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Ultimate Take Down of Anti-Abortion Logic

This will be a list of abortion-related sayings commonly found on the internet and rebuttals to them.

The Bible Says…

This is essentially an appeal to a specific grounded set of morality. When you do this you get pushback because not everyone grounds their morality in the Christian Bible.

Indeed, the Bible says a lot of things. It bans tattoos in Leviticus 19:28, “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves.” and in Leviticus 19:19 says “Don’t plant your fields with two kinds of seed [and] Don’t wear clothes woven of two kinds of material.”

So if you want to base decisions on the Bible you cannot pick and choose.

Moreover, we aren’t a theocracy so basing it on Biblical values is just insane.

In addition, certain religions and denominations either approve of abortion (in all or just certain situations) or don’t have anything to say about it all.

Judaism doesn’t believe life begins at conception and that a fetus isn’t a person. All major Jewish religions allow abortion to save the life of the mother.

Islam and Buddhism don’t have a say in it one way or another.

Certain Christian denominations like Presbyterian Church approve of abortion with few limits.

Pew Research has a great recap of all the stances.

Lastly, it often depends on whose Bible (it’s been translated into 700 languages and has 4 major versions) and how it’s interpreted. Numbers 5:22-27 approve of an abortion procedure “May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries”.

In Leviticus 27:6 the quote indirectly says a fetus isn’t a person when it says “…for a person between one month and five years, set the value of a male at five shekels of silver and that of a female at three shekels of silver”. It implies that you’re a person at one month of age but before that, you aren’t. So it cannot be murder because you’re not yet a person.

This is a good site to go to for how to use the Bible against abortion protestors.

Simply put, you’re not winning an argument when ground it in religion.

Common arguments in the abortion debate: https://patcosta.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Ethics-and-Common-Arguments-About-Abortion.pdf

Abortion as a life ethic; need to have broader application if want to be taken seriously: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/opinion/republicans-abortion-pro-life.html ; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/opinion/abortion-schenck.html.

Abortion is murder


It isn’t. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a19748134/what-is-abortion/. IVF is also rarely, if at all mentioned in abortion legislation. Presumably, a couple could use IVF and then decide to abort the mixture after a couple of days. The only difference is that a woman’s uterus is not involved. If abortion is murder then why are you not concerned with the reasons for the millions of miscarries?

Life Begins at Conception:


Yes, it can be argued that. But that neither makes it alive nor deserving of personhood. Life is a developmental process: https://rewire.news/article/2012/11/04/life-begins-at-conception-thats-not-point-0/.

Various religions differ on when life begins https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/04/when-does-life-begin-outside-the-christian-right-the-answer-is-over-time.html.

Abortion as Medical not Moral argument: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/abortion-arguments-morality-policy.html

Alabama and Abortion – Criminalizing and Jailing

At some point technology is going to advance where women (or men) can disable the ability to make a baby at the genetic level with a pill. Making it 100% guaranteed to not get pregnant. We are just in the beginning stages of individualized medicine thanks to the breakthroughs of CRISPR.

At that point the entire abortion debate is a moot point and footnote in the history of the US. The outcome is already established, it is only a matter of time when. I’ll write the history in the year 2150.

“While not stated explicitly in the constitution, Roe vs Wade legalized abortion across the US. This created two camps: a pro-life camp and a pro-choice camp. This was part of the Culture War and lasted approximately, 125 years. This debate was resolved by The Pill 2.0 in 2075, that disables the ability to make a baby at the genetic level until a person decides to have one.”

Now that we know how this debate will end-up, can we all agree to go save the ice caps?

EDIT:

For those who say “but I’ll continue to save the unborn till such a time”, you implicitly agree to the pro-choice position. Here’s why.

A supposed pill 2.0 permits women (and men) to control when they get pregnant/want to reproduce. You obviously cannot force people to NOT take the pill. You will be obligated to support choice, which carries with it the implication that pregnancy was always a choice, to begin with. Following the logic of choice, if it was always a choice, to begin with, it means women have bodily autonomy over how they control their pregnancy including terminating it.

TAKE DOWN OF ANTI-CHOICE TALKING POINTS

  1. Abortion is birth control. Abortion is healthcare. Abortion is responsible. Knowing you don’t have the means — financial, emotional or otherwise — to start or grow a family and proceeding to prevent a birth is called being responsible. 
  2. Abortion is safe, especially prior to 13 weeks, when more than 90 percent of abortions take place. Medication abortions can often be completed at home. Surgical abortions take roughly five minutes and, without sedation, can be done on your lunch break from work. Abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth.
  3. Adoption is not an alternative to pregnancy, it’s an alternative to parenting. Abortion is the alternative to pregnancy. 
  4. Pregnancy is not a mere “inconvenience,” as I’ve seen many anti-choicers proclaim. Pregnancy is a body- and life-altering event. It can and often does come with a wide range of temporary, long-lasting and sometimes permanent side effects and complications. Calling it an inconvenience is, frankly, offensive.
  5. Pregnancy is not a punishment for sex, it’s a consequence of sex. Antis essentially claim that having sex that results in pregnancy means you forfeit any say over your body; that’s your punishment. This is moral relativism. It’s the imposition of religious morality onto the masses. There’s no other foundation for this argument.
  6. This is an extension of number 5: pregnant people are still people, and they still have the same right to bodily autonomy that they had before an egg inside of them was fertilized. No one, fetuses included, can use that pregnant person’s blood, organs, or body to sustain their own life. There’s a reason the right to bodily autonomy outweighs the right to life. Unless we’re ready to put laws in place that mandate organ donation, we’ll remember that. Unfortunately, people will die without livers and kidneys, but that’s the cost of freedom and autonomy.
  7. Using emotion-laden words and phrases such as “killing babies,” “murder,” and “infanticide” cheapens and distorts this conversation. We’re talking about non-sentient embryos and a medical procedure.
  8. Later abortions (after 20 weeks) are a result of one of three things: unimaginable health complications preventing the conclusion of the pregnancy; anti-choice policies that have worked to delay what would have been an earlier abortion; or finances. Often, people will spend too much time trying to gather the funds for their abortion, and as the procedure costs more the later it is done, they’re caught in a cycle of constantly coming up short. This is why abortion funding is necessary.
  9. Defunding Planned Parenthood, which among other things cheaply provides the means to prevent pregnancy, and subsequently outlawing abortion is called reproductive oppression. Limiting the information provided about sex to religion-based ideas of abstinence is not only proven to be ineffective, but also unethical. People have a right to have all the information and resources they need to make decisions about their bodies.
  10. Banning abortion will only affect the already most vulnerable populations. People of means will always be able to obtain a safe abortion in another state. People in poverty will risk their lives or even die trying.