It’s a dark and stormy night when your plane touches down in Analogyland. You, a pro-life apologist, have been invited to give a speech about bodily autonomy and abortion at a local convention center. You get into your rental car and begin to drive to your hotel. The storm worsens. … Read More
“Reproductive Freedom”: Another Pro-Choice Non-Argument
Recently, some pro-choice people and organizations have moved away from focusing on bodily autonomy as grounding a right to an abortion and instead frame the issue as one of “reproductive freedom.” This might sound like a rhetorically powerful move—who could be against freedom? However, it is a self-defeating strategy that … Read More
“My Body, My Choice”: Abortion, Covid Mandates, and Common Ground
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes In our discussions as pro-life advocates about abortion, we often run into bodily autonomy arguments. These maintain that, because people have a right to control what happens to or in their bodies, or—at the very least—have the right to refuse to allow someone else to use … Read More
Parthood, Personhood, and Bodily Rights
In a series of papers—”Lady Parts,” “Were You a Part of Your Mother,” and “Nine Months”—Elselijn Kingma develops and defends the parthood view of pregnancy: that human fetuses are literally a part of the gestating woman’s body. If your mouth is slack and your eyes are squinting, yes, that was … Read More
Arguments about Pro-Life “Hypocrisy” Prove Nothing about Abortion
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes Charges of “pro-life hypocrisy” abound on the internet. Unfortunately, they also exist in professional philosophy journals in the form of “inconsistency arguments.” These take the following form: P1: Were pro-life people consistent, they would X. P2: Pro-life people … Read More