Thursday, October 25, 2012
My Top 10 LEAST Favorite Pro-Life Arguments
1. Bad: "Abortion is Murder"- actually murder by definition is illegal so as long as abortion remains legal it is not murder.
Better: It's the end of the life of a full separate and unique human being and is morally comparable to murder. Then you start hitting them with the facts about early development and go through explaining to them why it is a life.
2. Bad: "Women who get abortions are irresponsable" Thats a cruel generalization for one thing and while it may indeed be true of some it's not all.
Better: Many of those seeking abortion had the chance to prevent pregnancy and didn't when they should have.
3: Bad: "God hates abortion" In general faith-based arguments (if they are to work) need to be audience specific. In a Christian context you always want to use the specific passages that support the idea that God upholds unborn life. (Isaiah 46, Jerimiah 1, Psalm 139, 1Timothy 4) In the case of other theologies the key is to appeal to the contradictions that almost always exist between abortion, and a given religion's moral precepts.
4. Bad: "Abortion is bad because society is missing out on all the people who have been aborted" That's correct, we are. But it's a bad argument becuase it opens a whole can of worms host of other arguments from the pro-choice side, things like overpopulation and how horrible it can be to be an unwanted child.
Better: No human being is worth more than another so making life and death decisions about the lives of those who can't yet speak up for themselves is a bad idea in general.
5. Bad: "Abortion is bad for the economy" I'm not even sure where this one came from but the basic idea is that if most of the people who have been aborted since 1973 were alive and working social security in the US would not have failed. That might be accurate and reasonable but I don't like it for two reasons, 1 it totally disregards the morality of the issue and I don't find it appropriate to do that in an ethical debate, and 2 it's country specific and Abortion isn't just wrong in the US, it's wrong everywhere.
Better: If you're going to use it I'd reccomend using the gap in the workforce and the problems it's causing to help refute the over population argument.
6. Bad: "Overpopulation is a non-issue" It is an issue but if we (we being those living in the more prosperous developed areas of the world) stopped over consuming everything and taking so much more than what we actually need, hunger and poverty and diseases that we've rid our societies of could end in other parts of the world. Instead of calling it a non-issue try refuting the pro-choice argument that abortion is ok because of overpopulation by explaining that overconsumption is the real problem and bring up prevention of pregnancy verses ending a pregnancy.
7. Bad: "How would you like to have been aborted?" this one will get you nowhere mainly because most pro-choice people are pro-choice partly because fetal personhood doesn't compute with them. therefore the typical reply you can expect using this argument is that they wouldn't know or care.
8. Bad: "What if you aborted the next Albert Einstein?" Or the Hitlers and Stalins, and Lenins, and Gengas Khans and every other historical tyrant/murderer
9. General inconsistancies like abortion is wrong yet supporting war the death penalty... you get the idea
10. Bad: "Planned Parenthood is evil" they are the largest providers of elective abortion in the US and I'm inclined to agree with that statement because of that but they also provide actual healthcare the resources for which would need to be replaced. It is true that the founder of PP was a racist and had eugenist ideas and tendancies but I don't know that it operates like that anymore (I hope not)
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It is always important to look at both sides of an issue. Even when we know the other side is 100% wrong because it can only help strengthen our arguments.
ReplyDeleteVery awesome! I actually think it's funny that your #1 and my #7 (http://cand86.tumblr.com/post/14865629780/my-ten-least-favorite-pro-choice-arguments-and-how-to ) sort of line up in an opposite way; you're like, "Hey, abortion isn't legally murder, so stop saying that.", and mine's like "Hey, just because abortion isn't legally murder doesn't necessarily mean it's not morally murder, so stop saying that."
ReplyDeleteI like that you brought up #2 but I really don't know if your "Better" is actually any better- it's basically saying the exact same thing and leaving most pro-life readers, I think, to infer irresponsibility. A better move, to me, might be to remind pro-lifers of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, institutional, and policy-level barriers to contraceptive usage.
As far as #5 goes, Michelle Goldberg has a really great theory in her book "The Means of Reproduction" about what she deems "the birth strike", which explains how family size is decided (consciously or sub-consciously) based on what support and opportunities women have- and how the dwindling ratio of young workers to pensioners *is* an important issue, but one that is solved not by restricting access to abortion (after all, contraception does the exact same thing, reducing the number of children one has), but in incentivizing/removes the disincentives of having more children (through real incentives, not just short-term ones like a child tax credit, for example).
And yeah, you know how I hate #6 when pro-choicers use it. Seriously, while we can talk a lot about abortion and birth control as it relates to the population, the minute it strays into coercion (either forced abortion, forced sterilization, or forced birth or forced reproduction), both sides need to stop. People are not baby factors meant to be fired up or shut down based on the whims of whoever is in charge of the government.
Overall, I think it's a really good blog post! Helping to craft better arguments and avoid the pitfalls is always a nice thing- helps us get to the crux of an issue.