Overview - Abortion

• Stop cheapening pregnancy, childbirth, and the life process. They’re a sacred part of Creation, not inconveniences. If you believe that human life begins later rather than earlier in gestation, more power to you. There’s a case to be made for that. But you need to reach that conclusion honestly, with appropriate respect for what’s at stake. There’s no excuse for demanding access to partial birth and late-term abortions before you have reflected long and hard about how far along the fetus is on its journey to human infancy and the risk for its suffering—if indeed there is any excuse at all.
• Start putting as much energy into providing options for women who keep their unwanted pregnancies as you do into supporting women who want to get rid of them. That includes adoption, counseling, parenting support, and more. I can assure you from my own personal experience as an adoptive father that an unwanted pregnancy is not the same thing as an unwanted child. It’s time for you to stop acting as though it is.

There’s more at stake here than your interests alone. Your credibility as morally responsible advocates is inseparable from your ability to prove to the world that you’ve truly counted the costs for everyone involved, not just yourselves.

From the Pro-Life Movement

Pro-Life advocates, you have faithfully defended the sacredness of pregnancy and childbirth against all that would dismiss them. Many of you have shown extraordinary courage and selflessness by carrying your own unwanted pregnancies to term, including those with birth defects, and raising these children in loving homes. Were it not for you we might forget that these children, and the pregnancies they came from, are gifts from God that we are responsible for. But forgive me for being blunt, but you need to do something about your lack of credibility.

• It’s time for you to start putting some professionalism in your arguments. Spend less time in front of clinics shoving pictures of bloody fetuses in women’s faces and more time doing homework. There’s no excuse for accusing nations and aid organizations with proven track records of participating in “coerced abortions,” “eating fetuses,” and other sensationalistic crimes before you’ve bothered to fact-check any of it. You cannot expect the secular world to take you seriously if your scholarship doesn’t even meet junior high school standards.⁷
• Dispense with pseudoscience. “Babies” that can “feel their mothers” 3 months before they’ve even developed neural networks, abortion-breast cancer links, “imploding” 21st century population, “infinite” natural resources a-la-Julian Simon pseudo-economics, and other illiterate arguments contrary to well established science (Melbye et al., 1997; NCI, 2003; Beral et al., 2004; NAS, 2000; UN, 2001)—these must go. Credible scientific arguments are based on careful reviews of all up-to-date and relevant peer-reviewed research, and conclusions that are held with no more, or less confidence than the consensus of that research supports. Authoritative quotes from a few carefully cherry-picked “experts” don’t cut it, and neither does endlessly recycling decades-old obsolete papers—especially if you haven’t even bothered to read any of them first.
• Start facing facts about sex. Yes, it’s a beautiful and sacred celebration of love, not just a good time without commitment. But I’ve got news for you. Like it or not, sex outside of marriage and unwanted pregnancy are facts of life and no amount of sermonizing is ever going to change that. If you really want to do something about abortion, you need to do whatever it takes to reduce unwanted pregnancies. You cannot expect to do this with pious demands for abstinence-only at the expense of sex education and general access to contraception.⁸
• If you really consider yourselves pro-life, start walking that talk outside of the womb as well as inside it. It makes no sense to wage war against things like contraception, family planning, and reproductive healthcare services—all of which have been demonstrated to reduce death rates among women and infants, and lower abortion rates—simply because they offend your “moral” sensibilities. A great many of you are also conservative Evangelicals. According to recent surveys, you are considerably more likely than your secular counterparts to advocate militarism and other forms of violence in times of international dispute. As an American voting block you were the largest supporters of the Iraq invasion for instance, and continued to be after all of the original justifications for that campaign were shown to have been based on flawed intelligence. Yes, Saddam Hussein was evil, and I am aware of “Just War” theory. There is a compelling case for it. But only as a last resort, and then with tears and regrets. There is no excuse for cheering during bloody invasions and throwing “We Support Our Troops” tailgate parties before you’ve even fact-checked the evidence used to justify them. There’s even less excuse for doing everything in your power to dismiss evidence of large civilian casualty counts, even to the point of relying on bogus scientific and statistical arguments. The world should not be able to appreciate the irony in bumper stickers that ask “What Would Jesus Bomb?” It’s time for a lot of you to become Pro-Life rather than merely Pro-Birth.
• Most importantly, as a community you need to walk beside those from whom you’re demanding change, sharing their tears and burdens.