(Image by 🌸♡💙♡🌸 Julita 🌸♡💙♡🌸 from Pixabay)

I blog a lot about how pro-lifers can have more productive conversations with pro-choice people. I think pro-lifers often don’t understand what pro-choice people mean when they talk about bodily autonomy, when they talk about consent during pregnancy and delivery, when they get frustrated with pro-lifers raising the issue of abortion regret, or when they themselves talk about women. In other words, I spend a lot of time trying to show pro-lifers what they get wrong when they engage with pro-choice people, and how I think they could perhaps make some more progress.

One of the reasons I find myself returning to these issues is because the vast majority of my friends, colleagues and peer group are pro-choice. I really like these people: I understand them, I spend most of my time with them, and I can’t help but pick up on what they mean when they talk about abortion. So for our pro-choice readers: I try my best to understand where you’re coming from, and I really feel for you when pro-life people misunderstand you.

Having said this, I do think you’re getting something wrong – obviously! I disagree with you on something pretty big, and something I think is pretty important. However, there are lots of different ways of being wrong. Sometimes we’re wrong because we’re not aware of relevant facts. Sometimes we’re wrong because we are aware of all the facts and are interpreting them incorrectly. And sometimes we’re wrong because we are inconsistent in how we draw conclusions from the facts available.

I think pro-choice people can make all three kinds of mistakes. For example, most pro-choice people I know hold a mistaken belief about late term abortions – that they only take place when a woman’s life is in danger. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Furthermore, sometimes pro-choice people know as much as I do about prenatal development, but they don’t believe that facts about prenatal development mean we’re dealing with a person, rather than a human who is not a person. But for me, the biggest issue is that I think pro-choice people are inconsistent in how they apply some principles that they hold, principles they deeply care about. This is the biggest mistake that I think pro-choice people make – and it’s the mistake that pro-life people, in my experience, are least likely to address head on.

Let me be more specific. Almost every pro-choice person I know (and almost every pro-life person I know, for what it’s worth) is deeply committed to equal rights for all humans. Pro-choice people in fact often base their support for legal abortion on the fact that women have equal rights to men, and should be able to exercise their right to reproductive freedom in order to ensure that women’s equality has real weight. However, pro-choice people are also generally committed to equal rights for all, outside of the context of abortion: pro-choice people champion children’s rights, LGBT rights, migrants rights, disability rights, to name a few.

To all our pro-choice readers: I think you are absolutely correct to do this, and I’m so grateful for all the work you do in these important areas. I do think though, that you are being inconsistent in how you determine who exactly counts as an equal rights bearer. Most of you have some sense that unborn babies do not have equal rights to born people (on whose behalf you often advocate). Sometimes this sense is a strong belief, based on arguments about consciousness, perhaps, and sometimes it’s merely a sense that an unborn baby just can’t be the same as a person. However, I believe that this is a mistake. I believe that if you apply certain principles that you already hold in a consistent manner, you will arrive at the conclusion that unborn babies are included in the group of humans that bear equal rights. I don’t think you need any new or different principles. I just think a consistent application of most pro-choice people’s deeply held principles leads to the pro-life position.

Similarly, I understand where you are coming from when you point out that bodily autonomy trumps the right to life in cases such as kidney donation, or the Violinist argument. However, I think cases such as organ or bone marrow donation, which save a life that would otherwise be lost, are not actually comparable to abortion, which ends a life that would otherwise survive (in most cases). Instead, I think a far more comparable case is that of conjoined twins with a one-way dependency. I have yet to meet a pro-choice person who thinks that it would be OK for one twin to unilaterally opt for separation surgery that would mean their twin died. I therefore think that if you consistently apply that same principle to pregnancy, you wind up once again at the pro-life position.

At their best, pro-life and pro-choice people hold very similar, if not identical, principles. Our disagreement is not over whether life matters, nor is it necessarily over the facts surrounding abortion (although there are indeed many such disagreements). Our fundamental disagreement is that we apply the same set of principles differently. I think pro-life people apply these principles in a consistent manner, while I think the pro-choice application of these principles leads to contradictions. However, I could well be mistaken on that! I would welcome any feedback from our pro-choice readers on this point. Let us know what you think. Do you think you have different principles from me? Or do you think we have the same principles, and I am the one applying these principles inconsistently? We’re always open to hearing your perspectives; we truly value them.

Muireann