Three Bad Pro-Life Arguments

 
There is a thin line between friendly fire and sound coaching. I’m grateful for everyone who recognizes the humanity of the unborn and longs to see them protected from all who would do them harm. That said, from time to time our rhetoric carries with it unhealthy assumptions, however potent they might be at tugging at our heartstrings. We end up, while fighting for precious ground, giving up more precious ground. Here then are three arguments I hear regularly from my friends that I don’t believe help.
 
1.     Imagine all amazing artists, scientists, philanthropists we have lost through the evil of abortion. Or, imagine all the dictators, serial killers and abortionists we might have been spared because of abortion. We do not labor to spare the lives of God’s littlest image bearers because of all the good they might have done. We are, after all, sinners. More people means more wickedness. We don’t want to see the unborn flourish because of the good they might do for others, but because they are the others. Their value, like ours, is real, universal, and extrinsic to them, outside them. It is the imposition of the image of God that gives us our worth and dignity. Broader still, we don’t make decisions on what is right based on our best guess on how things might work out. Eve made that mistake. Our calling is to obey.
2.     If we don’t stop killing our own children, God will one day judge us. Now I’m all in favor of fearing the judgment of God. Perhaps the worst judgment, however, is being given over to reprobate minds that cannot even recognize the judgment of God. What, I want to ask these friends, do they think judgment from God might look like? What if He sent a delusion upon us such that we thought it a good thing to destroy the greatest gifts He gives us? What if He gave us over to our own depravity such that we willingly, freely murdered a million of our own children each year? What if He gave us a government that not only protected our “liberty” to do this, but taxed us all to pay for it? We do not have to wait for God’s judgment to come- we are in the midst of it right now. The murder of the unborn is not just a reason for God’s judgment but is God’s judgment.
3.     Abortion will cause Social Security to go bankrupt, because there aren’t enough children to pay into it. This makes as much sense as the old argument in favor of chattel slavery- if we outlaw slavery, who will pick all the cotton? Children are not given to us as future taxpayers, nor rescuers of a system of transfer payments that was not just flawed but doomed from its inception.  They are not little units of future government income but human beings. And they should be valued as such.
Which brings us to the only real argument there is. Abortion is wicked, vile, an abomination because it is the willful murder not just of the most helpless and weak of human beings, but of our own children. There is no deeper perversion of our created nature than the wanton destruction of our own little ones. Which is why every unborn child is due the full protection of the law, no matter how their precious lives began. Complicated arguments never help but always obfuscate. Simple arguments speak potent truths- all children should be safe in their mothers’ wombs, because they bear the image of the One who put them there.