I recently saw a post on Facebook said to be “the best pro-life argument I have ever seen”. I was curious, so I checked it out. I’m always suspicious of articles on controversial subjects that start out with something like “I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student…” And then I saw the light! I saw the truth. From an article in Esquire– of all places– written in 1976(!). So, Frederica Matthewes-Green insists, I’m not one of those dim-witted automatons merely spouting the ravings of my pro-gun, pro-war, patriotic right-wing church.
These writers always seem to feel that it’s a compelling trope. I used to be like you. But she doesn’t follow up with a list of other positions she has now adopted because she knows that that list would undermine her seductive introduction. Is she still opposed to war? Is she opposed to capital punishment? Is she in favor of universal health care? Does she support parental leave? Maternity leave? Did she ever? Really?
After reading her list of the things she supported back in the old folkie days, it becomes clear that whatever she thought she was in favor of back then, in her “hippie days”, it wasn’t what other people of her generation thought they were in favor of. In her coy estimation, it seems that women back then didn’t think much at all, and expected ridiculous things in the future.
That becomes evident when she proceeds to create a straw-man, the kind of person she believes believes in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. This prop of hers thinks embryos are just a blob, and that abortion would only ever be used in emergencies, as a last, desperate measure, and that there is nothing violent or distasteful about it all– beliefs that kind of cancel each other out, when you think about it.
And then the big slide. Having described in detail the painful, awful experience of an abortion at 20 weeks, she then proceeds to draw conclusions that makes no sense given her claimed pedigree of enlightenment and intelligence:
The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg.
Oh, everybody “knows that”? So, the enlightened progressive who rationally concluded that abortion is horrible suddenly leaps, magically, to the belief that life begins right at the instant of conception, all without a single reference to any religious belief.
She does not provide, of course, any logic or reason or analysis that would lead anyone to conclude that because a 20-week old fetus seems very human and perhaps entitled to the protection of the law, therefore the first two cells together must also be entitled the same recognition.
So why not, at the beginning of the article, acknowledge that your beliefs are grounded in your religion, not in your reason? Why are you pretending to reason your way to a conclusion that really doesn’t follow any of your arguments? Well, we know why: because nobody would take her arguments seriously. Believers will have already agreed with her, and non-believers will find her irrelevant.
Frederica Mathewes-Green is not unaware of the problem. From her website:
I have seen so much effort to produce publications, books, music, movies, and so on that can stand in the public square as quality material, and attract unbelievers. But look back at # 3; that only works as long as the material does not point to Christian faith. Once the mask slips and they realize we have been trying all along to bring them to Christ, they get angry. They feel duped.
Yes. Well. Try as you might to present an anti-abortion argument that seems rational and geared towards the general, public interest, your mask slipped, when you magically arrived at the point that life begins at conception. That is a religious belief and the argument that because an embryo has the complete DNA of an individual human being it is entitled to equal protection falls apart because brain-dead humans also have the complete DNA of an individual human being, as well as a complete body.
[whohit]The Best “Pro-Life Argument Ever[/whohit]