Can an atheist be pro life?

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Short answer: Yes!

Life is a blessing unto itself. It has intrinsic value. A cogent human (believer or not) looks above or beyond human frailty and failure and recognizes that value not only for what it is, but also its temporal value to society and to the individual.
 
As others have said, there can be, and are, atheists who are pro-life.

An atheist could certainly see the killing of a helpless baby human in the womb as a moral wrong and a bad thing for society, even if they don’t believe in God, heaven, hell etc.

Also, there are secular legal arguments against abortion, including the fact that it denies human/ civil rights to the child in the womb and also denies rights to the father of the child.
 
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And still, maybe it seems to be that religion have an impact on this issue. Don’t you think? Anyway, I was just asking.
 
An atheist can hold to any moral tenet he or she pleases. The logic of holding it to be objectively moral while adhering to atheism falls apart however.
 
Alligator said:
The logic of holding it to be objectively moral while adhering to atheism falls apart however.
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Why?

Objectively, a human zygote is a human (homo sapiens) in its zygotic stage of being, a human embryo is a human in its embryonic stage of being, a human fetus is a human in its fetal stage of being, a human neonate is a recently born human in its newborn stage of being, a human in their teens is a human in the adolescence stage of being, and a young adult is a human being in early adulthood. What do they all have in common? All or parts of their central nervous systems are developing.

At some point in early adulthood, the human being comes into their own and stops growing and developing physiologically, becoming an adult. By the time a woman reaches 35 years, she is considered advanced maternal age, or a senior mother, if she gets pregnant. At 55 to 60 years, we consider these adults to be geriatric adults or senior citizens, with the human body and mental capacities like memory and reflexes beginning to decline. But if we’re from the species homo sapiens, we’re human beings.

Atheists accept objective morality in the form of ethics that acknowledge accepted standards of right and wrong or a moral code of right and wrong, especially based on the human dignity and human experience. Being a human atheist doesn’t exclude adherence to objective morality. If anything, it can strengthen it exponentially, because unlike other belief systems, for an atheist, we get one life and this is it. I’ve met many atheists who are more principled than others of different beliefs because there is no afterlife that will make it all better, no devil that makes anybody do something bad, no God that makes someone good, no karma, no dharma, no reincarnation to give more chances to get it right from their perspective. We have this life and if our species and the earth is going to survive, it must be approached with respectful concern and not treated like a wasteland.

This is what I observed from other atheists and it was my own approach to life when I was an atheist.
 
A friend of mine works for a pro-life organization and she said that there are non-religious members in that organization as well. If an atheist is interested in protecting a vulnerable life from abortion, then they can definitely be pro-life.
 
Absolutely. This question always bothers me. I’m not an atheist, but know a few. Most of which ARE pro life. I always wonder why anyone even ties being pro life to religion at all. Pro life to me has NOTHING to do with ones religious beliefs. It is a human rights issue, a life issue, a humanity issue for many.

To me, asking this type of question is no different than asking if an atheist can be anti-murder.
 
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I’m pretty sure you completely missed what I was saying. I did not say an atheist couldn’t be a moral person with a moral code. I said, from an atheistic perspective, there is no moral code beyond what we, the individual, or society accept as a standard of ethics. That standard is either the psychological product of a natural selection process carried out through human history, or it is a defect in the individual holding the view as it goes against the societal view.

Regardless of whether the atheist thinks something is right or wrong, she has no objective reason for believing it. Or believing her own mind is rational at all since it is the product of an unguided natural process. At best, she is just doing whatever action best ensures the continuation of the gene pool. At worst, she’s acting out of survival of self. There’s not a transcendent right or wrong.
 
Alligator said:
Regardless of whether the atheist thinks something is right or wrong, she has no objective reason for believing it.
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It depends on how one defines morality to be honest. If you have an objective criteria as to what makes something moral/immoral and the definition is agreed upon, then it’s possible for objective observations to be made. Correct an atheist would be unlikely to believe in a transcendent right or wrong, and I saw where your original post was getting at that and so didn’t respond, but MamaJewel’s response is still a good summary of why it’s not needed for someone to reach that belief.
 
RabbiDaniel said:
Does beleiving (Religion, Bible) have an influence on the pro life, pro choice issue?
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Yes the bible influences our beliefs on the sanctity of human life made in the “Imago Dei”.
However, there are many people who will parse the bible and find contradictions that lead to doubting the mandate to protect human life. Many progressive Christians are doing that. “The bible is not clear on abortion”. Of course, by that same (false) standard, the bible is not clear on genocide either. But that is an inconvenient observation for progressive Christianity which has lost it’s way on the abortion issue.

The sanctity of human life is revealed in more ways than Scripture. The Catholic Church does not rely on bible verses alone to affirm human life. It relies on Tradition, natural law, etc in addition to scripture. All of them in a contextual harmony.
 
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Elf01 said:
Yet you were pro abortion as an atheist.
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Once my belief went away, I was actually still pro-life for about a solid year. Then after taking some science classes, I became pro-choice. After a few months quarreling with Catholic pro-lifers, I was still an atheist, but returned to a pro-life stance based upon the scientific existence of the species to which humans currently belong.

At that time, I came to realize that we are literally here to transform our species into its next stage of being. It isn’t some random occurrence either. One day, humans will no longer exist as the species we are. We will have moved into the next phase of being as whatever species we are to become. Our homo sapiens genetic code will sit there looking like “junk DNA” glopped in the entity we become.

We will transcend our species, if we don’t self destruct before getting to that future point of existence.

Somewhere along the way on this journey with God temporarily stepping away from me, my being realizes that none of this life is random. There are worlds of existence that make up who we are, and those worlds on minute levels are the foundation of our physical world of matter, yet the material in those minute worlds don’t operate based on the same laws of physics that we observe 3-D matter obeying.
 
My faith teaches certainly teaches that human rights, including the right to life, apply to all from womb to tomb. But this belief isn’t unique to the Catholic faith, nor does it need to be.

I do think that Catholics and other Christians shoot themselves in the foot by trying to make a religious case against abortion to a broader, diverse, and often secular world.
 
RabbiDaniel said:
Does beleiving (Religion, Bible) have an influence on the pro life, pro choice issue?
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Of course…

Especially when one’s Religion is Anti-Abortion.

That said… I don’t see why an eg Agnostic or non-activist? Atheist … could not be Anti-Abortion.
 
I once attended a pro-choice group’s secret meeting where they were practicing how to talk with pro-lifers. They play-acted the scenario of: “How do you know it’s alive” with their response being ‘Because the Bible told me so.’

In other words, they apparently think Christians are complete rubes whose answer to everything is ‘The Bible told me so.’ 😃

I’ve been against abortion my entire life for the exact same reason I’ve always been against murder and genocide: killing other people is wrong. I can look at a science textbook and see that there is a living human being inside a pregnant woman. Logic and reason tell me she’s not carrying anything other than a living human being. Why on earth would anyone think it’s acceptable to take the life of a helpless human being?

I would believe that no matter what faith / no faith at all I am because we inherently know that killing others is wrong.
 
Poet said:
I once attended a pro-choice group’s secret meeting where they were practicing how to talk with pro-lifers. They play-acted the scenario of: “How do you know it’s alive” with their response being ‘Because the Bible told me so.’
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Reminds of Luciferian tactics.
 
Poet said:
I once attended a pro-choice group’s secret meeting where they were practicing how to talk with pro-lifers. They play-acted the scenario of: “How do you know it’s alive” with their response being ‘Because the Bible told me so.’
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I’m skeptical that this accurately represents the full context of the discussion. I know plenty of pro-choice people and not one has ever argued that a growing fetus isn’t alive.
 
Dan123 said:
I’m skeptical that this accurately represents the full context of the discussion. I know plenty of pro-choice people and not one has ever argued that a growing fetus isn’t alive.
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I’m reporting exactly what I watched take place. This was exactly the role-play partner’s response: A wide-eyed ‘Because the Bible told me so.’

The question may have been how do you know it’s human? Regardless, the question in question (no pun intended) was one of those two and a blatantly scientific question.

If you want more context, it was in the late 90s (the point being that at that time many on the pro-abortion side were still pretending that a growing baby in utero is ‘just a clump of cells’) and I am in full agreement with you that many if not all pro-abortionists are fully aware that a baby growing in the womb is alive (and human). Whether these two women engaging in this exercise knew that or not, I can’t say. I would have to think they did. Their goal was to practice shooting down supposedly stupid pro-lifers who supposedly base all their beliefs on the Bible saying so.
 
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Poet said:
Whether these two women engaging in this exercise knew that or not, I can’t say. I would have to think they did. Their goal was to practice shooting down supposedly stupid pro-lifers who supposedly base all their beliefs on the Bible saying so.
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Was that the only response they role-played or was it part of a larger thing on the types of responses they might get?
 
That was their sole response. They seemed entirely clueless that anyone might be against abortion for ANY reason other than ‘the Bible said so.’

The shock that someone would believe that is part of why the incident has stuck with me for nearly 30 years. No, they offered NO other potential response.
 
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