Argument 1 could be defended from a scientific perspective, or a religious perspective, or both. There are both scientific and theological reasons to say, the moment of birth is the wrong criteria to say a foetus should become regarded as a "person" deserving protection and rights.

None of these are arguments against abortion. Not because I consider them wrong or anything, simply because they are not arguments: they require accepting that abortion is murder as a premise and therefore cannot be arguments to support abortion being murder. 1 is what they are trying to argue for, so cannot be an argument for itself. 2 is a method used, again not an argument in favor or against. 3 assumes the premise (you can only count abortions as deaths of human beings if you treat the unborn embryo as a full-fledged human, so this cannot be an argument in favor of treating it as one).

4 also is only relevant if one already accepts the equivalence between a fertilized ovum and a child, so cannot be an argument in favor of this acceptance. You are explaining why pro-life folks feel strongly about the issue, but not what arguments they present in favor of their position.

@terdon Since no human woman has ever gone to full term and given birth to anything other than a human, the burden of proof falls squarely upon abortion advocates to demonstrate that a human fetus is anything less than human.

@MikeBorden My point is only focusing on the logic: these cannot be arguments in favor of a position because they presuppose the position and the question is asking for arguments used by pro-life Christians. I am not arguing for or against abortion here at all, I am simply pointing out that none of the points presented here are arguments. For example, what you just wrote: "pregnancies result in humans" could be called an argument supporting viewing the fetus as human. The points in this answer, however, already assume that position and therefore cannot be arguments in favor of it.

abortionprocedures.com is mostly just appealing to emotion by showing the fetus as a baby consciously experiencing having horrific things done to it while in excruciating pain, even though I'm sure most doctors would object to the scientific accuracy of about every part of that imagery, from consciousness (which only develops around 24-28 weeks, after 99%+ of US abortions), to the procedure itself, to how and whether the fetus experiences pain. Not to mention that even the most mundane of medical procedures could be quite disturbing when seeing the details of it in a graphic video.

@terdon I (pro-choice) actually much prefer this type of answer that summarises the types of arguments rather than going into the arguments themselves, because there isn't really too much to object to here: these are indeed the types of arguments anti-abortion people make. Once you get into the arguments themselves, I find a lot more to object to in the form of strawmen, misrepresentations of data and otherwise flawed arguments (as per my comment in another answer here).

"The pro-life case requires ... only a consistent belief in human rights" - one can say the exact same thing about pro-choice. Which one of anti-abortion and pro-choice is more consistent and respectful of human rights entirely hinges on how much of a right one considers bodily autonomy to be and/or whether ones considers a fetus to be deserving of full human rights, even from when it's just an unconscious unfeeling clump of cells (and/or whether one accepts it's possible that making a "bad" thing illegal may not stop that thing from happening, and may cause more harm than good).

@NotThatGuy re point #2 I have included a clip of real-life footage. Viewer discretion is advised.

The original post has been extended to address objections raised in the comments.

The bodily autonomy human rights objection is only consistent when applied to cases of rape or incest--and most pro-life people agree that there should be exceptions for rape & incest. In all other cases of pregnancy, a fetus is in the womb as the result of two people's conscious, consensual action.

A separate, valid objection can be made for abortion exceptions to save the life of the mother. No serious voice in the pro-life movement objects on this matter.

@HoldToTheRod "The bodily autonomy human rights objection is only consistent when applied to cases of rape or incest" ... or it's consistent, again, if you don't consider a fetus to be deserving of full human rights. If you consider, say, a distinct human life to start at consciousness or childbirth, then you'd basically just have the government telling women they're legally required to carry around the thing growing inside them for the next 9 months, with no-one else's rights in consideration.

That would be the exact opposite of bodily autonomy.

@HoldToTheRod If one is willing to allow abortion for rape and incest, on what basis would you deny abortion in other cases? Drawing the line there seems awfully arbitrary compared to just allowing abortion in general. Except I expect most people have too much empathy to stomach the thought of telling a rape victim they need to carry around the child of their rapist for 9 months and give birth to it.

So they make an exception, while largely disregarding the fact that this proves that they don't care about the rights of a fetus all that much, which significantly undermines their denial of abortion in other cases.

Not arbitrary at all. Common law, statute law, and the Bible hold that people can be expected to take responsibility for their own actions. None of the above call for people to be held equally accountable for other people's actions.

A woman who is pregnant from rape or incest is pregnant because of somebody else's actions, in which she had no say.

The government doesn't force anyone to be pregnant (OK, maybe they do in North Korea, I don't know). The government protects human rights and seeks to restrain people from violating the human rights of other humans. Trying to assign rights (or "full human rights") on the basis of consciousness or size is addressed in the post-script of my argument. It follows a long line of arguments trying to exclude some class of human beings from recognition as human persons.

You could similarly argue that a woman who walks down a dark alley at night would be expected to take responsibility for that action by carrying the child to term if they get raped. It's a deeply problematic argument in any case. You should take steps to avoid unwanted consequences, but if unwanted consequences happen, that doesn't mean you should be forced to deal with those consequences in one way and only one way.

And if you're going to say that a woman has the right to violate the human rights of a fetus just because she didn't consent, then are you really considering the fetus to have full human rights? That's certainly not obvious to me.

Your analogy to dismiss the argument that cells aren't a distinct human is illogical. The question isn't "are those cells human" (they trivially are, much like cancer cells are), it's "are those cells a distinct human from the person they're growing inside". Those cells also lack a consciousness at the stage when most abortions occur, much like brain-dead people who are generally medically and legally considered to be dead. This distinction would also apply to every human ever.

That's in no way similar to any attempt to dehumanise living breathing humans, especially across racial divides.

"Give a voice to the women who have been deeply harmed physically and/or emotionally by abortion. The pro-choice movement seeks to hide these stories because they are inconvenient" - we don't have to hide anything. I personally think it's much more inconvenient for anti-abortion that 95% of women don't regret their abortion after 5 years

If we're talking women getting "coerced into" things, I very much expect the anti-abortion side to end up on the losing side. Many young women, especially those from conservative or religious upbringings, already have abortions in secret because they know their family would disapprove of that, and would ostracise them (or worse) if they found out. And now it's literally illegal to have abortions in a number of states? That sounds pretty coercive to me.

But data shows that it being illegal doesn't even stop women from having abortions, because women who have no desires for motherhood probably won't consider much to be worse than the prospect of painfully carrying around a child they don't want for 9 months, and giving birth to it, and the potentially also having to raise it.

@NotThatGuy Since this is a Christian forum I assume you are a pro-choice Christian (correct me please if I am wrong). 1) What would a human fetus be if not simply a stage in human development: fetus, newborn, toddler, adolescent, adult, etc. You can't get to adult without passing through toddler. No one stage is more human than another. It seems to me that pro-choice has to acknowledge that this is what is being chosen.

@NotThatGuy There would never be any humans beyond Adam and Eve were it not for the human fetus. 2) For a Christian person, can it be argued that availing oneself of abortion (in light of point # 1) is an act of faith. It cannot be argued that no pregnancies by rape occurred in Old Testament times. Divorce is allowed there because of hardheartedness but abortion is not. That is significant.

@NotThatGuy if your arguments were applied consistently they would support the following conclusions:

A) Rape is consensual. B) Rape shouldn't be illegal since it still happens when it's illegal. C) Cancer is indistinguishable from a human fetus. Not sure if these were attempts at humor, but they are not funny, they are absurd

It is one thing for people to bear the consequences of their own decisions, it is quite another to bear the consequences of someone else's decisions

The Turn Away study you cited has been thoroughly debunked for excluding most of the people whose views differed from the desired results. It is in fact one of the prominent examples of point #5 in my post

A) above should have said sometimes consensual. Either way I thoroughly reject the idea that a person who is raped is responsible for another person's decision to commit rape. It's a heinous crime, not a laughing matter.

@HoldToTheRod They're not attempts at humor, they're an analogy to demonstrate a potential flaw in your reasoning. Not entirely sure where you got those conclusions from. You might partially be confusing me poking holes in your argument with me defending my own point of view, and the arguments presumably rely on a fetus being a person, which is something we clearly disagree on. So no, me being consistent with respect to those arguments does not lead me to those conclusions.

"Cancer is indistinguishable from a human fetus" - if anything, YOUR argument implies this, if followed consistently. Almost all things in one's body (including cancer) trivially classifies as "is human", yet we have no objection to destroying cancer cells (as long as the person whose body its in consents, which would also be true with abortion). So it's definitely not as trivial as "If human => possesses_human_rights = TRUE".

Consider siamese twins. How do we decide whether there's 1 or 2 distinct humans there who should each have human rights? Well, consciousness would probably be the primary determiner of that. If someone has just a leg of a twin sticking out somewhere (or worse, a fully formed, but non-living twin), no reasonable person would object to them having that removed. Seems only consistent to use the same logic when it comes to pregnancy.

@MikeBorden I would definitely argue that having a consciousness and not being physically inside of nor attached to another human being does make one a whole lot more human than someone for whom that isn't true. And early human and animal embryos are also similar. Not a Christian (nor a historian), but AFAIK Christian opposition to abortion is fairly recent, and I'm not aware of the Bible explicitly disallowing abortion, but there are certainly verses which seem to align better with pro-choice ...

For example: a simple fine for killing a fetus as per Exodus 21:22-25 suggests that a fetus is property, not a person. And God himself advocates for an abortion ritual in Numbers 5:11-31. There are also a number of verses advocating for the slaughter of unborn children, but most Christians would probably just dismiss that for the same reason they dismiss all the other questionable things in the Bible.

Now you're just straw-manning my argument (and/or ignoring the definitions in my post). An individual human organ (healthy or otherwise) is not a member of the species homo sapiens. If consciousness bestows human rights, then a person who 1) knocks a victim unconscious and then 2) kills the victim, has committed assault but not murder?? The victim wasn't conscious when they died, so...anything goes?

(And those who claim a fetus is an organ do so in rejection of genetics)

@NotThatGuy It's hard to call the Numbers passage an abortion procedure since both a woman who has cheated and a woman who has not cheated are given the same potion to drink at the request of a jealous husband. The unfaithful wife's womb is affected and becomes barren (that is the curse, v. 27) and the faithful wife's womb is unaffected.

Exodus 21 in context here. Numbers 5 here. Neither makes for a contemporary pro-abortion argument.

@NotThatGuy The idea is that the husband is jealous but has no proof. Since God sees and judges all it is brought before Him. There is nothing in the passage that brings fetal life into view...it is about barrenness as a consequence of unfaithfulness.

A dead twin and a living fetus are not comparable

@NotThatGuy glad to know you don't believe the arguments you presented earlier. I don't either.

@NotThatGuy I offered my definition of a "human being". What is your definition?

@NotThatGuy In Exodus 21, if you read carefully, if the woman is accidentally struck causing her children to come out and there is no harm a fine is levied but if there is harm there shall be life for life. This actually strongly indicates that the fetus in the womb is equated with a human life as far as God is concerned.

@MikeBorden I think we may have finally found something we agree on! =). You may find my posts (linked earlier in the chat) on Exodus 21 & Numbers 5 interesting.

@HoldToTheRod I'm quite sure we have much common ground, even though some of the differences are critical. :-)

@HoldToTheRod I fail to see how I was strawmanning anything (and now you're just strawmanning me). My argument is that the line between mother and fetus is blurry and it's far from trivial to say that a fetus is a distinct human from the moment of conception - I don't know how many more times I need to say that.

Being unconscious is not the same as not having a consciousness. If you're braindead, you don't have a consciousness. If you're asleep or knocked out, you do. Murdering a braindead person isn't murder.

"A dead twin and a living fetus are not comparable" - define "dead" and "living", and then explain why they aren't comparable. The body of a siamese twin can still have a body that roughly works (in the sense that there's blood flowing, it responds to stimuli, etc.) even though it's lacking a consciousness, and in such cases any reasonable person would permit the other twin to surgically remove any part of their attached twin.

This could be practically identical to the physical state of an early-stage fetus, so if you agree with my previous sentence, it seems like you'd need to allow abortions by the same logic. I suppose you can appeal to religion and the idea of a soul at that point, but I don't see any secular or scientific argument that would make much sense here.

"I offered my definition of a "human being"" - where did you offer your definition? "A member of the species homo sapiens"? That's fine, but that doesn't in any way address the questionable distinction between mother and fetus.

"glad to know you don't believe the arguments you presented earlier" - so we're just doing pure strawmen now?

@MikeBorden The Numbers passage is a ritual where one of the two outcomes is an abortion. I wouldn't call it "an abortion procedure", but I would call it "an abortion ritual". As in an abortion is not the explicit goal, but it is explicitly one of the possible outcomes, to the ritual that should be performed specifically by God's command. If that isn't God approving of abortion, then I don't know what is.

As for Exodus, in the NIV it says "she gives birth prematurely", but there's also a footnote saying "she has a miscarriage", i.e. the baby dies (and the harm mentioned would thus be to the mother). KJV uses more poetic language that gives no clear indication of what it actually means (although it seems hard to argue that having her "fruit depart" equals giving birth to a baby that survives, because that wouldn't be much of a departure at all).

So yes, you could argue either way. Even though (a) a premature baby at that point in history would presumably be almost guaranteed to die and (b) I imagine physical trauma almost always results in a miscarriage, not a premature birth (you'd need a whole lot of force for the fetus to be ejected) - both of those makes the live-birth interpretation much less likely.

But just the fact that one could reasonably interpret it as I did, and it's even explicitly interpreted as such in a modern and popular English translation, doesn't seem to be in favour of anti-abortion Christians.

Neither may be a "contemporary pro-abortion argument", but they certainly are a lot closer to pro-abortion than anti-abortion. The first one especially seems to strongly suggest that God has almost no concern for the lives of unborn babies.

@NotThatGuy you're the one who said some of your comments did not represent your own point of view =)

I already defined alive. Dead = no longer alive. If you defined your understanding of "human being" I must have missed it

At no point after conception is the zygote/embryo/fetus indistinguishable from the mother (structurally or genetically)...I get the impression some try to blur the lines because they are otherwise motivated to do so, not because the line itself is blurry.

Thank you for clarifying your position on consciousness--you appeared to be using "conscious" and "having a consciousness" interchangeably earlier. But if braindead is the standard for not having a consciousness...a fetus has brain activity for almost the entirety of pregnancy. But if brain activity is not the standard, and an entity had a consciousness but was unconscious, how would you know that it did (or did not) have a consciousness?

@NotThatGuy b) is not how a miscarriage works--the force of the injury is not the force that ejects the baby. In any event, the text is written in Hebrew--English translations have to apply interpretation, which is why in my linked post I examined the Hebrew words. The Hebrew word does not refer to a miscarriage. And a baby delivered a couple weeks early could survive in ancient times.