MYTH:
Pro-lifers are a bunch of religious fanatics trying to impose their faith on
everyone else.
TRUTH:
-While
it’s true that most pro-lifers are religious believers, so is the population as
a whole, at least in the United States [see here]. Even if
pro-lifers tend to be more observant than their fellow citizens, they adhere to
a moral tradition that the vast majority shares.
-Also, the
public arguments pro-lifers make against abortion are rooted in natural law and
concrete scientific fact. The most fundamental pro-life argument is that
science proves that unborn babies are both alive and human from the moment of conception, and so to destroy them is, by definition, the taking of a human life.
The taking of innocent human life is always wrong in and of itself, and if we
can declare some human lives expendable, then none of us has a clear right to
exist.
-Since the
pro-abortionists can’t produce any facts or scientific evidence that unborn babies
are not living human beings, they need to create a philosophical
definition such as “personhood” that is designed to exclude living humans who
don’t meet certain subjective standards (brain activity, ability to feel pain,
emotions, viability, etc.). Some also use quasi-theological arguments, such as that
unborn babies do not yet have souls: I recall one “pro-choice” cleric, not a
Catholic, who relied on the etymological connection in many languages between “breath”
and “spirit” to argue that we don’t have souls until we are able to breathe
(notice that the pro-life argument doesn’t use or need the concept of the
soul). They also use emotional arguments to obscure the injustice done to
aborted babies.
-Religious
believers have the same right to try to persuade their fellow citizens as
anyone else; if their fellow citizens don’t find their arguments persuasive,
they don’t have to go along. To
paraphrase Saint John Paul II, we propose, we don’t impose.
-In the
United States the purpose of the First Amendment to the Constitution is to
protect religious believers from the state, not the other way around. Certain opinions are not prohibited simplt because they have a religious basis.
-Just
because a law corresponds to religious convictions does not make it an
imposition of religion. Murder, theft
and all sorts of other crimes are condemned in the Bible and in Church
teaching, but I don’t hear anyone calling for the revocation of those laws on that basis.
-The
abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and many similar movements for
social improvement were led by believing Christians; should we reject the laws
that resulted from these as an “imposition of religious faith”?
-There are
agnostics and atheists who nonetheless recognize the injustice of abortion,
such as the atheist writer Nat Hentoff, or the abortionist and NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson,
who was still an atheist when he changed to a pro-life position (only later did
he embrace the Catholic Faith).
DON’T BUY THE LIE!
Essential Pro-Life Resources:
Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)
The Elliot Institute (link)
National Right To Life Committee (link)
Care-Net (link)
Abortion Myth # 1 [link]
Abortion Myth # 2 [link]
Abortion Myth # 3 [link]
Abortion Myth # 4 [link]
Abortion Myth # 5 [link]
Abortion Myth # 6 [link]
Abortion Myth # 7 [link]
Abortion Myth # 8 [link]
Abortion Myth # 9 [link]
Abortion Myth # 10 [link]
Abortion Myth # 11 [link]
Abortion Myth # 12[link]
Abortion Myth # 13 [link]
Abortion Myth # 14 [link]
Abortion Myth # 15 [link]
Abortion Myth # 16 [link]
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