An Honest Examination
It is emotionally charged, politically weaponized, religiously controversial, and deeply personal. That is precisely why it deserves something increasingly rare: an honest examination of what we actually believe, what history actually records, what medicine actually tells us, and what Christianity actually teaches.
This is not an argument that every woman who has had an abortion is evil. It is not an argument that every circumstance surrounding a pregnancy is simple. It is not an excuse to treat women who have suffered through abortion with contempt.
It is an argument about something more fundamental: What is the unborn child?
If the child in the womb is merely tissue belonging to a woman, abortion can be understood as an exercise of bodily autonomy. If that child is a living human being at the earliest stage of his or her development, the question changes completely. Then abortion is no longer merely about a woman's body. It is about what one human being is permitted to do to another human being who cannot defend himself. And that question cannot be answered by slogans.
Before the Politics
One of the easiest ways to make abortion intellectually comfortable is to use language that hides what is happening. "Product of conception." "Pregnancy tissue." "Clump of cells." "Potential human."
But every human being is composed of cells. The fact that something is small does not make it nonhuman. The fact that something is dependent does not make it nonhuman. The fact that something cannot survive independently does not make it nonhuman.
An unborn child is not a potential human being in the sense that a seed is potentially an oak tree. The unborn child is already a human organism undergoing development. At fertilization, a new organism begins developing with its own genetic identity.
The important distinction is between being human and being developed. A newborn is less developed than an adult. A fetus is less developed than a premature infant. But development does not change the species of the developing organism. Birth changes the child's location and physiological environment. It does not change what the child is.
A Very Old Practice
Abortion did not begin in twentieth-century America. Ancient civilizations practiced methods of attempting to terminate pregnancies. The ancient Greek and Roman worlds provide numerous examples. Aristotle, for example, regarded abortion as permissible under certain circumstances before what he considered the fetus to have acquired sensation and life.
Early Christianity took a substantially different direction. Christian opposition to abortion appears very early in Christian literature. The Didache, generally dated to the late first or early second century, explicitly condemns abortion.
Before Roe
American abortion law did not begin with Roe v. Wade. During the nineteenth century, American states increasingly enacted restrictions on abortion. One important figure was Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer, a nineteenth-century American physician who became a major advocate for criminalizing abortion. In 1866 he published On Criminal Abortion in America, arguing that abortion represented a serious threat to women, children, families and society.
The motivations were not exclusively religious. There were concerns about medical ethics, maternal mortality, the protection of unborn life, professional standards, and the increasing ability of physicians to distinguish pregnancy from earlier stages of development.
Margaret Sanger
No serious discussion of twentieth-century reproductive politics can ignore Margaret Sanger. Sanger was a major figure in the American birth-control movement and eventually became one of the founders of what became Planned Parenthood.
But her philosophy was also intertwined with eugenics, a movement that attempted to improve the human population through selective reproduction. Sanger wrote extensively about eugenics and population control. Her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization contains arguments concerning the reproduction of people she considered unfit.
That historical record cannot honestly be erased simply because Sanger also advocated contraception. Nor should the opposite mistake be made: claiming every modern position associated with Planned Parenthood can simply be reduced to Sanger's personal beliefs. History requires distinctions.
Sanger's relationship with race is particularly controversial. She was involved in the Negro Project, launched in the 1930s. One frequently cited 1939 letter discusses the project and the importance of recruiting Black ministers and physicians. Sanger wrote: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population..." That sentence is frequently quoted as evidence that Sanger wanted to exterminate Black Americans. The historical record is more complicated: the sentence itself was Sanger denying that objective, not admitting it.
But the fact that she felt compelled to address the fear of racial extermination does not erase the broader eugenic context in which she operated. Sanger's writings demonstrate that she accepted ideas about selective reproduction and human fitness that are rightly condemned today. That is enough. There is no need to manufacture evidence against her. The real historical record is disturbing enough.
The Legal Landscape
In 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, holding that the Constitution protected a right to abortion under a constitutional right to privacy. For nearly fifty years, Roe became the foundation of American abortion law.
Then came Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey. The Court held that the Constitution does not confer a federal constitutional right to abortion and returned primary authority over abortion regulation to the states. America no longer had one national abortion regime. It had fifty different legal battles.
What the Data Actually Shows
The phrase "late-term abortion" is commonly used in political debate, but it is not a precise medical category. "At-term abortion" is even less precise. A pregnancy reaching 37 weeks is generally considered term. Abortions at that stage are extraordinarily uncommon.
There is no reliable national annual count of elective abortions performed literally at term. People sometimes hear claims that thousands of healthy babies are routinely being aborted at 38, 39 or 40 weeks. The available national abortion statistics do not establish that claim.
CDC surveillance generally reports abortions by gestational-age categories, and the overwhelming majority occur much earlier in pregnancy. Studies using national data have estimated abortions at or after 21 weeks at roughly 1% or less of abortions.
If someone tells you that there are a specific number of "40-week abortions every year in America," ask them for the actual source. The truth does not require exaggeration.
Some states do not specify a conventional gestational-age limit in the same way other states do, instead regulating abortion according to viability, medical judgment, or other statutory standards. A state having no explicit gestational-age limit in statute is not automatically equivalent to a law saying: "A doctor may electively abort a healthy fetus at 39 weeks for any reason." Those are different propositions.
Statistics Don't Answer the Moral Question
Suppose the number of abortions performed after viability were one. Would that make the other abortions morally acceptable? Suppose it were one hundred. Would that suddenly make the first trimester morally different?
Statistics describe how often something happens. They do not tell us whether it should happen. If abortion involves killing an innocent human being, then the moral problem exists whether the number is one million or one.