By Erin Black
I haven’t always been pro-life. Coming from a family of Democratic voters, and growing up near Seattle with almost all liberal teachers and peers, I always considered myself a Democrat. With that label came the views that I should support Democratic candidates, same-sex unions, and—in certain circumstances—abortion.
I was never staunchly pro-choice. Any blockhead with a sixth-grade biology education knows that the preborn are human beings. And as a non-blockhead sixth-grader with a sixth-grade biology education, I did. Clearly, even from the moment of conception, the zygote is fundamentally different from either sperm or eggs: it has its own DNA, distinct from the mother and father. And the DNA it has as a zygote is the same DNA it will have as an embryo, a fetus, an infant, a toddler, and so on. The substance of a distinct, living, human organism is the same at each stage of life—it just takes time to grow and develop. An elementary school child can see that.
But I was also influenced by the thinking of the left-leaning world around me in western Washington. I remember saying to my friend on homecoming night, junior year, that the only reason I would want abortion to be legal was that women might otherwise try to abort their children themselves with coat hangers, and end up accidentally killing themselves. She agreed. As terrible as we both thought abortion was, we were also concerned for the women who might try to abort their babies at any cost. It seemed like a necessary evil.
However, when I became a Christian as a senior in high school, my reservations for abolishing this horrific violation of human rights slowly faded. I am shocked to think I once told my pastor in Adult Confirmation class that I thought abortion should be allowed in cases where the babies had Down syndrome. He very gently reminded me of what a blessing those individuals can be to their families and friends. I never realized before that I had been advocating for eugenics: How could I have thought it was okay to kill people because of their disabilities?
I am also disgusted that I once thought it was okay to kill preborn babies who had been conceived in rape. It took an article by Hans Fiene of Lutheran Satire fame to change my mind on that. He explained that if people thought abortion was permissible in instances of rape, then what we are really saying is that those women don’t deserve to be “punished” with babies. And logically, it would follow that we do think women who became pregnant through consensual sex deserve to be “punished.” But that’s not what we want. We want equal human rights for all humans, regardless of how they got to be here. We don’t want to “punish” the women who became pregnant through consensual sex; we just want their babies to live. Pastor Fiene made me realize that the children of rape victims are just innocent children who don’t deserve the death penalty. The mothers who have survived that horrible act of violence need and deserve all the care and support and healing they can get. But one act of violence (abortion) isn’t going to undo another act of violence (rape).
As I realized more and more the inherent value of every human life, I became fully pro-life. When I joined Students for Life in my second year at Western Washington University, I started learning a lot about the scientific and philosophical arguments for the pro-life stance through the training we’d do. We’d talk about how the preborn are:
Distinct—with separate DNA from the mother and father;
Whole—not being cells taken off of a living organism, but the complete organism itself;
Living—satisfying the Seven Properties of Life biologists use to define living organisms; and
Human—having two human parents, making them necessarily human according to the Law of Biogenesis.
We talked about moral reasoning, such as the idea of being personally against abortion, but not wanting to tell others they can’t have them. This idea confuses moral claims with preference claims. It would be like saying, “Don’t like slavery? Don’t own a slave,” or, “Don’t like child abuse? Don’t abuse your children. But don’t tell other parents they can’t abuse theirs.”
We also talked about some of the myths perpetuated by the abortion industry, like the idea that legal abortions are “safe.” It turns out that abortions done at any stage are dangerous. Even the RU-486 pills taken in the first trimester can cause hemorrhaging, which the woman might not even know is happening, since she takes the second set of pills at home, and is told by the abortion workers to expect heavy bleeding. Some women have not gone to the ER when they should have, and bled out. Women getting later abortions have even hemorrhaged in the abortion facilities, and Planned Parenthood is known to fail to call 911 because it would look bad for an ambulance to show up in their parking lot.
Listening to a podcast last year from Kristan Hawkins, our national Students for Life president, I learned that, according to this Washington Post article (a left-leaning publication), 90% of illegal abortions committed before Roe v. Wade were committed by doctors in good standing in their community. So much for the “back-alley abortions” myth, I had been worried about in high school! It turns out they were called “back-alley abortions” because the women were let into the doctors’ offices through the back alley doors, not because they were done in back alleys!
So, as Martin Luther once said, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” Because the preborn are human, just like us. The only differences between born and preborn people can be remembered by using the SLED acronym:
Size
Level of Development
Environment
Degree of Dependency
It’s wrong to kill innocent humans, even if they are smaller than us, less developed than we are, in a different place from us, or more dependent on someone than we are on others. And every pro-choice argument I have ever heard—even the ones I used to believe—have turned out to be wrong. Thousands of women will not die if and when we overturn Roe. Children with special needs are no less valuable than any other children. Abortion does not heal a survivor of rape.
And the pro-life movement is waiting with open arms for every woman experiencing an unexpected pregnancy. Students for life alone has a multitude of resources for pregnant and parenting students to get them everything they need, not to mention all the organizations that help women, children, and families who may not be students. Adoption services will find children loving homes right away (and they will not be placed in foster care). And we even have resources for women and men who have been hurt by abortion.
So not only are we morally obligated to fight to end this horrific violation of human rights, but we are ready to take care of all the women, children, and men who need help when facing difficult circumstances. This is why I fight for life. Because every single human being is infinitely valuable and worth saving.