The following are a collection of debating points on abortion. If you would like to engage the Willard Preacher on any of these points, find him on Facebook or contact him directly.
- No one can prove that we are not killing a human being in abortion. So we might be. A civilized society should not legalize abortion if there is any chance they might be killing a human being. If we were about to implode a building, and someone stopped us and asked when we last checked the building to make sure no-one was in it, and we said it had been three or four months, and imploded the building without checking it one last time, and one dead body was found in the rubble, we would go to jail because it was our responsibility to make sure there was no human life in there. The same thing is true for abortion. If we consider ourselves to be a civilized people, it is our responsibility to know we are not taking a human life. An opinion, or educated guess, is not enough.
- If you ask your opponent what a woman is pregnant with, and they say a potential human being, tell them that you didn’t ask what it might be in the future, you asked what it is now. If he says it is a zygote, embryo, fetus etc. tell him that those are stages of development in mammals, and ask what sort of mammal she is pregnant with. Your opponent must say human. So at the very least he has admitted that women are pregnant with human mammals. If he says it may be a human mammal, but it is not a person, tell him that humans are persons (as opposed to ants, birds etc.), and that he cannot change the definition of what it is to be human just to defend abortion.
- The dehumanizing philosophy that defends abortion is the same one that we used to abuse the American Indians and the black Africans (slavery and segregation). It is also the same dehumanizing philosophy that Hitler used to defend gassing the Jews. Just as we said that the American Indians were more savage than human, and the black Africans were more animal than human, and just as Hitler said that the Jews were less human than the Aryans, we now say that the baby in the womb is less human that those outside the womb.
- When we say that one is human at conception; we are saying that we are human by nature. We don’t have to do anything, have a certain skin color or ethnicity, have certain body parts etc.. We are just human because we are. As soon as we say that we are not human at conception, we must then give authority to the government to tell us who is human and who is not. Who really thinks that is a good idea? If we took a survey of all Americans, and asked them if they thought it was a good idea to give the government the authority to tell us who is human and who is not, I think that survey would come back overwhelmingly no, it is not a good idea, but that is exactly what we do when we say that one is not human at conception.
- The enlightened white northerner position on slavery and segregation was to be pro-choice.
- If your opponent says that a woman has a right to do with her body as she wishes, tell him that the baby is not the woman’s body. It definitely is attached to her body, and is drawing nutrients from it, but it has a different genetic code than the mother, and may even be a different sex than she. We all have a combination of our mother and father’s DNA, but that does not make us our mother, or our father. In fact, it makes us a separate human being from both of them. Plus, a woman does not have the right to do with her body as she pleases. If she did, there would be no drug, or prostitution laws, and one would be able to sell body parts on eBay. There are even laws against suicide in some states, and that is the ultimate in doing with your body as you please – deciding whether it will live or die.
- Abortion has never been about a woman’s right to choose. It has always been about sex without consequences. The Supreme Court forced abortion on all 50 states in 1973 at the height of the sexual revolution. It was about the baby boomers wanting to have sex with anybody, anywhere, anytime, with no personal responsibility.
- Just because abortion is a constitutional right doesn’t mean it’s a moral right. Slavery was a Constitutional right, but nobody today thinks that it was morally right.
- The pro-choice position is that one must develop to a certain point before they will call him a human being and refrain from killing him. What right do they have to decide that someone is not human, and then retain the right to kill him if they wish? It sounds tyrannical at best.
- If we can decide how human one is by their stage of development, I think we can make a pretty good case that newborns aren’t fully human. All we would have to do is say that when one is fully human one can walk and talk and reason on a level higher than an animal. A newborn cannot walk or talk or reason on a level higher than an animal so newborns must not be fully human. Or we could say that scientists tell us that the human brain isn’t fully developed until one is twenty five, therefore even those in high school and college aren’t fully human. Or we could say that when we are fifty we are very different mentally, emotionally, and physically than we were when we were young adults, so maybe we aren’t fully human until we are fifty. Since humans are always changing, there is no logical stopping point to the argument that one has to reach some arbitrary stage of development before one is human.
- If, as a male, one is told that he cannot talk about abortion because he is not a woman and can’t get pregnant, tell your opponent that yes, you are not a woman, but as a former fetus you are against abortion, and are in essence going back to the old neighborhood, and speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves.
- We don’t become human because we develop to a certain point. We develop as we do because we are human.
- Your debate opponent may say that he is personally against abortion, but he does not feel that he has a right to tell others what to do. The only valid reason to be against abortion is if you think it is the killing of a human being. If this is the case, he not only has a right, but an obligation to speak up.
- The baby in the womb has a human mother, human father, it came from a human sperm and a human egg, it has human DNA, and is developing in the same way all other human beings have developed. Everything about it is human. It doesn’t have the potential to be human; it is human.
- If your opponent asks about rape and life of the mother, tell him if he wants to politically compromise, and make all abortion illegal except for rape and life of the mother, you will take it because it will stop the vast majority of abortions, but both are still morally wrong. If your opponent has blood lust when it comes to rape tell him to kill the rapist. At least he did something wrong. The baby is innocent. Also, he is not doing the woman any favors by offering her an abortion. The rape was not her fault. Given enough time and counseling she can realize that and emotionally heal. If she has an abortion, she becomes guilty of killing a baby. So not only has she been raped, with all the emotional trauma that entails, but now she is actually guilty of killing a baby. Far from helping an innocent victim, he has helped to make her a guilty perpetrator.
- As far as life of the mother goes, it used to be common sense that a woman gave up her life for her child. Now women are expected to kill their child to save their own life. Let’s say that a woman, who has a husband and three children at home, walks into a Post Office, and some guy is shooting up the place. He trains the gun on her. In this scenario she has two options. She can hold the baby up as a human shield, save her own life, and go back to her family having sacrificed her baby to save herself, or she can shield the baby, take the bullet herself, thereby sacrificing herself and saving the baby. Which should she do? Parents should always sacrifice themselves for their children. This remains true if a mother’s life is threatened in childbirth.
- Ask your opponent if he can name one time in human history when a government has declared some portion of the human population to be less human than the rest, when given enough time, we’ve looked back on it and said that they were right. The answer will always be no – they cannot. So why do we think that our government is first one to ever get it right. All of history says that the pro-choice position is wrong.
