Pro-choice is pro-violence. If you’re pro-life, this probably feels obvious to you. You might be surprised I even bothered to type it out. If you’re pro-choice, though, this is likely an explosive, even offensive, statement to you. But this statement happens to be accurate, and it doesn’t depend on a … Read More
It Is Wrong to Make People Worse Off: Bodily Autonomy, Abortion, and Forced Organ Donation
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
Quick Response #29: The Burning Fertility Clinic Thought Experiment
“There’s a burning fertility clinic, and you see a briefcase with 1000 frozen embryos and a toddler; you can only save one.” Yep, it’s the burning IVF lab thought experiment, intended as a mic-drop to prove that pro-life people don’t really believe the embryo is an equal human being. In … Read More
Selective Reduction: Abortion by Another Name
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Recently, we’ve gotten comments asking us to address whether or not “selective reduction” is an ethical practice (or perhaps more to the point, to explain why it is not). On one hand, this makes sense; we don’t have material specifically addressing selective reduction or assisted … Read More
Quick Response #28: An Acorn Is Not an Oak Tree, So a Fetus Is Not a Child
Judith Jarvis Thomson is famous for the Violinist argument from her paper “In Defense of Abortion,” but she actually begins it with another well-known analogy: since an acorn isn’t an oak tree, a fetus shouldn’t be considered a child. Emily Albrecht explains why Thomson’s acorn analogy, while popular, is a … Read More
Quick Response #27: You Need to Be Human Plus Something Else to Have Personhood
This quick response video addresses one of the most challenging pro-choice dialogue points, what we call the “human-plus” argument: that you need something like human nature, plus another feature like sentience or consciousness, in order to have personhood. As Emily Albrecht explains, the human-plus argument isn’t challenging to respond … Read More
Quick Response #26: We Need Broad Abortion Access for Cases of Poor Prenatal Diagnosis
Some people argue that, if for no other reason, we need broad abortion access because of situations in which a child won’t survive the birth process or other cases of poor prenatal diagnosis. In this quick response video, Emily Albrecht argues that euthanasia by abortion isn’t actually the compassionate option, … Read More
Adding Clarity to Isaac Saul’s Response to My Tangle Dialogue
A while ago, we published a blog article featuring a dialogue I had over email with Chloe, a reader of my friend Isaac Saul’s Tangle newsletter. It was a great dialogue, and Isaac was also gracious enough to publish a condensed version of it for his readers. Today, after last … Read More
Quick Response #25: The World Is Overpopulated, So We Need Abortion
In this Quick Response video, Emily Albrecht debunks the idea, floated by some prominent politicians like Bernie Sanders (and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to a lesser extent), that the world is at a critical stage of overpopulation, so we need abortion as a means of population control. Script: For at least … Read More