In post Roe America, abortion discussions can get ugly really fast. If you think I’m kidding, try posting an ultrasound image of a 12-week fetus with a formal argument for the pro-life position:
Premise 1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
Premise 2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.
Therefore, in Conclusion: Abortion is morally wrong.
Within minutes, you’ll have a string of comments, not all of them nice. “Why do you hate women?” “What are you doing for kids after they’re born?” “Do you have a uterus? If not, shut up you unreasonable bigot! Your argument has no validity.”
You expected pushback, but marvel how your post provoked such outrage. Why the intense personal attacks? It feels like something else is going on here.
You are not the problem
Let’s get three things straight. First, you don’t hate women. Pro-life pregnancy centers outnumber abortion clinics by a wide margin nationwide and they’re funded with private donations from prolifers, not tax money. Clearly, pro-lifers do love women who face unplanned pregnancies, both before and after birth. But suppose they didn’t. What follows—that the unborn are not human or that intentionally killing them is morally permissible? Arguments stand or fall on their merits, not the behavior of those advancing them.
Second, the issue isn’t that you’re anti-choice while your critics are pro-choice. Truth is, like all pro-life advocates, you are vigorously “prochoice” when it comes to women choosing a number of moral goods. You support a woman’s right to choose her own healthcare provider, to choose her own school, to choose her own husband, to choose her own job, to choose her own religion, and to choose her own career—to name a few. These are among the many choices you fully support for the women of our country. But some choices are wrong, like intentionally killing innocent human beings simply because they are in the way of something we want. No, we shouldn’t be allowed to choose that.
Third, you are not unreasonable. Calling you names is not the same as refuting your argument. If the premises of your argument are true, your argument is sound. If the conclusion of your argument follows logically from the premises, your argument is valid. Calling you names like “bigot” or “hateful,” or attacking you for your gender, will not disprove the validity or soundness of your argument. It’s a lazy attempt to dodge your case rather than doing the hard work of refuting it. Truth is, pro-lifers don’t merely state their argument. They defend it. The science of embryology is clear that from the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings. You didn’t come from an embryo; you once were an embryo. In the 2020 edition of their medical textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, authors Keith L. Moore, T.V.N. Persaud, and Mark G. Torchia write this:
Human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, the zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell (capable of giving rise to any cell type) marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.1
Very few abortion-choice advocates dispute these facts. In his book A Defense of Abortion, David Boonin—a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado—writes that “a human fetus, after all, is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development.”2 Yet he argues for abortion anyway, even while conceding that you’re identical to the embryo/fetus you once were.
In Writings on an Ethical Life, Australian ethicist and philosopher Peter Singer states:
Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense, there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.3
Philosophically, there’s no essential difference between you the adult and you the embryo that justifies intentionally killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependence are not good reasons for saying you had no right to life then but you do now. Stephen Schwarz suggests the acronym SLED as a helpful reminder of these nonessential differences:4
Size: You were smaller as an embryo, but since when does your body size determine value? Large humans are not more valuable than small humans.
Level of development: True, you were less developed as an embryo, but six-month-olds are less developed than teenagers both physically and mentally, but we don’t think we can kill them.
Environment: Where you are has no determinative bearing on what you are. How does a journey of eight inches down the birth canal suddenly change the essential nature of the unborn from someone we can kill to someone we can’t?
Degree of dependency: Sure, you depended on your mother for survival, but since when does dependence on another human mean we can kill you? (Consider conjoined twins, for example.)
In short, while there certainly are differences between human embryos and mature human beings, merely citing those differences is not enough. You must show why those differences are morally relevant for determining who does and does not have a right to life.
A larger worldview divide
The SLED acronym helps pro-life advocates quickly get to the philosophical crux of the abortion debate. At issue is not who loves women and who hates them, but a serious philosophical debate about what makes humans valuable in the first place. Either you believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life, or you don’t.
Pro-life advocates, following The Declaration of Independence, hold to what Christopher Kaczor calls an endowment view of human value.5 That is, humans are valuable by nature not function. Although they differ immensely with respect to talents, accomplishments, and degrees of development, they are nonetheless equal because they share a common human nature that bears the image of their Maker. Their right to life comes to be when they come to be.
Lincoln articulated this very point in arguing against slavery. If all men are created equal— and the slave is a man—then he was created equal to other men. Given his nature as an endowed being, you cannot rule over him the way that you would a hog. By “equal,” Lincoln did not mean equal in color, size, intellect, or moral development. Rather, drawing from the Declaration of Independence, he meant equal in nature—and this truth was self-evident.
From the endowment view, pro-life advocates distinguish intrinsic (fundamental) dignity— which we have in virtue of our humanity made in the image of God—from attributed dignity, which we earn through achievement, and which comes in degrees.6 You can’t earn intrinsic dignity. You can’t confer it on yourself or others. You can’t have more or less of it. You have it simply because you’re human. As Kaczor points out, the university scholar and the drunken beach bum share equal intrinsic dignity, though they differ in their attributed dignity. Unlike the beach bum, the scholar has flourished according to his nature. Thus, his attributed dignity is that which we accord to him based on his professional excellence. But the intrinsic dignity of both is identical and was there all along. Our job is to recognize it.
Abortion-choice advocates usually don’t recognize it. They more or less espouse a performance view of human value. Being human is nothing special. What matters is your ability to immediately exercise an arbitrarily selected trait that mature human beings possess but embryos and fetuses do not. Selected traits often include cognitive functions like self-awareness, sentience, solving complex problems, having desires, or interacting with one’s environment. Or, they may include physical features like body size, viability, location, or development.
For example, in her book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, feminist Katha Pollitt dismisses human embryos as “pea-sized,” “lentil-sized,” and “shrimp-like,” before reluctantly conceding their humanity: “Obviously, a fertilized egg is human—it isn’t a feline or canine—and it’s alive and it is a being in the sense that it exists.” But she doesn’t think all humans are equal:
It’s hard to see how a fertilized egg qualifies as [a person]. It has no brain, no blood, no head, no organs, or limbs; it cannot think, feel, perceive, or communicate. It has no character traits or relationships and it occupies no social space. It is the size of the period at the end of this sentence.7
Notice that both positions — the endowment view and the performance view — use philosophical reflection to answer the same foundational question: What makes humans valuable in the first place? Pick a side. There is no neutral ground here. That’s why abortion debates can heat up in a heartbeat.
Which view best accounts for human value?
Given Pollitt concedes the humanity of the unborn, an inquiring pro-lifer might ask what essential difference exists between Pollitt the embryo and Pollitt the adult that justifies killing her at that earlier stage of development. Her reply: Embryos fail to qualify because they’re too small (“the size of a pea”), too undeveloped, can’t think or feel, can’t communicate, aren’t conscious, aren’t self-aware, don’t look like children, and don’t function like the rest of us.
But why are those characteristics valuegiving in the first place? And who decides which traits ultimately matter? She more or less appeals to consciousness when she states that embryos “cannot think, feel, perceive, or communicate,” but what exactly does she mean by “consciousness?” As Christopher Kaczor points out, requiring actual consciousness renders us nonpersons whenever we sleep. Requiring immediately exercisable consciousness excludes those in surgery, but not those who sleep. Requiring the basic neural brain structures for consciousness (but not consciousness itself) excludes those whose brains are temporarily damaged.
On the other hand, if having a particular nature from which the capacity for consciousness is present makes one a valuable human being—even if one can’t currently exercise that capacity—then those sleeping, in surgery, or temporarily comatose are valuable persons with a right to life, but so also are human embryos, fetuses, and newborns.8
Moreover, performance accounts prove too much. Infants cannot make conscious choices or interact with their environments until a few months after birth, so what’s wrong with infanticide? Toddlers, meanwhile, cannot reason or solve complex problems. Can we intentionally kill them?
Abraham Lincoln raised a similar point with slavery, noting that any argument used to disqualify Blacks as valuable human beings works equally well to disqualify Whites:
You say “A” is white and “B” is black. It is color, then: the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are a slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again: By this rule you are to be a slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own. But you say it is a question of interest, and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.9
Put simply, performance accounts of human value result in savage inequality. As Patrick Lee and Robert George point out, if humans have value only because of some acquired property like skin color or consciousness, and not in virtue of the kind of thing they are, then it follows that since these acquired properties come in varying degrees, basic human rights come in varying degrees. Do we really want to say that those with more self-consciousness are more human (and more valuable) than those with less? This relegates the proposition that all men are created equal to the ash heap of history.10
Finally, performance accounts of human value are subject to episodic problems. For example, during fetal surgery, the fetus may be removed from the womb, fixed, then placed back in his mother’s body to be born naturally weeks later. Press reports about these types of surgeries speak of “babies who are born twice.” In such cases, does the fetus go from being a non-person prior to surgery, to briefly being a person during the procedure, then back to not being a person during recovery?
Or suppose that a woman who is twenty-fourweeks pregnant flies from the United States, where legal viability is twenty-two weeks, to Bangladesh—where it’s thirty-six weeks. She returns home a week later. Does her child go from being a person while the jet is in US airspace to being a non-person when she enters Bangladesh airspace—only to become a person once again when she arrives back in the U.S? Absurd! Viability measures our technology, not fetal value.
True, humans differ immensely with respect to talents, accomplishments, and degrees of development. Nevertheless, they’re equally valuable because they share a common human nature made in the image of God. Humans have value simply because they’re human, not because of some acquired property or trait they may gain or lose in their lifetime.
You’re on the hot seat—now what?
Suppose the campus newspaper want to interview you on abortion. The reporter isn’t exactly friendly. Citing a feminist professor, he asks why pro-lifers like you hate women. How might you respond in a minute or less? Instead of panicking, say the following:
I hope you don’t believe pro-lifers hate women, but I think you are right about one thing: If the unborn are not members of the human family, I am indeed unfairly imposing my views on women. However, if each and every human being has an equal right to life, and the unborn is one of us, can you see things my way? That is, if you shared my position that abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being, wouldn’t you do everything you could to stop it? Wouldn’t you want unborn humans protected by law just like everyone else? Of course, I realize you don’t share my position, so my point here is really quite modest: The issue that separates us is not that I hate women and you love them. What separates us is that I believe the unborn are members of the human family and you don’t. That’s the issue I hope we can talk about.
Suppose the reporter follows up with, “So, why are you pro-life?” Here’s your one-minute sound bite to focus the debate on what truly matters:
I am pro-life because it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. The science of embryology is clear that from the earliest stages of development — from the one cell stage — you were a distinct, living, and whole human being. You weren’t part of another human being like skin cells on the back of your hand; you were already a whole living member of the human family even though you had yet to mature. Meanwhile, there is no essential difference between you the embryo and you the adult that justifies killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying we could kill you then but not now.
In short, stick to your SLED. It will help you keep the main thing the main thing.
About the Author Citations Scott Klusendorf
Scott Klusendorf travels throughout the world training pro-life advocates to persuasively defend their views in the public square. He contends that the pro-life message can compete in the marketplace of ideas if properly understood and properly articulated. Scott is the author of T he Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture, released in March 2009 by Crossway Books and co-author of Stand for Life released in December 2012 by Hendrickson Publishers. Scott has published articles on pro-life apologetics in The Christian Research Journal, Clear Thinking, Focus on the Family Citizen, and The Conservative T heological Journal. Scott is a graduate of UCLA with honors and holds a Masters Degree in Christian Apologetics from Biola University.
1. Keith L. Moore, T.V.N. Persaud, and Mark G. Torchia, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 11th ed. (Philadelphia: Elsevier, 2020), 11.
2. David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20.
3. Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: Ecco Press, 2000), 127.
4. Stephen Schwarz, The Moral Question of Abortion (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1990) pp.17-18.
5. Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 102-106.
6. Christopher Kaczor, A Defense of Dignity (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) pp. 5-6.
7. Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (New York: Picador, 2014), 69.
8. Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 56–57.
9. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers University Press, 1953) 2:222.
10. Patrick Lee and Robert George, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 138. s