Quick Responses to Common Pro-Choice Arguments

The Underground Project seeks to educate and provide people with opportunities to speak out for the innocent who are silenced by the murder of abortion.  Abortion can become a heated subject to talk about with people.  Often opponents to pro-lifers resort to hurling rhetorical and emotional slogans like grenades and waiting for them to go off in the pro-lifer’s face (though some pro-lifers are guilty of this as well). The purpose of this article is to provide what we call “quick responses” for abortion dialogue that can keep that “grenade” from “blowing up in your face.”  The response is usually a question that forces the pro-choicer to evaluate their slogan and see if it makes sense.  Here are the most popular ones:

 (Special thanks to David Lee and Steve Wagner of Justice for All and Stand to Reason and who taught us how to dialogue and use some of these responses more effectively.  You guys rock!)*

 

Pro Choice Slogans about:

Life, Humanity, and Personhood

Pro Life Responses

 

Abortion isn’t killing.  It isn’t alive, it’s just tissue.
  1. How can something that’s growing not be alive?
  2. Biology says that the fetus is alive, and abortion makes it dead, isn’t that killing?

 

It isn’t human.
  1. What is it?  A dog?  A fish?  A carrot?
  2. If a being has human parents, isn’t it human?

 

It’s human, but it isn’t a person.  It’ s just a potential person.

What makes someone a person?  (Point out that qualities pro-choicers demand for personhood typically don’t apply to born people like infants, the elderly, the mentally handicapped and the comatose.)**

 

Abortion just terminates a pregnancy.

Childbirth terminates a pregnancy, is abortion the same as childbirth?

 

It’s just a microscopic piece of tissue.

Aren’t we all “pieces of tissue” in different sizes?  Are bigger people, more valuable people?

 

It can’t think or feel pain. It isn’t like us.

Newborns can’t think like us, and people in comas can’t feel.  Can we kill them?

 

It isn’t even in the world yet.

What planet is it on then?  I would suspect Earth, like the rest of us.

 

It’s totally dependent on the mother to live.

Should we cherish the helpless, or kill them? Isn't a toddler dependent on his/her mother too?  Should we allow the killing of toddlers as well?

 

It’s just a part of the woman’s body.

If that’s true then pregnant women have two brains, two hearts, 20 fingers and toes, and a penis half the time!

 

No one knows when life begins.  It’s a religious question.

Can a Satanist kill a two-year-old in a ritual sacrifice?  After all no one knows when life begins and that’s what his religion says.  In addition, if no one knows when life begins then shouldn't we play it safe and not kill a life in question?

 

Pro Choice Slogans about:

Rights, Fairness, Privacy and Choice

Pro Life Responses

A woman has a right to choose.

A right to choose what?  If it’s abortion, what does an abortion do?  A murder has the choice to kill its victims, but that choice has consequences.  Everyone has the right to choose, but choices that kill innocent humans should have the same consequences.

My body, my choice!

What about the child’s body and her choice? Again, make the distinction that there are two different bodies that we are talking about.

A woman has a right to privacy.

Does a woman have a right to abuse her two year old in private?  Can a father molest his daughter if it is done in the privacy of their own home?

No one has the right to use a woman’s body as life support.

Aren’t parents supposed to take care of and support their children?  How does a child living inside their parent change that?

You can’t force me to donate an organ for you?  How can you force me to bear a child?

Your organs weren’t made for me.  For whom is the uterus designed?

If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a baby?

Trust you with what choice?  Is it the choice to attend college, get married, or kill a child?  Not all choices are equal or good.

We shouldn’t force our morality on other people.

Isn’t a mother who aborts her child forcing her morality on her child?

It’s not fair to force a woman to be a mother against her will.

Isn’t she already a mother?  The question is will she be the mother of a live baby or a dead one.

Abortion is a private decision between a woman and her doctor.

If a woman privately hires a doctor to kill her child, should we interfere?

Abortion is a private decision between a woman and her God.

Many serial killers say God told them to kill their victims, does that make it okay?

Abortion is fundamental for women’s rights, without it they can’t have equality with men.
  1. What about the rights of 650,000 women that are aborted each year?
  2. When men abandon a crisis pregnancy they are considered scum and jerks.  Are you saying women need to strive to be jerks or scum?

 

Outlawing abortion will be unfair for poor women who can’t afford to obtain safe ones.

Is it unfair to deny people the chance to hurt or kill others?

Some women have no other choice.

Would a drug addict who doesn’t want to give up her son to the state have “no other choice” but to kill him?
   

 

Pro Choice Slogans about:

Social Issues, Health, and Safety

Pro Life Responses

Every child a wanted child***

So should we kill all the unwanted ones?

What about children who will have terrible lives or live in poverty?

We could just euthanize those children in their sleep, is that a good solution to poverty? In addition, we would have to survey all the children currently living in poverty and ask them if the better solution would have been for us to dismember them in their mother's wombs and see what they think.

What about overpopulation!?

Should we kill the homeless, mentally handicapped, or senile?  They’re just contributing to overpopulation, right?

Abortion is legal.

So was slavery.  What is legal isn’t always right.

You should be more tolerant.  If you don’t like abortion don’t have one.

If you don’t like child molestation, don’t molest one.  (Does that sound tolerant or absurd to you?)

The government can’t legislate morality.

 

What about laws that forbid murder, theft, and rape?  Isn’t that legislating morality?

Opposition to abortion is religiously based.  What about Separation of Church and State?

 

Religious people oppose the killing of toddlers, should we say they should stop because of “Separation of Church and State?”

Even if abortion were made illegal, there would still be many abortions.

Rape is illegal but there are still many rapes, should we do away with that law?

Abortion is safer than childbirth.
  1. If a woman’s child is drowning in a lake, shouldn’t she reasonably risk some of her safety if the only other alternative is the child’s death?
  2. Should every woman get an abortion because it’s “safer” than childbirth?

Do you want women to die in dangerous “back-alley” abortions?
  1. No, the death of the mother would be just as tragic as the death of the child.  Can’t we have a world where neither dies?
  2. Should we legalize terrorism to make it safer for the terrorist?

 

Pro Choice Slogans about:

Hard Cases

Pro Life Responses

What about a woman whose life is in danger?
  1. What condition would do that?  (Usually they have no idea so explain that this situation is extremely rare and usually the child will die regardless)
  2. The doctor should do his best to save both, but that is a very rare case.  On the other hand, it is very common for the child’s life to be in danger during an abortion. What about her life?

What if a woman was raped?
  1. Am I a child of rape?  If I were, would that mean at one point I didn’t deserve to live?
  2. Rape is the fault of the father, why should the child pay for his crimes?
  3. Do we allow the mother to kill the guilty party?  No. Then why would we allow her to kill the innocent party?

What about a mother who’s going to have a deformed child?
  1. What amount of imperfections justify the death of a child?
  2.  If a mother’s born child becomes deformed, does she have a right to kill it?

 

Pro Choice Slogans about:

Pro-Lifers

Pro Life Responses

Pro lifers show disgusting photos of dead babies!

They are disgusting photos because abortion is disgusting. 

Are you personally going to adopt those babies you don’t want aborted?
  1. If we adopt them, will you tell women to stop aborting them?  (1.3 million couples are waiting to adopt newborns)
  2. If a woman is going to kill her toddlers, do I have to adopt them to stop her from killing them?

You’re a man.  You don’t have a uterus.  You have no right to tell me what to do!  (Or, You’re not pregnant.  Who are you to tell me what to do?)
  1. How do you know I’m a man?
  2. Some women don’t have uteruses, are they second-class citizens?
  3. Do I have to be a parent or an abused child to oppose child abuse?
  4. The entire Supreme Court that decided the Roe vs. Wade decision were men.

Pro-lifers are fanatics that bomb clinics, shoot abortion doctors and break the law!
  1. Why do you think pro-lifers do those things?
  2. It’s terrible when people harm those that they consider “unwanted.”  That’s why I oppose abortion.

            An important point to remember about these responses is that they are not designed to present the entire pro-life position to someone.  Instead, they are quick ways to neutralize inflammatory slogans and bring the issue back to the main point, the killing of the unborn.  Good luck, and remember that the goal is not to debate with individuals and “win” fights about abortion.  Instead, grace, wisdom, and tact must be used to dialogue about abortion in the hope that people will see that it is a reasonable position to hold.

 *One tactic used successfully by Justice for All staff members is “Trot Out the Toddler” or TOTT.  In short, TOTT is a tool to show people that many reasons used to justify killing the unborn would also justify killing born people, including toddlers.  Many of the pro-life rejoinders above use this tactic, but not all of them.  How many can you find that Trot Out the Toddler?

**Arguments about personhood can be diffused by TOTT (see above).  Often they can become too technical for TOTT to be of use.  Stay tuned for more Underground articles about this issue.

***This is one of the slogans of Planned Parenthood.