Who can fashion the most compelling argument against abortion from a secular perspective?

[Torie]

I do not recall anyone hitting the nail on the head regarding one of the most popular issues on Atlas to debate and use to traduce. So I invite those who are interested to pen their best case here. You can do that irrespective of your own personal opinion of course as a devil's advocate or otherwise.

I am inspired in this mission by Yale Kamisar's law review article on euthanasia:

Euthanasia Legislation: Some Non-Religious Objections


https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1338&context=book_chapters

In a similar view, what are your non religious objections to abortions, beyond the obvious exceptions, e.g. saving the life of the mother?

The best effort if there is substantial effort put it here, gets the post in the quality post thread in the Forum Community.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

I'm pro-choice and religious. I'll take a whack at it.

It is often said that, regardless of the reason for an abortion, that they are unwanted and rare. That may have been the case in the past, but over the last few years we've seen movements like #ShoutYourAbortion and groups who support expanding abortion access as much as possible. Women are often under pressure by their boyfriends to terminate a pregnancy, and that is how abortion always has two victims.

You don't have to be religious to acknowledge that a fertilized egg already contains life, and life that will naturally develop into a child. The only difference between an unborn baby and a child or an adult is age and location. I had the same human rights at age five as I do now, and no one would ever argue that my age precluded the existence of those rights or made me anything other than a person.

If fetuses are not members of the human race, then what are they? They are not tumors, they are not "bundles of cells" any more than we are also "bundles of cells," and they're obviously not in the animal kingdom. They are homosapiens experiencing natural development, and we don't have the right to make the choice over who gets to have that experience or how, irrespective of gender/sex, or even the way the child was conceived. Until science informs us that we can classify these biologically distinct beings as anything other than human, we have no more right to take away that life than of someone who is at a later stage in life.

Even if the child will have a difficult or short life (and doctors often make mistakes in those predictions!) we are not the arbiters of what life is or what "quality of life" is. Biology informs us that fetuses are alive, fetuses are human, and therefore abortion ends human life in 100% of cases.

How'd I do, Professor Torie?

[The Mikado]

Most of the people I hear making secular anti-abortion arguments dip into pseudo-eugenics-ish arguments about lower birthrates leading to aging populations and a declining economy and it being necessary for national economic health to promote higher birthrates and that banning abortion is a key element to promoting higher birthrates. It's way more skin-crawling rationale than religious anti-abortion arguments, mainly because it's basically the argument Stalin used to reban abortion in the USSR (where are the footsoldiers of tomorrow's war going to come from if they're aborted in utero?).

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wrote this a few years ago. It's possible I'd phrase myself differently at some point, but I think the gist of the argument is still pretty compelling:

Pro-choicers have very strong opinions on what does not constitute a person, but they are almost always at a loss to explain what does. I have yet to hear a coherent "definition" of personhood that does not raise a whole slew of disturbing moral implications. Is it all about cognitive capabilities? They begin to develop long before birth, and continue long after it. Depending on your standards, you can easily find yourself defending infanticide, which I'm hoping most sensible pro-choicers wouldn't want to. Is there something magical about birth that turns a non-person into a person, even though a 9-months fetus is virtually identical in every regard to a newborn baby? The only argument I can think of is about the idea that the organism can survive without being biologically connected to another organism. But what's so special about dependency to another organism that's so different from, say dependency to a drip-feed or a dialysis? Or even dependency to a mother and father who feed you? Equating personhood with self-sufficiency is even creepier than equating it with abstract thinking.

Most pro-choicers, I hope, accept that personhood can't be equated to birth, and that it begins at some point earlier than birth. But none of the milestones they talk about (sensitivity to pain, brain activity, heartbeat, implantation, gastrulation, etc.) is really all that "hard". For example, the various components that make sensitivity to pain possible don't develop overnight, but over multiple weeks. The same is true with brain activity and with basically any "faculty" that the embryo or fetus can be said to have. So you end up arguing that "personhood" is not a binary attribute, but a sort of continuum where someone becomes slightly more of a person every second. That's basically the ship of Theseus revisited. But legally (and, more importantly, morally) this cannot be so. What would it possibly mean to say that someone is a "partial" person? Personhood is a statement about someone's fundamental worth, dignity, and rights - it either exists or it doesn't. When pro-choicers want to use one of these arbitrarily milestones, they are thus equating such fundamental ontological change to a microscopical biological change. It would be as saying that Theseus' ship stopped being Theseus' ship after the 7th, the 19th or the 43rd plank was replaced. It obviously can't be right.

Now, seeing the impossibility of locating a true "beginning" to personhood, the question we must ask ourselves is: on which side would I rather err? Would I rather confer rights and dignity to a being that shouldn't have them, or deny them to a being that should? If, like me, you believe that killing a person is an absolute evil, something that nothing can ever justify (I won't go into trolley problems, since they are irrelevant to the issue at hand), you can't possibly choose the latter. If you have an absolutely unimpeachable, ironclad philosophical argument stating that personhood begins at time X, fair enough, go ahead and allow abortions before X. But if there is but a 0.0000001% chance that you are wrong, that maybe there something is already there before time X (and time X could be any time after conception), then you have gambled with a person's right to life. A society that accepts this gamble is a society that doesn't see people as ends onto themselves, but rather as disposable quantities whose value can sometimes be balanced out with other considerations. That's not a society I would be comfortable living in.

[Torie]

The argument above has considerable quality to it, but elides over the issue of the design of the line on the graph, from a moral qualm standpoint. What is the height of the one or more cliff(s) (A-D) as it descends from the sublime to the demonic, and how much does it matter? And how much do you weight the degree of risk and where associated with the sublime (the lack thereof), or the demonic, as compared to just muddling through? What does the topo map look like as to cliffs, or lack therof,as to height and their location?

[progressive85]

All human life is precious and we are given one chance in this world to live and breathe.  It is the rarest of gifts, and once it is taken away, it is never again to be given back.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, isn't it something that everyone for abortion has already been born? (I am here today, and so are you, because our mothers made the choice to give birth.)

Actually, there's a real secular (humanist) argument to be made for fetal rights, which was one of the reasons why I identified as "pro-life" for as long as I was.

I do believe that pro-life people see it as a basic human right that once life is there to allow it to continue to live -  whether or not God or a deity or a religion is a part of that belief that probably depends on the person.

[Del Tachi]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

[Ferguson97]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

You're going to have to elaborate here.

[Del Tachi]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

You're going to have to elaborate here.

If you're intent on reading the Bible literally, there isn't really a strong case to be made against abortion. 

[Ferguson97]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

You're going to have to elaborate here.

If you're intent on reading the Bible literally, there isn't really a strong case to be made against abortion. 

Then why do so many Christians oppose abortion?

[Del Tachi]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

You're going to have to elaborate here.

If you're intent on reading the Bible literally, there isn't really a strong case to be made against abortion. 

Then why do so many Christians oppose abortion?

It's pretty close to 50/50 actually.  Only 51% of Christians believe abortion should be illegal in all/most circumstances.

[Ferguson97]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

You're going to have to elaborate here.

If you're intent on reading the Bible literally, there isn't really a strong case to be made against abortion. 

Then why do so many Christians oppose abortion?

It's pretty close to 50/50 actually.  Only 51% of Christians believe abortion should be illegal in all/most circumstances.

I’ll rephrase: why do so many Christians who do oppose abortion use religious arguments to argue against abortion?

[All Along The Watchtower]

The mainstream pro-life arguments are already not religious.  There isn't really a Biblical argument to make against abortion (at least from the Christian Fundamentalist positon.) 

You're going to have to elaborate here.

If you're intent on reading the Bible literally, there isn't really a strong case to be made against abortion. 

Then why do so many Christians oppose abortion?

It's pretty close to 50/50 actually.  Only 51% of Christians believe abortion should be illegal in all/most circumstances.

I’ll rephrase: why do so many Christians who do oppose abortion use religious arguments to argue against abortion?

Do you know much about the early history of Christianity, or indeed, the vast majority of its history?