Questions About Abortion from College Students Part 1

A series offering brief answers to a list of questions submitted to Students for Life of America

In preparation for an event with Students for Life of America, they compiled a list of questions from their campus groups and sent them to me. They wanted me prepared to offer a brief response to help the student leaders process these challenges. We made a few short videos and will finish the video series in the coming weeks, but it seemed appropriate to share the responses in a written form as well. This is the first installment of however many installments are necessary to respond to every question submitted.

Question 1 - Why should I care about the fetus if having a baby is inconvenient?

In some way or another, every other human life has the capacity to be inconvenient to us. I want to get across town to a football game or a show, but traffic interferes. A person wants a job, but someone else gets the position. A student wants admission into the school of their dreams, but so many other qualified students applied they get rejected for reasons which may never be clear to them. Other people can always be seen as an inconvenience from certain points of view.

The question when discussing embryonic human life or fetal human life is not whether their existence will frustrate life goals or ambitions. They might. The question is whether the early human life is one of us. Is the fetal human a full member of the human family? If the answer to that question is yes, then it doesn’t matter if their existence is inconvenient, we are not permitted to kill them. We don’t get to kill other human beings because their existence frustrates our goals. The defender of abortions rights must explain why we can kill fetal or embryonic humans for being inconvenient when we cannot kill newborn or adolescent humans for the same reason. What explains the moral difference between human beings at different developmental stages? I defend the position the equal dignity of all human life is grounded in our shared humanity. They must explain why some human life is more important than other human life, they don’t get to simply declare a life is inconvenient.

Finally, we will unavoidably fail to achieve all sorts of goals in our lives, and the reasons for our failures are rarely due to other people existing. Failing to meet goals is not a failure to flourish. It is not a failure to live a fulfilling life. It is just a part life. If we stop seeing our goals as ultimately important and place a greater emphasis on the importance of relationships with the people in our lives, we can encounter more than our own ambitions. We might just find out that a greater number of people in our lives is a blessing rather than a frustration. We might discover we love our child more than something we previously believed would make us happy. Our early ambitions might naturally fade as our joy in our family grows.

Question 2 - How can I better explain that a baby's life is of equal value to the women's life?

We must not allow ourselves to be forced to frame the abortion discussion as a question of competitive value. The fetal human is not more valuable than the life of the woman gestating it. Neither is the woman more valuable than the fetal human. As two members of the human family, they share equal human dignity and are both owed equal respect.

This means when a challenge arises of which rights supersede the other, the right of the fetal human to continue to exist and the right of the mother to control how her body is used, the exact same analysis will be applied as in any other case. If the fetal human is one of us, then destroying them would be homicide. All death is either accidental, natural (heart disease, cancer, etc.), suicide, or homicide. Abortion would fall under the category of homicide. Some homicide, humans killing other humans, is justifiable. Cases like Just War Theory, self-defense, or cases of medical necessity create scenarios where to save life in the face of moral or natural evil we must be free to perform an action which may be lethal to another human life. We don’t intend to destroy. We act to preserve life, either the life of an innocent attacked by someone intending to do them harm, e.g. the lives which will be saved by resisting an evil nation; or the life that will be lost if we allow certain pathological conditions during pregnancy to progress until we lose both the mother and the unborn child. The bar for justifiable homicide has been set extremely high.

Does pregnancy meet those conditions under normal circumstances? Not at all. We need necessity, we have no other choice but to destroy a life to save a life, and proportionality, the threat of harms is proportional to the action taken to preserve life. A healthy pregnancy fails to reach those standards in both cases. The unborn human doesn’t have to die because the harms of pregnancy under normal conditions aren’t life threatening. They are life altering, but that isn’t justification for destroying another life.

This isn’t a conversation about prioritizing one life over another. This is the exact same conversation we would have anytime tough questions arise about how we treat our fellow man in extreme situations.

Question 3 - When does life begin?

At the completion of the fertilization process, and this isn’t even controversial. A whole, distinct, and living human organism exists at the completion of the fertilization process. The embryo is not a constituent part of either of its biological parents. It is not an organ in the mother’s body but a new human life at the earliest moments of its developmental path. It is distinct life, with its own genetic identity. And it is human. In fact, it is by definition a human child from the moment it comes into existence as it is the direct biological progeny of its parents. We can quibble over the use of the term baby, but it is undeniably a child.

The question may need further exploration if the abortion supporter is asking when morally meaningful human life exists or when the embryo becomes a person. They should not be allowed to assume such distinctions exist without challenge. We don’t get to wave rhetorical hands and declare such a thing as a non-personal human exists or that non-meaningful human life is a coherent idea. Anyone who wishes to declare that whole groups of human lives lack equal dignity better be able to explain how they have the authority to divide the human family up in that way. Further, how we can ever trust they have identified the dividing point between the valuable and the valueless correctly? If they are wrong, which they almost certainly are, they invite us into terrible injustice. We are unjustly destroying other human beings because we find their existence inconvenient. It is better to embrace an inclusive view of human value, our starting point is that every human life ought to be treated with dignity and respect.