At a rally in Pennsylvania this week, Elon Musk responded to an audience member’s question about whether he would ever consider publicly supporting the pro-life movement. He responded with his frank opinions about abortion after viability, while critiquing the root causes of why women so often feel they must choose abortion.
“In my opinion, which is bound to offend some,” he said, according to the video, “If a baby can survive outside the womb, it cannot be aborted. If a baby can survive outside the womb, it is not abortion, it is murder.”
He added, “Part of the challenge is that the education system has terrified girls and women and relentlessly pushed the idea that getting pregnant is the end of your life. When you instill terror in young girls that getting pregnant is the worst thing that can happen, they’ll believe that if they’re just kids.” He has made this type of statement before.
Musk: ‘It is not abortion, it is murder’
Musk’s statement cuts against the grain of much of the mainstream media narrative and what is considered acceptable discourse on abortion. He’s right, yet doesn’t go far enough; induced abortion is always the direct killing of an innocent human being – and isn’t medically necessary.
In fact most Americans, like Musk, actually do support limits on abortion. As Live Action News reported, polling from May 2024 found that just 25% of respondents believed abortion “should be legal in all cases.” A Knights of Columbus poll from January 2024 found that 58% of all Americans favored significant restrictions on abortion.
Viability is arbitrary: Abortion always involves killing an innocent life
Though welcome, Musk’s comments fall short of a fully pro-life position. Every individual human life cycle begins when a new and genetically distinct human organism is formed at fertilization. This is a noncontroversial, strictly scientific take that has been acknowledged by biologists and taught regularly in textbooks for decades.
The emphasis on “viability,” sometimes thought of as the point in which a baby can survive outside the womb (often placed at a gestational age of around 24 weeks) has been a focal point ever since Roe v. Wade, when a law clerk set an arbitrary line based on the medical technology of 1973, largely for the purposes of expanding access to abortion in the now-overturned Supreme Court decision that forced legalized abortion upon every state in the nation.
While Musk’s comments accurately depict the terrible reality of late-term abortion, we must not lose sight of the reality of what happens to a baby aborted before this time.
- 6-8 Weeks: When a baby is aborted up to about six to eight weeks, their life is usually taken via the abortion pill which cuts off nutrition, starving them of necessary nutrients until they die.
- 8-12 Weeks: Around this time, as a baby’s hands and feet start to develop and they become able to suck their thumb in utero as well as move and kick and flex fingers. At this gestation, a pill may still be used, or abortionists may use a violent aspiration suction procedure, which rapidly pulls the baby apart.
- 13-24 Weeks: Horrifically, babies between 13 to 24 weeks of age are aborted by dilation and extraction (D&E): a gruesome procedure in which the abortionist physically grips each of the baby’s limbs with forceps and tears them off the child’s body. Babies at this age respond to stimuli, flinching away from the instruments in pain. Some babies born prematurely have have survived as young as 21 weeks.
- 24-40 Weeks: Musk is correct about the horrors of post-viability abortions. Babies aborted later than 24 weeks – “later abortions,” which although considered uncommon, absolutely exist for reasons other than fetal anomalies – are not simply induced. Because the point of every induced abortion is a dead baby, their hearts are first stopped by lethal injection prior to delivery. Or a federally-illegal procedure might even still be used.
From the preborn baby’s earliest development up through 40 weeks, what are all of these abortion procedures, if not murder? Every single one ends the life of a living human organism at a different stage of development.
We need education – real education – and not simply fear of pregnancy
By claiming that “the education system has terrified girls and women and relentlessly pushed the idea that getting pregnant is the end of your life,” Musk rightly targeted the failures of modern sex education.
Abortion giant Planned Parenthood is one of the largest providers of sex education in schools, and their “education” tends to feed their business. The focus is on enabling “safer sex,” avoiding pregnancy through contraception, avoiding STDs, and how to obtain an abortion. They are teaching children how to be sexually active with no strings attached, which keeps them walking through the doors of Planned Parenthoods for contraceptives. And when those contraceptives “fail” (because the design of sex is for procreation — and sometimes, despite a person’s best efforts, “life finds a way”) Planned Parenthood has “abortion care” to “offer” as well. Despite the fact that Planned Parenthood’s type of “comprehensive” sex ed is so pervasive in schools, anytime young women get pregnant, it’s often blamed on a “lack of sex education.”
There is evidence to suggest that it is the pervasive sex ed that is failing — not the “lack” of it.
All of this leaves out the uniquely human aspects of the sexual act, ignoring that there are real people with real feelings and thoughts and psychology involved. Modern sex ed fails on almost every level to teach basically anything comprehensive about sex and sexuality. What needs to be taught is not only the biology of it, but the emotional and mental risks of sex (as well as the physical risk of STDs), guidance and support on how to develop healthy relationships, and developing healthy boundaries. Teen girls should know more about their biology, charting cycles, the physical signs they observe every month and what they mean for their health, and how eventually to use these signs to avoid pregnancy – or achieve it, when the time is right.
And importantly, real sex education should include the science of human development at every stage, in an age-appropriate manner. The science is no secret – Baby Olivia is a 3D animation, a “window to the womb” that helps to visualize the development of a preborn baby from conception until birth. The nonprofit Endowment for Human Development (EHD), which is committed to neutrality, contains actual photos of videos of developing babies in the womb. Any number of visually stunning and scientifically accurate sources are available to combat the lies and whitewashing that abortion supporters promote, because they fear that resources like Baby Olivia might stigmatize abortion.
Arming everyone with the real facts about sexuality and the human person empowers them to make more informed decisions rather than, as Musk pointed out, being terrified at the thought of not being able to have an abortion and the fear that pregnancy (even as an adult) means that “getting pregnant is the end of your life.”
