My Pro-Life Defense on Reddit - My Stance

As you may have seen on my Facebook, I posted in on reddit in response to the question/prompt: 

Okay conservatives, post your rational arguments that we constantly bury here. I won't downvote any of them. Hopefully others will follow suit.

[Here's the link] of my response and the literally hundreds of follow-up comments. In this post, I'm going to outline some of the basics of my stance on abortion, and will continue to clarify my position further in future posts.

Introduction
As I began responding to the hundreds of responses I got, my stance on abortion became increasingly clear to me. Believe it or not, I was largely unconvinced that abortion was wrong until only a few months ago. To me, the Biblical support that the soul begins at conception is shaky and unconvincing. Not only that, I objected to the idea that abortion is murder and that those who have abortion are murderers, because to me, a genuine belief in this morally justified things like the bombing of abortion clinics or the murder of doctors who perform abortions. Also, if abortion truly was murder, why don't the anti-abortion conservative evangelicals care more about the issue? I just didn't believe that the pro-life rhetoric that abortion is murder was genuinely reflected in their belief systems or in their actions. All this paired with the lack of any sort of emotional attachment to "clumps of cells", I could not bring myself to accept the pro-life side.

So as I began writing back to my millions of fans around the world, my stance became solidified. To me, these stances are coherent and internally consistent, and it seemed like many of the pro-choice people were satisfied with many of my answers. That said, some of my beliefs are non-traditional, especially for an evangelical Christian. I haven't really run these arguments by many Christians, so tell me what you think.

Abortion is a violation of human rights.
The following is the response that I submitted, to which I got over a 1,500 upvotes and hundreds of responses. This line of thought came to me as I was reading about William Wilberforce in the book Amazing Grace (thanks, Knox!). I thought to myself, "How could they not see Africans as people too? Shouldn't it be so obvious?" I've actually never heard someone give the following argument, and from some of the responses I got (which I will post later), it seems like it's the first time that others may have heard it as well.

"I think abortion is a violation of human rights. I'm actually a little surprised that most progressives are so adamantly pro-abortion, as I think it's actually the next human rights hurdle that needs to be overcome. In Roman times, infantacide was common, because children were perceived to be property of their parents, without rights for themselves. Now, we recognize the personhood of children, and killing children is universally accepted as morally wrong. Two hundred years ago, slaves were considered as the property of their owners, and had no human rights. Killing a slave was merely just destroying something that you owned. Now, it's nearly universally accepted that those slaves were persons, and deserved their own human rights.
Which brings us to today. I understand the argument that a woman should be able to do what she wants with her body and I agree with it, so long as it does not infringe on the basic human right of life of someone else. I know that all (if not most) pro-choice people out there do not consider a fetus as a human life, deserving of human rights (if so, I don't think you would be pro-choice!). However, 200 years ago, slave owners viewed slaves as sub-human, as did parents to children even longer before that. Slave owners would have objected that they should have the right to do what they wanted to their property. 

Yes, I understand that infantacide, slavery, and abortion are all different issues, with different societal implications and cultural nuances. However, the point is that we see in history that society has progressed to recognize various "peoples/groups" to be persons deserving of human rights, and I think/hope that the same will be true for unborn babies. These changes come not only with legislation, but with a general shift in thinking. It goes much deeper than just politics to general worldview. 

Progressives have led us in the fight for human rights in so many different areas, and it is a little surprising to me (and a little sad) that for the most part, they aren't also fighting for human rights in the realm of abortion. 

Edit: sorry for using "pro-abortion". It is a poor choice of words, and should be "pro-choice" instead."

A baby's personhood begins at conception
This is the underlying assumption I hold. I will elaborate more on this in the next post, but I just wanted to make this clear.

The moral heinousness of aborting a baby and murdering an adult are NOT the same.
I do not believe that aborting an unborn baby is of the same moral weight as murdering an adult or even of the same weight as murdering a born baby. So while it could technically fit the dictionary definition of murder, I think that the word "murder" is too loaded and has moral implications that I do not think necessarily apply to abortion. You may object that if it is essentially the same action of ending the life of a person, it should carry the same moral weight. Here's an argument against this that I posted -

I think that two identical actions with two different subjects/victims can hold different moral weight. For example - adult rape is morally wrong, but in my mind, raping a 2-year old (and it does happen), is indescribably worse. Another example would be robbing the house of a rich person and stealing $1000 of cash seems "less wrong" than knowingly stealing $1000 from a poor family. From many perspectives, the crime is the same, and both are morally wrong (taking this at face value), but one seems to carry more moral weight than the other. 

This of course does not add to the idea that abortion is less morally weighty than murder of a toddler, but it feels that way, and that's the best I can give you at the moment. I need to give it a little more thought, but I hope this kind of gives you some of my premises and framework of thought.

As I mentioned above, I have a real problem with the implications of considering abortion as morally equal to the murder of an adult. Would it be morally justifiable to murder an abortion doctor, who may have "technically" murdered hundreds of people? Would it be morally justifiable to treat those who have abortions as true murderers? In my opinion, no. However, most pro-choice people don't consider it any sort of moral transgression if a baby is aborted before the third trimester, and I've found this observation of different moral "weights" is a reasonable, appealing one. The abortion has been framed in such a polarizing way, where abortion is either murder, and mass genocide is happening, or there hasn't been any moral transgression at all. I find this to be unnecessarily polarizing, and I believe there is a middle ground.

Should abortion be criminalized in the US? 
As in all things, I believe that Christians should not put hope in any legislation to be the solution, and I really don't believe that an all-out ban on abortion is the solution, at least right now. I don't actually think that the legislation is the root problem at all. If we ask ourselves, "Why are people having abortions? What is the root cause?", I don't think it's possible to just point at Roe v Wade and say, "If that law wasn't passed, no one would be having abortions right now." There are various root causes, ranging from poverty to inadequate sex education to a disregard for the unborn. All of these need to be addressed.

That said, do I believe that abortion should be criminalized? First of all, I don't think it ever will. I don't believe that Roe v. Wade will ever be overturned, so I think it is somewhat futile framing the debate in such all-or-nothing terms. That said, given a choice, I don't think that the US is ready for a ban of abortion, especially in how people in the country view abortion. It was brought up multiple times that abortion rates go down in countries that legalize it fully, and that abortions remain common in countries that criminalize it. Until abortion is widely seen as more of a last resort, I don't think banning abortion will necessarily have the desired effects that so many pro-life people hope for. In addition, I feel like there are just too many special cases that may make abortion morally justifiable, which makes legislation even more difficult to write and pass.

However, passing legislation to curb abortions is still beneficial, as it does help shape the culture. A great example of this is the ban of third-trimester abortions, where tons of the liberals that responded agreed that this was a necessary restriction on abortion. So just in summary, I believe that legislation is one answer, but not the answer, and the pro-life movement needs to bring answers to some of the other root problems that cause abortion.

The pro-life should be truly pro-life, not just anti-abortion.
You will not believe how many people asked about my stance on universal healthcare,
war, and capital punishment. While my stances on those issues does not have a real bearing on the validity of my arguments, people just wanted to make sure that I was holding an internally consistent worldview.

I think it's very important for pro-life people to be pro-life, not just pro-unborn-life. One of the major complaints that I read over and over is how the same conservatives who claimed a regard for the unborn showed no regard for the lives of the poor or the lives of soldiers. While I think all of these issues are more nuanced than simply being pro-everything, we really need to think about whether or not we display a sufficient care for the poor, the elderly, and people in other areas of the world where we are invading.

Below is one of my responses to a question about the pro-life movement.

I totally agree with you that we need to address why unplanned pregnancies happen. The pro-life movement has yet to show an appropriate concern to these issues along with an appropriate concern for those who are stuck making the difficult decision of whether or not to keep their baby. 

That said, I don't think it's an either-or thing w.r.t more restrictive legislation. I believe that it's a both-and thing. But yeah. The pro-life movement (along with all of us citizens of the world) needs to pay more attention to the root cause.

So this concludes my first post. What are your thoughts? Do you have objections? I hope some of you do. Because I've been thinking through the holes and perceived holes in my arguments and have tried to formulate counterarguments for them.

Coming up next - When does personhood begin?

Then after that - Answering the tough questions of rape, mother's safety, and other objections.