As I’ve investigated both sides of the abortion debate, I’ve become honestly curious to discover if there is any anti-abortion argument that isn’t based on a lie (or lies). I’m going through the most popular current US anti-abortion talking points and giving each a Politifact-esque truth rating. Let’s investigate!
In this New York Times piece covering the issue of fetal pain, the overwhelming consensus among scientists is that fetuses are not capable of feeling pain before 24 weeks. The few scientists who speculate that fetuses might feel pain before 24 weeks point out that they “did not think their work or current evidence provided scientific support for fetal-pain laws.”
The threefactchecks cited above also cover this ground, but here is the Guttmacher article showing that 6% of US abortion providers are located in majority-black neighborhoods. The toomanyaborted.com page claims that Guttmacher claims that “only 9% of abortion clinics are located in urban neighborhoods,” which means they are lying about Guttmacher lying in order to perpetuate their lie. It’s a lie within a lie.
Major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, disagree. The birth control pill’s primary method of controlling birth is suppressing ovulation, with a backup of preventing implantation in the uterus. Maybe you think every fertilized egg flushed out before implantation is an abortion; in that case, you should definitely be taking the birth control pill, as many, many more zygotes are lost in “natural” sex than sex on the pill.
You should be able to intuitively conclude that this is not true, but if you want a citation, this study shows that the risk of death is 14 times greater in childbirth than in medical abortion.
Truth-o-meter: False
13. Crisis pregnancy centers are legitimate clinics that give scientifically sound information about abortion, which is why employees wear lab coats and are trained in reading ultrasounds.
Crisis pregnancy centers are actually run by volunteers from local Christian churches. These volunteers are almost always not trained in any medical profession, including sonography, which might explain why one center told a woman her IUD was a baby. However, volunteers will frequently wear lab coats and give “intake” paperwork in an attempt to fool clients into thinking they are trained medical professionals. They are well-known forgiving out falsemedical information, including that abortion causes breast cancer, infertility, “post-abortion syndrome,” and child abuse, or that abortion is much more dangerous than childbirth, or that birth control pills are abortifacients, or that condoms don’t work, and the list goes on …
Truth-o-meter: Pants on Fire
14. The focal point of the abortion debate is whether or not a fetus is living.
The focal point of the abortion debate is whether or not pregnant people have the right to bodily autonomy, meaning the right to govern what happens to their own body. You’re welcome to your own personal opinion on when a human being’s life begins, but it’s irrelevant.
Truth-o-meter: False
15. Banning abortion stops abortion.
Multiple comprehensiveworldwide studies by the World Health Organization concluded that countries where abortion is illegal have no lower rates of abortion than countries where it is legal. They do have significantly higher rates of unsafe abortions, however.
#14 needs a big more explanation, especially since it has no cited sources.
Those who are pro-choice believe in the concept of bodily autonomy, meaning, each person has absolute rights over their own body. We see this concept widely reflected elsewhere in life, with the idea of organ transplant and blood donation. Both of these procedures are voluntary and respect the right of an individual to chose if, and when, their body can be used for another person. Similarly, when a person has an issue with their body, they can decide to undergo a procedure to change it. Simple examples might be crooked teeth, removal of a tumor, addition of an artificial limb, or even changing hair color. No one else has the right to tell you what you can or can’t do with your body. (There is one widely accepted, but controversial, exception to this I’ll get into below.)
Those who are anti-abortion and call themselves pro-life believe that the fetus is a human being and deserving of all the rights of a human being, which includes right to life, or as they more gruesomely describe it sometimes, freedom from murder. The idea is that once a human has been conceived, many people believe (as a matter of faith) that a human soul has now been connected to the fetus. Because this is not a matter of science, and not provable beyond a religious belief, this is considered an emotional argument. You can believe it, or not, but it doesn’t change any of the facts available to all people.
Now, the issue here is that if you take this position (that a fetus is automatically a human being, regardless if your reason is religious or emotional), you can’t ALSO believe in bodily autonomy. The two ideas are incompatible. You can’t say “yes, you can have bodily autonomy, but not for THIS.” because then you no longer have control over your own body.
The general counterargument to this is “well it’s not ONLY your body you’re dealing with anymore.” But this doesn’t work quite as well as it sounds. In this line of argument, you’re suggesting that the fetus which cannot exist outside of the body, should be granted bodily autonomy, but the person carrying the fetus and its only means of survival should not. Ultimately, this argument treats a pregnant person like an incubator, not a person. Or, another way to put it, as soon as someone becomes pregnant, they lose their bodily autonomy and their life is a secondary concern to the life of the fetus.
There is no middle ground in this argument. Whereas we can often compromise on other things (spend our taxes here AND cut them here; no death penalty BUT life sentences instead), the divide between bodily autonomy and “life at conception” simply doesn’t have a shared point of view. You can’t say “sometimes a person who can be pregnant has bodily autonomy, and sometimes they don’t” because you’re also saying “if you can’t become pregnant, you ALWAYS have bodily autonomy” and that’s the essence of discrimination.
So, you can PERSONALLY believe at life at conception, the soul attached to a fetus, the ideas of heaven and hell, or any number of faith-based ideas, but if you decide that ALL peoples should believe these ideas, you can’t also believe in bodily autonomy (nor freedom of religion actually), and therefore, you have a discriminatory mindset.
The abortion debate is primarily a discussion of bodily autonomy, but on a personal level, it might be a matter of emotionally deciding when life begins. The first is non-discriminatory, universal, and fact based. The second if applied outside yourself, is discriminatory, personal, and belief/emotion based.
*(The only area of bodily autonomy that’s currently an exception to the argument of full rights over your own body is suicide. Most countries have laws against suicide which are intended to allow emergency responders help people with mental illnesses. However, this is idea currently under debate in many places in the world, as the right-to-die, especially for the terminally ill, has raised multiple questions with regards to bodily autonomy and in general, countries seem to be moving towards respecting a person’s right to die.)
ForLoveFromFear 