“The strongly held beliefs avowed with certainty on both sides of the abortion debate are not scientific facts but philosophical, theological, and moral viewpoints that must compete in the marketplace of ideas.”
-Lloyd Steffen
#freespeechmatters 18.12.2021
America, I think the left needs to take more time to form better arguments. While perusing the web to find a topic to write about, I found an absurd argument that suggests that abortion should be protected under the First Amendment. I’m here today to make the case that abortion actually violates the First Amendment by silencing the unborn completely, never giving them the chance to exercise their Constitutional rights.
Lloyd Steffen at Salon bases his argument on a number of false premises. First, he declares that “fetal humanity is a philosophical and moral question, not a question science is competent to decide.” Let me get this straight. The left, who worships science when it demands we all stay masked and locked up for a virus that has a very low death rate, now wants us to believe that there are limits to science, especially in regards to fetal humanity. “That a certain point in biological development determines fetal humanity will always be a matter of belief, not science, and such beliefs will be arbitrary beliefs at that,” Steffen writes.
He concludes his arguments, stating “The beliefs about fetal humanity are either explicitly religious or otherwise grounded in non-scientific beliefs akin to religious beliefs.” This is why he suggests that abortions deserves protection under the First Amendment. However, nobody is suggesting that you should not be able to have views favoring abortion. Government laws restricting abortions in practice don’t dictate how society should feel about them. Furthermore, abortion strays far from a religious or non-scientific belief the moment an unborn fetus is killed.
At first, I was having trouble understanding Steffen’s argument, but I later realized that he was stretching. If anything, the pro-life lobby could argue that legal abortions infringe on the unborn’s right to ever have a say, to ever freely express, and to ever hold religious or nonreligious beliefs. Abortion ultimately puts an end to the constitutional and human rights reserved for the unborn.
Steffen attempts to continue the narrative that only those with religious beliefs are pro-life, while those who are able to set their religion aside are often pro-choice. I think this is a faulty narrative. The issue of abortion is certainly a moral one, as is murder. Murder, however, is illegal because we as a society agree that if we universally accepted murder, order could never be restored. Your neighbor would murder you if they run out of food, just to put food on their table. Without any accountability, people would have the option to take other people’s lives into their own hands when they deem necessary.
While I disagree with Steffen’s claim that abortion has a “strong and explicit constitutional foundation,” I agree with his argument that different viewpoints on the matter must compete in the marketplace of ideas. Since, in his words, fetal humanity may never be determined by science, there’s really no way of strongly concluding whether abortion is an act of murder or not. This suggests that neither the pro-life nor the pro-choice crowds can speak with certainty. I’m open for an honest, open debate regarding the future of abortion in this country. However, pro-choice crowds have made it abundantly obvious that “pro-life” is synonymous with being anti-women.
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