Twelve years ago, at an annual pro-life student symposium in Toronto, I had the privilege of sitting under the tutelage of pro-life apologist Scott Klusendorf. After leaving us rapt with awe over the simplicity of making a solid yet secular pro-life defense, Scott further impressed us with the importance of considering full-time pro-life work as a career choice. I’ll never forget his words*:
“There are more people working full-time to kill babies than there are working full-time to save them. That’s because killing babies is very profitable, while saving them is very costly – so costly that large numbers of people who say they are pro-life are not lifting a finger to stop the killing, and those that do lift a finger do just enough to salve the conscience, but not enough to actually stop the killing.”
I believe Mr Klusendorf is right about this. Most pro-life action is undertaken part-time, often by stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers, whereas abortion advocates have doctors and paid professionals, politicians, judges, lawyers, and university professors all working to propagate abortion ideology and ensure that it remains on demand. The rest of us (and by that I mean we who regularly engage the issue, say nothing of the hundreds of thousands who are pro-life in ideology but never speak or think of it unless explicitly asked) unite a few times a year for a March for Life or a Life Chain, or to attend a pro-life conference with like-minded friends. But how many of us pro-life faithfuls are involved in actual activism on a regular basis? Do we treat abortion like a hobby? Something we can devote a few hours to, here and there?
“Those that do lift a finger do just enough to salve the conscience, but not enough to actually stop the killing.” Could this be true? I know I feel so zealous after attending a pro-life event, but I often ask myself: am I really doing all I can do to change minds in the culture at large? How easy it is to fall into a habit of simply blogging and talking to one another! We reason that we’re making a difference because, after all, we do the occasional debating with abortion advocates on Facebook or Twitter, and perhaps we even have the occasional dialog with pro-choice friends or colleagues. But do our efforts match the intensity of the abortion death toll around us?
With approximately 44 million global abortions occurring annually, that means that every single day, more than 120,000 developing human beings beginning their lives in a position of utmost dependency just like you began yours, are being denied their opportunity at life. Every. Day. Are we acting like it? In North America alone, it’s about 4000 per day. Every. Day. Are we who got to live and who know this killing is wrong doing everything we can? I’ll wager we all could do more. And that’s why I’ve decided to make Mr Klusendorf’s challenge my own. And it’s why I’m passing it on to you.
I launched Pro-Life Humanists with the intention of ultimately building a fully-funded pro-life organization that atheists can work in. (Read this post to learn how too many pro-life organizations won’t hire atheists)
I’m asking you to consider doing one of two things:
1. Consider a full or part time career as a pro-life advocate. Join me in making it your job to become as thoroughly equipped and trained to defend the pro-life position as possible. Join me in taking the pro-life message back out into the atheist community where it’s not often heard.
2. “Hire” one of us. If you can’t make a career of pro-life work, you can become the collective employer of those who aspire to do so. A team of 100 people funding $30/mth, 60 people donating $50/mth or 200 people donating $15/mth can collectively hire (at a baseline survival level) one person to be their full-time voice for the voiceless. There are many funded pro-life organizations out there, let’s make sure there’s at least one where atheists can work!
We’re starting small and we’re part-time volunteers for now, and of course we’ll need to fund the organization too, since one of the main purposes of Pro-Life Humanists – flying to atheist conventions to dialog one-on-one with our peers – will require at least $2000 – $3000 per event, but I’m letting you know this is on the radar and you – especially if you’re a pro-life atheist who has wanted to be more active but didn’t know what you could do – are a part of this. Please be a part of this. There are so few of us and this work is vital!
I want to hear from you. Please click below or send me an email at 
… and let’s chat about how you can be involved. No one is holding the door for pro-life atheists – not the majority of our atheist peers and not the majority of mainstream Christian pro-lifers. It’s up to me and it’s up to you.
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* Gregg Cunningham, director of Center for Bioethical Reform first spoke those words to Scott himself, prompting Scott to leave his job as a pastor and pursue full-time pro-life work.
Thanks. This moved me, and poked my conscience to start taking some steps, outside the realm of theory, toward saving at least a few of the many hundreds aborted in West Bengal every day. I have also rethought the possibility of taking up the moderator job you mentioned in the “Secular Case” comments section — if that could free up some of your time for your work in the trenches. I will write to you further about all this by email.
It’s hard to get a clear picture of the abortion situation in West Bengal or in India in general. It seems that the % of pregnancies ending in abortion is lower than in the US (there are no abortion-rights activists here saying openly that unborn babies are parasites and intruders, etc.), but the rate of pregnancy is higher, due to poor contraception, due in turn to lack of knowledge and other causes. So while India has a population around 4 times that of the US, it may have something like 6 times the number of abortions per day or per year. Early abortion is legal, but it seems the great majority of abortions are performed by uncertified abortionists — which is illegal. I’m not sure about the reasons for this, but it may simply be that it’s easier for women to keep it quiet if they don’t go to a certified facility, and they may actually find the certified places more scary than their local options.
Without a massive improvement in the lives of the poor that has eluded India for centuries, the only alternative to abortion in many cases might be even higher infant mortality, coupled with a worsening of already-bad conditions for the rest of the family. Though I might personally think it would reflect well on the human spirit to share the suffering in that way, enabling a few of the otherwise-doomed unborn to survive and grow up, instead of human society’s business-as-usual of reflexively allocating the suffering to the smallest and most defenseless, that is not likely to happen.
Nonetheless I think it would be better for some kind of local panel to evaluate and reluctantly approve those abortions, rather than woman’s-choice, in order not to deviate from the principle we should uphold that the unborn child is a citizen belonging to society, not to its parents only. But as a strategy for actually saving lives, such illegalization will help little, since the legal abortions seem to be a small minority in the first place.
So it may be that the lives that can be saved at present will not be among the poorest, and that a campaign of educating and sensitizing people as to the personhood of the unborn might really be the best focus. That campaign should include the poor, but might be expected to have better results among those less poor. Education about adoption and help for poor families should also be a part of the approach, but such resources are limited and already under strain.
Someone will say that my ideas are a recipe for overpopulation, but again I am not willing to think that the smallest and most defenseless should automatically be treated as the safety valve to prevent overpopulation.
My picture is likely to change in significant ways as I go on learning, and perhaps even some readers here will have better information about some things, which I will welcome. But I thought it would be worth putting these present understandings of mine out as a tentative sketch and a basis for further clarification.
Thank you for talking about the situation in your country. While the pro-life movement might share the same principles and overall goals around the world, we need to be cognizant of the political context that we face. Part of the reason why I am so resistant to life-begins-at-conception ideology is that, in the United States, any proposal to restrict oral contraceptives is a political non-starter. Attaching such a provision to any pro-life initiative guarantees its defeat.
Do opportunities exist in India for taking the pro-life message to the atheist or humanist communities? You sound like you might be effective in that capacity. I think most of Pro-Life Humanists’ efforts are focused on North America, so I think you would need to act largely independently.
I also think that PLH needs financial support.
Above I wrote “Early abortion is legal.” This might give the wrong impression in a couple of ways. First of all, it’s legal up to 20 weeks. But secondly, it is not abortion on demand. There are criteria. But the criteria are liberal, and it’s often said that the liberality of the law is further abused to perform a lot of illegal sex-selective abortions against girls. What is agree to be very clear is that the sex ratio is about 940 females to 1000 males.
First let’s see if we’re operating on the same assumptions.
“Part of the reason why I am so resistant to life-begins-at-conception ideology is that, in the United States, any proposal to restrict oral contraceptives is a political non-starter. Attaching such a provision to any pro-life initiative guarantees its defeat.”
If I understand correctly, you want a pro-life initiative that will not be defeated. If a proposal to restrict oral contraceptives is attached to any pro-life initiative, it will be defeated. Life-begins-at-conception ideology necessarily entails proposals to restrict oral contraceptives, guaranteeing defeat, so you are resistant to life-begins-at-conception ideology.
This assumption —
Life-begins-at-conception ideology necessarily entails proposals to restrict oral contraceptives
— seems to be a part of your sequence of logic. But I wouldn’t operate on that assumption. Contraceptives, as strictly defined, prevent conception, so they function before life/personhood has started.
Some pro-lifers, notably Catholics, I think, may oppose contraception as such, but not all do. I fully support it.
Are you thinking of morning-after pills? I think that some pro-lifers oppose them, but my impression is that at least some pro-lifers who support contraception consider those pills as contraception and don’t oppose them; while others who support contraception may think that those pills sometimes operate as abortifacients, and do oppose them on that ground.
If it could be proven that they are not abortifacients, then all pro-lifers who support contraception would support those pills. If on the other hand it could be proven that they ARE abortifacients, then all life-begins-at-conception pro-lifers, including those who support contraception, would oppose those pills. But if the latter were proved, then opposing them would be less a guarantee of defeat, wouldn’t it?
“Part of the reason why I am so resistant”
Since we’re now talking about pragmatic reasons for defining “life” or “person” in a particular way, as opposed to purity of actual meaning, how much would we gain pragmatically by life-begins-at-consciousness? Someone told me that that means 20 weeks. Such unborn child-protection legislation would certainly be easier to pass than life-begins-at-conception, but it seems to me one reason it would be easier to pass would be that the abortion-rights forces wouldn’t really lose much by it. Their constituents would simply be careful to schedule their abortions early, but would there really be significantly fewer abortions?
“Do opportunities exist in India for taking the pro-life message to the atheist or humanist communities?”
Though I’ve lived in India for a long time, most of my knowledge about abortion issues comes from the internet. The English-language internet still focuses disproportionately on the US, so I’m just now changing gears and trying to really understand the situation in India. This organization’s —
http://www.respectforlifeindia.org
— statement is:
“Respect for Life India is a non-profit, secular organisation of people from all walks of life, united in a common goal-which is to promote life in all its stages – from conception to natural death, and to act against all that would demean human dignity. RFLI believes that every human is precious and unique in the eyes of God and the human family”
— which doesn’t sound like hard-core secularism. “Secular” here sometimes means “non-denominational.”
I had just been intending to contact them. But I know that there are other humanist groups here, probably not already pro-life, and you’re right that it might be more productive to contact those who are not.
I would not expect the humanists here to be as resolutely pro-choice as in the US. In the US, I have the feeling there’s a particular culture that is defined by atheism, pro-choice and pro-gay rights, as though those things were all inseparable.
Incidentally, do you speak Bengali or Nepali? I have been following the world chess championship, so I have been getting some education about India. I heard that the northern languages are actually more similar to English and Norwegian than to the southern Dravidian languages.
I tried to reply here, but the software did not accept it here nor on other pages of this website either. (I have some idea what the problem was, but will discuss that with Kristine if at all.) So I have posted my reply as a comment to the “Personhood” article, http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org
I’m not easily impdesser. . . but that’s impressing me! 🙂
“Contraceptives, as strictly defined, prevent conception, so they function before life/personhood has started.”
Some contraceptive devices are thought to induce very early micro-abortions. It is a complicated and controversial topic, but that seems to be a possibility–especially for certain types of devices. Kristine might be a better authority on this topic.
“If it could be proven that they are not abortifacients, then all pro-lifers who support contraception would support those pills. If on the other hand it could be proven that they ARE abortifacients, then all life-begins-at-conception pro-lifers, including those who support contraception, would oppose those pills. But if the latter were proved, then opposing them would be less a guarantee of defeat, wouldn’t it?”
Only to a small degree, I think. Most voters, at least in the United States, would not be swayed by such a consensus. Most voters are indifferent to whether contraception causes early micro-abortions. Only movement right-to-lifers discuss such considerations.
“Their constituents would simply be careful to schedule their abortions early, but would there really be significantly fewer abortions?”
Late abortions are apparently largely caused by women not realizing they are pregnant earlier. Therefore, such women would be limited in their ability to schedule earlier abortions. Furthermore, late abortions are more dangerous and expensive, so women are probably not delaying their abortions now, anyway. I think a case could be made from the statistics, too, that time restrictions reduce the overall number of abortions.
Keep in mind, too, that early-term abortion restrictions are very difficult to enforce.
“Keep in mind, too, that early-term abortion restrictions are very difficult to enforce.”
But successful enforcement is not the only consideration. Maureen Condic, whom I have quoted before, writes of a pro-choice professor:
“Egginton is clearly concerned about the psychological impact of fetal pain legislation; that if society acknowledges a fetus is capable of experiencing pain in any capacity, the fetus will assume greater value in the minds of many, and therefore abortion may be subjected to more stringent regulation.”
The psychological impact of legislation. A 2005 LA Times article about the work of an abortionist quoted one of his patients:
“She regrets having to pay $750 for the abortion, but Amanda says she does not doubt her decision. ‘It’s not like it’s illegal. It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong,’ she says.
Because it’s legal, she feels she has done nothing wrong.
Many people feel abortion should be legal only for pragmatic reasons. Their purpose is not to send a message that society condones it. But isn’t it almost inevitable that it will send that message?
You have no idea how badly I would love to work full time defending life. As it is, I spend almost every day that I am not working on reading and writing about what is happening with abortion in the USA right now. This is the most relevant problem that could have ever happened. I don’t see how people ignore it and pretend everything is fine.
Well your help is more than welcome if you have any skills that can help improve the site or the organization, fund-raise etc… the more volunteers I have on board, the faster we will be able to move toward a status as a brick and mortar pro-life organization with salaried staff. 🙂