Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “How can you call yourself pro-life if you are in favor of the death penalty?” Or maybe someone has told you, “You’re not pro-life, you’re pro-birth. Once a baby is born, you stop caring about them.” These kinds of attacks aren’t really attacks on the position that unborn children have intrinsic value and should not be killed on a whim. Actually, these attacks are distractions from the hard-hitting facts of the abortion debate. Yet, many people still want to know how to respond, because these distractions are thrown around relentlessly.
The death penalty argument is a bad-faith argument in almost every case because in almost every case, the person bringing it up is in favor of abortion and opposed to the death penalty. How can you call someone out for being both pro-life and pro-death penalty when you yourself are a hypocrite by your own standard? Commentator Allie Beth Stuckey put it best when she said, “I am anti-abortion for the same reason I am pro 2A & pro-death penalty for murder: because innocent life is supremely valuable and worth protecting.”
Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America had the perfect answer for the argument about how pro-lifers are hypocrites if they don’t spend their efforts on helping foster children and solving other societal ills. She asks, “Are you upset that the American Diabetes Association doesn’t fight cancer?” The obvious answer to Kristan’s question is no. We intuitively realize that specialization is a good thing when it comes to solving society’s problems. The American Diabetes Association is right to focus on the issue of diabetes. The same is true for being pro-life. We focus our efforts on protecting women and children from abortion because we want to be effective, not because we don’t care about other issues.
Don’t let pro-choicers distract you by bringing up every societal issue under the sun. They do that because they don’t want to talk about the issue at hand, which I believe is the greatest human rights violation on the planet today. We must be laser-focused on protecting the vulnerable from the evils of abortion.
