Abortion

The case against abortion does not require a church, a party, or a sacred text. It requires only the standard we already use everywhere else: that a human life is not made expendable because someone with power finds it inconvenient.

Begin with what is not disputed. At conception a new human organism begins — distinct, living, developing along the only path that ends in a person. The disagreement is never really about what that being is, but about whether it counts. And counting is exactly the question common morality answers: suffering is bad whoever suffers it, and no one may be killed for another's convenience.

The strongest objection is the one worth taking seriously: bodily autonomy. No one should be forced to donate an organ, and pregnancy makes real demands on a woman's body. That claim is serious and deserves a real answer rather than a slogan. But autonomy has never meant the right to end a life that already depends on you; we do not let a parent abandon a born child to die because the burden is heavy. The honest resolution is not to pretend the unborn is nothing. It is to hold both lives as valuable, protect the child, and refuse to treat the frightened woman carrying her as an enemy.

A society is measured by whom it makes disposable, and the unborn are the only class we still call nothing at all.

Where to look further

This argument is not ours and does not have to be taken on trust. Abolitionists Rising makes the abolitionist case, that an unjust law has no claim on obedience. Live Action documents what abortion is and what it does. Juan-Elias Riesco is a missionary to the abortion clinics in Chicago, who argues where the killing happens and offers a real alternative instead of a slogan.

An argument you refuse to hear is not an argument you have answered.