MYTH: “Women have a ‘right to choose’. We have no right to tell a woman what she can do with her own body.”
TRUTH: While this common pro-abortion pronouncement may sound good on the surface, it does not stand up to examination on several grounds:
1) Abortion is directed at, and kills, the body of the child, not the mother. From the moment of conception the zygote, embryo, fetus, child, and so on is a separate body having its own process of growth, growing its own organs, and with its own DNA; no part of our bodies has its own organs, or different DNA. Pro-life people are not trying to tell the mother what to do with her body: we are seeking to prevent others from doing deadly harm to the unborn baby’s body.
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| Mother and Child: two bodies |
2) A generic “right to choose” is a non-sensical proposition that even abortion rights supporters don’t really believe in. Any action at all can be expressed as a “choice”. How many people, pro-life or pro-choice, support the choice to rape, murder, or steal? Many people who call themselves “pro-choice” don’t even want to permit the “choice” to hold a sign in front of an abortion clinic. Choices can only be evaluated on the basis of what is being chosen, and people who go by the label “pro-choice” almost always mean no more than the choice of a mother to abort her unborn child.
3) Likewise, even pro-choice advocates are in favor of laws restricting what people, including women, can do with their bodies. There is no public clamor in favor of the right of women to use their bodies to drive drunk; nobody that I know of supports the right of women to use their bodies to beat their already-born children; I have never heard a pro-choice advocate support the right of women to strap explosives to their bodies and set them off in crowded marketplaces.
4) Pro-choice supporters are inconsistently silent on the issue of women who feel they have been given no choice but abortion:
- The Alan Guttmacher Institute (historically associated with Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion provider) has found that the two most common reasons women abort are lack of finances and emotional support. And yet pro-choicers try to shut down the pregnancy help centers that offer emotional support and material help that’s not available anywhere else (see Pro-life Answers to Pro-choice Arguments) .
- Mary Cunningham Agee surveyed post-abortive women about what they had really wanted. 91 0ut of 100 women said that they would have preferred to give birth, but felt that abortion was their only choice. This survey was part of her inspiration for the founding of The Nurturing Network, an organization with thousands of volunteers providing the practical assistance that women told her they needed.
DON’T BUY THE LIE!
Essential Pro-Life Resources:
Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)
Care-Net (link)
To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE
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