As a college student in this generation, it is a bit strange to be pro-life. As a woman in college, being constantly told that I have a right to my own body, it is downright radical to be pro-life. We pro-lifers face quite the uphill battle against a culture that is opposed to us and our ideals.
As a college woman, I am met with surprise (and sometimes dismay) when someone learns about my unconventional (and perhaps, to them, abrasive) views. I know my views are radical. I know it would be so much easier to simply coincide with the natural ebb and flow of popular opinion. Instead, I (along with a few others) stick out like a stubborn rock, interrupting the flow, risking the shock, annoyance, and possibly hurt, of those around me. Still, we persist. But why? How is it all worth it, if it would be so much easier to go with the flow, to say that “although it isn’t right for me, you ought to have the right to do what you please with your body”? I may succinctly sum up my reasoning for my views in three words: Every life matters.
This I believe: that humans are intrinsically valuable. If I am intrinsically valuable today, and I’ve undergone no essential change since the beginning, then I must have been intrinsically valuable in the beginning, too.
This I believe: human life begins at conception. From the moment a sperm fertilizes an egg, the resultant zygote is endowed with every gene that it will ever have. Humans do not get put together in the womb; it is not as if different parts get added on like an assembly line. Rather, humans undergo development in the womb, just as they continue to develop throughout the different stages of their lives. A few-week-old fetus doesn’t look like a toddler just as a toddler doesn’t resemble a seventy-year-old. Humans look and act differently at different stages, and it follows that their level of dependence on others varies; this doesn’t diminish their value at any certain stage.
This I believe: independence does not equal humanity. We all depend on each other. A baby depends on its mother long after birth for sustenance, although it is outside the womb. A person with special needs depends on his or her caretaker, sometimes for constant assistance. Do we devalue these people’s humanity, to the extent that we are willing to take their lives at our convenience? Further, in a broader sense, do we not heavily depend on farmers to grow food, civil engineers for clean water, doctors for health?
This I believe: to adopt a functionalist philosophy towards humanity devalues humanity. Human value can not be based on the functions a human performs or what he or she looks like. This only serves to make humans the judges of other humans’ value. By adopting a functionalist philosophy and thus stripping rights from the unborn, we may also be dangerously close to stripping rights from the handicapped. Thus, we may be caught giving those rights to artificial intelligence (which may function like a human), or animals with pseudo-human intellect like cats, dogs and dolphins. In other words, some people will not make the cut for the basic right to life, while some non-humans do make the cut.
And so, why am I pro-life? Because every life is intrinsically valuable, begins at conception and ends in natural death, and is not contingent upon independence. Life is beautiful, precious, and deserves to be protected. Be skeptical of those who insinuate that life exists on a continuum of value, for as Abraham Lincoln said two hundred years ago:
“You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.”
