Empty emotional appeals are the only way for pro-choicers to win the debate on abortion. They know this very well, which is why they talk endlessly about why pro-lifers don’t hold exceptions in certain difficult cases. Even though these “exceptional” cases are amazingly rare, pro-abortion people hone in on these in order to make pro-life Americans look bad, and to intimidating them into compromising on their views. Foolish pro-lifers in name only choose to accept the exceptions rather than put up a fight, but they should know better.
According to research, only 6% of women who have abortions use health concerns as their reason for doing so. Yet, the primary health concern for many of these women was “feeling too ill during the pregnancy to work or take care of other children.” Obviously, pregnancy can cause a number of temporary changes in a woman’s body. Yet, these short-lived setbacks hardly constitute a valid reason to kill a child, and millions of pro-life mothers would agree with me.
Of course, the left does not actually want a “health of the mother” exception to liberate women from morning sickness. In reality, they are looking for an excuse to offer elective abortion-on-demand in all nine months of pregnancy even in jurisdictions that nominally don’t allow such abortions. This insidious instance of doublespeak goes all the way back to Doe v. Bolton, the lesser-known companion case to Roe v. Wade. In the Doe decision, the court defined “health of the mother” to include “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.” Under this over-broad and terrible definition, any woman could claim to experience emotional distress from a pregnancy and have that child aborted under the health exception.
Clearly, being pro-life with exceptions only opens up a back door for unlimited abortion-on-demand. More Americans are rallying for life than ever before. We shouldn’t apologize or compromise when it comes to saving women and children from the horrors of abortion. In this unprecedentedly pro-life moment in American history, let’s be truly pro-life without exceptions.
