A Civil, Productive Conversation on Abortion

Secular Pro-Life supporter Shannon Jessup shares:

I am so grateful for Secular Pro-Life and for the clarity and simplicity of the pro-life position expressed here.

I was in Detroit yesterday morning, and was engaged by a woman collecting votes for proposal 3. She spoke with my husband for a minute, but we’re from Maryland. I didn’t want a fight, but instead of just moving along I told her, “Actually, I am pro-life.” She asked me, “Why?” And while there are a million reasons that can lead to a million arguments, from being here [on the SPL Facebook page] I knew to simply say, “Because I believe that babies are humans.” She took a second, then argued about government regulation/intervention over personal decisions and I repeated, “I believe that babies are humans.” She told me I was putting the rights of a fetus above the rights of a woman, and instead of arguing about the ridiculous assertion, I told her that “fetus” is a Latin word and means “baby,” and that I simply believe that babies are humans. She challenged me with the fact that there are a million miscarriages each year as though that were some kind of a counter argument, and I told her that yes I grieve that as well. She said she didn’t grieve her miscarriage, and I said that my friends and I grieve ours but everyone processes differently, but Babies are still Humans.

I have felt confused in the past on how to engage because abortion is always presented as a religious issue, and not everyone believes that humans bear the image of God. But through this page simplifying that Humans having value is a universal axiom, the self-evident truth of Babies being Human is that that is reason enough to Not Kill Babies.

Anyway, thank you so much. She didn’t get angry, we didn’t go on tangents, because I was able to continually bring it back to the simple point that babies are humans. Secular Pro-Life did that for me.

[Photo credit: Doug Zuba on Unsplash.]