Common among some pro-choice advocates is a position that attempts to compromise the two ends of the abortion issue. I like to call this position personally pro-life. Adherents of this view believe personally that abortion is wrong, but they don’t want to impose their views on others. They typically view their position as a purely religious one that ought to stay out of the public realm. We shouldn’t, they say, enforce our religious beliefs on those who don’t hold them. This view, I believe, is severely confused.

It’s just my faith

Some personally pro-life individuals will justify their position by claiming that it’s ludicrous to legislate one article of their faith for an entire population. For them, such a reality would be akin to an inquisition on the secular world, having people live under an iron fist of doctrine. Abortion, then, is wrong for personally pro-life individuals because their religion forbids it, but for others it is permissible because they don’t follow the precepts of the personally pro-lifer’s religion.

Just because a proposed law, however, aligns with a particular religious belief, that doesn’t mean that said law is completely null. For instance, a Catholic in–say–Afghanistan may push for a law that bans marital rape. Now, as a Catholic, he believes that the human person ought to be treated with dignity, and that women can’t be unjustly treated as mere means for sexual gratification. The fact that the common-sense view that marital rape is wrong happens to coincide with what the Church teaches, doesn’t mean it’s a purely religious article that has no bearing in the public sphere. There can be overlap between what a religion teaches and what would support the common good.

The Afghani Catholic’s faith, then, coincides with the typical view that all people should be treated with dignity regardless of their sex, race, religion, age or level of development. This is precisely what the pro-lifer is arguing for–regardless of how young, helpless, and dependent a human is, it deserves to be treated with dignity. There is no recourse to religious language because the pro-life position doesn’t require any.

It’s a misunderstanding to view the pro-life position as one that is purely religious. The pro-life position is not concerned with imposing a religious worldview on others, as evident by such movements like Secular Pro-Life. What it’s concerned with is securing a right to life for the unborn. Similarly, the Civil Rights movement, though motivated by Christian principles, wasn’t about imposing religion on others–rather, it was about securing basic human rights for a certain group of individuals. This is exactly what the pro-life position wants, to extend the basic human right to life to a certain group of individuals–namely, the unborn.

Why can’t we be tolerant?

When a personally pro-life person suggests that pro-lifers can tolerate abortion in the public sphere, and perhaps just pray for those who choose it, they implicitly reveal an egregious misconception of what pro-lifers actually think about abortion. What we tolerate on a daily basis are annoyances, things that frustrate us. Tolerance is simply the act of permitting bothersome things to happen or exist. For instance, we tolerate a dementia-stricken man’s repetition of the same question. Even though his incessant questioning and our repeated answers, may bother us, we tolerate his senility.

While it’s okay to tolerate nuisances, it’s not okay to tolerate evils. For instance, take that same old man. While it’s okay for us to tolerate his senility, it’s not okay for us to tolerate someone taking advantage of his senility. Say a young man convinces this dementia patient that he’s his son and needs money for whatever reason. It would be wrong to just tolerate the robbery of this helpless old man. Furthermore, say this young man beats the old man whenever he refuses to give the money. Again, we would rightly think this situation intolerable. Why? Because this isn’t something that merely bothers us, it’s something that is blatantly wrong, evil.

Pro-lifers don’t see abortion as merely a nuisance, rather they see it as a great moral evil. On the pro-life view, there is an entire population of helpless, voiceless, innocent, and utterly dependent human beings that are being unjustly robbed of their lives. This is why a true pro-lifer can’t just tolerate abortion, like they can tolerate other things that bother them (e.g. crying babies, noisy neighbors, holding hands during the Our Father). Also, if the personally pro-life individual is so concerned about toleration, then shouldn’t they be concerned about the intolerance shown towards the unborn? Isn’t abortion, as apologist Trent Horn puts it, “the ultimate act of intolerance” because it can’t even tolerate the existence of the unborn?

What about free will?

Some personally pro-life individuals will argue that because God gave human beings free will, he wants them to use that free will. In exercising free will humans make many choices, and abortion is possibly one of those choices. Therefore, if God wants us to exercise our free will, then abortion should remain legal so humans can fully make choices like God wants them to.

Just because God gives us free will, however, doesn’t mean that he expects an anarchic practice of it where none of our choices are limited or punished. If abortion were to remain legal because God wants us to exercise our free will, then it would also logically follow that murder, rape, molestation, stealing, and other depraved actions should remain legal so we can freely exercise our wills with respect to them.

Notice, however, that even when we outlaw immoral actions, that doesn’t render our free will useless. There are still people who will exercise their free will and break the law. So a law against abortion would do nothing to eliminate free will, rather it would urge people to freely choose the good of protecting the unborn rather than killing them. The law isn’t coercive; people still have free will, they can still break the law if they so desire.

There is no doubt that God gave us free will for a good reason. He didn’t give us free will like a pyromaniac gives a nine-year-old a match, expecting him to just go wild. He gave us free will so that we may freely choose the Good–choose Him.



I can’t tell someone how to live their life!

Personally pro-life individuals will argue that they can’t fully accept the general pro-life position because it wants, on a legal basis, to tell people how to live their lives. We can’t, they would argue, make choices for other people–a person’s choice is entirely theirs. The problem with this argument is that the person making it is mistakenly assuming–perhaps unknowingly–that laws are made primarily to “tell people how to live their lives.”

This is, obviously, a very facile way of viewing laws. Laws are put in place primarily to protect and promote the common good, not to subjugate the lives of civilians. In many cases protecting the common good includes protecting people from harming other people. For instance, we have laws against rape to protect people from be sexually harmed. Now it would be insane to suggest that we can’t support laws against rape because they tell sexually aggressive individuals how to live their lives. A law against rape isn’t put into effect to “make the choice” for rapists or tell them “how to live.” Rather, the law’s primary goal is to protect the potential victims of rapists.

Now why can’t we view abortion in a similar manner? Why does a law against abortion have to be seen as telling people how to live? If there were a law put in place against abortion, it wouldn’t be concerned with imposing a way of life on individuals, it would be concerned with protecting the lives of the most vulnerable and helpless individuals. Much in the same way that laws against rape aren’t concerned with imposing a way of life on rapists, but are rather concerned with protecting the potential victims of rape.

Exposing a contradiction

What accompanies a personally pro-life position is a glaring contradiction. I am constantly amazed at how many personally pro-life individuals don’t understand the morally incompatible facets of their worldview.

Firstly, they describe themselves as pro-life since they think it’s wrong to kill the unborn because the unborn are human persons and therefore have a right to life. Secondly, they think it’s wrong to impose their personal belief about abortion on others. But, given their reason for thinking abortion is wrong, it would make perfect sense to want to outlaw it! Their view basically boils down to this: Abortion is wrong because it unjustly kills innocent human persons, but it should still be legal for people to unjustly kill these innocent human persons. This is the great contradiction which underlies the personally pro-life position.

Notice, if we were to apply this logic to any other morally reprehensible action, people would think it utterly ridiculous. Can you imagine someone who thinks stealing is wrong, but still wants stealing to remain legal lest he unfairly has his views about stealing imposed on others? Moreover, what about someone who thinks that murder is wrong, but wants murder to remain legal because he feels like he has no right to hold others to his personal views about murder? Can you imagine someone who believes killing helpless, innocent, voiceless, human beings is wrong, but thinks killing them should remain legal because he doesn’t want to impose his views on others?

While being personally pro-life may seem like a great compromise, it is a morally unsound position to hold. Believing that something is an atrocity while at the same time remaining in favor of its legality, does nothing to show how morally and politically progressive one is–rather, it shows the degree of cognitive dissonance one assumes under such a position.