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In order for abortion to be tolerable, we must dehumanize the child being aborted. We use cold language like “fetus” which, while scientifically accurate, distances us from the reality of how human an unborn child truly is. In part 1 we discussed why scientific law demands that the unborn are human. Today, let’s discuss why we must logically see that their human rights are worth protecting.
Logic needs to be consistent
A common argument for abortion is that they aren’t human enough. They often lack some feature, without which it can be justified to terminate their existence. The logic behind many pro-choice beliefs rest in a certain comfort that the living organism being destroyed is subhuman.
However, it’s important to examine these arguments systematically – in other words, we can’t view the arguments on their own. We must find what sort of world view someone must adopt if their reasons to support abortion are going to remain consistent. As we’ll see, to argue that abortion is justifiable demands a worldview that is possible to believe, but horrific to live out.
Viability outside the womb
This is one of the most common ways abortion is justified. Many believe that since an unborn child can’t support itself outside the womb, it either isn’t human at all, or not quite human enough. This is a broad category, and there are many issues people raise:
- It doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand things
- The lungs can’t breathe without assistance
- Its heart can’t sustain it
- Other systems aren’t developed enough
Before the age of 22 weeks, these are all very true. Even after 22 weeks, a premature baby’s odds of survival are very dependent on modern medicine. There’s no arguing that an unborn child is generally incapable of surviving outside the womb. Yet we must ask how that justifies assigning it a lesser form of humanity.
This logic is simply inconsistent with other beliefs a person often holds. Consider what this must imply about the value of all life: you are only fully human, with rights worth protecting if you are mentally competent and able to support yourself without medical assistance.
In other words, it argues that abortion is tolerable because the thing being terminated doesn’t meet a mental and physical standard. This logic, taken to its natural conclusion, simply can not stop at abortion.
Truly holding to this belief leaves a person no room to argue with the elimination of the mentally challenged, nor with removing medical care from those whose biological systems cannot support them without technological assistance. Eugenics, the belief in breeding out physical and mental abnormalities, is also difficult to oppose. In the end, dehumanizing a person based on mental or physical standards has no reason to stop simply because that person isn’t sitting in a woman’s abdomen.
(Before moving on, I want to point out that I’m not arguing unborn children should be protected because they can be kept alive sooner than any time in history. A human’s value isn’t based on context. Whether a child could be kept alive by technology is irrelevant – a human life has absolute value at any stage of life, whether or not science would allow them to survive outside the womb.)
Ability to feel pain
This is similar to the previous point but deserves its own brief discussion. Many will find abortion acceptable up to the point where the child can feel pain. This typically occurs at around 20 weeks, meaning that an unborn’s right to be protected doesn’t begin until it has existed for over 19 weeks.
Again, this is a way of coping with what abortion is, but it doesn’t make sense when taken to its full conclusion. Supporting abortion on this basis implies:
- What makes us human is being conscious of something stimulating our senses
- Terminating life is only wrong if it can be felt
- Life is only valuable under certain circumstances
Allow me to sum this up in a personal example. When winter hits, our home gets visited by mice. I am the designated trap setter and cleaner, getting rid of several mice in the span of a few months. No one else is willing to do this job – not because they’re incapable, but because the nearness of it reminds them that living creatures are dying in these traps. My family is content to know that mice are being taken care of as long as they don’t bear the weight of knowing that suffering, even for just a moment, is occurring.
I believe this same way of coping is partially responsible for why so many people support abortion up to 22 weeks – they know what’s being done, yet they aren’t supporting the suffering of another creature. Instead, it’s necessary to dehumanize it to a lump of unfeeling tissue, unconscious and unaware of what’s being done to it. Yet as before, we cannot take a large amount of the population and determine that their worth is lessened because of their current state of awareness.
How the unborn look
A recent Gallup poll was very revealing, yet not the least bit surprising. People were asked which trimester should be the cutoff for receiving an abortion. An overwhelming 60% felt the first three months of pregnancy should be a legal range to receive an abortion. Yet only 28% felt it should be legal in the 2nd trimester, and only 13% thought the final three months of pregnancy should be a legal time to terminate (yes, that’s 101% but I assume percentages were rounded).
While the ability to feel pain or survive outside the womb likely played in to many votes, there’s no denying that we ascribe humanity on something as shallow as “Does it look human to me?” Consider the “circus freaks” of history – these were human beings that didn’t fit a normal look, and were then dehumanized and used as spectacles.
Even those who are pro-life give different weight to an unborn child’s life based on how it looks in the womb. How many women are eventually told to “get over it” when losing a child at 20 weeks? Yet very few would say such a thing to a woman who loses a child even 1 day after its birth. Even more, the idea of fully-fertilized embryos being discarded is barely a blip on many pro-life radars.
And if we’re honest, it’s not hard to understand why. Just look at this chart of a baby’s development over its lifetime in the womb:
I’ve had ultrasounds of all 4 of my children, and I’m willing to admit that they’re much cuter at 36 weeks than at 8 weeks.
An embryo doesn’t look very human by how we think of a human baby. At 12 weeks they have more of a human form, but the proportions aren’t quite there. Yet notice that as a child become more and more like how we imagine babies, the more people are opposed to ending its existence.
The value of life
We must understand what it means to be human. If humans are measured by their mental or physical capacity, then we have no reason to reject exterminating certain sections of the population. How a child looks or what it understands cannot comfort us into bowing to societal pressure. Human beings are made in the image of God, and every image-bearer has value.
Skin color, country of origin/residence, religion, political beliefs, or any other measure that puts one human below another has no room in the minds of Christ’s people. Likewise, whatever measure used to support abortion simply cannot hold weight when taken to its logical conclusion.
Whatever we use to gauge the value of a single human life, or even the value of an entire population, must be held consistently. There are certainly those who believe in exterminating the homeless, mentally handicapped, the physically deformed, and many other people who don’t fit a certain pattern. Yet many, many people who support abortion do so because they haven’t seen that their beliefs on abortion are at odds with how they value the lives of those who are born.
This isn’t a means for us to shame someone, or “win” an argument by pointing out flaws. Those with any attachment to abortion, whether personally or politically, are in need of seeing people as Christ does. The same world that hates Christ is the same world that devalues human life. We can win debates all day long, but the world will continue finding new ways to do evil. So as we consider the logical reasons why the abortion argument is flawed, let us never forget our higher goal of bringing people to repentance of their sins so they can be forgiven for everything, not just incorrect thinking about the unborn.
Finally, we should remember that the abortion debate comes down to a single issue: Is a human life being ended? This will be an important question as we move on to part 3: What about a woman’s right to choose?
