Being Pro-Life in 2022

Recently, a historic Supreme Court decision was overturned, upending nearly fifty years of precedent. Personally, I am delighted that this finally happened. Roe vs. Wade and other pro-abortion decisions made by the Supreme Court, were absolutely injust in every sense of the word. No where does the constitution grant the right to have an abortion and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade allows those kids of decisions to return to the states, a move which allows individuals to have more of a say in our governance. Some say that the overturning of Roe was an undemocratic move, that nine people should not be able to make decisions for the rest of the country. But, in fact, the overturning of this precedent allows each state to make their own calls, which means that individuals in the voting booth have more opportunity to refine the laws where they live.

People who live in blue states, who are pro-abortion, are displeased, obviously, fearing that their access to abortion will be suddenly limited. But in all likelihood, the people who live there will still have this access. The overturning of Roe doesn’t make abortion illegal. It simply states that it is not a constitutionally protected right. But each state has their own laws, their own constitution, and they can make it such that abortion is a protected right.

To be honest, though, I wish that the overturning of Roe did make abortion illegal in all fifty states. Abortion is a cruel, barbarous practice that the American people have been conned into thinking is nothing more than a matter of personal preference. I don’t say this without the knowledge that women who find themselves with an unplanned pregnancy will face many personal difficulties. When I was first married, I worried, at times, about what I would do if my birth control method failed and I became pregnant. We were poor, I didn’t have my own health insurance, and I was still in college. But even then, I never considered abortion an option. Difficult circumstances aren’t a free pass to terminate pregnancies. Women in bleak situations need help, support, and understanding. They do not need to kill their unborn child.

In all my life, I have never once heard a compelling argument for why abortion is necessary. At this point, I’ve heard just about every “reason” in the book, and they all crumble under even the slightest scrutiny. I’d like to cover some of the most popular arguments in this blog post and offer an explanation for why they are nonsensical.

First, we’ll start at the most basic level: It’s not a human being; it’s just a clump of cells. “Clump of cells” is one of the most intellectually dishonest phrases I have ever heard. At the end of the day, we’re all just “clumps of cells.” Cells are the most basic building block of life and we’re all made of them. An embryo is alive, and an embryo is a human. These statements aren’t opinions, they’re scientific facts. An embryo has its own distinct genetic code, with all the programming needed to form into a unique individual, including eye color, height, hair color, predisposition to certain conditions, facial structure, etc. An embryo meets every qualification for life: order, sensitivity or response to the environment, reproduction, growth and development, regulation, homeostasis, and energy processing. This isn’t something that takes a biologist to figure out–an elementary school student could identify an embryo as being alive. And it most certainly is a human. Not a super developed human, certainly a very small human, but a human nonetheless. It has human DNA; its humanity is woven into the very fiber of its being. There is nothing else it could possibly be.

To me, this is all you really need for a pro-life argument. If a fetus is a human being, killing it and forcibly removing it from its mother is murder. However, there are pro-choice people who, agreeing that a fetus is a human being, still believe it is permissible to have an abortion. They believe that some human beings can be terminated. They may use any of the following criteria to make that assessment.

1. It cannot survive on its own. This argument has, in my opinion, very obvious problems. If total autonomy and independence is the benchmark for personhood, for being able to be protected from murder, then toddlers, the disabled, and the elderly are all on the chopping block. If a toddler is removed from the care of their parents and left to their own devices, they will surely die. The same is true for many people who are currently protected by the law. Independence is not a suitable requirement for being granted the right to live.

2. It is very small/underdeveloped/has no brain activity. This argument has an expiration date, considering that a fetus will grow, develop, and gain brain activity while in utero, and will continue to do so until they reach their mid-twenties. Electrical brain activity begins before most women (who aren’t trying to conceive) would even realize they’re pregnant, at five or six weeks. Most of the brain activity at this point and even until pretty close to gestational age is merely reflex, though. So that begs the question: how much brain activity must someone have before we consider them to be protected by the law? A baby who has just reached viability, who would be born and survive, would not have much more in the way of thoughts and feelings than a forty-three-day-old fetus, and a full term baby still can’t crunch numbers or remember much of anything. There are grown adults with cognitive disabilities whose brains don’t develop much past that point either. Are they all fair game to kill? Some people call fetuses “brain dead,” but they do not fit this description because, for one thing, their synapses are firing before they reach eight weeks of gestation. But even if they didn’t, they still wouldn’t be considered “brain dead.” Brain death is "when a person on an artificial life support machine no longer has any brain functions. This means they will not regain consciousness or be able to breathe without support." However, a fetus, though dependent on the mother for bodily function, will gain consciousness and eventually be able to breathe without support once born.

3. It is inside of another person (aka, the mother). The location of a person does not change what they are: a person. The fetus, while dependent on the body of the mother, is its own individual, distinct from the mother. A baby who has been born is not fundamentally different from who they were while still inside their mother’s womb.

A person may agree with and understand all those points, but still find abortion to be a reasonable option for women who are facing an unwanted pregnancy. They would argue that the mother’s freedom is more important than the life of their child. They do not care that this is an incredibly selfish mindset. To them, abortion is a fundamental right for women and without it, women will forever be at a societal disadvantage.

I say we should work on fixing society’s problems, rather than blaming the birth of children for everything. I won’t deny that women still face inequality in our country (and, even more so, around the world), even in this day and age. But the solution to wage gaps and discrimination isn’t to punish women who choose not to kill their children. If we continue to uphold abortion as the solution to all of our culture’s ills, then we can simply turn a blind eye on women who elect to have their children, since it was their own choice and they could have just killed their child while still in the womb to avoid their plight. The truth is, though, I don’t think that children are the life-ruining, freedom-sucking, resource-draining parasites that pro-abortion advocates claim they are. Children are blessings and the birth of every child–regardless of sex, race, ability level, degree of health, or socioeconomic status–is a benefit to our society. Each person on this planet is worthwhile. I won’t pull out the “what if that child you aborted would have found the cure for cancer?” argument, because it frankly doesn’t matter. Even people who don’t accomplish anything in life still deserve to live. We don’t have to prove our worth to be allowed to exist. We all have our own potential, whether we live up to it is our own choice. It shouldn’t be decided for us before we even open our eyes for the first time.

This post is already getting long enough and I certainly haven’t covered every argument or issue that pro-choice people can cook up, so I think I’ll come back to this in a few weeks to cover a few more things (like the foster care system, saving the the life of the mother, and the supposed apathy of pro-life people). For now, I think this is a good start.