Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Abortion In Cases Of Life-Threatening Pregnancy

There is an obvious distinction between abortion because a baby is regarded as sub-human or inconvenient and abortion because a pregnancy or birth threatens the life of the mother.  However, some pro-lifers condemn even the consideration that abortion might be permissible in the latter scenario.  The only reason why a woman would be obligated to sacrifice herself so that her unborn baby can live is if unborn children have a greater value than adults, and yet this completely contradicts the actual pro-life stance.  Anyone who condemns abortion as murder should quickly see why this is the case.

A consistent pro-life position affirms that all humans have the same baseline human rights.  Thus, to prioritize unborn humans over humans outside of the womb by default only commits the inverse of the error that regards unborn children as inherently less important than other humans.  Pro-choice ideology trivializes or outright ignores the humanity of those within the womb, while the idea that a mother who will die if her baby is born must simply resign herself to her death trivializes the humanity of the mother.

In order to remain consistent with the fundamental tenet of pro-life philosophy, one must admit that a mother whose life is threatened by a pregnancy has the right to choose which life will be treated as the higher priority.  Some mothers in such a scenario might choose their children over themselves, and others might choose themselves; neither has sinned because no mother is obligated to die so that her unborn child can live [1].

It should not take anyone more than a few moments to realize that unborn babies have human rights if being human means that one has certain rights.  Likewise, it should be obvious that it is unjust to automatically prioritize either the life of an unborn baby over that of its mother if simply being human grounds human rights.  No position that denies either of these logical facts is rational (they are both facts about what follows from certain premises and are not even claims about whether or not humans have rights to begin with), and yet most people deny one or the other.



[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-exception-to-abortions-immorality.html

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