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Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing
The political philosopher Ryan T. Anderson, bestselling author of When Harry Became Responding to the Transgender Moment , teams up with the pro-life journalist Alexandra DeSanctis to expose the catastrophic failure—social, political, legal, and personal—of legalized abortion.
Hope in the Ruins of Roe
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion law to the democratic process, a powerful new book reframes the coming Our fifty-year experiment with unlimited abortion has harmed everyone —even its most passionate proponents.
Women, men, families, the law, politics, medicine, the media—and, of course, children (born and unborn)—have all been brutalized by the culture of death fostered by Roe v. Wade .
Abortion hollows out marriage and the family. It undermines the rule of law and corrupts our political system. It turns healers into executioners and “women’s health” into a euphemism for extermination.
Ryan T. Anderson, a compelling and reasoned voice in our most contentious cultural debates, and the pro-life journalist Alexandra DeSanctis expose the false promises of the abortion movement and explain why it has made everything worse. Five decades after Roe , everyone has an opinion about abortion. But after reading Tearing Us Apart , no one will think about it in the same way.
Hope in the Ruins of Roe
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion law to the democratic process, a powerful new book reframes the coming Our fifty-year experiment with unlimited abortion has harmed everyone —even its most passionate proponents.
Women, men, families, the law, politics, medicine, the media—and, of course, children (born and unborn)—have all been brutalized by the culture of death fostered by Roe v. Wade .
Abortion hollows out marriage and the family. It undermines the rule of law and corrupts our political system. It turns healers into executioners and “women’s health” into a euphemism for extermination.
Ryan T. Anderson, a compelling and reasoned voice in our most contentious cultural debates, and the pro-life journalist Alexandra DeSanctis expose the false promises of the abortion movement and explain why it has made everything worse. Five decades after Roe , everyone has an opinion about abortion. But after reading Tearing Us Apart , no one will think about it in the same way.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published June 28, 2022
66 people are currently reading
522 people want to read
About the author
Ryan T. Anderson
16 books107 followersRyan T. Anderson researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at The Heritage Foundation. He also focuses on justice and moral principles in economic thought, health care and education, and has expertise in bioethics and natural law theory.
Anderson, who joined Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society in 2012, also is the editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.
Anderson’s recent work focuses on the moral and constitutional questions surrounding same-sex “marriage.” He is the co-author with Princeton’s Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis of “What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” (Encounter Books, December 2012). The three also co-wrote the article “What is Marriage?” in the winter 2011 issue of Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Anderson, George and Girgis filed amicus briefs with the 9th Circuit Court on the appeal of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case reviewing the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, and with the 1st Circuit Court on the challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In January 2013, the co-authors filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court after it agreed to hear the cases.
Anderson’s previous positions include assistant editor of First Things; journalism fellow of the Phillips Foundation; and executive director of the Witherspoon Institute, where he was research assistant to Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, First Things, Weekly Standard, National Review, Ricochet.com, New Atlantis, Claremont Review of Books, Touchstone, Books and Culture, Christianity Today, The City and Human Life Review.
Anderson received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He is a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his master’s degree. His research spans the natural law tradition in conversation with classical and contemporary liberalism. The tentative title of his dissertation: “Beyond Private Property and Social Welfare: Economic Justice and Economic Rights.”
Anderson, who was born in Baltimore, Md., currently resides in Washington, D.C
(from Heritage Foundation Website)
Anderson, who joined Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society in 2012, also is the editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.
Anderson’s recent work focuses on the moral and constitutional questions surrounding same-sex “marriage.” He is the co-author with Princeton’s Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis of “What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” (Encounter Books, December 2012). The three also co-wrote the article “What is Marriage?” in the winter 2011 issue of Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Anderson, George and Girgis filed amicus briefs with the 9th Circuit Court on the appeal of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case reviewing the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, and with the 1st Circuit Court on the challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In January 2013, the co-authors filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court after it agreed to hear the cases.
Anderson’s previous positions include assistant editor of First Things; journalism fellow of the Phillips Foundation; and executive director of the Witherspoon Institute, where he was research assistant to Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, First Things, Weekly Standard, National Review, Ricochet.com, New Atlantis, Claremont Review of Books, Touchstone, Books and Culture, Christianity Today, The City and Human Life Review.
Anderson received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He is a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his master’s degree. His research spans the natural law tradition in conversation with classical and contemporary liberalism. The tentative title of his dissertation: “Beyond Private Property and Social Welfare: Economic Justice and Economic Rights.”
Anderson, who was born in Baltimore, Md., currently resides in Washington, D.C
(from Heritage Foundation Website)
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April 10, 2024
Published only four days after Dobbs deposed Roe, Tearing Us Apart was written by the authors (both conservative Catholics) to “equip pro-life readers with the truth so that they can offer it courageously to others.” The Religious Right wants to ban abortion nationwide, and this book encapsulates their case in more ways than one. This book is intended for pro-lifers and this review is intended for pro-choicers. Here is what you need to know:
This Is Not A Bible-Thumping Exercise
The authors are well aware of the receding tide of religiosity, and wish to equip readers with a philosophical case against abortion that cannot be dismissed as merely faith based. Their case against abortion rests on three principles: a unique human person comes into being at fertilization; abortion ends a human life; government has an overriding interest in preventing the killing of human life and, therefore, in preventing abortion. The authors seem to use “fertilization” and “conception” interchangeably, asserting at one point that “a new human being comes into existence at conception” and then only two pages later: “When a sperm fertilizes an egg, a new organism comes into existence”. Fertilization is when sperm meets egg. Conception comes later when the blastocyst implants in the uterus’s wall – the formal beginning of pregnancy. The book’s blurring of this distinction is not an encouraging sign.
Beyond addressing the opposing side’s arguments, the authors don’t go further than asserting that human beings have a rational, and therefore personal, nature because we are capable of reason. Since every human being is genetically the same organism throughout life, the stage of development can’t matter for personhood, only our capacity for reason. On this logic, anencephalic babies who are born missing most or all of their brain never attain anything approaching rationality, let alone personhood, but the authors would have us believe that even anencephalics are persons with a rational nature that healthy animals do not possess.
The Book Is Replete With Misinformation And Pseudoscience
When it comes to telling the “truth about abortion”, chapter 2 is the absolute nadir of the book. It is riddled with medical misinformation, such as the claim that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer, which has been debunked by multiple studies over the years. It also plays up the death rate of 0.7 women per 100,000 abortions – for the record, the death rate from colonoscopies is 6.5 per 100,000 procedures. These and countless other examples of pseudoscientific scaremongering have been forced on abortion providers in the guise of informed consent laws with the sole purpose of making it harder to get an abortion. The authors then take the “abortion industry” to task for opposing providing women with “accurate medical information” regarding the risks and side effects of abortion; except that it’s not accurate medical information at all, which is why it is resisted in the first place. The authors’ claims to the contrary are lies.
One more dishonorable mention. The authors devote a whole section to denouncing the landmark Turnaway study for one of its many findings: that women who got abortions felt relief not regret afterwards. The most telling sign of the authors’ rank dishonesty is that they ignore the central findings of the Turnaway study: that women who were denied abortions, as well as their children, became materially worse off as a result. Instead, the authors turn to Priscilla Coleman, a professor at Bowling Green State University whose research purports to show that women who underwent abortions were at far greater risk of anxiety and depression. Look up Priscilla Coleman and you find that her work has been critiqued by dozens of colleagues who could not reproduce her results (the authors cite exactly one study which supposedly did). They further found that when pre-existing mental health histories are considered – something the authors falsely claim Coleman did – the disparities vanish.
The Lies By Omission Are Even Worse
What you won’t find in this book is any mention of the fact that maternal mortality, infant mortality, and poverty rates are far higher in the so-called pro-life states than in the pro-choice states. Life expectancy is also far lower in the former compared to the latter. The authors are correct that high pre-Roe maternal mortality was not connected to rates of “back-alley abortions”, but they are silent on the fact that current high rates are because of the poor state of healthcare and social services in pro-life states, which is telling because abortion was practically inaccessible in these states even before Roe was overturned.
The authors instead press the spurious argument that banning abortion would reduce maternal mortality by citing a study from Mexico which showed this result for Mexican states. If you look at the relevant CDC data, you will find the exact opposite is the case in America — only in America. The Republican Party has been almost as zealous in gutting welfare programs and the social safety net as they have been in fighting against abortion. Having won their biggest victory in half a century, it remains to be seen if they will compromise their hostility to “big government” in favor of saving babies.
A Mirror For Thee But Not For Me
Having laid a foundation of outright lies about abortion, the authors spend the rest of the book presenting an alternate reality history of how abortion turned every aspect of national life against the pro-life movement to the detriment of the nation. Apparently, it was the Democratic Party, under the nefarious influence of the abortion lobby, which corrupted the rule of law and American political life, and made “a toxic mess out of the confirmation process”. Just look at how Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh became the victims of nefarious smear campaigns by pro-abortion Democrats fearful that they would overturn Roe v Wade.
The pot is outraged at how black the kettle has become. Both political parties have evolved considerably on abortion, in opposite directions, and whilst the authors accuse the Democratic Party of corrupting the judicial confirmation process for the sake of abortion, it was the conservative movement that spent decades packing the federal bench for its own aims, culminating in Trump’s nomination of three Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett whose hearing took place only weeks before the 2020 election – Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, was denied even a hearing by Republicans with almost a year to go until the 2016 election.
Within days of the Dobbs ruling returning regulation of abortion to the states, the Supreme Court ruled that state regulation of open-carry firearms was unconstitutional, and also ruled to curtail the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change. A triple win for the Republican Party on abortion, guns, and corporate power; and yet the authors have the nerve to claim it was the other side whose agenda has corrupted everything. That the Supreme Court is now an openly partisan institution has damaged the rule of law far more than abortion ever could have. If judicial activism by the abortion movement gave us Roe, the conservative movement’s response was “two can play at that game”.
The muckraking doesn’t stop there. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist, a fact that Planned Parenthood has reckoned with in recent years. A lot of digital ink is spilled on the connection between race and abortion to charge the pro-choice movement – if not necessarily its members – with similar motives. Much less space is devoted to examining the pro-life movement’s own origins, perhaps because abortion did not become a central issue for the Religious Right until 1979, six years after Roe vs Wade.
They’re Coming For Contraception Next
In chapter 4, the authors take the medical community to task for: “an over-reliance on oral contraceptives, which likewise treat pregnancy as a disease to be prevented. Both second-wave and modern feminists hail easy access to birth control as a key component of female liberation, but, similar to abortion, contraceptive drugs treat the male body as normative and use chemical methods to alter the female body, thereby rendering sex sterile.”
Contraceptives prevent pregnancies and therefore prevent abortions. If you’re surprised that this is ignored by the Catholic authors of this book, you have no right to be. Do I even need to mention that the words “condom” and “sex education” appear nowhere in the book? A better question is why this bizarre tangent about contraception appears in a book about abortion at all. It’s almost as if the authors are laying the intellectual groundwork for a rollback of modern family planning methods along with abortion.
Consider the philosophical case they put forward earlier. If the fertilized egg is already a human person, then certain contraceptives which prevent the fertilized egg from implanting are “abortifacients” and therefore murder weapons. This will be the basis for outlawing IUDs and certain forms of Plan B. The authors also seem unaware that between a third and half of all fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant, and the erstwhile human person is washed out with the next period, which means, as the late comedian George Carlin once quipped, that “any woman who’s had more than one period is a serial killer!”
Theocracy Will Never Happen, And Praise The Lord When It Does
This book is a tendentious work of partisan fiction, advancing countless mundane lies in the service of the transcendent “truth” about abortion. But it’s worse than that: the book’s conclusion inveighs against the sexual revolution with these words: “The breakdown of marriage and the family since the sexual revolution, fueled by a false ideology that portrays freedom as mere license, has created conditions that make abortion appear like a solution to a very real cultural ailment.”
By marriage, the authors mean “real marriage”. Co-author Ryan Anderson’s first two books were attacks on the movement for same-sex marriage, published respectively before and after Obergefell vs Hodges. That case was cited in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion calling on the court to revisit its rulings on contraception, gay rights, and gay marriage. Notwithstanding wildly differing poll numbers, banning abortion enjoys far higher support than banning gay marriage or contraception, and advocating one of these does not mean that someone advocates all three. But the core of the movement overlaps strongly with those who do, and their vision is of “real America” restored to its “Judeo-Christian roots” under a regime of “ordered liberty”, a pseudo-democratic theocracy in all but name.
The right to choose was the first to fall, but make no mistake, they’re coming for all of it.
This Is Not A Bible-Thumping Exercise
The authors are well aware of the receding tide of religiosity, and wish to equip readers with a philosophical case against abortion that cannot be dismissed as merely faith based. Their case against abortion rests on three principles: a unique human person comes into being at fertilization; abortion ends a human life; government has an overriding interest in preventing the killing of human life and, therefore, in preventing abortion. The authors seem to use “fertilization” and “conception” interchangeably, asserting at one point that “a new human being comes into existence at conception” and then only two pages later: “When a sperm fertilizes an egg, a new organism comes into existence”. Fertilization is when sperm meets egg. Conception comes later when the blastocyst implants in the uterus’s wall – the formal beginning of pregnancy. The book’s blurring of this distinction is not an encouraging sign.
Beyond addressing the opposing side’s arguments, the authors don’t go further than asserting that human beings have a rational, and therefore personal, nature because we are capable of reason. Since every human being is genetically the same organism throughout life, the stage of development can’t matter for personhood, only our capacity for reason. On this logic, anencephalic babies who are born missing most or all of their brain never attain anything approaching rationality, let alone personhood, but the authors would have us believe that even anencephalics are persons with a rational nature that healthy animals do not possess.
The Book Is Replete With Misinformation And Pseudoscience
When it comes to telling the “truth about abortion”, chapter 2 is the absolute nadir of the book. It is riddled with medical misinformation, such as the claim that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer, which has been debunked by multiple studies over the years. It also plays up the death rate of 0.7 women per 100,000 abortions – for the record, the death rate from colonoscopies is 6.5 per 100,000 procedures. These and countless other examples of pseudoscientific scaremongering have been forced on abortion providers in the guise of informed consent laws with the sole purpose of making it harder to get an abortion. The authors then take the “abortion industry” to task for opposing providing women with “accurate medical information” regarding the risks and side effects of abortion; except that it’s not accurate medical information at all, which is why it is resisted in the first place. The authors’ claims to the contrary are lies.
One more dishonorable mention. The authors devote a whole section to denouncing the landmark Turnaway study for one of its many findings: that women who got abortions felt relief not regret afterwards. The most telling sign of the authors’ rank dishonesty is that they ignore the central findings of the Turnaway study: that women who were denied abortions, as well as their children, became materially worse off as a result. Instead, the authors turn to Priscilla Coleman, a professor at Bowling Green State University whose research purports to show that women who underwent abortions were at far greater risk of anxiety and depression. Look up Priscilla Coleman and you find that her work has been critiqued by dozens of colleagues who could not reproduce her results (the authors cite exactly one study which supposedly did). They further found that when pre-existing mental health histories are considered – something the authors falsely claim Coleman did – the disparities vanish.
The Lies By Omission Are Even Worse
What you won’t find in this book is any mention of the fact that maternal mortality, infant mortality, and poverty rates are far higher in the so-called pro-life states than in the pro-choice states. Life expectancy is also far lower in the former compared to the latter. The authors are correct that high pre-Roe maternal mortality was not connected to rates of “back-alley abortions”, but they are silent on the fact that current high rates are because of the poor state of healthcare and social services in pro-life states, which is telling because abortion was practically inaccessible in these states even before Roe was overturned.
The authors instead press the spurious argument that banning abortion would reduce maternal mortality by citing a study from Mexico which showed this result for Mexican states. If you look at the relevant CDC data, you will find the exact opposite is the case in America — only in America. The Republican Party has been almost as zealous in gutting welfare programs and the social safety net as they have been in fighting against abortion. Having won their biggest victory in half a century, it remains to be seen if they will compromise their hostility to “big government” in favor of saving babies.
A Mirror For Thee But Not For Me
Having laid a foundation of outright lies about abortion, the authors spend the rest of the book presenting an alternate reality history of how abortion turned every aspect of national life against the pro-life movement to the detriment of the nation. Apparently, it was the Democratic Party, under the nefarious influence of the abortion lobby, which corrupted the rule of law and American political life, and made “a toxic mess out of the confirmation process”. Just look at how Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh became the victims of nefarious smear campaigns by pro-abortion Democrats fearful that they would overturn Roe v Wade.
The pot is outraged at how black the kettle has become. Both political parties have evolved considerably on abortion, in opposite directions, and whilst the authors accuse the Democratic Party of corrupting the judicial confirmation process for the sake of abortion, it was the conservative movement that spent decades packing the federal bench for its own aims, culminating in Trump’s nomination of three Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett whose hearing took place only weeks before the 2020 election – Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, was denied even a hearing by Republicans with almost a year to go until the 2016 election.
Within days of the Dobbs ruling returning regulation of abortion to the states, the Supreme Court ruled that state regulation of open-carry firearms was unconstitutional, and also ruled to curtail the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change. A triple win for the Republican Party on abortion, guns, and corporate power; and yet the authors have the nerve to claim it was the other side whose agenda has corrupted everything. That the Supreme Court is now an openly partisan institution has damaged the rule of law far more than abortion ever could have. If judicial activism by the abortion movement gave us Roe, the conservative movement’s response was “two can play at that game”.
The muckraking doesn’t stop there. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist, a fact that Planned Parenthood has reckoned with in recent years. A lot of digital ink is spilled on the connection between race and abortion to charge the pro-choice movement – if not necessarily its members – with similar motives. Much less space is devoted to examining the pro-life movement’s own origins, perhaps because abortion did not become a central issue for the Religious Right until 1979, six years after Roe vs Wade.
They’re Coming For Contraception Next
In chapter 4, the authors take the medical community to task for: “an over-reliance on oral contraceptives, which likewise treat pregnancy as a disease to be prevented. Both second-wave and modern feminists hail easy access to birth control as a key component of female liberation, but, similar to abortion, contraceptive drugs treat the male body as normative and use chemical methods to alter the female body, thereby rendering sex sterile.”
Contraceptives prevent pregnancies and therefore prevent abortions. If you’re surprised that this is ignored by the Catholic authors of this book, you have no right to be. Do I even need to mention that the words “condom” and “sex education” appear nowhere in the book? A better question is why this bizarre tangent about contraception appears in a book about abortion at all. It’s almost as if the authors are laying the intellectual groundwork for a rollback of modern family planning methods along with abortion.
Consider the philosophical case they put forward earlier. If the fertilized egg is already a human person, then certain contraceptives which prevent the fertilized egg from implanting are “abortifacients” and therefore murder weapons. This will be the basis for outlawing IUDs and certain forms of Plan B. The authors also seem unaware that between a third and half of all fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant, and the erstwhile human person is washed out with the next period, which means, as the late comedian George Carlin once quipped, that “any woman who’s had more than one period is a serial killer!”
Theocracy Will Never Happen, And Praise The Lord When It Does
This book is a tendentious work of partisan fiction, advancing countless mundane lies in the service of the transcendent “truth” about abortion. But it’s worse than that: the book’s conclusion inveighs against the sexual revolution with these words: “The breakdown of marriage and the family since the sexual revolution, fueled by a false ideology that portrays freedom as mere license, has created conditions that make abortion appear like a solution to a very real cultural ailment.”
By marriage, the authors mean “real marriage”. Co-author Ryan Anderson’s first two books were attacks on the movement for same-sex marriage, published respectively before and after Obergefell vs Hodges. That case was cited in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion calling on the court to revisit its rulings on contraception, gay rights, and gay marriage. Notwithstanding wildly differing poll numbers, banning abortion enjoys far higher support than banning gay marriage or contraception, and advocating one of these does not mean that someone advocates all three. But the core of the movement overlaps strongly with those who do, and their vision is of “real America” restored to its “Judeo-Christian roots” under a regime of “ordered liberty”, a pseudo-democratic theocracy in all but name.
The right to choose was the first to fall, but make no mistake, they’re coming for all of it.
July 8, 2022
This was a very timely read, one that I think everyone could benefit from. Anderson and DeSanctis rely on data and soundly backed arguments to make the case for life, showing how abortion not only harms the unborn child, but also the mother, a disproportionate number of children with disabilities, the medical system, and the rule of law. The chapters I found most compelling were chapters 1-3. I would encourage anyone, regardless of where they stand on the issue, to read this book with an open mind. Our goal should always be to know the truth, regardless of if it follows our preconceived ideas or our personal feelings.
The primary questions at the heart of this debate are: Is it ever morally right to take the life of an innocent human being? - and - Does each and every human being have an equal right to life? Or do only some have it in virtue of some characteristic that may come and go?
As Mother Teresa stated: “Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.”
Edited to respond to comment:
Vladimir, I took some time to read John’s review. I appreciate his thoroughness when expressing his opinion.
His issues with “incorrect data” centered on claims such as:
1) There is an increased risk of breast cancer when women have had an abortion,
2) Women who have abortions are at increased risk of mental health problems
3) Banning abortion reduces the maternal mortality rate.
While I am not convinced that Anderson’s and DeSanctis’ presentation of the data was incorrect, what would it change if they were wrong in those areas? The question at stake is “Is it ever morally okay to take the life of an innocent human being?”
We could argue all day about what data is the right data, but in the end you have to decide when life begins and when an individual gains rights.
When Life Begins: (Source - @ProLife_Millenial)
It is a scientific fact that human life begins at conception:
Multiple medical experts and embryologists agree that human development begins at conception.
One study found that 96% of biologists agree that human life begins at conception. The majority of these biologists identified as liberal, pro-choice, non-religious, and Democrat.
Our knowledge of fetal development supports this. The zygote which is formed at fertilization already contains the full genetic code (DNA) of a human. Before most women ever know they are pregnant, every major organ has already begun developing, as well as some external features.
Here is a detailed explanation of the science behind conception and why, from the very moment of fertilization, a brand new human life begins.
Because human life begins at fertilization, then abortion effectively ends a human life.
The intentional taking of a human life is murder.
When an Individual Gains Rights -
Essential Question: Given the humanity of the unborn, does each and every human being have an equal right to life or do only some have it in virtue of some characteristic that none of us share equally and which may come and go within the course of our lifetimes?
There is no morally significant difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today that would justify killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying you had no right to life then but you do now.
“Abortion-choice advocates deny that all human beings are valuable and deserve protection. Which ones don’t qualify? The ones that are too small, not developed enough, in the wrong location, and are too dependent on other people. “ - SLED Test
People are not valuable based on their stage of development or their exercisable capacities or abilities. If we base people’s value on their capacities, it is impossible to defend equality - those who develop their capacities the furthest should matter most. Think of what that means for babies, the mentally disabled, or the elderly. Anytime we see denials of personhood used throughout history, it has always been used to oppress and even extinguish groups of people.
The primary questions at the heart of this debate are: Is it ever morally right to take the life of an innocent human being? - and - Does each and every human being have an equal right to life? Or do only some have it in virtue of some characteristic that may come and go?
As Mother Teresa stated: “Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.”
Edited to respond to comment:
Vladimir, I took some time to read John’s review. I appreciate his thoroughness when expressing his opinion.
His issues with “incorrect data” centered on claims such as:
1) There is an increased risk of breast cancer when women have had an abortion,
2) Women who have abortions are at increased risk of mental health problems
3) Banning abortion reduces the maternal mortality rate.
While I am not convinced that Anderson’s and DeSanctis’ presentation of the data was incorrect, what would it change if they were wrong in those areas? The question at stake is “Is it ever morally okay to take the life of an innocent human being?”
We could argue all day about what data is the right data, but in the end you have to decide when life begins and when an individual gains rights.
When Life Begins: (Source - @ProLife_Millenial)
It is a scientific fact that human life begins at conception:
Multiple medical experts and embryologists agree that human development begins at conception.
One study found that 96% of biologists agree that human life begins at conception. The majority of these biologists identified as liberal, pro-choice, non-religious, and Democrat.
Our knowledge of fetal development supports this. The zygote which is formed at fertilization already contains the full genetic code (DNA) of a human. Before most women ever know they are pregnant, every major organ has already begun developing, as well as some external features.
Here is a detailed explanation of the science behind conception and why, from the very moment of fertilization, a brand new human life begins.
Because human life begins at fertilization, then abortion effectively ends a human life.
The intentional taking of a human life is murder.
When an Individual Gains Rights -
Essential Question: Given the humanity of the unborn, does each and every human being have an equal right to life or do only some have it in virtue of some characteristic that none of us share equally and which may come and go within the course of our lifetimes?
There is no morally significant difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today that would justify killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying you had no right to life then but you do now.
“Abortion-choice advocates deny that all human beings are valuable and deserve protection. Which ones don’t qualify? The ones that are too small, not developed enough, in the wrong location, and are too dependent on other people. “ - SLED Test
People are not valuable based on their stage of development or their exercisable capacities or abilities. If we base people’s value on their capacities, it is impossible to defend equality - those who develop their capacities the furthest should matter most. Think of what that means for babies, the mentally disabled, or the elderly. Anytime we see denials of personhood used throughout history, it has always been used to oppress and even extinguish groups of people.
January 7, 2024
The books stays on topic and the prose is easy to read. The title describes the content exactly. Every chapter has an introduction and a summary at the end, making it very skimmable and easy to reference. Other than the summaries, there is very little repetition. I almost highlighted the whole book. Following is a mix of the book’s points and my thoughts.
Abortion is a brutal act of lethal violence against a very young human being, against a woman’s son or daughter. The most common abortions are surgical and chemical. Surgical abortions involve ripping apart the body limb from limb, usually by suction force. Chemical abortions involve starving the fetus to death, which takes several days, and then forcing premature labor to expel the corpse. Such actions against a post-birth human would be considered war crimes.
The only way someone can be okay with abortion is to deny the humanity of the unborn. The same strategy has been (and is) used to deny human rights to marginalized groups throughout history. We’ve seen how denying rights to the youngest of humans has created a culture that devalues life: the elderly and disabled are euthanized and mass shootings are committed by people who see no value in life.
You can’t complain about bodily autonomy when you consented to sex in the first place. You’re not even allowed to not wear a seatbelt or get a Covid vaccine.
A human being at a day old, a week old, a month old has their own DNA, their own blood type, their own organs. They are a separate person from their mother. A human doesn’t stop developing until age 25, after which we start to slowly decline. Age does not determine someone’s worth.
The power of women to create life should be regarded in awe by society. Women should be revered for this. Instead, we tell women that pregnancy is undesirable, unnatural, and a burden, and that women’s bodies need to be like men’s. Men are enjoying consequence-free sex thanks to abortion. Workplaces refuse to accommodate pregnant and nursing women — they’re the ones who didn’t get the abortion. About two-thirds of women regret abortion, but they are dismissed as not existing. Few women are warned about the side effects of abortion. It has not liberated women. It has liberated men.
The proof to me that this is evil is how abortion proponents are so against precautions, regulations, and education that might interfere with abortion. This is how it’s summed up:
Pro-Life: You aren’t bothered that it destroys human life?
Pro-Abortion: No; we’re telling people it’s not really life and not really a person.
Can we at least limit it to the first month? First trimester?
No.
Can we at least make it more humane? Give the baby anesthesia before ripping them apart?
No.
Can we show the mothers ultrasounds first?
No. They’re more likely to change their minds if we do.
You’re at least warning mothers of the potential side effects, right?
No, we can’t do that. It’ll just scare them.
Can we make sure the clinics have the same health and safety standards as doctors’ offices and hospitals?
No.
If you say you’re pro-choice, why are you promoting vandalizing and bombing crisis pregnancy centers and slandering and libeling them?
If they don’t choose abortion, the choice is wrong.
Why are you okay with abortion after birth? That’s infanticide.
An infant doesn’t count as a person. Neither does a toddler. They’re not self-aware. So the mentally disabled and elderly with dementia don’t count, either. And poor people and people of color shouldn’t be having children anyway.
Can we stop abortions for racist, sexist, and ableist reasons?
No.
Can we make businesses more accommodating to expecting and new parents?
No.
Everything you’re doing is designed to make as many people as miserable as possible.
Of course. I’m Evil.
Language: Clean (racial slurs are censored)
Sexual Content: Human reproduction discussed in clinical terms
Violence/Gore: Mild
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
===============================
HIGHLIGHTS (Continued in Comments)
Introduction
Abortion distorts science and corrupts medicine, pretending that the child in the womb isn’t a human being at all and that tools meant for healing can rightly be turned to killing. Abortion perverts what it means to live in a justly ordered political community with laws that protect all of us—and in a society where our laws say that some human beings don’t deserve to live, we are all at risk. Abortion leads to a particular devaluation of unborn children diagnosed with illnesses or disorders in the womb, as well as devaluation of girls in parts of the world where sons are more highly prized. It undermines solidarity with the poor, the weak, the marginalized, people with disabilities, and anyone on the periphery of life. It allows those in power to deem certain lives expendable, allowing people to eliminate “populations that we don’t want too many of,” in the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign. – Mother Teresa
There I was, anti-war, anti-capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters? For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. … Every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear. … Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. … It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive—no woman “wants” to go through with it. … The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause would be more outrageous than violence—fatal violence—against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us? [Frederica Mathewes-Green]
1. Abortion Harms the Unborn Child
Some of those who defend abortion claim, for instance, that the fetus isn’t even a human being. In reality, the unborn child is from the moment of conception a living human being. The gametes—sperm in a man and egg in a woman—are genetically and functionally parts of the potential parents, but by the time fertilization is completed, a unique human being has come into existence. He or she has human genetic material entirely distinct from both mother and father—and indeed from every human being who has ever existed or ever will exist.
Though the unborn child lives inside his or her mother’s womb, that human being isn’t a part of the mother’s body in the way that, say, her lungs or her heart are. The woman’s lungs and hearts are organs, organized and operating within her body and enabling it to function properly as a complete organismic whole. The unborn child, by contrast, is both genetically and functionally distinct from both mother and father. It is its own organism, organized with its own parts, its own organs such as the lungs and heart, or the cells that will later develop into these organs.
The unborn child is an entirely new organism—a whole human being. Yes, it is young and immature. Yes, it has yet to develop into something that looks like an adult. But the one-celled zygote is exactly what a one-day-old human being looks like, and it does exactly what a one-day-old human being does. So, too, with the eight-day-old blastocyst—that’s what a human being of that age looks like, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. So, too, with the twenty-week fetus. These are all complex, whole organisms, even though they are rapidly developing to reach the next stage of life. The child in the womb needs the same things that we all need outside of the womb: nurture, care, protection, and a hospitable environment. … The human brain doesn’t even finish fully developing until a human being reaches his mid-twenties.
The view of moral personhood put forward by these thinkers would render it utterly impossible to defend equality as a moral principle. If what matters morally are our developed capacities, then those who develop their capacities the furthest should matter most. Why believe in moral equality if it isn’t somehow connected to a common nature? Absent a coherent view of personhood based on intrinsic value and root capacities, a human being conceivably could gain and lose moral worth several times throughout the course of his life subject to fluctuations in his abilities. … Denials of personhood to categories of human beings have been used throughout history to subjugate, oppress, and extinguish groups of people that those in power wanted to eliminate. History gives us little reason to believe that denying personhood to some human beings has ever been used in precisely the opposite way.
Yet many supporters of abortion argue that protecting babies from the violence of abortion is an illegitimate use of government power. They argue that the state may not impose morality on other people, or that it can’t legislate based on “religious” values. They insist that a state that enacts laws protecting unborn babies has somehow exceeded its rightful authority. None of these arguments withstands scrutiny. We don’t even need to consider abstract academic debates about the role of the state. On even the most minimalist conception of the state, protecting innocent persons from lethal violence and necessary government function. Therefore, the state should protect all human beings. If we accept that the unborn child is a human being and that all human beings have intrinsic worth and are persons in that sense, then the government’s role is indisputable: any government worthy of its name is obligated to protect the lives of unborn human beings, too. … Laws that protect innocent life are a functioning government’s default position, and the burden of proof is on those who would demand exceptions.
All laws … have to do with morality, at least on some level. This defense of abortion suffers from the misguided notion that we should separate law from morality, an effort that even abortion supporters would not promote in most other areas. And there’s nothing more or less “religious” about our abortion laws than our homicide laws, or laws against theft, tax evasion, or running a stop sign. What matters isn’t whether a proposition coincides with secular or religious values but rather the proposition is true. If it is true that killing an innocent person is unjust, then it is appropriate for the state to prohibit such injustices.
No one would applaud the proposal, “If you don’t like slavery, don’t own a slave.” Notwithstanding our nation’s disgraceful history on this score, thankfully today we recognized that slavery is a grave moral evil, one that the government has justly abolished and prohibited. Telling those who disagree with slavery merely to avoid participating in it, and using this argument to justify continued government protection of slavery, would be a non-starter with reasonable people, because we know that slavery degrades and violates the personhood of the enslaved human being and of the enslaver. The same is true of the unborn child killed in an abortion, his mother, and the abortionist—and the government has the same responsibility to step in and prohibit this injustice.
In consensual sex, even in the case of failed contraception, the man and woman voluntarily engage in the act that brings a new life into existence. The unborn child is not an intruder who uses force and violence to attach himself to the mother, the way a parasite attaches to a host. Rather, the unborn child is right where he is supposed to be, doing what he’s supposed to be doing. Conception is the natural fruit of sex, and a child developing in the womb is a sign of reproductive health. Conception and gestation are natural results of sex. People—parents especially—bear responsibilities for the natural consequences of their acts.
Even in the case of rape—a horrible violation of a woman’s dignity, bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and rightful liberty—justice still requires respecting the unborn child’s life. The child, after all, wasn’t the rapist, did nothing wrong, and is still the mother’s child. The burden of persisting even in a difficult pregnancy is not proportionate to losing one’s life.
These [early] feminists knew that bodily autonomy meant that women must consent to sex if it is to be just, including in the context of marriage, but that no one could rightly “consent” to killing an unborn child. That is, “reproductive freedom” applies prior to conception, when reproduction takes place. After conception, the issue is no longer “reproductive freedom” but ending a life that has already been produced. No one is in favor of “forced pregnancy” or “forced childbirth”—women should be free to decide whether or not to have children. But the way in which they exercise their freedom not to have children cannot entail killing the children they have already conceived.
The attempts to dehumanize the unborn baby fail spectacularly. There is simply no plausible scientific case that the unborn child is anything other than a human being at a certain early state of development—an early age of life. Likewise, the attempts to acknowledge the humanity of the unborn child but deny his moral worth and value—the various “personhood” debates—lack a firm philosophical theories and lead to morally abhorrent conclusion that we’d never embrace in other circumstances.
2. Abortion Harms Women and the Family
Some prominent second-wave feminist theorists, such as Shulamith Firestone, took the argument a step further, claiming that abortion was essential step in liberating women from the “tyranny of biology.” Not only would abortion allow women to eliminate the physical burden of pregnancy and avoid the sacrifice of childrearing, but it would aid in dissolving marriage and the nuclear family, which many feminists believe are inherently harmful to women.
Why are the feminists who got exactly what they wanted still clamoring for more? Perhaps it’s because abortion has done significant damage to women and society, even if they don’t realize it, starting with how it encourages mothers to view their children as antagonists, how it allows men to view women as always sexually available without any marital commitment or promise of stability required, and how it allows employers and society as a whole to treat the male body as the norm and female fertility as a problem to be solved—rather than a reality to structure social relations around.
But even on its own terms, the promise of women’s liberation is an illusion, a Band-Aid on a bigger wound, an act that can only compound any problem that already exists. Turning the most foundational and vulnerable human relationship into one of violence can only harm both mother and child—and that’s exactly what it’s done. Even though many women experience abortion as a solution—such as when abortion appears to alleviate financial or relationship concerns—and even though many women have abortions without suffering obvious physical or psychological consequences, no woman is better off for having participated in lethal violence against her child. Violence against innocent human beings is never a real solution.
Women are much worse off for living in a society that has embraced abortion. Because abortion is so readily available and widely accepted, it has increasingly become a choice that women are expected to make, especially when they find themselves in less than ideal circumstances. Perhaps the most significant detriment to women of such a culture is that widespread acceptance of abortion has undermined healthy relationships between men and women and severed the natural connection between sex and reproduction.
Rather than neutralizing the disparities between men and women to free women from the burden of pregnancy—as feminists claimed it would—abortion has intensified the ways in which our culture treats pregnancy as a “woman’s problem.” Abortion has not increased support for pregnant mothers in need but has federal a culture that treats women who continue pregnancies as if they’re on their own, because, after all, they could’ve chosen abortion. … Abortion has made it easier for men to leave women and harder for women to say no to abortion, even when they would prefer to choose life.
Abortion is a brutal act of lethal violence against a very young human being, against a woman’s son or daughter. The most common abortions are surgical and chemical. Surgical abortions involve ripping apart the body limb from limb, usually by suction force. Chemical abortions involve starving the fetus to death, which takes several days, and then forcing premature labor to expel the corpse. Such actions against a post-birth human would be considered war crimes.
The only way someone can be okay with abortion is to deny the humanity of the unborn. The same strategy has been (and is) used to deny human rights to marginalized groups throughout history. We’ve seen how denying rights to the youngest of humans has created a culture that devalues life: the elderly and disabled are euthanized and mass shootings are committed by people who see no value in life.
You can’t complain about bodily autonomy when you consented to sex in the first place. You’re not even allowed to not wear a seatbelt or get a Covid vaccine.
A human being at a day old, a week old, a month old has their own DNA, their own blood type, their own organs. They are a separate person from their mother. A human doesn’t stop developing until age 25, after which we start to slowly decline. Age does not determine someone’s worth.
The power of women to create life should be regarded in awe by society. Women should be revered for this. Instead, we tell women that pregnancy is undesirable, unnatural, and a burden, and that women’s bodies need to be like men’s. Men are enjoying consequence-free sex thanks to abortion. Workplaces refuse to accommodate pregnant and nursing women — they’re the ones who didn’t get the abortion. About two-thirds of women regret abortion, but they are dismissed as not existing. Few women are warned about the side effects of abortion. It has not liberated women. It has liberated men.
The proof to me that this is evil is how abortion proponents are so against precautions, regulations, and education that might interfere with abortion. This is how it’s summed up:
Pro-Life: You aren’t bothered that it destroys human life?
Pro-Abortion: No; we’re telling people it’s not really life and not really a person.
Can we at least limit it to the first month? First trimester?
No.
Can we at least make it more humane? Give the baby anesthesia before ripping them apart?
No.
Can we show the mothers ultrasounds first?
No. They’re more likely to change their minds if we do.
You’re at least warning mothers of the potential side effects, right?
No, we can’t do that. It’ll just scare them.
Can we make sure the clinics have the same health and safety standards as doctors’ offices and hospitals?
No.
If you say you’re pro-choice, why are you promoting vandalizing and bombing crisis pregnancy centers and slandering and libeling them?
If they don’t choose abortion, the choice is wrong.
Why are you okay with abortion after birth? That’s infanticide.
An infant doesn’t count as a person. Neither does a toddler. They’re not self-aware. So the mentally disabled and elderly with dementia don’t count, either. And poor people and people of color shouldn’t be having children anyway.
Can we stop abortions for racist, sexist, and ableist reasons?
No.
Can we make businesses more accommodating to expecting and new parents?
No.
Everything you’re doing is designed to make as many people as miserable as possible.
Of course. I’m Evil.
Language: Clean (racial slurs are censored)
Sexual Content: Human reproduction discussed in clinical terms
Violence/Gore: Mild
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
===============================
HIGHLIGHTS (Continued in Comments)
Introduction
Abortion distorts science and corrupts medicine, pretending that the child in the womb isn’t a human being at all and that tools meant for healing can rightly be turned to killing. Abortion perverts what it means to live in a justly ordered political community with laws that protect all of us—and in a society where our laws say that some human beings don’t deserve to live, we are all at risk. Abortion leads to a particular devaluation of unborn children diagnosed with illnesses or disorders in the womb, as well as devaluation of girls in parts of the world where sons are more highly prized. It undermines solidarity with the poor, the weak, the marginalized, people with disabilities, and anyone on the periphery of life. It allows those in power to deem certain lives expendable, allowing people to eliminate “populations that we don’t want too many of,” in the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign. – Mother Teresa
There I was, anti-war, anti-capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters? For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. … Every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear. … Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. … It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive—no woman “wants” to go through with it. … The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause would be more outrageous than violence—fatal violence—against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us? [Frederica Mathewes-Green]
1. Abortion Harms the Unborn Child
Some of those who defend abortion claim, for instance, that the fetus isn’t even a human being. In reality, the unborn child is from the moment of conception a living human being. The gametes—sperm in a man and egg in a woman—are genetically and functionally parts of the potential parents, but by the time fertilization is completed, a unique human being has come into existence. He or she has human genetic material entirely distinct from both mother and father—and indeed from every human being who has ever existed or ever will exist.
Though the unborn child lives inside his or her mother’s womb, that human being isn’t a part of the mother’s body in the way that, say, her lungs or her heart are. The woman’s lungs and hearts are organs, organized and operating within her body and enabling it to function properly as a complete organismic whole. The unborn child, by contrast, is both genetically and functionally distinct from both mother and father. It is its own organism, organized with its own parts, its own organs such as the lungs and heart, or the cells that will later develop into these organs.
The unborn child is an entirely new organism—a whole human being. Yes, it is young and immature. Yes, it has yet to develop into something that looks like an adult. But the one-celled zygote is exactly what a one-day-old human being looks like, and it does exactly what a one-day-old human being does. So, too, with the eight-day-old blastocyst—that’s what a human being of that age looks like, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. So, too, with the twenty-week fetus. These are all complex, whole organisms, even though they are rapidly developing to reach the next stage of life. The child in the womb needs the same things that we all need outside of the womb: nurture, care, protection, and a hospitable environment. … The human brain doesn’t even finish fully developing until a human being reaches his mid-twenties.
The view of moral personhood put forward by these thinkers would render it utterly impossible to defend equality as a moral principle. If what matters morally are our developed capacities, then those who develop their capacities the furthest should matter most. Why believe in moral equality if it isn’t somehow connected to a common nature? Absent a coherent view of personhood based on intrinsic value and root capacities, a human being conceivably could gain and lose moral worth several times throughout the course of his life subject to fluctuations in his abilities. … Denials of personhood to categories of human beings have been used throughout history to subjugate, oppress, and extinguish groups of people that those in power wanted to eliminate. History gives us little reason to believe that denying personhood to some human beings has ever been used in precisely the opposite way.
Yet many supporters of abortion argue that protecting babies from the violence of abortion is an illegitimate use of government power. They argue that the state may not impose morality on other people, or that it can’t legislate based on “religious” values. They insist that a state that enacts laws protecting unborn babies has somehow exceeded its rightful authority. None of these arguments withstands scrutiny. We don’t even need to consider abstract academic debates about the role of the state. On even the most minimalist conception of the state, protecting innocent persons from lethal violence and necessary government function. Therefore, the state should protect all human beings. If we accept that the unborn child is a human being and that all human beings have intrinsic worth and are persons in that sense, then the government’s role is indisputable: any government worthy of its name is obligated to protect the lives of unborn human beings, too. … Laws that protect innocent life are a functioning government’s default position, and the burden of proof is on those who would demand exceptions.
All laws … have to do with morality, at least on some level. This defense of abortion suffers from the misguided notion that we should separate law from morality, an effort that even abortion supporters would not promote in most other areas. And there’s nothing more or less “religious” about our abortion laws than our homicide laws, or laws against theft, tax evasion, or running a stop sign. What matters isn’t whether a proposition coincides with secular or religious values but rather the proposition is true. If it is true that killing an innocent person is unjust, then it is appropriate for the state to prohibit such injustices.
No one would applaud the proposal, “If you don’t like slavery, don’t own a slave.” Notwithstanding our nation’s disgraceful history on this score, thankfully today we recognized that slavery is a grave moral evil, one that the government has justly abolished and prohibited. Telling those who disagree with slavery merely to avoid participating in it, and using this argument to justify continued government protection of slavery, would be a non-starter with reasonable people, because we know that slavery degrades and violates the personhood of the enslaved human being and of the enslaver. The same is true of the unborn child killed in an abortion, his mother, and the abortionist—and the government has the same responsibility to step in and prohibit this injustice.
In consensual sex, even in the case of failed contraception, the man and woman voluntarily engage in the act that brings a new life into existence. The unborn child is not an intruder who uses force and violence to attach himself to the mother, the way a parasite attaches to a host. Rather, the unborn child is right where he is supposed to be, doing what he’s supposed to be doing. Conception is the natural fruit of sex, and a child developing in the womb is a sign of reproductive health. Conception and gestation are natural results of sex. People—parents especially—bear responsibilities for the natural consequences of their acts.
Even in the case of rape—a horrible violation of a woman’s dignity, bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and rightful liberty—justice still requires respecting the unborn child’s life. The child, after all, wasn’t the rapist, did nothing wrong, and is still the mother’s child. The burden of persisting even in a difficult pregnancy is not proportionate to losing one’s life.
These [early] feminists knew that bodily autonomy meant that women must consent to sex if it is to be just, including in the context of marriage, but that no one could rightly “consent” to killing an unborn child. That is, “reproductive freedom” applies prior to conception, when reproduction takes place. After conception, the issue is no longer “reproductive freedom” but ending a life that has already been produced. No one is in favor of “forced pregnancy” or “forced childbirth”—women should be free to decide whether or not to have children. But the way in which they exercise their freedom not to have children cannot entail killing the children they have already conceived.
The attempts to dehumanize the unborn baby fail spectacularly. There is simply no plausible scientific case that the unborn child is anything other than a human being at a certain early state of development—an early age of life. Likewise, the attempts to acknowledge the humanity of the unborn child but deny his moral worth and value—the various “personhood” debates—lack a firm philosophical theories and lead to morally abhorrent conclusion that we’d never embrace in other circumstances.
2. Abortion Harms Women and the Family
Some prominent second-wave feminist theorists, such as Shulamith Firestone, took the argument a step further, claiming that abortion was essential step in liberating women from the “tyranny of biology.” Not only would abortion allow women to eliminate the physical burden of pregnancy and avoid the sacrifice of childrearing, but it would aid in dissolving marriage and the nuclear family, which many feminists believe are inherently harmful to women.
Why are the feminists who got exactly what they wanted still clamoring for more? Perhaps it’s because abortion has done significant damage to women and society, even if they don’t realize it, starting with how it encourages mothers to view their children as antagonists, how it allows men to view women as always sexually available without any marital commitment or promise of stability required, and how it allows employers and society as a whole to treat the male body as the norm and female fertility as a problem to be solved—rather than a reality to structure social relations around.
But even on its own terms, the promise of women’s liberation is an illusion, a Band-Aid on a bigger wound, an act that can only compound any problem that already exists. Turning the most foundational and vulnerable human relationship into one of violence can only harm both mother and child—and that’s exactly what it’s done. Even though many women experience abortion as a solution—such as when abortion appears to alleviate financial or relationship concerns—and even though many women have abortions without suffering obvious physical or psychological consequences, no woman is better off for having participated in lethal violence against her child. Violence against innocent human beings is never a real solution.
Women are much worse off for living in a society that has embraced abortion. Because abortion is so readily available and widely accepted, it has increasingly become a choice that women are expected to make, especially when they find themselves in less than ideal circumstances. Perhaps the most significant detriment to women of such a culture is that widespread acceptance of abortion has undermined healthy relationships between men and women and severed the natural connection between sex and reproduction.
Rather than neutralizing the disparities between men and women to free women from the burden of pregnancy—as feminists claimed it would—abortion has intensified the ways in which our culture treats pregnancy as a “woman’s problem.” Abortion has not increased support for pregnant mothers in need but has federal a culture that treats women who continue pregnancies as if they’re on their own, because, after all, they could’ve chosen abortion. … Abortion has made it easier for men to leave women and harder for women to say no to abortion, even when they would prefer to choose life.
October 25, 2022
I’m conflicted about this book. On the one hand, it is fairly comprehensive about the reality of abortion and how it harms our society. But the tone of the authors and the audiobook narrator is often snide and condescending, which was grating, and makes it a book that I could never recommend to someone who isn’t already pro-life. It’s also hard to know what’s true and what’s not - for example, the authors write about abortion leading to higher rates in breast cancer, but I’ve heard that those studies have been debunked, and the authors don’t address why the studies are correct and their critics are wrong. They also dismiss accusations against Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh as false and motivated solely by abortion activists’ desire to not have pro-life judges on the Court. But I find the accusations against them credible. Overall, this is not the book I wish it had been.
July 14, 2022
a great book for people trying to understand the pro-life argument
This book is very good! I would recommend it for people looking to understand the pro-life argument, either because they are questioning their pro-choice stance or because they want to strengthen their pro-life argument.
This book is very good! I would recommend it for people looking to understand the pro-life argument, either because they are questioning their pro-choice stance or because they want to strengthen their pro-life argument.
July 9, 2022
I couldn't stop thinking about how similar to Mein Kampf this was.
May 11, 2023
With Roe vs. Wade having been recently overturned and abortion laws now returned to the states, the time has never been more urgent for pro-life individuals to be prepared at the local level to strike against abortion. Scott Klusendorf's book "The Case for Life" is more of a how-to manual for how to make the pro-life argument, but "Tearing Us Apart" is the book that will make you want to be prepared, once you learn all of the ways that abortion brings harm to so many different areas of life.
Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis take it one topic at a time -- abortion harms women by undermining the sacred and moral relationship (p.41) between mother and child, and by damaging a woman's emotional and psychological health (p.87); abortion harms medicine by turning a profession that exists for healing into a tool of destruction (the Hippocratic Oath forbids abortion -- p.122); abortion harms the political process as it has become the "blessed sacrament" of the Democratic Party (p.188,198), which now leaves no room for any dissent on the issue (p.180); abortion harms the media, as reporters have devised various deceptive euphemisms ("fetal cardiac activity" or "embryonic pulsing" instead of "heartbeat," p.210) to obscure basic facts.
And of course, worst of all, abortion harms unborn children, the most helpless members of the human community, who are denied their personhood so their killing may be justified. "Just as past societies once classified some human beings as non-persons based on race or religion, so today we classify a segment of humanity as non-persons based on age, size, location, or stage of development. The law should refuse to endorse such arbitrary standards of personhood and, in so doing, protect us all." (p.46).
The book is not just a rant, either, as the conclusion provides several practical suggestions for what we should do in response. "We can't neglect the responsibility that each of us has on an individual level to build a culture of life . . . None of us can do everything, but each of us can do something." (p.238)
Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis take it one topic at a time -- abortion harms women by undermining the sacred and moral relationship (p.41) between mother and child, and by damaging a woman's emotional and psychological health (p.87); abortion harms medicine by turning a profession that exists for healing into a tool of destruction (the Hippocratic Oath forbids abortion -- p.122); abortion harms the political process as it has become the "blessed sacrament" of the Democratic Party (p.188,198), which now leaves no room for any dissent on the issue (p.180); abortion harms the media, as reporters have devised various deceptive euphemisms ("fetal cardiac activity" or "embryonic pulsing" instead of "heartbeat," p.210) to obscure basic facts.
And of course, worst of all, abortion harms unborn children, the most helpless members of the human community, who are denied their personhood so their killing may be justified. "Just as past societies once classified some human beings as non-persons based on race or religion, so today we classify a segment of humanity as non-persons based on age, size, location, or stage of development. The law should refuse to endorse such arbitrary standards of personhood and, in so doing, protect us all." (p.46).
The book is not just a rant, either, as the conclusion provides several practical suggestions for what we should do in response. "We can't neglect the responsibility that each of us has on an individual level to build a culture of life . . . None of us can do everything, but each of us can do something." (p.238)
February 20, 2023
A well reasoned "other side" to the state/media narrative. Unlike what the state/media narrative tells us, nearly every social/moral issue has at least two sides, and typically more.
It is unimaginable that a sane mother killing her child would not involve feelings of guilt. The loss of human life leaves an emotional scar no matter if it is by your decision or not. Miscarriages, accidents, inability to help an addict come clean before death, all leave a scar. When it is because of your decision ... a soldier in war, a policeman or citizen acting in self defense, or a doctor that knows a "better doctor" (more experienced, special talent, etc) could have saved them, all feel guilt.
Is the feeling "valid"? It is a feeling ... it at least validates that you are a human that is not a psychopath.
https://beingbeliefbehavior.blogspot....
It is unimaginable that a sane mother killing her child would not involve feelings of guilt. The loss of human life leaves an emotional scar no matter if it is by your decision or not. Miscarriages, accidents, inability to help an addict come clean before death, all leave a scar. When it is because of your decision ... a soldier in war, a policeman or citizen acting in self defense, or a doctor that knows a "better doctor" (more experienced, special talent, etc) could have saved them, all feel guilt.
Is the feeling "valid"? It is a feeling ... it at least validates that you are a human that is not a psychopath.
https://beingbeliefbehavior.blogspot....
June 28, 2024
Having been part of the Pro Life movement nearly all of my life, this book was not written for me. Even so, I learned quite a few things. And, If you are new to or considering supporting life for the pre born, or if you do not know the data or history, this book would be helpful. My critique is that it was a little long; I felt there was quite a bit of repeat or overlap. And, it was presented as a logical breakdown of the harms of abortion, and there is a lot of fact, but I found it also to have a lot of passion-based opinion, which keeps it from being fully what it was proposed to be… I respect the author’s intent, and I wish more people would read about the specific history and motivation and the sheer numbers. I respect their desire to change hearts and minds about this subject.
July 4, 2022
Using hard data, personal stories, and logical and philosophical arguments, Anderson and DeSanctis make a compelling case for the pro-life position. Consequently, the work serves as a great means of strengthening one's own stance if the reader is pro-life, trying to convince someone to support life if they're on the fence, or challenging one's preconceived notions of abortion if they're pro-choice. With the recent Supreme Court decision sending the decision making about abortion back to the states, the fight for life is one that has become much more localized than ever before, so it's important to be equipped with the relevant facts regarding such highly important and controversial topic. This book does exactly that in a easily readable format therefore I recommend it to everyone no matter their position on the issue of abortion. Even if it doesn't end up changing your mind at least it'll have you engage with arguments for the pro-life position that aren't the mischaracterized straw men that are shared by the mainstream media.
June 26, 2022
Pro-Life, pro-choice or somewhere in the middle, Tearing Us Apart will give you the information you need to make an informed decision. This book carefully examines the impact of 50 years of abortion madness on women, children, families, equality, medicine, the rule of law, the democratic process and popular culture.
Carefully researched and documented, it is a compelling read. Personal stories of tragedy and hope are coupled with grim statistics and a shameful history of greed and subterfuge. It becomes clear as one reads that the devaluation of life has corrupted our culture and eroded our institutions.
Now that the Supreme Court has returned the issue of abortion rights to the states, the work to protect life has just begun. This book concludes with hope and optimism, knowing that change to protect life will be incremental. Tearing Us Apart is an excellent resource for all who want to make that change happen.
Carefully researched and documented, it is a compelling read. Personal stories of tragedy and hope are coupled with grim statistics and a shameful history of greed and subterfuge. It becomes clear as one reads that the devaluation of life has corrupted our culture and eroded our institutions.
Now that the Supreme Court has returned the issue of abortion rights to the states, the work to protect life has just begun. This book concludes with hope and optimism, knowing that change to protect life will be incremental. Tearing Us Apart is an excellent resource for all who want to make that change happen.
September 23, 2022
Amazing and important book. Everyone should read it. “Women, men, families, the law, politics, medicine, the media—and, of course, children (born and unborn)—have all been brutalized by the culture of death fostered by Roe v. Wade. Abortion hollows out marriage and the family. It undermines the rule of law and corrupts our political system. It turns healers into executioners and 'women’s health' into a euphemism for extermination.” -from a book summary
Quotes:
“Abortion strikes at the bond between mother and child, turning it into a conflict between adversaries and a justification for violence- a relationship not of love but of antagonism and mutual destruction.”
“Abortion distorts science and corrupts medicine, pretending that the child in the womb isn’t a human being at all and that tools meant for healing can rightly be turned to killing.”
“Abortion perverts what it means to live in a justly ordered political community with laws that protect all of us- and in a society where our laws say that some human beings don’t deserve to live, we are all at risk.”
“Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be, contingent on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.” -Mother Teresa
“Mother Teresa is correct: the individual’s right to life does not depend on our consent, but the brutality of abortion is possible today because enough citizens have agreed, either implicitly or explicitly, to close their eyes to the truth about what abortion is. That truth is almost too painful to acknowledge, and many have learned to look away instead.”
“A society that endorses abortion devalues the life of every single member, as it allows mothers to destroy their children and sanctions violence against the most vulnerable members of the human community. Each of us enters life dependent on our families, particularly on our mothers, and though our level of dependence fluctuates throughout the course of our lives, we remain dependent on one another. A healthy society doesn’t deny or try to eliminate dependency; it helps people meet the needs of their neighbors and bear one another’s burdens.”
“Denials of personhood to categories of human beings have been used throughout history to subjugate, oppress, and extinguish groups of people that those in power wanted to eliminate. History gives us little reason to believe that denying personhood to some human beings has ever been used to further justice or equality. In fact, in every instance it has been used in precisely the opposite way.”
“Government exists to (at the very least) protect against lethal violence. The denial of personhood undergirding the defense of abortion entails another ugly position, with grave political consequences: the belief that might makes right. If we accept the framework of moral dualists, someone or some group must be able to decide which human beings count as persons. This belief means that stronger people, by virtue of their capabilities, can rule over the weaker- or the wiser over the dumber, the older over the younger, the prettier over the uglier, and so on. This view rejects a fundamental truth about human nature that government exists to defend, the truth that all human beings are created equal.”
“Laws that protect innocent life are a functioning government’s default position, and the burden of proof is on those who would demand exceptions. In fact, a state that does NOT aim to protect innocent life from lethal violence should be considered illegitimate. If each of us enjoys the same natural dignity by virtue of our humanity, then there is no sound basis on which a government could arbitrarily deprive certain individuals of their lives, rights, or freedoms."
“Families, communities, and entire societies become better when they treat the most vulnerable among us with love and consideration…Whether in the case of a difficult prenatal diagnosis, a challenging financial situation, or pressure to abort, no form of suffering can erase the value of the unborn child, a child who is always worthy of love and protection.”
“Surely no one would say that he is personally opposed to slavery but in favor of his neighbor’s right to choose to own a slave.”
“It is fundamentally arbitrary to allow a mere difference in the degree of development of a trait to serve as the basis for treating creatures in radically different ways…If all human beings have the same basic traits but some have developed them to a greater extent, making that difference of developmental degree the basis for treating those human beings in radically different ways is itself unjust, for those human being aren’t different in kind. Albert Einstein doesn’t have greater moral worth than Joe the plumber.”
“Indeed, the view of moral personhood put forward by these thinkers would render it utterly impossible to defend equality as a moral principle. If what matters morally are out developed capacities, then those who develop their capacities the furthest should matter most."
“Far from being an intruder in his mother’s womb, the unborn child is where he belongs. Furthermore, parents bear special obligations to their children, and a woman’s bodily autonomy does not justify lethal violence against the unborn.”
Listened on Overdrive, twice in a row
Quotes:
“Abortion strikes at the bond between mother and child, turning it into a conflict between adversaries and a justification for violence- a relationship not of love but of antagonism and mutual destruction.”
“Abortion distorts science and corrupts medicine, pretending that the child in the womb isn’t a human being at all and that tools meant for healing can rightly be turned to killing.”
“Abortion perverts what it means to live in a justly ordered political community with laws that protect all of us- and in a society where our laws say that some human beings don’t deserve to live, we are all at risk.”
“Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be, contingent on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.” -Mother Teresa
“Mother Teresa is correct: the individual’s right to life does not depend on our consent, but the brutality of abortion is possible today because enough citizens have agreed, either implicitly or explicitly, to close their eyes to the truth about what abortion is. That truth is almost too painful to acknowledge, and many have learned to look away instead.”
“A society that endorses abortion devalues the life of every single member, as it allows mothers to destroy their children and sanctions violence against the most vulnerable members of the human community. Each of us enters life dependent on our families, particularly on our mothers, and though our level of dependence fluctuates throughout the course of our lives, we remain dependent on one another. A healthy society doesn’t deny or try to eliminate dependency; it helps people meet the needs of their neighbors and bear one another’s burdens.”
“Denials of personhood to categories of human beings have been used throughout history to subjugate, oppress, and extinguish groups of people that those in power wanted to eliminate. History gives us little reason to believe that denying personhood to some human beings has ever been used to further justice or equality. In fact, in every instance it has been used in precisely the opposite way.”
“Government exists to (at the very least) protect against lethal violence. The denial of personhood undergirding the defense of abortion entails another ugly position, with grave political consequences: the belief that might makes right. If we accept the framework of moral dualists, someone or some group must be able to decide which human beings count as persons. This belief means that stronger people, by virtue of their capabilities, can rule over the weaker- or the wiser over the dumber, the older over the younger, the prettier over the uglier, and so on. This view rejects a fundamental truth about human nature that government exists to defend, the truth that all human beings are created equal.”
“Laws that protect innocent life are a functioning government’s default position, and the burden of proof is on those who would demand exceptions. In fact, a state that does NOT aim to protect innocent life from lethal violence should be considered illegitimate. If each of us enjoys the same natural dignity by virtue of our humanity, then there is no sound basis on which a government could arbitrarily deprive certain individuals of their lives, rights, or freedoms."
“Families, communities, and entire societies become better when they treat the most vulnerable among us with love and consideration…Whether in the case of a difficult prenatal diagnosis, a challenging financial situation, or pressure to abort, no form of suffering can erase the value of the unborn child, a child who is always worthy of love and protection.”
“Surely no one would say that he is personally opposed to slavery but in favor of his neighbor’s right to choose to own a slave.”
“It is fundamentally arbitrary to allow a mere difference in the degree of development of a trait to serve as the basis for treating creatures in radically different ways…If all human beings have the same basic traits but some have developed them to a greater extent, making that difference of developmental degree the basis for treating those human beings in radically different ways is itself unjust, for those human being aren’t different in kind. Albert Einstein doesn’t have greater moral worth than Joe the plumber.”
“Indeed, the view of moral personhood put forward by these thinkers would render it utterly impossible to defend equality as a moral principle. If what matters morally are out developed capacities, then those who develop their capacities the furthest should matter most."
“Far from being an intruder in his mother’s womb, the unborn child is where he belongs. Furthermore, parents bear special obligations to their children, and a woman’s bodily autonomy does not justify lethal violence against the unborn.”
Listened on Overdrive, twice in a row
August 31, 2022
The prolife book we needed!
Perfect for longtime prolife fighters.
Perfect for those committed to abortion that are questioning their stance or looking to understand the prolife arguments.
Perfect for people new to thinking deeply about the abortion question.
Extremely quotable and so many brain explosion moments due to how succinct and articulate the sentences are. They don’t take 17 pages to argue something. The sections are short but powerful. And sometimes it hits you like a gut punch.
I’m not new to the pro life world - I was at the Students for Life of America conference in Bethesda, MD in 2013. I attended the March for Life the same year in 2013. Almost 10 years ago. I remember being at that conference hearing one of the speakers talk about overturning Roe. As the Obama administration years went on it seemed unlikely that we would ever overturn Roe during my lifetime. Then, the Trump years happened which while good for the pro life issue were divisive. Incredibly, Trump got 3 supreme justices (thanks Harry Reid 😉). Alas, during the Biden administration Roe is overturned. Amazing. Elections have consequences. And it’s just incredible, I had thought it was unrealistic that Roe would be overturned in my lifetime. But by God’s Grace, 49 years was enough, not a 50th year for Roe. Lord have mercy on what we have done. Now, to continue our prolife movement because the word and need continues. But knowing that it’s more possible today to secure legal protections for ALL people than yesterday? Incredible.
Read this book.
Perfect for longtime prolife fighters.
Perfect for those committed to abortion that are questioning their stance or looking to understand the prolife arguments.
Perfect for people new to thinking deeply about the abortion question.
Extremely quotable and so many brain explosion moments due to how succinct and articulate the sentences are. They don’t take 17 pages to argue something. The sections are short but powerful. And sometimes it hits you like a gut punch.
I’m not new to the pro life world - I was at the Students for Life of America conference in Bethesda, MD in 2013. I attended the March for Life the same year in 2013. Almost 10 years ago. I remember being at that conference hearing one of the speakers talk about overturning Roe. As the Obama administration years went on it seemed unlikely that we would ever overturn Roe during my lifetime. Then, the Trump years happened which while good for the pro life issue were divisive. Incredibly, Trump got 3 supreme justices (thanks Harry Reid 😉). Alas, during the Biden administration Roe is overturned. Amazing. Elections have consequences. And it’s just incredible, I had thought it was unrealistic that Roe would be overturned in my lifetime. But by God’s Grace, 49 years was enough, not a 50th year for Roe. Lord have mercy on what we have done. Now, to continue our prolife movement because the word and need continues. But knowing that it’s more possible today to secure legal protections for ALL people than yesterday? Incredible.
Read this book.
January 8, 2025
"Tearing Us Apart," is the report of what abortion is doing to the USA. Not only does it end the life of an unborn person, it also really wreaks havoc on our society, especially the women its practice touts as supporting and promoting. I am a pro-lifer, and didn´t need to read this book to find out why it is wrong, but what I learned is the sad story of how it destroys so much of our society: it harms women physically and psychologically, it harms the gender equality, it harms the field of medicine, it harms the rule of law, politics, the democractic process, the media, and popular culture. (All of these topics are covered in various chapters.)
But the long and short of it is this: abortion is a practice that began relatively recently in human history, and was completely unthinkable as recently as 100 years ago. The only reason the practice is common today is because there are now two groups of people: those who believe that the unborn child is a human and those who try to rationalize that it is everything else but! And why does the latter group even exist? Because having an unwanted child is too much bother for so many people today, and now that we have the means to end these lives, we can choose to end them and continue our convenient lives.
But the long and short of it is this: abortion is a practice that began relatively recently in human history, and was completely unthinkable as recently as 100 years ago. The only reason the practice is common today is because there are now two groups of people: those who believe that the unborn child is a human and those who try to rationalize that it is everything else but! And why does the latter group even exist? Because having an unwanted child is too much bother for so many people today, and now that we have the means to end these lives, we can choose to end them and continue our convenient lives.
July 6, 2022
Quite the read. By and large, an excellent book. Anderson and DeSanctis shine when discussing thee cultural, philosophical, medical, and moral harms of abortion. Truly compelling stuff. Where they fail is in the use of statistics. Percentages that are too small to matter when abortion-advocates cite them suddenly become huge problems when the authors cite them as proo0f of the danger of various kinds of abortion. I’m also a little leery of attributing psychological harm to abortions (though I don’t doubt it, personally) because I’m not sure how your can really disentangle correlation and causation. (Maybe women prone to anxiety.depression are more likely to get an abortion, even if procuring an abortion does increase your likelihood of anxiety/depression.)
Worth every penny for the outline of action in the conclusion, but the chapters on on how abortion harms the medical profession, law, and culture are particularly good. And, of course, on how abortion harms the unborn child. I do love that Alexandra gets her digs in at her fellow “Catholics” who flagrantly disobey the magisterium.
Worth every penny for the outline of action in the conclusion, but the chapters on on how abortion harms the medical profession, law, and culture are particularly good. And, of course, on how abortion harms the unborn child. I do love that Alexandra gets her digs in at her fellow “Catholics” who flagrantly disobey the magisterium.
July 19, 2024
This is one of those books where you start with your mind made up. If you lean pro-life, it is an encouraging and expansive look at the contemporary abortion debate. If you lean pro-choice, it is dangerous political subversion. One other reviewer notes that the book (or at least, the audiobook reader) seems to lean into this with its supercilious tone. I can see it. My biggest disappointment with the book was how divisive it often felt.
At the same time, it was an interesting summary of arguments for life starting at conception and covered extensive ground ranging legal analyses to role of abortion in media to different scientific studies.
It was published during a weird time in the abortion debate. Written pre-Dobbs, the book was then published post-Dobbs, and I think it will overall date the work quite fast. I don't see myself returning to this one, which is a shame. I think it has much to offer. The execution just left me underwhelmed. (Plus, I feel like I will forget it pretty fast, which is kind of remarkable considering the hot-button nature of this issue.)
I wouldn't say to dismiss the book, I did after enjoy it. But don't expect it to change many minds.
At the same time, it was an interesting summary of arguments for life starting at conception and covered extensive ground ranging legal analyses to role of abortion in media to different scientific studies.
It was published during a weird time in the abortion debate. Written pre-Dobbs, the book was then published post-Dobbs, and I think it will overall date the work quite fast. I don't see myself returning to this one, which is a shame. I think it has much to offer. The execution just left me underwhelmed. (Plus, I feel like I will forget it pretty fast, which is kind of remarkable considering the hot-button nature of this issue.)
I wouldn't say to dismiss the book, I did after enjoy it. But don't expect it to change many minds.
August 5, 2024
There are many books that make the case against abortion. In this book, Anderson takes it a step further and looks at the ramifications of the abortion-friendly society that Roe v. Wade produced. A society that has accepted abortion as a norm is one that harms men, women, children, the judicial system, the medical profession, the legal system, and the media. Accepting abortion as a good isn't an isolated position. The ideological worldview that comes from that has far-reaching impact into many areas of life and society.
While the road may be difficult to undo the damage of Roe v. Wade, it is possible to change the tide of society. Understanding the deep impact of abortion is part of dealing realistically with the problem. If you want to understand the blight that abortion has had on our society, beyond just the destruction of unborn children (which alone is a great tragedy and a great evil), I highly recommend this book.
While the road may be difficult to undo the damage of Roe v. Wade, it is possible to change the tide of society. Understanding the deep impact of abortion is part of dealing realistically with the problem. If you want to understand the blight that abortion has had on our society, beyond just the destruction of unborn children (which alone is a great tragedy and a great evil), I highly recommend this book.
October 29, 2022
Anderson and DeSanctis do an excellent and thorough job of detailing the many layers of our culture that have been harmed by both the act of abortion and the underlying values that promote abortion as if it is a public good.
I was particularly struck by the idea that abortion treats female fertility as a problem to be solved rather than a biological reality to be considered as we structure society. That explains how people can call a surgery that takes the life of a baby "healthcare."
People who actively advocate for abortion will probably not read this book. But I recommend it for anyone who wants to be equipped to advocate for the protection of unborn life.
I was particularly struck by the idea that abortion treats female fertility as a problem to be solved rather than a biological reality to be considered as we structure society. That explains how people can call a surgery that takes the life of a baby "healthcare."
People who actively advocate for abortion will probably not read this book. But I recommend it for anyone who wants to be equipped to advocate for the protection of unborn life.
June 29, 2023
I've been following this debate for as long as I've been politically aware so I'm not sure there is an argument I haven't heard. That said, this brings all the arguments together, gives rejoinder to the arguments on the other side and also discusses the negative effects this fight has had on every institution in our society.
It won't have much of an impact on those invested in abortion as a right, but to those sitting on the fence or those wanting to better understand the arguments of the anti-abortion view point, this is indispensable.
It won't have much of an impact on those invested in abortion as a right, but to those sitting on the fence or those wanting to better understand the arguments of the anti-abortion view point, this is indispensable.
October 2, 2022
Published after Roe was overturned, but this is still an incredibly timely book. I found it educational and insightful despite my years of understanding how the pro-abortion culture has seeped into every facet of society. It is a call to action to abolish abortion through legislation and in our culture, making our world a place where the act of abortion is relegated to our history books- past tense but never forgotten.
July 30, 2023
Eye-opening book! I got shocked by many things I read in the book. A big thumbs up also because everything has a source. I confirmed many of the links shared there.
This a great book to enrich the debate over abortion. I believe people from both sides should read it to see that there is much more around abortion than we think.
This a great book to enrich the debate over abortion. I believe people from both sides should read it to see that there is much more around abortion than we think.
August 21, 2022
Anderson and DeSanctis do an excellent job covering the history of abortion and the far-reaching effects it has had on our culture and our country. This is a very difficult read, but an important one. Lord, have mercy on us.
October 30, 2022
This book illuminates how abortion has had an impact on almost every aspect of culture. It seems like an issue that most never deal with yet the ramifications has creeped into society in such a way that has changed has all our lives without us even noticing or blatantly that harms us all.
July 21, 2022
A examination of the effects that the abortion culture has on a wide variety of segments of American culture.
August 6, 2022
Probably the most important book I have read all year. It's difficult in parts, but timely.
August 10, 2022
Great book. Exposes the pro-abortion community thoroughly.
August 13, 2022
I found this helpful in such a polarizing topic.
October 11, 2022
Extremely informative
October 22, 2022
A relatively brief history of abortion in our culture. Informative and thought provoking.
January 3, 2023
Listened to this on and off for a couple months as an audiobook. Very informative and big picture - the narrator was hard to listen to, so I would recommend reading it.
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