Response to Someone Unsure about Abortion

An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal a little over a month ago by one Rebecca Sugar, after the momentous Dobbs v. Jackson ruling finally put an end to the 50-year scourge on our justice system that was Roe v. Wade. As the debates now it go back to the states and will continue there, some of them will be shrill. But Ms. Sugar’s article essentially charges both sides with being shrill, and on its face appears to be a serious challenge for a reasoned and sensible argument with no hyperbole. The writer offers that “Americans like me . . . can be persuaded with thoughtful, considered debate,” adding, “We haven’t gotten much of it.” First she rejects the pro-choice activists’ excess and “tactics [that] repel people, rather than draw them in. We will never hear a word you say.” And then she turns to the pro-life side with a similar complaint of excess, claiming that the pro-life reference to “conclusive” science showing that human life begins “at the moment of fertilization” is a confusion of “moral and ethical arguments with scientific ones.” Her challenge is for a thoughtful, reasoned response. Her complete article is here.

I set to taking up this challenge, proverbial pen in hand, and at once fired off a response to the Journal. Of course my reply wasn’t one of the ones printed; they probably had hundreds to choose from. So instead, I’m including it here:

I find the sincere and honest request from Ms. Rebecca Sugar a welcome challenge, as she says she is looking for a reasonable argument shorn of hyperbole and stridency. While I agree that there is plenty of both, and that it is in evidence on both sides of the controversy, I nevertheless will offer this. Please note, Ms. Sugar, that the debate from the left is always entirely a straw man. They say they are fighting for the rights of women to control their own bodies legally. We of the pro-life persuasion do not believe those rights to be at issue at all. For us it's entirely about the right of the unborn to stay alive. You quote a pro-life activist claiming that the science is clear that life begins at conception, not birth, and suggest that this confuses ethics with science. But the claim is not in itself a moral or ethical opinion. Though I am no scientist either, I do know that as far as any scientist can determine, when two haploid cells merge to form a zygote, a new organism immediately and swiftly begins to develop. No moral judgment informs this belief, though a moral judgment is certainly informed by it. We ought not kill innocent people; and we have no reason at all to believe that a fetus is less than a living human being. There was indeed a flimsy notion of viability that seems to have been invented when Planned Parenthood v. Casey was handed down by the Court [in 1992]. But if viability is to be the standard, then who is to say that even a one-day-old baby is a human being? Leave that child alone and it will most surely die; one might even say that it is arguably less viable outside the womb. Ms. Sugar, our settled position is simply this: a fetus is a helpless infant human being. Could someone persuade us otherwise? No one ever tries.

Rev. Burnell F Eckardt Jr, PhD

Pastor, St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Kewanee, Illinois

Editor, Gottesdienst,  the Journal of Lutheran Liturgy