During the “Preparing for a Post-Roe World” event at the annual Wilberforce Weekend conference, pro-life speaker, author, and apologist Stephanie Gray Connors responded to various slogans commonly used today to promote abortion. Here’s her response to the statement, “Abortion is healthcare.”
‘Abortion is healthcare.’ Instead of using five minutes to reply, it’s really tempting to just use five words. “What? That is ridiculous.” To respond to that, what we want to do is ask a question, two in particular. We want to ask, “What is abortion, and what is healthcare?”
In terms of answering the question, “What is abortion?” I’m reminded of something my dad would tell me growing up. My dad is originally from Scotland. He didn’t immigrate to Canada, where I’m originally from, until he was in his thirties, which means my dad’s got a fantastic Scottish accent, right? He’s right from Glasgow, Barrhead.
Anyway, so my dad would always say to me growing up, “Right, Stephanie, your old Scottish grandfather used to say use their own words against them.” So, when it comes to answering the question, “What is abortion?” Don’t quote a pro-lifer. Use the abortion supporter’s words against them. Go to their textbooks. What do they say?
And, so, I went to the National Abortion Federation’s textbook on abortion. It’s called the Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion. And in chapter 10, they specifically refer to feticidal techniques, feticidal techniques. So, the question we want to ask is this: “What is the meaning of the root word cide?”
Feticidal, cide. That means to kill. So, there’s an admission there by using the term feticidal, that it’s a technique that involves killing. Or take one of their chapters on D&E abortions after 12 weeks. That chapter in this textbook refers to the pregnancy elements by calling them “spinal cord” and “calvarium.” Well, we want to ask, “The spinal cord and calvarium of who?”
That textbook is not referring to the spinal cord of the pregnant woman, but rather of the preborn child. So, there’s this admission that it’s killing and that it involves parts not of the woman but of the baby and dismembering those particular parts. Then, there’s Planned Parenthood itself. We just heard the reference to Margaret Sanger, their founder. And yet, would you know that back in 1952, long before Roe v. Wade, they had a brochure not on abortion but on birth control. And in answering questions about birth control, they answered the question, “Is birth control abortion?” And they said, quote, “Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.” End quote. Planned Parenthood, 1952.
So, if we’re asking the question, “What is abortion?” We get the answer from abortion supporters that abortion is killing. So, then we have to ask ourselves if we’re trying to figure out whether killing is healthcare, “What is health care?” And we know healthcare involves the treatment and prevention of disease or maintaining and restoring health. So, the question is “What disease are we responding to when someone’s pregnant?”
And the answer is pregnancy isn’t a disease. It’s a sign the body is working right. If you have cancer of the eye, you might have to remove the eye. It could cause you to be blind, but you never take a healthy eye and maim it. So, with abortion, we actually have a healthy body, a healthy state—a pregnancy—which should occur because the body is fertile at that time. And then abortion is maiming that. It’s like destroying an eye that’s functioning well. It doesn’t make sense. And it’s certainly not healthcare.
You know, some abortion supporters might say, “Well, abortion is healthcare because physicians do it.” So, we want to ask a question: “Just because the doctor does something, does his action suddenly become morally acceptable by his involvement?”
And then to answer that, we can use a little parable. Imagine you have someone working in the black-market underground organ-harvesting industry where they kidnap people or take political prisoners and have their organs removed—maybe their kidneys, maybe their liver, maybe their heart—and transplant them into someone who’s paid good money to get access to those organs. We all agree that’s unethical.
But in order to remove the organs from one person and successfully implant them in another, you can’t have just a random person on the street doing that, right? You need a physician to do it. Would we ever say because it’s a surgeon working in the black underground human organ trafficking market—would we ever say that that type of organ harvesting is ethical and healthcare because a doctor does it? And obviously, we would say it is not ethical, and it’s not healthcare because what a physician is doing in that case is destructive to a human person.
And, so, since we know the preborn child is a human person, albeit younger, and because we know abortion kills that human person, and because we know healthcare is about maintaining health and restoring a sick body to a healthy state, and abortion does the opposite of that, an abortion is not healthcare.
That was Stephanie Gray Connors, answering the common pro-abortion slogan: “abortion is healthcare.” Throughout our preparing-for-a-post-Roe-future event, Stephanie responded to other slogans as well. To receive access to her presentation as well as the other speakers at this very special event, go to wilberforceweekend.org.
Publication date: June 3, 2022
Photo courtesy: Heather Mount/Unsplash
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.