No, Pro-lifers Don’t Want To Force Women To Birth Babies

June 29, 2017 | Published first in The Federalist

It’s a fallacy to claim that the pro-life community seeks to force childbirth and compel women to render themselves human sacrifices for their unborn children.

This week Planned Parenthood activists have been marching around the nation’s capital dressed in the costumes of sex slaves from the dystopian “Handmaid’s Tale” Hulu show. They’re objecting to Republican discussion of cutting federal funding to the nation’s largest abortion provider after evidence coming out for several years showing the organization trafficking in human body parts obtained from abortions.

Women wearing similar costumes have shown up at state legislatures to protest health and safety regulations for abortion clinics. A standard line relating attempted curbs on abortion to the handmaid garb is that, like the book, Republicans want to“force women to have babies.” It’s evidently a popular trope among abortion supporters. Recently, Federalist contributor Daniel Rendleman highlighted it as an insight he gleaned from spending a semester at Yale Law with a small group of pro-choice women in a reproductive rights seminar.

In sharing his classmates’ perspectives and stressing the need for the pro-life community to respond, Rendleman acceded to this fatal pro-choice fallacy when he professed: “We do want to make women undergo childbirth even when they do not want to.” This statement is wrong on all levels: Logically, scientifically, philosophically, and legally.

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