Sometimes our pro-life arguments can become overcomplicated by statistics, rabbit-trails, and long rebuttals to straw-man arguments from the other side. We want to defend the pro-life position with everything we can muster, but sometimes it seems like we must have an answer to every argument from a pro-abortionist to properly defend life.

Fortunately, that is not true. All we need to know in order to effectively engage is a simple syllogism and three questions, which you can find here:

In this video, Scott Klusendorf, a pro-life speaker and author with the Life Training Institute, speaks at Illinois Family Institute’s 2023 Worldview Conference on “The Issue of Abortion” and what we need to engage.

You’ll want to re-watch this multiple times, both for the instructive content and humor!

WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore praised Illinois last month for what she saw as a strength. Illinois has become a go-to state for abortion:

Women travel from all over the country to have abortions in Illinois. As neighboring states restrict abortion access, Illinois is seen as a haven that protects access.

The number of “tourist” abortions carried out in Illinois nearly doubled from 2014 to 2018. She credits two groups of people for this development. First, while neighboring states have enacted laws related to such things as parental notification, counseling, waiting periods, or restrictions on public funding, Illinois politicians have been busy making law too. Even if Roe v Wade gets overturned, they have seen to it that Illinois’s abortion centers will remain open for business – with taxpayer funding for customers on Medicaid. Because of moves like these, says Chicago activist Megan Jeyifo, pregnant women pursuing abortion are choosing Illinois “because it’s quicker and less expensive.”

“Looking at Abortion More Expansively”

Moore also credits Illinois activists for having worked to change the narrative about abortion. I read her article carefully. Here is what is meant by “changing the narrative,” based on what she wrote in Abortion Access And Activism Remain Strong In Illinois:

• Abortion should be commonplace. In an earlier era, “keep abortion safe, legal and rare” was the operative slogan. No more. “Rare” must be dropped. Why? Because …

• Words are tools. “Political education means astute communication.” Messaging must serve the cause, and saying abortion should be “rare” doesn’t project the right message. How is the “right” message to be projected?

• Storytelling is a political tactic. Political education also means “storytelling” and “humanizing people.” Here’s what is meant by that. Since nearly 1 in 4 women will at some point have an abortion, everyone knows and loves someone who’s had one. Also, abortion experiences can be difficult. Therefore, stories designed to stir up feelings of love and compassion, especially those involving hardship, should be told.

The campaign to change the narrative, then, reduces to a political strategy by which stories are told to manipulate people into going along with an agenda they would not otherwise go along with. Emotions surrounding the universal values of love, compassion, and goodwill are stirred up and tied to a message that says, if you are loving and compassionate, you will join the “fight” for this cause. This is the very essence of propaganda.

Tack on the all-purpose rhetorical caboose “justice,” and voilà, you have organized a “reproductive justice” train. Moore lauds the fact that the idea of abortion as “reproductive justice” was conceived in Chicago. “The beauty of the reproductive justice framework,” said Toni Bond, one of the framers of the strategy, “is the way that it looks at things much more expansively.”

Looking at Abortion Activists More Expansively

I abhor abortion. I think it’s one of the most egregious human rights violations of our day. But abortion activists aren’t moved by my outrage. Or by yours. In the face of hardened abortioneers (social activists specifically pushing abortion), I think there’s a time and place for drawing them out.

Here are two ways to do that. Both involve looking at abortion – and the abortioneer – more expansively. (Never give an ounce of air to the emotional manipulation. Just call it out, and then proceed.) One approach is to make the case for human life based on facts and logical reasoning. If a conversation is to be had, center it on the nature of abortion. For more on how to make the case for life this way, I highly recommend the work of Scott Klusendorf, president of Life Training Institute (LTI) and author of The Case for Life. Click here or here for more on that.

“Why We Fight”

The other way to proceed is to do what the activists do – tell stories. Except that we tell stories that are true. Here’s a true story:

In 2001, HBO released the ten-part miniseries Band of Brothers. Based on the Stephen Ambrose book of the same name, it followed a group of WWII paratroopers, E Company (“Easy Company”), through basic training, D-Day, occupied France, and finally into Germany.

In Episode 9, “Why We Fight,” the soldiers encounter an altogether different kind of evil. It’s April 1945, the war in Europe is all but over, and they’re stationed in the German town of Landsberg awaiting orders. One day, a few of them venture out to explore the area. They come to the edge of a forest, and before them stands a high barbed wire fence with a locked gate. They venture closer and find behind it hundreds, perhaps thousands of dazed, emaciated and starving prisoners. They have seen fierce battle, but this is a horror on a whole new level, and they are speechless.

After they set about meeting the prisoners’ basic needs – food, water, medical attention – they marched the Landsberg townspeople out to the camp. They made them look, straight on, at the human atrocity that had been taking place in their own backyard, with their complicity. I think it’s safe to say that nobody would want to have been one of the Landsberg townspeople that day.

We can’t drag Illinois abortion defenders out to the POC rooms of Planned Parenthood’s sparkling new complexes in Fairview Heights (near St. Louis) or Flossmoor (near Indiana), or to the spa-like Carafem (near Wisconsin). But one day, all the things that have taken place behind those fences and walls will be exposed.

What we can do now is challenge the activists to look more expansively – straight on, as much as is possible – at exactly what it is that they are championing. Invite them to watch an actual abortion procedure with you. There are plenty online. Maybe even let them have the honor of choosing one to watch. Click here, here, or here for options. Afterward, invite them to explain what they just saw. Perhaps they might further explain how it merits the term “justice.” For the truly hardened, if you can manage to do all this in public, that’s all the better.

You may not change the moral orientation of a given abortioneer, but you can proceed with confidence, knowing that the real justice train only runs one way. In drawing the abortioneer out into the light, you will have invited someone championing evil to look at it from a very uncomfortable place. That’s what tends to happen when the light of truth is shone into the “haven” of darkness.

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Ever notice how the media has a knack for pulling on our heart-strings in an attempt to divert us from the real facts of the matter? In logic, this fallacy is called, “A red herring.”

A great example of this is the news coverage surrounding an amendment proposed by U.S. Representative Andy Harris (R-MD) regarding the protection of embryonic stem cells. But before we discuss the current legislation, let’s get a running start, and get some background on the issues behind it.

The Christian, pro-life position is that human life begin at conception. A normal human embryo has all 46 chromosomes innate to human development, and is already pre-programmed with the biological data needed to grow to a fully-formed adult. Every human embryo contains an eternal soul that must be protected.

The Ethics of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)

When an infertile couple is seeking to conceive, one method they may pursue is IVF. In this process, it is common for multiple embryos to be created. The ensuing problem is that some of these embryos are not used by the hopeful parents, leading to the dilemma of what to do with the frozen embryos that are left over from this procedure. Storing the embryos indefinitely can be costly, and often the parents have no practical way to bring them to full-term.

People choose different approaches to dealing with these embryos, including:

1. Donating them to another infertile couple who “adopts” their embryo and attempts a successful pregnancy and delivery (this option is rarely chosen).
2. Donating the embryos for stem-cell research.
3. Thawing without donating (thus terminating the life of the unborn embryo).

From a Christian worldview, clearly only one of these choices is viable (adopted embryos), as the other choices destroy human life.

Stem Cell Research

We must be careful in our discussion of these topics with others, that we have the issues clear in our mind. Christians are NOT opposed to stem cell research. There are different sources for stem cells, including adult stem cells derived from human fat. These stem cells offer the promise to potentially cure all sorts of physical maladies. We encourage this kind of research and hope for medical breakthroughs along with everyone else.

What we oppose, is the practice of conducting stem cell research on human embryos, because of the fact that a human life is destroyed in the process.

The Harris Amendment

So back to the current legislative situation. Military personnel who serve in our armed forces are sometimes injured in their line of duty in a way that causes permanent reproductive harm to their bodies. Our government has decided to fund IVF options for those veterans who wish to grow their families through this means.

Representative Harris has presented an amendment that specifies that any federal funding provided in any act of law may only be used to provide IVF treatments if such treatments do not result in the destruction of viable human embryos before embryo transfer. His amendment was adopted by a U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee by a vote of 29-21.

There has been an immediate push-back on this, because it would eliminate the immediate thawing, or research options, leaving only continued freezing (at a cost) or donation for embryo adoption. The argument is that this bill is not practical. It is inconvenient and will make this process more difficult for those who want to choose IVF.

The “red herring” in this story is that this involves our wounded military veterans. The media is choosing to portray this as showing a lack of support and compassion for those who have given so much (even potentially their hopes for a future family), in defense of our nation. Anyone who supports the Harris Amendment could be portrayed as unpatriotic, or unsympathetic to our troops.

What Is the Right Choice?

In any situation, we must avoid the tug of emotion and always ask ourselves, “What is the right thing to do?” Pragmatism is the view that “Whatever works is right.” The end justifies the means. It doesn’t matter what approach or method you choose, as long as you get the desired outcome. The problem with that view is that it isn’t wise or safe. Pragmatism has been behind many human atrocities in the past century, including eugenics.

As much as we want to see our veterans receive proper care and medical services, we cannot do so at the cost of human life. They put their life on the line to defend U.S. citizens, and that defense should be extended to unborn Americans as well.

A friend of mine recently put the matter as concisely and clearly as I believe it can be expressed:

“Any legislation that ends with,
‘And then the baby dies…’
is bad legislation.”

Opponents of the Harris Amendment suggest that an embryo isn’t truly human life because it is too small (size), or the embryo doesn’t have cognition (level of development), or it isn’t in the mother’s uterus (environment), or because it can’t sustain life on it’s own if unfrozen (degree of dependency).

Christian apologist, and pro-life advocate, Scott Klusendorf, has created an acronym (SLED) from these arguments that can help us to remember them, and be able to articulate a consistent and rational position on the defense of human life. None of these elements define human life. If you argue on that basis of any of them, you can easily also argue for infanticide or euthanasia.

The worth of a human life can never be equal to convenience on the scale of justice. Once intrinsic human life is devalued, on any level, it is only a matter of time until the taking of more lives will be justified by the same extended arguments.

Let us pray that efforts like Congressman Harris’ will find a hearing and that those in our nation’s leadership will seek to defend the most basic tenet of our inalienable rights: the immutable right to life.

IFI Faith, Family & Freedom Banquet

We are excited to have as our keynote speaker this year, former Congresswoman and Tea Party Caucus Leader, Michele Bachmann!  She distinguished herself by not only forming and chairing the Tea Party Caucus in 2010 in the U.S. House but also through her courageous and outspoken pro-life leadership as attested to by her rating of zero from NARAL.

Please register today before the early bird special expires.