CLAIM:
In my opinion, as a male, which is always secondary to the woman, the bottom line is the decision always needs to be made by the woman not any government law. This decision of life and death is very personal and involves many considerations: each persons religious beliefs, the medical options, the family circumstances, the relationship between the father and mother and how the pregnancy occurred, just to name a few. It is not my business to determine nor judge a decision regarding their personal life. My role is to respect that decision and the person who makes it. The personal decision of life or death by an adult outside of my family is none of my business and certainly not the government’s.

REBUTTAL:
While arguing for a level of autonomy in making decisions about a pregnancy, there is a flawed presumption. The writer states:

This decision of life and death is very personal and involves many considerations: each persons(sic) religious beliefs, the medical options, the family circumstances, the relationship between the father and mother and how the pregnancy occurred, just to name a few. It is not my business to determine nor judge a decision regarding their personal life.

What if the issue were not talking about life in the womb but a life cradled in a mother’s arms, or sitting at the table in a highchair, or strapped into a car seat? In these circumstances, life and death decisions are not just up to family members. It is recognized by laws and traditions that a person cannot use the arguments of family circumstances, relationships, or even religious beliefs to take action that would harm or kill a child.

A persistent and intentional oversight in abortion-rights reasoning is that we are talking about a human life that is growing in the womb. Removing that life from the womb requires terminating that life. We lack the technology to transfer it to another womb. Ending the pregnancy requires ending the life.

Each life that comes into existence comes with its unique predicaments. Sometimes, the parents are a loving couple that welcomes the news of a pregnancy with excitement and anticipation. Sometimes, the pregnancy occurs at an inconvenient time for schooling, work, or military deployment. Sometimes, pregnancy occurs at a time of relationship turmoil. The predicament is different each time, but the reality is that in a pregnancy, you have human life that must be killed if the plan is to end the pregnancy.

Ignoring the religious position for a moment, people must ask themselves if they genuinely want a society where some lives can be ended because they are not wanted or convenient. If the answer is “yes,” then society must wrestle with where that entitlement to terminate a human life would end. Does it end at some point chronologically, such as a particular stage of gestation, at birth, a few days after birth, or before the child starts school? And if a chronological position is taken for when to terminate life, what reasoning supports that point in time and not another point in time?

Some will often argue that life can be terminated because it relies on another life to survive. In other words, it is parasitic. If that is the argument, at what point is our reliance on others to survive diminished enough to qualify for protection? Or, to put it differently, how dependent must we be on others to permit them the right to end our lives?

It is neither a little thing nor a private thing to say that some lives can be ended. There was a time in the abortion advocacy movement when abortion proponents argued that if we all agreed it was a life, then, of course, it should not be ended. As demonstrated in an earlier installment, leading abortion advocates now admit that in an abortion, a life is ended.¹https://christianliferesources.com/2024/10/24/giving-women-a-choice-on-abortion/

Killing is the unnatural act of ending a life that is otherwise continuing. Abortion is the word for ending that life that was continuing in the womb. The difference is not in the “humanity” of that life but in the term used to describe its ending.

Because every pregnancy occurs under various circumstances, it presents an opportunity for us to help people cope with such a difficult time. The tenet of their faith also challenges Christians who have a religious problem with abortion to think of others ahead of themselves (Philippians 2:8-9). That is why Christians are often at the forefront in offering help at times like this. For those Christians, it is not enough to just oppose abortion but to be a force of good to help people navigate the challenges they face. People are not to be left in a predicament where killing someone is the only viable solution.