Something happened recently that surprised me. It seems that abortion advocates are quietly retreating to where they stood in the 1990s. You may remember Bill Clinton’s famous mantra from that era: abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” At the time it sounded moderate, even responsible. But the phrase never survived a second look. Why should abortion be rare if there is nothing wrong with it? And safe for whom? Safe for the child? Obviously not. The slogan was question-begging from the start, and it sparked a genuine debate inside the abortion-rights movement over how the movement ought to present itself to the public.
That debate produced a decisive shift. Beginning in the early 2000s, the movement moved away from the defensive posture of being merely “pro-choice” and toward being unapologetically pro-abortion. Look where that shift has landed us today. The dominant messaging is now “Shout Your Abortion.” Brag about it. Wear a shirt with a number on it announcing how many abortions you have had. That kind of open celebration has become the more confident, more visible face of the movement.
And yet, every so often, you still catch a glimpse of the old retreat—someone insisting, “Don’t call me pro-abortion. I don’t favor abortion. I just want women to have the choice.” That framing works on soft evangelicals and on people who have never been carefully taught how to think about the issue. But it does not solve the underlying problem. It only relocates it. Because if you truly support abortion, why do you feel the need to apologize for it at all?
The Clip That Says It All
I came across a clip recently that captures this tension perfectly. In it, a representative from Students for Life of America is defending the pro-life position at a campus event, and a visibly agitated student challenges her. The student’s complaint is not about biology or bodily rights. Her complaint is about a word. “I wish you would stop saying pro-abortion,” she says. “I am pro-choice. Stop rephrasing it so that you seem more legally and morally in the right.”
Pause on that. The student is not upset that she has been misrepresented on the facts. She is upset at being described as favoring the very thing she is arguing should be legal. And that reaction raises the obvious question: if there is nothing wrong with abortion, what exactly is there to apologize for? Why the discomfort with the plain label?
Here is a tactic worth developing whenever you encounter this. When someone tells you, “I am not pro-abortion, I am just pro-choice,” respond with a simple, patient question: Could you tell me the choice you support? A choice to do what? Make them define it. Do not let the word “choice” float free of its content, because “choice” by itself is not a moral position at all—it is an empty category. We choose between career paths, between homes, between meals. None of that is in dispute. So the question stands: choice to do what?
There is only one honest answer, and you must be willing to press until you get it. The choice in question is the choice of a mother to intentionally end the life of her own offspring while it is in the womb. That is the choice being defended. Everything else is packaging.
This becomes far easier to see when the conversation is set against imagery that depicts what abortion actually is, because now “choice” has to be defended against the visible reality of the choice being offered. Greg Cunningham puts it well: when you show pictures of abortion, abortion protests itself. That is exactly right. The pictures do the arguing.
A Definition Battle Is Not a Refutation
As the clip continues, the exchange grows louder. “Abortion is so great,” the student says sarcastically. “Why do you have a hard time admitting you subordinate—because you are using a moral fallacy where you are specifically making me seem more antagonistic.” The representative holds her ground.
Watch what is happening here, because it is a common move. When someone is losing an argument, they often begin to pound the table. They get louder. And they start slicing definitions in ways that are unclear and unhelpful, hoping to muddy the water until no one can tell what is actually at stake. The charge that the pro-life representative is being “morally fallacious” is asserted, but it is never demonstrated.
So let us take the charge seriously and test it. Here is the pro-life argument, the syllogism we have taught since this show began:
- Premise one: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
- Premise two: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.
- Conclusion: Therefore, abortion is wrong.
An argument like this can be refuted in exactly two ways. You can show that the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises—that the argument is invalid. Or you can show that one or more of the premises is false—that the argument is unsound. Those are the options. The angry student does neither. She does not identify a logical gap between the premises and the conclusion. She does not show that either premise is false. She simply announces that the reasoning is fallacious and raises her voice. That is not a refutation. It is an assertion wearing the costume of one.
What Is Really Driving the Objection
So what is actually idling behind her frustration? I think it is a worldview she never states and never defends: moral relativism. The view runs like this—morality is personal, we each construct it for ourselves, and no one has the right to judge what anyone else constructs. On this picture, there is no moral reality “out there” to line up with. Right and wrong are not discovered; they are manufactured according to taste. You like chocolate, I like vanilla, and no one is entitled to correct anyone. Abortion becomes just one more preference, and the choosing of it is what supposedly makes it good.
The trouble is that relativism collapses under its own weight, and it does so in at least three ways.
First, it is self-refuting. Tell someone “you shouldn’t judge,” and notice what you have just done—you have judged them for being judgmental. Say “you shouldn’t force your morality on others,” and you have just issued a moral rule you expect them to obey. The relativist ends up smuggling in the very thing he claims does not exist. “There are no binding moral rules—except this one: you must never say anyone is wrong.” That will not hold together.
Second, relativism cannot account for real moral wrongs. If morality is merely personal preference, then you lose the ability to say that anything is genuinely wrong. Why is it wrong to torment the vulnerable for entertainment? Why is it wrong to harm a small child because it suits someone’s private code? On relativism, you cannot say. You are reduced to “that’s just their choice.” The person who wants to defend the abused suddenly has no ground left to stand on. A view that cannot condemn cruelty is not a serious moral theory.
Third, no one can actually live this way. If the student truly believed that morality is nothing but personal preference, she would have no business correcting the pro-life speaker at all. The consistent move would be to say, “You have your preferences, I have mine, and there is no way to adjudicate between us”—and then fall silent. But she does not fall silent. She insists the pro-life student is wrong. She judges her. And in that very act she abandons the relativism she is relying on. People cannot help behaving as though some things are really, objectively wrong, because some things really are.
Honesty Has Its Merits
Here is what strikes me about all this. If you believe abortion should be legal through all nine months of pregnancy, and that a woman should have the moral right to exercise that option at any point, then why not simply admit you are pro-abortion? If there is nothing wrong with it, stop apologizing for it. We are long past “safe, legal, and rare.”
To their credit, some of the more candid voices on the other side have seen this and acted on it. Katha Pollitt wrote a book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, arguing that supporters should openly describe themselves as pro-abortion and quit hiding behind softer language. Camille Paglia has made a similar point, calling “pro-choice” intellectually dishonest on two counts: it refuses to name the choice, and it dodges the fact that what we are really talking about is abortion. She has gone so far as to say she has always regarded abortion as the killing of one’s own offspring—not the mere removal of tissue, but the elimination of a concrete individual. She proceeds to argue for abortion anyway, on other grounds we need not take up here. But at least she is honest about what it is. The angry student in the clip was not.
Two Objections Worth Answering
Two related objections tend to surface in exchanges like this, and both are worth addressing directly.
The first is the appeal to ectopic pregnancy. The claim goes: since you accept intervention in an ectopic pregnancy, you have already conceded abortion, so what is your objection? But return to the syllogism and notice how carefully premise two is worded—abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being. That word matters. First, no pro-life law in any state prevents a woman from receiving treatment for an ectopic pregnancy. Second, an ectopic pregnancy is a genuine pathology: the embryo has implanted not on the wall of the uterus but in the narrow fallopian tube, where it cannot survive and where, as it grows, the tube can rupture and the mother can hemorrhage to death—leaving both mother and child dead. Ideally a physician treats both as patients, but in many cases the pregnancy simply cannot be sustained. When the physician acts to save the one life he can, he foresees the death of the embryo, but he does not intend it. That is why this is not abortion under our careful definition. To equate life-saving treatment for an ectopic pregnancy with elective abortion is intellectually dishonest.
The second is the parasite argument—the notion that the child in the womb is a parasite feeding off its host. This has always struck me as one of the weakest arguments offered, for two plain reasons. A parasite is, by definition, an organism of a different species from its host—something that does not belong and does not share the host’s nature. The unborn child is not a different species; it is the human offspring of two human parents. And a parasite does not belong in the body it invades, whereas a woman’s womb is the one place in all the world designed precisely to sustain the life of her own child. If the child does not belong there, where on earth does it belong? To call one’s own offspring a parasite is not merely bad biology. It is a moral confusion about what that child is.
Stop Apologizing
Notice what the angry student never did. She never argued that the unborn are not human, and therefore abortion is a permissible personal choice. She never engaged the syllogism. She was simply angry at being called pro-abortion. But the label only stings if some part of you suspects the thing being named is indefensible.
So here is the challenge, offered plainly. If abortion does not intentionally take the life of an innocent human being, then there is nothing to apologize for—own it, name it, defend it wholeheartedly. And if it does take such a life, then no amount of relabeling will change what it is. Either way, the honest path forward is to stop hiding behind the word “choice” and answer the only question that matters: a choice to do what?