another one of the platitudes that the pro-abortion side often repeats ad nauseum, this statement flippantly makes some very serious and complex ethical assumptions — namely, that I am justified in taking any action, no matter how severe, if someone infringes on my bodily autonomy.

But is this true? Is it “my choice” to deal however I want with someone who impedes my capacity for physical sovereignty?

In the case of physical assault, some people would say yes, I am justified in defending myself against physical assault in any way I choose. Yet even in this case, there are many who would disagree, saying that I am certainly justified in stopping the assault by harming the assailant, but that I wouldn’t be justified in ending the life of the assailant unless I had no other choice. Take a second and ask yourself, what do you think? If you were able to stop an assailant without ending his or her life, would you be justified in choosing to end the assailant’s life anyway?

If not, then “my body, my choice” isn’t actually a morally justifiable principle in this situation — and if it’s not justifiable in this situation, how much less justifiable would it be in a situation where no violent assault is taking place?

Let’s say, though, for the sake of argument, that you do think that if someone were assaulting you you’d be justified in choosing to kill them even if it wasn’t necessary, making “my body, my choice” applicable to cases of violent assault. Firstly and importantly, this is not supported by our laws; if you use unnecessary and excessive force against someone — even someone who is violently assaulting you — you will be held accountable for breaking the law. If a woman is punching a man in the face, and the man defends himself by killing the woman, the law will not deem him to have acted with a justifiable amount of force, but will prosecute him as a criminal. With this in mind, consider the case of an unwanted pregnancy, where the child is causing the mother very minimal and temporary “harm” — would the mother be justified in killing the child?

Even more importantly, though, a violent assault is a very different situation than that of a pregnancy — even an unwanted one. An adult violently assaulting you is not comparable — morally, logically, or legally — to a child in your womb. To compare the relationship between a mother and her pre-born child to the relationship between a victim of violent assault and the person who is violently assaulting them is an absurd equivocation. And if someone is making this comparison, it’s evidence that they’re looking at this issue extremely irrationally, which means it’s useless to try to reason with them by pointing out the flaws in their logic — there is no logic in their position, only emotion and ad hoc justifications for their ideology.

To be clear, I fully realize that this isn’t an argument against the claim that a violent assault is a comparable situation to a pregnancy; what I’m doing is explaining to you why I am dismissing the claim outright. The fact is that some claims are so irrational, they’re not worth taking the time to argue against, because it can be deduced from the irrationality of the claim that the person isn’t open to listening to reason anyway. If you cannot see immediately that an adult violently assaulting someone is not a comparable situation to a child in his or her mother’s womb, then nothing I could say will matter.

But I digress — back to the main topic.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you believe a woman would indeed be justified in using any means whatsoever to “take back” her bodily sovereignty from her child — what would this mean? What would it say about your values?

In short, it would mean that you hold power as a higher ideal than love.

This is the principle behind the notion “my body, my choice” in relation to abortion — I have absolute power over my own body, and nothing supersedes that power, nothing is more important than it, not even the life of my own innocent child; and because of this, I am morally justified in killing my child for the sake of maintaining my power.

When those on the pro-abortion side talk about “rights” like “the right to bodily autonomy”, what they’re really talking about is power. And it logically follows from their arguments that they view power as being more important than love. Many of them even take it so far as to hold power as the highest ideal — power is what matters most to them. Power is sacred. And this is far from a new idea. In fact, it was the predominant view in the pre-Christian pagan world. Power was seen as divine, which is why kings and other rulers were viewed as gods — whoever had power thereby had divinity, because power was the divine principle. So in a very real way, the pro-abortion movement is a regression from Christian values to pagan values. Much more could be said about this, but let’s stay focused on the philosophical aspect of abortion rather than the religious aspect for the time being.

Now, I’m not saying that pro-abortion people don’t value love at all; what I’m saying is that they value love less than they value power — indeed, as I’ve explained, they typically value everything less than they value power.

Those on the anti-abortion side see things quite differently, though. We believe that love is more important than power. Many of us even take it so far as to hold love as the highest ideal — love is what matters most. Love is sacred. Love is the very foundation of reality (see my post Agápē for more on this idea). Now, similarly, I’m not saying that anti-abortion people don’t value power at all; what I’m saying is that they value power less than they value love — indeed, they typically value everything less than they value love (at least in principle; living out these beliefs is always easier said than done, and I’m certainly not claiming that everyone who opposes abortion is a saint).

This principle, that love is the highest ideal, is what’s behind the belief that it is morally wrong to kill your own child in utero even if you didn’t conceive this child on purpose. Often consent is used as a major talking point in the abortion debate, and the anti-abortion side will try to argue that consenting to sex is consenting to pregnancy — which is a legitimate point to consider and flesh out. But this doesn’t cover cases of sexual assault, which, although they account for less than 1% of abortions, are still important to consider. And ultimately, abortion isn’t wrong because you’ve consented to some sort of binding agreement with your potential future offspring — it is wrong because it ends the life of a human being in a situation where such action is not morally justified. Why is it not morally justified? Because while it’s important to have power over your own body, your power and your sovereignty are subordinate to the moral responsibility that you have to love your child.

Also important to consider on this point is the child’s innocence. When we’re determining whether a situation would allow for the justifiable killing of another human being, that human being’s guilt or innocence is one of the most significant factors. If a person is innocent, it is never morally justifiable to kill them. This is one of the most basic principles of morality and law. While pro-abortion individuals will often claim that a child in utero cannot be called innocent because the child’s presence causes the mother harm and may even place her life in danger (claims which are typically wildly and unscientifically exaggerated), this doesn’t change the fact that the child obviously isn’t deliberately causing the mother harm. So, rather than using the word “innocent”, it may be more beneficial to use the word “blameless” as it would be harder to twist its meaning. But the principle remains the same: If a person is blameless, it is never morally justifiable to kill them.

In Summary

I think it will be helpful to re-state more concisely what we’ve covered here:

• A human embryo is a human being; to deny this is to deny scientific, biological fact.
• Giving ourselves the power to determine which human lives are valuable and which aren’t is extremely unwise, dangerous, and historically ignorant, because it inevitably leads to atrocities.
• For this reason, we necessarily must view every human life as equally valuable in order to protect humanity against such atrocities.
• While ending a human life can be morally and legally justifiable in certain situations, an unwanted pregnancy is not one of them — both because of a mother’s responsibility to love her child, and because of the child’s innocence.
• Therefore, abortion is never, under any circumstances, morally or legally justifiable.

Obviously, our laws do not currently reflect this conclusion. And I certainly am not claiming that what I’ve said here is somehow the final word on the issue; there is far more that could be said about the philosophy which informs the abortion debate, but I’ll leave it here for now, and possibly follow up with another post in the future.

I do hope you’ve found this helpful. Abortion is a very emotionally-charged issue, but that doesn’t mean we can’t think rationally about it. The more we can recognize what’s going on below the surface of this debate — the philosophical implications of the various arguments being made — the more effective we can be in our dialogue about it.

As always, feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

God love you.