Abortion, prayer – and my revealing Twitter chat

A little while ago, the Oscar-winning actress Julia Roberts posted a captioned picture of herself on Facebook in response to the leak of the US Supreme Court’s draft opinion on Roe v Wade (the landmark 1973 decision that conferred a constitutional right to abortion).

She wrote: ‘Happy Mother’s Day. May we be mothers when we want, how we want and IF we want.’ [Mother’s Day in the US is on a different date to the UK.]

In response, I posted the comment: ‘She’s also saying “May we allow the unborn to live and become our children, but only when we want, how we want and IF we want”.’ Although my comment garnered 131 ‘likes’, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the volume of furious comments that resulted.

In the face of the ensuing onslaught of criticism, I didn’t want to resort to the usual ‘drive by’ put-downs, which do nothing to advance the cause of Christ. Instead, I wanted to respond with sound arguments. So, I prayed to the Lord for His wisdom and insight. The following passage in 2 Corinthians came to mind: ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:5).

For some responses, the fallacies were self-evident. For example, one commenter highlighted an apparent contradiction between my pro-life stance and my profile picture, which I had changed to the Ukrainian flag in support of that country’s fight against the Russian invasion: ‘You know Ukraine supports abortion right?’

I responded to this strained logic by asking rhetorically: ‘Er, yes. But if, in solidarity with Syrian refugees, I changed my profile pic to that country’s flag, does that mean that I’m supporting Islam…’

Another commenter put a positive spin on the adverse implications that I mentioned: ‘… which is a really good and grounded philosophy considering the world is overpopulated and millions of children are starving.’

I replied: ‘A.k.a. The Margaret Sanger philosophy of eugenics’ and quoted Sanger on population control: ‘the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization’.

Margaret Sanger (founder of the American birth-control organisation, Planned Parenthood) originally promoted abortion as a method of reducing the non-white populations (a.k.a. racial eugenics) which she perceived as a burden on and threat to the white majority.

The commenter explained: ‘I’m for a more wholesale approach. Just make less people’; to which I replied: ‘Er… abortion doesn’t make less people. Certainly, not any more than execution does.’

The inanest reply to my comment went: ‘if you had a uterus, you could make that decision, but you don’t so… case closed!’ Well, by that token, women MPs would be unjustly excluded from Parliamentary debates on increasing government funding for prostate or testicular cancer research.

Furthermore, I wondered out loud whether that requirement would also be applicable to trans women. So, I asked the one question that confused the commenter who elsewhere had promoted full inclusion of sexual minorities: ‘Does a trans woman (without a uterus) have a say [in this debate]?’

Unsurprisingly, they found it impossible to give me a straight answer.

Perhaps, the most shrewdly devised argument focused on what the pro-choice movement calls bodily autonomy: ‘Let’s say there was a “person” who required constant life-support to survive, but the catch is that he/she needed to be hooked up directly to you, taking a substantial amount of your blood, nutrients and oxygen. Now also imagine that it’s a potentially risky procedure in which there is a chance you could die or never be the same again, healthwise. Do you think you should have to right to decide whether or not to give support? Or do you think it’s the government’s right to decide for you?’

So, I wrote: ‘Oh, you mean, like one conjoined twin deciding that the other should die?’

Considering that we were talking about human life, the rejoinder to that was utterly repugnant: ‘And keep in mind, that it is completely one-sided, you do not share a body in that the relationship is not symbiotic but rather he/she is completely dependent on you, almost in a parasitic manner. Do you think you should have the right to decide? … Parasitic meaning that only one party benefits from the other, it is not a mutual dependency. Which is exactly what a pregnancy is.’

More than any other, this comment unwittingly revealed the dehumanising tendency within the pro-choice movement: one that equates the foetus to a clump of cells and pregnancy to parasitism.

Again, unsurprisingly, that commenter could not explain why the bodily autonomy argument cannot similarly support a legal right for an able-bodied conjoined twin to have the other twin medically terminated (even if the latter is severely mentally or physically disabled).

The special pleading of the pro-choice movement is that the unborn are sub-human (even if the euphemism is ‘potential human’).

For evangelicals, with God’s enablement, to resist this demonic contempt for the unborn must continue to be ‘a hill to die on’.