On March 22, Catholic apologist Trent Horn spoke to attendees at Live Action’s 2025 Young Leaders Summit about pro-life apologetics. He walked through some of the most common pro-abortion arguments, offering ways to counter them while reminding the audience to be gracious while advocating for preborn children.
Horn listed three kinds of pro-choice arguments: the first argument ignores the humanity of the preborn child. The second denies the humanity of the preborn, and the third admits the humanity of the preborn child but claims the child does not have a right to life.
Walking through the arguments, Horn explained that pro-life apologetics includes driving the conversation back to the question that matters most: What are the unborn?
“If the unborn are not human beings, then abortion needs no justification, but if the unborn are human beings, abortion can’t be justified,” he said.
He noted that many abortion advocates don’t want to focus on the humanity of the preborn when discussing abortion, instead turning to other issues, such as women’s rights or privacy. Horn said pro-lifers lose when they engage in those topics without focusing on the fact that abortion is wrong because “directly killing an innocent human being is never permissible.”
To counter those denying the humanity of the preborn child, he said, you need science and philosophy; science explains when life begins, while philosophy shows how to treat that life. Though many people focus on the differences between an embryo or fetus and a grown adult, Horn said there are “biological differences between the unborn and the born, but those differences do not have moral relevance when it comes to our biological rights.”
Finally, Horn focused on the argument that a mother cannot be forced to bring a child into the world against her will.
“Someone might say that just as you can’t force me to give you a kidney, you can’t force a pregnant woman to give her body to an unborn child… that child may be a person with a right to life, but not a right to life support,” he said.
Expounding on the kidney scenario, he said, “The reason you may need this kidney has nothing to do with anything I did. I’m not responsible and don’t owe you anything.” This is unlike a situation in which a man and woman come together in an act that they know may potentially create a child.
Secondly, Horn pointed out that in failing to give a kidney he may be failing to act heroically, but he isn’t actively killing the person in need. “While failing to donate a kidney is failing to save, abortion is choosing directly to kill, and that’s always wrong.”
Horn also pointed out that because his kidney is not made to sustain the life of another person, no one else has a moral right to it. The mother’s uterus, however, is naturally ordered to sustain the life of the preborn child, so that child has a right to the organ to sustain his or her life.
Horn ended by reminding the audience to be “gracious” to those they talk to about abortion, saying, “We must always make sure that when we speak, the only thing that causes offense is the truth we share, not the words or attitudes we use, because the truth may cause offense until it breaks a person’s heart, and then the Holy Spirit enters to convert them.”
