Pro-Choicers, Ectopics/Miscarriages & Incubator Slavery
Responding to some wild interactions I've had on substack this week
The past 2 weeks have been absolutely wild with the election. I had a few notes about abortion that went viral and garnered quite the army of pro-choicers ready to defend their right to baby murder.
A few of the comments were common enough that I wanted to respond to them properly here. My aim is that you would become more confident to respond to these bad arguments when you hear them online or in person.
Look, I’m not debating faith with you. I wouldn’t do that. I believe you are entitled to whatever religious beliefs you choose.
If you want to believe life begins at conception, I am not here to argue. I don’t argue with the religions that believe life begins at first breath, or the ones that believe life is eternal, and we all will have many incarnations, either.
Life beginning at conception is not a religious belief, it’s a biological fact.1Citing other false beliefs other people have doesn’t change the facts.
You should understand clearly, however, that if life begins at conception as you insist, it also ends there for the vast majority.
50% of fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus, and are spontaneously shed.
5% of embryos implant somewhere other than the uterus and not only can’t survive, but also threaten the life of the person who is carrying them
25% of the embryos that do implant have fatal defects and stop maturing by 12 weeks. If these embryos are not fully shed from the body, together with the rest of the uterine lining, they threaten the life of the person carrying them.
These numbers are talking about miscarriages. Abortion is the intentional murder of a pre-born human who, otherwise, would live. Miscarriages are the natural, unintended death of a pre-born baby through natural cause. Conflating the two is a deceptive tactic to make abolitionists look like we hate healthcare and are idiots. We’re not criminalizing natural tragedies, we’re criminalizing murder, which is performed by murderers, not natural cause.
An additional 5% will continue to develop past 12 weeks, but have fatal defects that mean, once delivered, they will never leave the hospital. Some of these fetuses have abnormalities so severe that continuing the pregnancy to term threatens the life of the person carrying them.
What this actually means: it’s not possible to conceive and carry a fetus to term without simultaneously conceiving embryos and fetuses that will die. It’s also not possible to conceive and carry a baby to term without risking one’s own life.
This is false. Pregnancies do not put mothers at risk, health defects, illness, and other features of our fallen world do. If a pregnancy needs to be stopped by medical staff, they don’t have to murder the baby, they just have to remove it. If the baby dies from there, that death is a result of natural cause, not the doctors slaughtering the baby in cold blood.
Fact: There is no such thing as procreation without accompanying death.
Death is a part of our fallen world. Murder is too, but the difference is we’re commanded to not murder by God.
Viability by definition is neither subjective nor a decoy. It’s a legal concept, not a moral one.
If you believe voluntarily terminating a pregnancy is morally wrong, you should be glad that the government hasn’t yet decided to force you to. In China, the 1-child policy made abortions legally mandatory for decades (look it up). This frequently took the form of infanticide, because families preferred boys. By the time the 1-child policy was reversed, 30 million female fetuses and babies had been aborted or murdered to make room for males.
If a government assumes the power to make abortion illegal, it simultaneously assumes the power to make it mandatory. Can’t have one without the other.
Banning abortion is a defensive tactic to uphold justice of an already committed crime (baby murder). Banning abortion is NOT positively forcing a women to have a baby. Besides the case of rape, all women give consent to getting pregnant.
In the case of rape, as tragic as it is, the rapist should be convicted (with the child being the evidence), and the Mother should not change sides from rape victim to murderer.
On a more compassionate note, I honestly hope the women in your life never have a pregnancy that goes sideways and who is maimed or killed as a result of being denied medical treatment because the doctor didn’t want to lose their license and/or wind up in jail. That would be one very ugly leopard eating her face.
Ectopic pregnancies are not abortions, so I’m not sure what “maiming” or “killing” you’re referring to?2If abortion was outright banned, it doesn’t cover miscarriages, and ectopic pregnancies.
Doctors do not refer abortion clinics in emergency situations, they try to save both patients. Imagine you’re a doctor, and 1 patient’s arm was stuck in another’s chest cavity. Would you call a hitman to decapitate one of them?
Let’s say the only time you can murder a baby is if it’s affecting the life of the mother, and ectopics were actually abortions, just for a minute. Would you now be pro-life for the other 97% of abortions? Sounds like your big hangup is the Mom, but otherwise, you detest baby murder? Of course not. So just argue for your actual position; “I think murdering babies should be available legally on demand, and here is why…”
I have close relatives who are very prolife. I remember asking one of my cousins what about after a child is born? He basically explained that is was before a child is born that mattered. I became pro born. I get that people do not want the worst abuses of proabortion advocates. However, I want to know what you believe about the born? Once a child is born what social and family supports do you believe in? Has anyone challenged you to think about the children for whom you say you are advocating? I hate the idea of abortion, but I do not think women should die from a non viable pregnancy, because emergency rooms will not treat her. The issue of abortion is not about infanticide like too many people try to make it. Also, pro lifers need to care after the born arrive in the world, not just use abortion to be antifunding
I do not hold that life only matters “before they’re born”, if your cousin actually said that, I think he is wrong.
I believe all human life, despite age, location, ethnicity, etc. are made in the image of God and should be protected and upheld. All of our laws currently do that for all humans in our country except one; the pre-born.
The assumption here is that the only way we can help born people in situations of poverty or abuse is with bloated government programs, which is obviously false. We can all independently help our neighbor as Jesus commands us without forcing it to happen poorly through the civil government. That’s what churches are for.
To summarize my position: Don’t murder babies, help born people.
To summarize the pro-choice position: Murder babies, vote for government programs
Life threatening situations of illness, accidents, non-viable pregnancies etc. are not abortions. There are no abolition laws that classify this as an abortion. If the medical staff is saving both patients, that’s healthcare. If someone is intentionally trying to terminate a baby, that’s murder. That’s where the abolition kicks in.
The issue of abortion is absolutely about infanticide. Life begins at conception, so if that life is destroyed at any point, it is by definition murder.
Even in the worst case scenario, if someone was wrong about not caring for the born, even if they HATED the born, that only proves that they’re a hypocrite, it doesn’t disprove the position itself that abortion is murder.
Let’s apply this to rape. Rape is legal, and anti-rape groups are saying that this is evil. Someone comes along and says “Well, anti-rapers have to care for the rapists before they rape, like when they are watching porn” Does that change the fact that the evil of rape itself is legal? No, and that’s the fight we’re fighting, not the personal beliefs of the people fighting it.