How to Defend Your Pro-Life

Views in 5 Minutes or Less

By Scott Klusendorf

Suppose that you have just five minutes to graciously defend your pro-life beliefs with friends or classmates.  Can you do it with rational arguments?  What should you say?  And how can you simplify the abortion issue for those who think it’s hopelessly complex? Here’s how to succeed in three easy steps:

1) Clarify the issue

Pro-life advocates contend that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being.  This simplifies the abortion controversy by focusing public attention on just one question: Is the unborn a member of the human family?  If so, killing him or her to benefit others is a serious moral wrong.  It treats the distinct human being, with his or her own inherent moral worth, as nothing more than a disposable instrument.  Conversely, if the unborn are not human, killing them for any reason requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled.

In other words, arguments based on “choice” or “privacy” miss the point entirely.  Would anyone that you know support a mother killing her toddler in the name of “choice and who decides?”  Clearly, if the unborn are human, like toddlers, we shouldn’t kill them in the name of choice anymore than we would a toddler.  Again, this debate is about just one question: What is the unborn?

At this point, some may object that your comparisons are not fair—that killing a fetus is morally different than killing a toddler.  Ah, but that’s the issue, isn’t it?  Are the unborn, like toddlers, members of the human family?  That is the one issue that matters.

Remind your critics that you are vigorously “pro-choice” when it comes to women choosing a number of moral goods.  You support a woman’s right to choose her own doctor, to choose her own husband, to choose her own job, and to choose her own religion, to name a few.  These are among the many choices that you fully support for women.  But some choices are wrong, like killing innocent human beings simply because they are in the way and cannot defend themselves. No, we shouldn’t be allowed to choose that.

2) Defend your pro-life position with science and philosophy

Scientifically, we know that from the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings.  Leading embryology books confirm this. Prior to his abortion advocacy, former Planned Parenthood President Dr. Alan Guttmacher was perplexed that anyone, much less a medical doctor, would question this.  "This all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge," he wrote in his book Life in the Making.

Philosophically, we can say that embryos are less developed than newborns (or, for that matter, toddlers) but this difference is not morally significant in the way abortion advocates need it to be.  Consider the claim that the immediate capacity for self-awareness bestows value on human beings.  Notice that this is not an argument, but an arbitrary assertion.  Why is some development needed?  And why is this particular degree of development decisive rather than another?  These are questions that abortion advocates do not adequately address.  Put simply, there is no morally significant difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today.  Differences of size, development, and location are not relevant.  Think of the acronym SLED as a helpful reminder of these non-essential differences:

Size: True, embryos are smaller than newborns and adults, but why is that relevant?  Do we really want to say that large people are more valuable than small ones?  Men are generally larger than women, but that doesn’t mean that they deserve more rights.  Size doesn’t equal value.

Level of development: True, embryos and fetuses are less developed than you and I.  But again, why is this relevant?  Four year-old girls are less developed than 14 year-old ones.  Should older children have more rights than their younger siblings?  Some people say that self-awareness makes one valuable.  But if that is true, newborns do not qualify as valuable human beings.  Six-week old infants lack the immediate capacity for performing human mental functions, as do the reversibly comatose, the sleeping, and those with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Environment: Where you are has no bearing on who you are.  Does your value change when you cross the street or roll over in bed?  If not, how can a journey of eight inches down the birth-canal suddenly change the essential nature of the unborn from non-valuable tissue mass to valuable human being?  If the unborn are not already human and valuable, merely changing their location can’t make them so.

Degree of Dependency: If viability bestows human value, then all those who depend on insulin or kidney medication are not valuable and we may kill them.  Conjoined twins who share blood type and bodily systems also have no right to life.

In short, it’s far more reasonable to argue that although humans differ immensely with respect to talents, accomplishments, and degrees of development, they are nonetheless equal (and valuable) because they share a common human nature.  Humans have value simply because of the kind of thing they are, not because of some acquired property they may gain or lose during their lifetimes.

3) Challenge your listeners to be intellectually honest.

Ask the tough questions.  When critics say that birth makes the unborn human, ask, “How does a mere change of location from inside the womb to outside the womb change the essential nature of the unborn?”  If they say that brain development or higher consciousness makes us valuable humans, ask if they would agree with Joseph Fletcher that those with an IQ below 20 or perhaps 40 should forfeit their right to life?  If not, why not?  True, some people will ignore the scientific and philosophic case you present for the pro-life view and argue for abortion based on self-interest.  That is the lazy way out.  Remind your critics that if we care about truth, we will courageously follow the facts wherever they lead, no matter what the cost to our own self-interests.

Scott Klusendorf is the president of the Life Training Institute and travels throughout the United States and Canada training pro-life advocates to persuasively defend their views in the public square. For additional resources visit www.prolifetraining.com.