Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - Must You Remain Silent on Abortion Unless You Adopt a Baby?

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

If you’ve never adopted a child, does this disqualify you from speaking out against abortion? Alan offers five reasons why this challenge is mistaken.

If you've never adopted a child, does this disqualify you from speaking out against abortion? Well, that's what I want to talk to you about in this December 2021 episode, although I'm recording it in January of 2022, on this December 2021 episode of my podcast, Thinking Out Loud with Alan Schliemann. The Planned Parenthood employee thought that she had me with this one question. She said, how many unwanted children have you adopted? None, I replied. Now, she probably thought, checkmate, I got him, right? You see, the pro-life view in her mind results in more babies being born. And so it follows, according

to this lady's thinking, that if I don't adopt any of these babies, then I'm disqualified from arguing against abortion. Now, although this question and this challenge that she's asking me is rhetorically powerful, it's not actually a very compelling case against pro-lifers. Now, before I jump into why that's the case, let me just offer this clarification or just try to be clear here about what my view is on adoption. I do believe adoption is beautiful, right? That's for certain, okay?

I do believe adoption is beautiful, right? That's for certain, okay? It's a noble, it's a praiseworthy act when a loving couple sees a child in need and adopts him or her as their own. But if you've never adopted a child, does this disqualify you from speaking out against abortion? Now, although this is a common challenge that is raised by abortion choice advocates,

there's at least five problems with this thinking. Okay. So first of all, there is no logical connection between a person's unwillingness to adopt a child and their moral claim that abortion is wrong. Right. I mean, just because both are related to the subject of abortion, that doesn't mean that they are contradictory.

So how then does a pro-lifer's unwillingness to adopt a baby give another person justification to kill that baby? Right? In logic, we call this a red herring. It's a distraction from the main point. It's a distraction from the main point. And what's going on here is that the question illegitimately shifts the attention from the morality of abortion to the pro-life person. Now, this is clever sophistry, but it's bad logic.

So that's the first problem with this particular challenge. Here's the second one. the first problem with this particular challenge. Here's the second one. The misstep becomes more obvious with two morally comparable illustrations. All right. So imagine you're living in the 19th century America, okay, when slavery is legal, okay, and you're trying to argue that slavery is immoral. And some slavery advocate retorts to you, well, how many ex-slaves have you employed in your company? Now, your argument against slavery is being dismissed because if it succeeds, it results in freed slaves who are now unemployed, if you will, right? And so the thinking is if you don't employ them then you can't argue against slavery well

that doesn't make any sense though right i mean the question of whether or not slavery should be abolished should be decided based upon the merits of the argument against slavery and not on your willingness to hire freed slaves let me give give you another illustration. Imagine you're arguing to criminalize sleeping on a city's sidewalks, right? Now, if your legislation passes, then what happens is it displaces the homeless population that's been sleeping on those sidewalks, right? And so someone responds to you by asking you this, well, how many homeless people are you willing to house in your home? Now, even if you wouldn't take in a single homeless person, why should your argument in favor of such a law be dismissed?

Right? Consideration of your position should be based on, again, the merits of your argument and not on your willingness to house the homeless. Now, let's be honest here. I mean, yes, we would need to determine what to do with a displaced homeless population, but that's a completely different problem and a different kind of question. In the same way, the question of whether abortion is wrong should be decided on the merits of the argument and not on the pro-lifer's willingness or unwillingness to adopt babies born from a woman who decided against

aborting her child. Okay, so here's the third problem. This particular challenge is what we call an ad hominem attack. Now, an ad hominem is simply a Latin word for the logical mistake made when someone attacks another person's character instead of their argument. So in this case, the abortion choice advocate attacks the pro-lifer's character, claiming that they're immoral because they won't adopt babies, instead of engaging the reasons given in their argument against abortion. given in their argument against abortion. So whether or not a pro-lifer is immoral has nothing to do with the validity of their argument against abortion. All right, here's the fourth problem. This challenge presumes an impossible standard.

How many babies does a pro-lifer need to adopt before they qualify to argue against abortion? Is it one baby? Well, that would hardly make a dent in the number of babies that need to adopt before they qualify to argue against abortion? Is it one baby? Well, that would hardly make a dent in the number of babies that need to be adopted, right, if we simply ended abortion. Okay, what about two babies? Well, that's also not very much, right? Well, how about three? Probably still lacking, right? So what's the magic number of adopted babies that's needed to qualify a pro-lifer to speak against abortion? No individual or married couple could adopt enough babies to make a significant difference.

An abortion choice advocate could always claim their effort was insufficient. In fact, I remember a while ago, my friend and colleague at Stand to Reason, Greg Kokel, he once took a call on his radio show from a female abortion choice advocate. And she challenged him by asking how many foster children he was personally raising in his home. And Greg explained that he and his wife had adopted two girls from teenage mothers in crisis pregnancies.

But of course, this didn't satisfy his caller, right? Nor did the descriptions that he'd offered of other ways that he'd helped mothers and babies over the years, right? And finally, the fifth problem with this particular challenge is that it's just a smokescreen, right? Abortion choice advocates don't seem to believe this challenge is a serious defense of abortion. When a pro-lifer answers their challenge by providing proof of an adoption,

the abortion choice advocate is caught off guard and quickly changes the subject, showing that adoption, the whole adoption challenge, wasn't their actual concern. And so what makes this challenge odd is that it presumes the pro-life community is doing nothing to meet the needs of women, pregnant or not, and their children. But the reality is that there are more pregnancy resource centers in the United States than there are abortion clinics. And these centers and their staff provide counseling, they provide pregnancy testing and maternity supplies and ultrasounds and housing and even financial assistance for women and their unborn and born babies. And that's why I believe that this challenge is not only based on faulty reasoning, but it's also short-sighted. Abortion choice advocates appear to care for unadopted babies, but they betray their true position with their alternative,

and that is kill unborn babies before they're born. Pro-lifers, by contrast, not only argue against such ghastly action, but we also take steps to care for both mother and baby. All right, that's all I have for you today. If you enjoy these short podcast topics, be sure to rate or review my podcast on iTunes

or wherever you listen to podcasts on. And thank you for listening. I will talk to you next time.