The debate over abortion involves the perceived battle over the valuation of two different lives — the life of the mother and the life of the child. Abortion advocates have historically and repeatedly pitted mother against child by asking pro-lifers whose life matters more and whose rights should come first — with the resounding answer to their own question remaining steady: the mother’s life. For them, the mother (and her wants and dreams and health) matters more than her child’s life.
In a recent article, Guardian TV critic and avid abortion supporter Lucy Mangan determined that anyone who is against abortion must devalue women and place a newly created human zygote at a higher valuation than his or her mother. (I say his or her because the child’s sex is already determined at the moment of fertilization).
But what Mangan claims to be a true representation of the pro-life argument is actually a complete misrepresentation of the anti-abortion point of view.
Pitting mother against child
Mangan stands firmly on the false idea that a woman is more valuable than her child in utero.
Mangan doesn’t fully argue this fallacy in the op-ed, but focuses on three young British pro-lifers featured in a Poppy Jay documentary — Eden McCourt, Madeline Page, and James. She erroneously claims that the three of them “believe … that life begins at conception and that those two conjoined cells immediately trump everything about the woman carrying them; her mental and physical health, her happiness, her present, her future, her bodily integrity and autonomy, her relationships (including with the children she already has), her desire to live the life she wants and not have it derailed by a mistake, or a rape… But it leaves this core devaluing of women’s lives intact” (emphases added).
This is a classic pro-abortion claim — that a woman’s preborn child can be her enemy, her adversary, her oppressor. With this bold accusation comes an insulting presumption about the pro-life point of view, based on Mangan’s own perceived notions about pro-lifers — primarily, that if they value preborn human life, they are automatically devaluing the woman’s life.
This is untrue. The pro-life view is that every human being from the moment of his or her creation to the moment of his or her natural death is of equal value. The baby and the mother are not adversaries, and one is not inherently worth more than the other. Both mother and child have inherent value as human beings that can not be eliminated by any law that man creates, or any attempt to strip them of their humanity.
A pro-life society doesn’t force a woman to parent her child; it simply states that she cannot kill her child, and holds that killing innocent human beings is not an acceptable or humane solution to any socio-economic concern or health crisis. If a pregnancy must end to protect the mother’s health or life, the baby can be delivered and be provided with appropriate medical care — not directly and intentionally killed by suction, dismemberment, lethal injection, exsanguination, intentional neglect, and so on.
Dehumanize to justify killing
The outdated idea that preborn children aren’t human beings has been destroyed by scientific and medical advancements that allow us to watch as the first stages of life play out.
Since preborn children are scientifically proven to be human beings, the pro-abortion argument attempts to dehumanize them in order to win people to its side. It does this by appealing to various traits which cannot determine the value of a human being — their size, their level of development, their environment, and their degree of dependency. These traits do not determine factors of humanity, personhood, or value.
Dehumanization attempt #1: Size
Since the preborn child is obviously smaller than a born human being and doesn’t necessarily “look” like a human being during the first stages of development, the pro-abortion argument is that he or she is therefore less valuable than the mother.
However, a human being’s value is not determined by his or her size. A smaller person is no less valuable than a larger person, and so forth. As Alan Shlemon notes for Stand to Reason, “She’s still equally a person even though she differs in that characteristic.” We can’t justify killing people based on their size.
Dehumanization attempt #2: Level of Development
Abortion advocates argue that abortion must be easily accessible through at least the so-called age of “viability” in which a doctor has determined that the baby can live outside of the womb (which is entirely subjective). Until the baby has reached a certain predetermined ‘level of development,’ under the pro-abortion ideology, he or she can be targeted for abortion.
But humans continue to develop well after they are born, and into adulthood. After birth, the newborn develops to an infant and then a toddler, and so forth. The brain doesn’t even finish developing and maturing until a person is an adult in his or her mid-to-late 20s.
Some people may never develop eyesight or hearing or the ability to walk — but this doesn’t diminish their humanity. They are still human beings.
Dehumanization attempt #3: Environment
A human being’s value does not change based on his or her environment or location. If a preborn child can survive inside the womb but not outside the womb, that does not mean that child has no rights or isn’t of value. The uterus is a preborn child’s natural environment — until birth, when it no longer is. If a woman is placed outside of her natural environment into outer space or under the ocean, she may not be able to survive — but this would not make her less of the person she has always been.
Dehumanization attempt #4: Degree of dependency
A human being’s level of dependency doesn’t affect his or her value as a person. A newborn is still dependent on her parents to care for her long after she has left her mother’s uterus. And a school-aged child is still dependent on his parents to a greater degree than a teenager with a driver’s license.
“Can a mother kill her newborn son because he depends on her body for nutrition? Or, imagine you alone witnessed a toddler fall into a swimming pool. Would you be justified in declaring him not valuable simply because he depended on you for his survival? Of course not! Since the unborn depends on his mother in the same way, it’s not reasonable to disqualify his value either,” explained Shlemon.
Mangan and other pro-abortion advocates want abortion to be legal for a variety of reasons, but when they must use false and discriminatory claims to advance their cause, they have no firm foundation on which to stand. After all, one’s own bodily autonomy does indeed have limits; every law restricts what we can and cannot do with our bodies, especially when it comes to what our bodies can and cannot do to harm the bodies of others.
Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.
