Arguing Abortion

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Lost_Sheep

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How does one make a religious argument against abortion with someone who is not religious and doesn’t believe this whole “God thing?”
 
Lost_Sheep said:
How does one make a religious argument against abortion with someone who is not religious and doesn’t believe this whole “God thing?”
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You can’t. You’ll have to work with science and natural laws which by-the-way are compatible with Catholic teaching. So, you don’t necessarily have to bring up religion to make a point.
 
You will probably have to make a secular argument such as:
  1. A human baby can only come from the mixture of human sperm and human egg.
  2. Both a sperm and an egg are living cells, at no point do they become anything other than living human cells.
  3. A zygote (sperm + egg) is nothing less than a living human that has unique DNA.
  4. It is wrong to kill a human.
  5. Abortion is killing a human (regardless of circumstance or intention).
  6. Therefore, abortion is wrong.
 
Lost_Sheep said:
How does one make a religious argument against abortion with someone who is not religious and doesn’t believe this whole “God thing?”
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I would think that you could make the same argument against abortion as you would argue against the murder of any child or adult.

If it is wrong to kill another human being it is wrong to kill an unborn human child.

If it is not wrong to kill an unborn human being it is not wrong to kill any human being.
 
Lost_Sheep said:
How does one make a religious argument against abortion with someone who is not religious and doesn’t believe this whole “God thing?”
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Fight three ways on this.

First remind them that the guilt of killing a potential child usually haunts the woman the rest of her life. It doesn’t matter if she tells herself it was just a brainless bit of biology. It doesn’t matter if she uses every argument in the book. She still knows when it happened. She still knows how old it would be by now. And she still gets to remember the physical trauma her body went through after the fact. This is doubled if for some reason she never ends up having any kids. It’s tripled if she does. Because she’ll know exactly what she destroyed the first time around.

Then step around the idea that people without kids would really have been all in to get one. It would have made someone’s absolute perfect gift. They would have been over the moon. So carrying the kid’s a real act of bravery, self-sacrifice, and ultimate selflessness. Things the world really could use more of.

Then mention that the idea that people would play around with the parts of their bodies that make kids only to rip the little tiny guys apart for the sake of convenience and more play-time neither sounds particularly mature or principled. It’s a base form of animalism that makes everything about them and their pleasure. It doesn’t raise them up but ends by pulling them down. They’ve got to go around knowing they’d trade their future children for a night’s romp. Just for a short buzz they’d be willing to justify the termination of another person’s potential being. It’s really shallow, self-absorbed, and childish.

Then you can just smile and tell them to go ahead. Because your kind will eventually outnumber theirs. Done and done.

Peace Lost_Sheep

-Trident
 
Lost_Sheep said:
How does one make a religious argument against abortion with someone who is not religious and doesn’t believe this whole “God thing?”
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You really can’t. Their beliefs are as strong as yours.
 
This particular person is one of those who doesn’t believe life begins until a fetus is “viable” outside the womb. And is using a term I am unfamiliar with: Bodily Autonomy. :confused:
 
I saw an avatar here on Catholic Answers that is a good argument against abortion. To paraphrase, it said, “It’s growing. Isn’t it alive? It came from human parents. Isn’t it human? Then how can you justify killing it?”

With a lot of people who say they’re pro choice, they’re pro choice only up to a point. Many will admit they have problems with the concept of late term abortions, for example. It’s important to figure out where they stop supporting the culture of life and address why they feel abortion is justified in some cases and not in others, arguing that all children deserve the right to be born and loved. 🙂
 
I took an ethics class once and a student wrote an amazing essay in the defense for life by arguing that at the moment of conception a person is created and an unbroken chain will continue to exist until death. I would argue that bald eagle eggs are protected by the federal government because bald eagles are endangered, so the government establishes that bald eagle eggs are future bald eagles that need protection. Furthermore, I may be wrong here, the federal government does not specifically say a fetus is not a human/person. A murderer or drunk driver can be convicted of two killing if a woman is pregnant. The federal government simply says abortion is legal. In other words, abortion is the legal killing of a person, and is more equivalent to killing for self-defense.
 
I think you have to meet people where they are. If they are not ready to believe in any kind of faith, religious arguments just won’t work. The only option you have is to use arguments they can understand. For abortion, there are many statistics about its harmful effects on women. These statistics will be evidence of the truth – God does not want people having abortions – but it is not proof. Ultimately, they need faith to believe, but faith requires believing without seeing and hearing. For people who will not believe, we can only pray and hope that God’s urging through the Holy Spirit will change them.
 
I think one can make an argument against abortion just by looking at the progress of humanity through history.

Every time human civilisation has improved, it’s by elevating the status of people, and by being more caring towards them. When we have not cared, we have been in danger of slipping backwards.

In the 19th century and into the 20th, slavery was abolished because people realised it was fundamentally incompatible with human dignity and the respect that human life inherently deserves. No country in the world (I think) today executes children. All but the most fringe laissez-faire among us advocate for at least limited degrees of social security. We have ideas like habeas corpus (even if the principle underlying it is rather honoured in the breach rather than observance sometimes). We do not tolerate cruel punishments (even if we disagree on what quite counts as ‘cruel’ sometimes). In our various ways in different countries we have at least tried to create justice for all, or the best we can manage at it right now.

Many countries have abolished the death penalty (and I suspect that the United States will, within my lifetime) - not because people who are executed do not deserve it but because we all deep down are forced to acknowledge a concern about what the taking of human life does to society - to all of us.

No doctor or biologist on Earth could plausibly argue that a newly-conceived clutch of cells isn’t human life - it is both alive and human. Abortion isn’t legal currently because the embryo isn’t human life but only because our society currently says that some human lives don’t matter. It used to be said (or at least implied), that people of a particular race, or national origin, or religion, or the disabled, or women etc, ‘didn’t matter’, and did not deserve our protection or equal and fair treatment because they were implicitly lesser human beings. I think in time this is the argument which will see the end of at least elective abortion.

I think we also have to be wary about special case arguments that people often make - “what about abortion in the case of rape or incest?” Also the common tropes that women are in danger from unsafe abortions if it’s made illegal - or that it stops unloved and unwanted children from being born into poverty where they never have a real chance…

…which to my mind is extremely spurious. There are special case arguments for every law and we don’t allow them to undermine them usually. Allowing for abortion in any case really, is like saying “we’ll allow for a little murder providing you can give a good argument in favour of it.”

While I am not remotely in favour of the use of contraception - it is undeniably very easily and cheaply available these days, for anyone, and generally very reliable if used properly (though not as reliable as not having sex if you’re not open to life, but that’s a different thread…). If we cannot stop people having sex, unwanted children can at least be stopped by the various methods of birth control. But if it does slip up - there is a new human life and no one has a right to condemn that life to death.

As for the circumstances into which we are born, that is the chance that each of us takes anyway, for good or bad, without knowing it. Once we have life, good or bad, we are all entitled to keep it, and very very few people willingly give it up, however bad it’s god. The answer to poverty isn’t to kill children or to encourage women to think that abortion is the only option. We can’t bend moral laws just because it makes social problems easier to deal with - we have to work to improve society instead.

And as for economics, you can make an economic argument for everything. It makes sense to kill everyone with learning difficulties or disabilities, and to weed out all otherwise “useless” people in society, and toss them out with the garbage. That has happened in the lifetime of many people alive today, and the world rightly condemns the perpetrators of such actions. Why? Because we value human life and human dignity.

To bring religion back into it - Christ said that above all the other commandments we should love our neighbours as ourselves. Surely when we are called to be patient and kind to children - when we are called in fact to emulate them - that includes not murdering them with the excuse that they are too young to matter yet!

But I do not believe one needs religion to believe in human ethics.
 
Lost_Sheep said:
This particular person is one of those who doesn’t believe life begins until a fetus is “viable” outside the womb. And is using a term I am unfamiliar with: Bodily Autonomy. :confused:
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The baby outside the womb is only viable when waited on hand and foot! Is this such a marked difference from the moments prior to birth?
 
+1 that you won’t get anywhere with a religious argument with a person who is areligious. To make the case against abortion, then, you put their own values at the forefront (equality and science, for example).

Here are 2 articles that make such a case. One is my own, the other is my attempt to put Trent Horn’s AWESOME video into a short blog format. Neither of these depend upon the religious view:

Abortion Kills a Living Human…
Why is Abortion Wrong (Trent Horn)
 
What I would love to have is a big library of counter-arguments, sound bites, squelches, and put-downs to anything they could throw at me.
 
ahs said:
+1 that you won’t get anywhere with a religious argument with a person who is areligious. To make the case against abortion, then, you put their own values at the forefront (equality and science, for example).

Here are 2 articles that make such a case. One is my own, the other is my attempt to put Trent Horn’s AWESOME video into a short blog format. Neither of these depend upon the religious view:

Abortion Kills a Living Human…
Why is Abortion Wrong (Trent Horn)
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Thanks, but neither provides a counterpoint to the statement “[it is a human] when it can survive outside the womb.” The notion that it is a human from the very moment of conception is something they seem to want to conveniently ignore because it does not suit their agenda. Trying to convince them is difficult whether one uses religious or secular arguments.
 
Lost_Sheep said:
Thanks, but neither provides a counterpoint to the statement “[it is a human] when it can survive outside the womb.” The notion that it is a human from the very moment of conception is something they seem to want to conveniently ignore because it does not suit their agenda. Trying to convince them is difficult whether one uses religious or secular arguments.
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You counter that by asking “why must one be able to live outside the womb in order to be human?”. Science will not help them there, because it’s not a scientific claim. (It’s actually circular reasoning.)
You point out the scientific fact that : the baby in the womb requires nourishment, hydration, and a safe place to develop…nothing more. What does every human being in the entire world need to survive? (Nourishment, hydration, and safety.)
 
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