A pregnant woman is carrying a human life. Science indicates this. The continuity of the development points to this. Our intuitions imply this. Our language suggests this. Scripture shows this. The Church fathers plainly state this.
But the prolife argument is stronger than merely the humanity of the fetus. I see specific ethical factors inherent in a pregnancy that strengthen the moral obligation a mother has for her unborn child. Here are four:
- The fetus is completely helpless and vulnerable, and those who are strong have a special moral responsibility to care for those who are weak.
- The fetus is dependent upon her mother, and people have a special moral responsibility to care for those who depend upon them.
- The fetus is the offspring of her parents, and parents have a special moral responsibility to care for their offspring.
- The fetus is innocent, and it is morally unjust to kill the innocent.
Thus, while I do believe that a pregnant woman is carrying a human being, I do not believe she is carrying any human being. She is carrying her helpless, vulnerable, innocent son or daughter. She has the ordinary ethical responsibility we all have to care for human life, but she also has the special ethical responsibility to care for the weak, for those who depend on her, for the innocent, and for her own child. Abortion, thus, does not violate life merely in some generic sense. It violates a mother-child relationship and special moral obligations to care for the helpless and the innocent.
If you say we should care for the oppressed, you should be prolife.
If you say we should care for the weak and the vulnerable, you should be prolife.
If you say we should stand up for the innocent, you should be prolife.
Human Rights
If you believe in human rights, you should be prolife.
Human rights belong to humans. All humans. If you are a human being, you have human rights. The unborn is a human being.
We humans have justified all sorts of cruelty by denying full humanity to certain groups of people. In the antebellum South, Americans justified slavery by saying that black people were not fully human. In Nazi Germany, Hitler justified the Holocaust by saying that Jews were an inferior race. In many Muslim countries today, Muslims justify special taxes on and mistreatment of nonMuslims by saying that they are dhimmis. When those in power want to violate the human rights of the vulnerable, they often justify their actions by claiming that the vulnerable are not as fully human as the rest of us.
This is precisely what the proabortion position must do. Abortion requires people to deny the humanity of a certain class of human in order to justify the practice. The proabortion position cannot stand if the fetus is a human life. I’m sure that my proabortion friend does not endorse slavery, but she thinks of the unborn the same way the antebellum South thought of its black population.
We play a dangerous game when we begin to say that only certain humans are real people. We become the antebellum South without ever knowing it and grow outraged if someone points out the likeness.
Today we abort about 20% of all unborn children in America.[i] Can you imagine the outcry if we killed 20% of the women in our country? Or 20% of the Hispanics? Or 20% of our two-year-olds? Or 20% of any group? The unborn is the most vulnerable and most oppressed group of people in America. There is no other group of people that we kill at a rate of 20% per year. And with abortion, we have actually sanctioned it.
As a society, we have come to recognize the full humanity of all races, religions and genders. Those were long, hard fights, and we may not be where we would like to be, but we are certainly not where we were. It is now time for us to recognize the humanity of all stages of development. Maybe we need to see that the unborn are like a vulnerable race. They may not look exactly the same as those in power, but they are just as human. They are the same as we are but at a different stage of development. They are human beings. They have human rights, and abortion denies them those rights without ever giving them a choice.
[i] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-abortions-rose-in-2020-with-about-1-in-5-pregnancies-terminated
