A substantial proportion of religious-Right voters care about, or at least vote on, only one issue: abortion. They swallowed their distaste for Donald Trump’s hypocrisy and (by their lights) egregious sinfulness and voted for him because of just one thing. He promised (and, as we now know, alas, delivered) a U.S. Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Why are they so fanatical about this one issue, eclipsing, as it does, all others? It is because they really think abortion is murder. They synonymize “embryo” with “baby.” Abortion is baby-killing.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who really believes—deeply and sincerely believes—that abortion is murder. You’d count up the number of “babies killed” and liken it to an annual holocaust of hideous magnitude. No wonder they scream outside abortion clinics and even occasionally murder the doctors who staff them. Wouldn’t we all scream if we believed what they believe?
But how do we respond, we who march in the vanguard of progressive, enlightened thought? “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.” A woman’s body is hers alone, and nobody else’s business. “My body, my choice.”
Of course I empathize with those slogans. But can you see how hollow they sound to someone who deeply and honestly thinks an embryo is a baby and abortion is murder? “Yes, your woman body is yours but there’s another body inside it, a human being with rights just like yours.” Can you see how the standard pro-choice arguments would fall flat to someone who can’t distinguish an embryo from a baby—someone who sincerely thinks human life begins at conception? Our standard arguments would not only fail with such people, but they’d find them downright infuriating.
We have to modify our arguments to meet the deeply held beliefs of our opponents head-on. We have to persuade them out of their fallacious belief, their passionate conviction that human personhood begins at conception and therefore abortion is murder.
The fallacy is articulated with almost childlike naivete in the official Roman Catholic Doctrine of the Faith titled Donum Vitae:
From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. To this perpetual evidence … modern genetic science brings valuable confirmation. It has demonstrated that, from the first instant, the program is fixed as to what this living being will be: a man, this individual-man with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization is begun the adventure of a human life. …1
“It would never be made human if it were not human already.” Seriously? Does that mean that an acorn is an oak tree? Does that mean the whispering embryonic zephyr out in the Atlantic is synonymous with the hurricane that later flattens a town in Florida? Monozygotic twins part after fertilization. Which twin ends up in possession of the unique new human life? Which twin is the inhuman zombie?
But does an aborted embryo experience pain? This is a question we cannot answer for certain. But if it does have a capacity for feelings or experiences, there is absolutely no reason to suppose its capacity exceeds that of an embryonic pig or cow (which it closely resembles in every relevant respect). And, whatever an embryo may or may not feel, it is beyond doubt that an adult pig or cow has a hugely greater capacity to feel pain and dread when led to the slaughter. If you both eat meat and simultaneously object to abortion on the grounds that the embryo might feel pain, you are a hypocrite—or else you just haven’t thought it through. “Pro-life” turns out to mean exclusively pro-human-life.
Maybe the “pro-lifer” carries human exclusiveness further. Even if the embryo has no greater capacity than a pig embryo, it has the potential to become a human being with very much greater capacity than a pig. By aborting it, you are depriving a future human of a fulfilled life. Your abortion robs a would-be thinking, feeling, loving person of existence. What joys might she, or he, have experienced in a long and full life but for your callous act? Might you be killing a Beethoven?
That argument cuts closer to the bone. It is hard to resist speculating on what that incipient little life could have become. But now imagine the potential life you prevent every time you refrain from sexual intercourse. But the “Road not taken” argument rapidly spirals out of control. All too soon we arrive at Michael Palin’s “Every sperm is sacred.” “It is your moral duty to have (unprotected) sex with me because of the potential human life you might be denying if you do not.”
Here’s another point we might make, and this one will work only if—admittedly a fairly big “if”—our hypothetical pro-lifer accepts the truth of evolution. At what point in evolution does human life achieve its peculiar level of sacredness such that killing a human embryo resembling a small fish is infinitely worse than killing an actual fish? If, hypothetically, a latter-day Livingstone stumbled upon a relict population of Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, or Sahelanthropus, should we treat them as infinitely precious human life for moral purposes such as those we deploy in the abortion debate? If you think human life is infinitely precious but “animal” life is not, where in the evolutionary continuum would you draw the line?
This conundrum doesn’t worry me because I’m not an enthusiast for drawing lines—either in evolution or in the parallel process of embryonic development (which is also a smooth continuum, in this case from zygote to baby and beyond). Nor will it worry you if—as is quite possible in a dogmatic “pro-lifer”—you don’t believe in evolution. But there must be some sensible evolutionists out there who are also foes of abortion (even Christopher Hitchens had qualms), and this last argument might give them pause.
But, to return to my main point, our most popular “pro-choice” style of argument—a woman’s absolute right to control her own body—won’t cut any ice with “pro-lifers” who think abortion is murder. If we want to persuade them—and there are plenty of them in Congress and other influential positions—we have to target our arguments directly toward their fundamental premise: the illogical, or at least dubious, premise that personhood begins at conception. “My body, my choice” is very persuasive to you and me. It will leave them cold, even needlessly hostile. And they are the ones we need to persuade.