ProLife is the Wrong Choice (Why it's a Self-Defeating Position)

ProLife is the Wrong Choice (Why It’s a Self-Defeating Position)

Although abortion vs. anti-abortion has been framed as a culture war, and there have been many anti-abortion laws passed (all of them egregiously passed, we might say) the debate isn’t really a debate because one position is scientifically, legally, and philosophically sound. And that position is the ProChoice position. The ProLife position is not scientifically, legally, or philosophically sound. And this is why I have often referred to the ProLife argument as a non-sequitur or non-argument.

Now, what do I mean by saying it’s a non-argument?

Well, boiled down to the base claim behind the ProLife position, it’s that = Human life is sacred, therefore terminating human life is bad.

This is a religious claim, not a scientific one. Certainly not a legal one.

Even if the claim is reframed to say = Human life is sacred, therefore terminating human life is unlawful, the ‘unlawful’ bit has NOT been defined either because the legal status of an unborn fetus has never been defined in a court of law.

But a mother’s rights (as an autonomous individual) have been defined. And this causes problems later on, as we’ll see.

Knowing their ProLife claims are undefined, savvy lawyers working for religious institutions have tried to frame it in scientific terms in order to better try and hitch their religious ideology to the science and thereby validate their claim as more “credible.” As such, they will say things like “Life begins at conception.”

This is also not a scientific claim.

Biologically speaking, there is no delineating point of “life beginning” at conception. Or at any other given point, for that matter. It simply doesn’t exist.

Life’s beginning point in terms of embryonic development is scientifically undefined. Saying that “life begins at conception” doesn’t mean anything.

We also know that it’s scientifically false to make this claim.

Life often self-terminates after conception. Miscarriages, chromosomal defects, genetic defects, environmental toxicity, and other factors might make the so-called life non-viable. That’s why you’ll hear people talk about the viability of a fetus. If it’s not viable, it means it’s not “life” in the sense of it will become a living organism.

More importantly, though, self-terminating cells which immediately die after conception cannot be called “life.” Saying a collection of dead cells after conception is “life at conception” isn’t only wrong, it’s categorically wrong and shows there is a willful ignorance in making such a claim.

(Logical fallacy note: Category mistakes are an analytical misstep wherein an individual misclassifies a concept into an improper framework, assigning attributes to an entity that it fundamentally cannot possess.)

Willful ignorance is, in this case, a tactic. If the science disproves the validity of your claim, then it’s better to only use science when it’s in favor of your claim and not delve too deeply into the nuance of it lest you invalidate your own claim. Which is why abortion debates usually skirt the science and double down on emotional appeals.

(Logical fallacy note: An appeal to emotion becomes a fallacy (argumentum ad passiones) when someone manipulates feelings—such as fear, pity, anger, or flattery—to make you accept a claim that has no actual factual or logical proof.)

But why is it categorically wrong to say that “life begins at conception”? Partially because the number of steps in embryonic development and the way cell division works happen along a gradient so gradual that it’s nearly impossible to simply select a starting point. It’s undefined.

Without a point of demarcation around what we’d consider life, or precisely at what instant it begins, all we are left with is a gradient of cellular division. Interestingly, the philosophical concept of the Theseus ship paradox is the best way one can describe this gradual biological transition and why it’s so hard to define.

(Philosophical note: The Ship of Theseus (also known as Theseus’s Paradox) is a classic philosophical thought experiment about identity and continuity over time. It asks whether an object remains the same thing fundamentally if all of its original parts are eventually replaced.)

When it comes to cellular division and embryonic development, you’re dealing with the Thesesus’s ship paradox not merely as a philosophical thought exercise but as a real, literal version of the event.

As such, saying that “Life begins at conception” runs into the very difficult dilemma of “Life” being undefinable and so saying that it starts at the implantation of the sperm into the egg is simply a semantic way of manipulating the language to sound like there is a defined “starting point” when there clearly is not.

Both sperm and eggs are living cells. When they combine, they form a different living cell. And when they change and develop new, different cells, they become something different. Each developmental stage is technically a new kind of life, but this is why it’s a literal real life Theseus’s ship paradox.

In order for “life” to begin, each stage of development would need to define a new “life” as beginning. It would need to be defined at the Germinal Stage, at fertilization of an oocyte, to the zygote, to cleavage and the morula, to blastocyst formation, to trophoblast, to embryoblast, to implantation of the blastocyst and the endometrium, to chorionic gonadotropin, to the Gastrulation & Neurulation stage, to the germ layers, the ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm formations, on to the neurulation and formation of the neural tube, on to Organogenesis and embryo growing various buds which may turn into body parts, to literally eight more stages of this, then, finally, at the end of week 8, the Carnegie stage 23, the embryonic period concludes and the organism is officially classified as a fetus.

None of that has been defined as a “starting point” for life, because each one of those stages represent different forms of cellular life which are distinctly not the form before it nor the form after it. As such, each kind of life is a different kind of “life.”

That’s what science says.

Legally speaking, it’s even more complicated.

Remember earlier when we discussed how a mother’s legal rights are defined but an unborn fetus’s are not? This is because the fetus isn’t born yet and therefore does not have identity or autonomy apart from the mother. As such, they cannot be a protected individual under the law because they are not a separate entity from the mother. Not yet, at any rate.

To define it as such would be problematic (and is problematic wherever they’ve passed anti-abortion laws) because essentially what needs to happen is you must grant privileges and rights to something undefined at the same time as having these rights usurp the mother’s identity and autonomy, thereby putting both forms of “life” in conflict with each other definitionally.

Under the law, minors (aka children) do not share the same rights or privileges as adults, for good reason. Well, not just one reason, there’s hundreds of reasons why undeveloped, young, still forming children cannot be granted the same rights as adult humans. It’s for their protection and safety that they have LESS rights, not more.

So, it’s strange to take a fetus, as an undefined kind of life, and automatically give it protected rights that outweigh the mother’s protected rights. When I talk about conflict of legal rights, this is what I mean. Because there has been no legal definition of a fetus having any legal standing as anything separate from the mother, it’s a very weird thing to suddenly say it’s an individual with protected rights that usurp hers legally. Steps have been skipped.

Furthermore, the more problematic part of granting a fetus such rights is that only individuals with a legal identity can be given rights to the degree religious-backed lawmakers are trying to give. But giving something without an identity the same rights as something with an identity, creates a conflict of identity which then legally voids the meaning of the rights for both entities. Why is it null and void? Because you’ve confused what the law can discern in terms of an entity’s “rights” without teams of lawyers to translate and explain what the heck anyone means by erecting laws this way. It’s nonsensical because it’s incoherent and therefore incorrect. Use all the legalese you want, without any clear definitions of what we’re talking about, it might as well be Greek to us.

The fact that laws HAVE been passed this way SHOULD bother you.

Religious judges accepting laws this way are doing a disservice to not only citizens rights but the law in general. It’s lazy. And, frankly, they’re setting us back. Because all these ill defined terms and conditions will need to be undone or corrected when someone finally decides to take the time to PROPERLY define these things and rewrite the laws to make LOGICAL sense.

This is only the start of the legal issues which complicate the ProLife position. Other legal things are = life is undefined, life beginning at point X is undefined, a fetus’s rights are undefined, a mother’s identity and rights are in conflict with the way laws are treating her sovereignty.

Finally, there’s a legal and moral complication we have yet to discuss. The laws as written don’t guarantee a better quality of life for the fetus/baby and therefore cannot be the primary reason to “save a life.”

ProLife advocates say that the fetus must be brought to term no matter what. Life, according to them, is sacred after all (also not a legal term, but a religious one). But what’s the moral implication of this if the baby is going to be born into an immediate world of suffering, starvation, and pain?

Forcing a life into a world of pain, suffering, starvation, disease, & etc. knowing that this is the outcome is the opposite of kind or just. It’s evil. Abortion, in this case, would be a mercy.

Morally speaking, to force a child into a miserable existence just to feel good about your religious convictions is evil.

To demand a mother who doesn’t have the means to provide a good life to the child is cruel.

Demanding both these things be written into law so they are forced upon the mother and the child is not justice, it’s the opposite. It's an injustice.

This is why it’s legally problematic. Because laws, although not needing to be necessarily just, do seek to limit and control behaviors of the citizens these laws are erected over. As such, if the premise is that life is sacred, then writing a law which guarantees the suffering of this life is neither just nor moral, so what is the purpose of the law since it defeats the purpose of the claims which the law was predicated on? In this case, it defeats the claim that since life is sacred it must be protected.

All of these reasons should be enough for us to dismiss the ProLife position altogether. It’s an unthought, underdeveloped, legally and morally problematic position that avoids actually defining its terms because it doesn’t rely on facts but emotions to gain any traction with people. It’s manipulative and, if taken as an absolute, can lead to conditions which are anti-thetical to its own claims, meaning that it’s SELF-DEFEATING.

The last thing we need to be weary of is that a lot of these anti-abortion bills don’t actually seek to protect the infant after birth. They are written, more or less, to force women to be incubators and birth children for no other reason than this is what aligns with the religious beliefs of those seeking to pass these laws. In other words, it’s not about saving babies but forcing women to make babies no matter what so that they can be later converted into religious acolytes. That’s not hyperbole, that’s literally what many of these anti-abortion bills and laws–as written–are seeking to do.

Naturally, this ulterior motive to control women is sinister. There’s no reason to think that women would be making bad decisions about their own bodies as long as they are getting proper medical treatment, good medical information and support, and access to good healthcare. It’s no wonder then, that so many of these anti-abortion bills/laws try to strip healthcare away from women, or else limit and restrict it. There’s absolutely no valid reason to do this except to control women.

All this just to ask a simple question. Do you know what position isn’t self-defeating? Which position aligns with science? Which position contains clearly defined terms? Which position doesn’t manipulate the law or your emotions? Which position doesn’t seek to harm a baby that’s come to term? Which position doesn’t seek to limit women’s healthcare? Which position doesn’t try to pass religious superstition off as scientific fact and then try to codify it into law?

You’ve probably already guessed it, but yeah, it’s the ProChoice position.

It’s not only the superior position legally, morally, philosophically, logically, and so on, but it’s the only position that makes sense if you’ve ever given it a modicum of thought.

So, what needs to change in the ProLife arguments for them to be valid? Well, literally everything. Everything about them is wrong, incorrect, illogical, invalid, and self-defeating.

Yet we write them into laws. If this doesn’t bother you, something is very very wrong with you.

If you still think ProLife has any merit whatsoever, you haven’t understood a single one of these arguments and may need to re-read this critique several more times for it to sink in. Until real changes are made, however, the ProLife position doesn’t have a single leg to stand on. It’s a non-argument. A non-starter. It’s an invalid position to take morally. It’s legally confused and oftentimes contradictory.

Until a valid argument can be brought forward regarding the abortion debate, the only valid position is the ProChoice position. Given what we’ve learned, though, that’s not even a controversial statement. It’s just a brute fact at this point.