Debating point: "What about ... ? (rape, incest, deformities, economics, etc.)"

The question will arrise "What about ... ? (rape, incest, deformities, economics, etc.)"



Summary of the Pro-Life Response.
(1) Parallelism on rape: "Do you favor the death penalty for rape? No? Why, then, do you favor the death penalty for the innocent child?"
(2) Clarification on incest: "Abortion just helps cover up the crime so that the perpetrator can continue his molestation of the victim."
(3) Extrapolation on birth defects: "Do you support the elimination of handicapped adults and children? No? Then why do you support the killing of handicapped preborn babies? Are you saying that handicapped preborn babies are worth less than human beings already born? Yes? Doesn't this message transfer to born handicapped human beings?" [To the audience]: "Does anybody out there think this way?"

Background. The most effective way of refuting the "what about?" slogan is by parallelism. This consists of simply applying the pro-abort's logic to born human beings. Thus;
• We don't kill the guilty rapist, so why should we kill the innocent child resulting from the rape?
• We don't kill teenaged Down's Syndrome children — why should we kill them when they're unborn?
• You say you can't afford another child? Why don't you just kill the children you have now? That would really improve your financial situation!

Perfection: A Survival Trait. NARAL Pro-Choice America and other pro-abortionists sometimes produce photographs of hideously deformed and crippled preborn or even newborn children (their favorite is anencephalic babies) in order to buttress their argument that defective preborns should be exterminated.

However, when one group of people decides that another group of people is somehow inferior or is not worthy of life, they are falling into the trap of eugenicist thinking.

The terrible danger with the pro-eugenics argument is that, once we begin to loftily judge which children are fit to live and which are not, we have no way in the world of stopping the slaughter.

The most decisive and difficult step in this process is the very first one; when the first step has been taken, all subsequent steps are based on the logic "It's been done before, so it must be all right."

The Nazi doctors started by killing one little child — baby boy Knauer — and quickly progressed to the mass slaughter of entire classes of people. In the end, they were even killing children with slightly deformed ears and those children they deemed "difficult to train."

The Anti-Eugenics Argument. The main arguments against abortion for eugenics are these:
(1) The best way to derail the pro-abortion "eugenics" argument is to ask whether or not handicapped (P.C. term: "differently abled") individuals have less of a right to live than those people who are perfectly healthy. The answer to this question must be "no." The next step is to point out to the pro-abortionist that he is deciding which preborn babies will live or die based solely on whether or not they are handicapped. Conclude by stating that this is the core mentality supporting any kind of discrimination.
(2) Once it is judged acceptable to stop 'defective' persons from being born, it is a short step to ending the lives of 'defectives' that are already born. This is already occurring in this country. More than 2,000 'defective' newborns are being quietly put to death in the United States every year. Some 'doctors' have referred to this as "A second chance at abortion" or "fourth-trimester abortion," as described in Chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, "Euthanasia."
(3) What a dreadful message this eugenicist thinking conveys to surviving children, especially if they are handicapped! They will soon deduce that they would have been discarded (or still might be) if they did not measure up to their parent's standards of perfection. In other words, they are being judged as material goods, not as persons with intrinsic worth. For further information on eugenics programs and the philosophy of eugenics, see Chapter 24 of The Facts of Life, "Eugenics."

What About Rape?: "Mandatory Motherhood." Pro-abortionists often bring up the specter of what they call "authentic mandatory motherhood:" A woman being raped and then being 'forced' to bring her child to term.

One way to highlight the fallacy of this pro-abortion argument is to ask a person to imagine himself thoroughly examining two newborn babies lying side by side — one conceived within a loving marriage and one conceived as the result of a brutal rape — and then ask which would be considered more human. If these two babies were laid side by side, could anyone identify the one who was a conceived by rape?

Of course not!

Then why select one baby for extinction based solely upon the circumstances of his or her conception?

If pro-abortionists favor abortion for rape based solely upon the circumstances of the conception, then perhaps they should be consistent and advocate abortion for all preborn babies conceived out of wedlock. After all, there has always been a stigma attached to being what we used to call a 'bastard.'

If fact, unmarried mothers are committing the systematic extermination of illegitimate children right now, because more than 80 percent of all abortions are committed upon single women who became pregnant through fornication.

Since nearly half of all children born in the last twenty years have been conceived outside of marriage, the challenge to an abortophile to be consistent on this matter will strike a chord with many people under the age of twenty. The pro-abortionist will protest that the rape was a forced conception, while children born out of wedlock are the products of "lovemaking between two consenting individuals," but the point will have been made — that the preborn child conceived as a result of rape would be sentenced to death by the abortionists because of matters totally outside his or her control.

Related Arguments. It is interesting to ask a pro-abortionist if he or she favors the death penalty for rape. Oddly enough, pro-abortionists are usually anti-capital punishment and will almost certainly answer "No." Then ask them then why they favor the death penalty for the innocent unborn baby!

The pro-abortionists in this country and every other country where abortion is legal used the "hard cases" of rape and incest to drive the wedge that eventually opened the door wide to unlimited abortion. They promised that they only wanted abortion for the "hard cases," and then inevitably pushed for more and more exceptions to this rule until they achieved abortion on demand for any reason: Convenience, sex selection, covering up promiscuity, financial 'necessity,' and so on.

This is the basis of the anti-life strategy of gradualism or incrementalism.

The Numbers. If all of the "hard cases" for abortion — fetal deformity, rape, incest, mother's life, mother's health, and mother's age — are added up, they represent less than three percent of all abortions! In other words, more than 97 percent of all abortions are performed for social reasons — that is, abortions for convenience.

Chapter 19 of The Facts of Life, "United States Abortion Statistics," includes a summary of the average numbers of abortions performed for various reasons in the United States. Chapter 19 also includes the results of an Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) poll of the aborting women themselves regarding why they obtain abortions. Chapter 19 of The Facts of Life also shows the results of 27 surveys of women, asking why they had abortions, in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet entitled "WHYABORT.XLS." During a debate, it is very useful to note the incredibly small number of abortions performed for the so-called "hard cases."