Recently (May 31, 2009) a man shot and killed George Tiller in the midst of a church service. Tiller was one of the few doctors in America that performed partial birth abortions and he was also consistently in the center of the abortion debate. Because Tiller was such a high-profile person in the abortion services community, and he was shot dead in a church, there has been a lot of media attention paid to the event. This attention has revealed something very telling about the current pro-life movement – we are failing miserably.

Before justifying such a claim I want to state some of my background assumptions via a quick argument seeking to establish that both Tiller’s killing and abortions are immoral. I will then explain why I think the pro-life movement is failing. Finally, I will conclude by presenting the strategy that I think the pro-life movement should endorse and demonstrate what that strategy looks like in action by arguing for the truth of some of the premises in the following argument.

1. Personhood begins at conception. That means from the earliest stage of pregnancy we are dealing with a human person and should treat him or her accordingly.
2. The unjustified killing of a human person is morally wrong.
3. Almost all abortions are instances of unjustifiably killing a human person.
4. Therefore, almost all abortions are morally wrong.

Though this is slightly off topic, I should point out that according to the above argument the killing of George Tiller was morally wrong. I am perfectly content with such a view since I take all instances of vigilantism as being morally inappropriate. On my view, killing Tiller is not just morally wrong but also pragmatically wrong. If one wants to see abortion more highly restricted (or eliminated altogether), killing abortionists won’t help that matter. If anything, it makes it more unlikely.

With the above argument in mind, I want to describe why I think the pro-life movement is failing and what should be done to correct it. First, why it is failing. I take as a representative sample of media coverage a recent column on the BBC News website (Anti-abortion and violence in the US). In this column, author Nick Triggle notes what he takes to be the general tenor of the abortion debate in the US. First he notes that quite-popular President Obama “was heckled by anti-abortion activists over his decision earlier this year to lift restrictions on funding for abortion.” He then notes that such heckling and protests are quite common in the US and its commonplace is, at least, partly attributable to the “hundreds of religious stations across the country.” He continues, “the level of involvement of religious groups” is vastly different in the US than in the UK. Finally, and most tellingly, he says “With half the US population regular church-goers, everything from sexual abstinence and euthanasia campaigns to the abortion debate has been dominated by religious groups.”

Now I don’t have a problem with Triggle’s article. In fact, I think his analysis is spot on. What I do have a problem with is that the pro-life movement has allowed itself to be branded as a religious movement. If you go to any number of websites that have reported on Tiller’s killing and look at just a few of the comments you’ll see a frequent theme. You’ll see many pro-choice supporters accusing “pro-lifers” as being close-minded and trying to force their religious beliefs on the rest of America. Sadly, the responses by those same pro-lifers support such an idea.

But don’t get me wrong; I am proud that most people in the pro-life movement are Christians. That religious groups are the primary reason this is still an issue in America today is a good thing. That means we are still fighting for the oppressed and willing to defend the defenseless. However, we do not live in a world that accepts our authority as their authority. Religious groups cannot make a religious argument to convince the world that abortion is morally wrong. We must give them arguments with premises that they can accept on their own terms. We can’t allow the fact that the pro-life movement is dominated by “religious groups” to become a fact that the pro-life argument is a religious argument.

There is simply no need to give a religious argument for the immorality of abortion. Of course, these types of arguments are available, but they will only convince those that already accept that religion as true and authoritative. Most in America today do not (even many of those that refer to themselves as Christians) accept Christianity as true and authoritative. Here one might ask what type of argument should we give, if not a religious argument. What would a non-religious argument look like? Here is an example of one, very simple, argument that all religious and non-religious people can use to make the case for the life of the unborn.

1. Either the unborn are human persons or not.
2. If the unborn are not human persons, then no justification for an abortion is needed (just like we don’t need justifying reasons for removing tonsils).
3. If the unborn are human persons, then the justification typically given for an abortion will never be morally adequate (just because an individual is too busy or too poor to take care of another human person does not mean that individual is justified in killing that human person).

This focuses the debate on the thing that matters most. Are the unborn human persons? I believe they are, but not even that belief depends upon a religious assumption. Why think the unborn are human persons? This can be boiled down to one general idea.

• The location of a thing is never a morally salient feature of that thing.

If one should think of a newborn as a human person, then there is no good reason to not think of a pre-born as a human person. Frankly, it is absurd to think that a few inches determine the moral status of a person. To believe that the fetus is magically transformed from non-person to person by traveling down the birth canal is rationally unacceptable. The fetus just prior to birth is just as much a human as the infant just after birth. Its location is irrelevant.

Further, there are no good reasons to cut off personhood at some earlier point in the pregnancy either. Distinctions based upon trimester are purely arbitrary ways for people to refer to general stages of development. Almost everything that a person needs to develop into a grown human being is present from conception. The only additional things needed are external. They are 1) an appropriate environment and 2) to not be killed. But this is just as true for you and me as it is for the unborn. If you kill me, then I will obviously not continue grow as a human being. But even if you just remove me from an environment conducive to my continued growth (e.g. by stripping off my clothes and placing me outside during an Alaskan winter), then I too will die. That the unborn depends upon the appropriate environment to live does not mean it is not a human person. If you don’t kill me, then I will continue to grow as a human person grows. If you don’t kill the unborn, they will do the same.

Now of course much more can be said in favor of the pro-life position. This is intended to be a very rough and ready type of argument that, for our purposes, simply demonstrates how the pro-life movement should advance its cause. You should notice that nothing I have said against the morality of abortion has depended upon a religious argument. Not once did I appeal to the Bible or to church teaching. If the pro-life movement begins to advance these types of arguments, then we will have a much greater shot at convincing the general public that abortion is morally wrong. Even if that does not result in Roe being overturned (though I in fact think it could), it will prevent a great number of women from choosing to have an abortion. But as long as the pro-life movement relies upon religious arguments we will continue to be marginalized in the public sphere. Our arguments are compelling and their arguments are not. In order to progress the pro-life agenda we must use the compelling arguments and not ones that rely upon a religious text that a vast number of Americans don’t accept as authoritative.

If you’d like more resources for developing this type of argument I’ll make two recommendations. The first is Stand to Reason’s Bio Ethics page. At STR’s page you’ll find a wealth of good reasoning about the abortion issue (as well as many of today’s other pressing ethical issues). The second is Life Training Institute, which is run by Scott Klusendorf, a former member of Stand to Reason. (I’m indebted to Greg Koukl of STR and Klusendorf for the formulation of the above argument.) Klusendorf just published a book dealing with the abortion issue called, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (this links to the book’s website). You can get his book from that site or from Amazon at The Case for Life.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I live in Toronto, Canada. This means I get double the dose of politics, which in turn means I get to stick my nose in twice as much stuff.

Approximately seven weeks ago the Canadian people went to the polls to elect a new government. Because there are three main Canadian parties and one dedicated to the interests of Quebec, the likelihood of any one party winning a majority is small. There are a total of 308 ridings and the Conservatives were hoping to win enough new seats so they could have a majority government. They did win more seats (19), but not enough to have a majority. Here is how the election broke down by seats won and percentage of seats available.

• Conservatives:    143  46.4%
• Liberals:               76    24.7%
• Bloc Québécois:  50   16.2%
  
• New Democrats: 37    12%
  
• Independent:       2      0.7%
  

Since the Conservatives have the most number of seats, they are the ruling party. In the last week, for various reasons (which don’t really matter for my purposes here), the leaders of the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois, and the New Democrats decided that they were unhappy with the Conservative government and wanted to form a coalition that would unseat Harper and have the head of the Liberal government as Prime Minister (currently Stephane Dion). Because the combination of these three governments would give the coalition 165 seats as opposed to the Conservatives 143, the coalition could oust the Conservatives and take over.

With that background in mind we can see how many people are reasoning fallaciously concerning the proposed coalition government. The leaders of the coalition parties (and many of their supporters) seem to be reasoning this way:

1. Canadians voted that the Liberals should have 76 seats.
   
2. Canadians voted that the Bloc should have 50 seats.
3. Canadians voted that the NDP should have 37 seats.
4. So, Canadians voted that the Liberals, the Bloc, and the NDP should have 165 seats.
5. Canadians voted that the Conservatives should have 143 seats.
6. Therefore, if the Liberals, the Bloc, and the NDP form together, more Canadians voted for that coalition than for the Conservatives.

So what is wrong with this reasoning? Why is it fallacious? I mean it’s true that more Canadians voted for these parties individually than for the Conservatives, so it must mean that more Canadians would want a ruling party to be formed from these individual parties than for the Conservative party. As we’ll soon see, this is the Fallacy of Composition.

People commit the fallacy of composition when they assume that what is true of the parts must be true of the whole. We can easily see why this is fallacious with a common example.

1. It is true that parts of my body are invisible to the naked eye.
   
2. Therefore, my body as a whole is invisible to the naked eye.

Here is another example that plenty of sports writers are guilty of committing.

1. Team A is better at every postition than Team B.
2. Therefore, Team A as a whole is better than Team B.

Both of these are examples of fallacious reasoning. It is obvious that there are parts of my body that can’t be seen with the naked eye, but it’s also obvious that my body as a whole can be seen with the naked eye. What about the second example? Well, it might be true that Team A has bettter players at every position than Team B, but Team A might not practice very much together or might have more selfish players at every position. Either case would make it reasonable to think that as a whole Team B is better (e.g. the 1980 U.S. hockey team).

Okay, so how does the relate to the recently formed coalition government in Canada. If people assume that because more Canadians voted for parts of the coalition that more people voted for the whole coaltion, then they are reasoning fallaciously. Many people that voted for one of the coalition parties individually might be quite unhappy with what results by combining them altogether. If, for example, I care about issue X and voted for the Liberal party because of their committment to issue X, but in order to form the coalition the Liberals had to give up issue X, then that might be enough to lead me to not vote for the coalition at all. After all, the issue I really care about was just given up by the Liberal leader. If these types of scenarious weren’t plausible, then why have separate parties to begin with? There must be at least a few issues that separate the parties, but if those are the ones I care about then why would I continue to support a group of leaders that just gave up on that issue?

The only way we can know for sure if more people want to have a coalition of Liberals, Bloc Québécois, and New Democrats running Parliament and not the Conservatives is if there were an election with these two options. Of course that would never happen because as soon as an election is called each party would go back to trying to win votes for their own party. Keep in mind that it may be true that more Canadians want a coalition government, but we can’t know that from the fact that more Canadians voted for the three parties individually than for the Conservatives.

As an American, I find this whole thing really fascinating. It is also interesting to see that American politicians don’t have a corner on the ‘bad reasoning’ market.