When arguments get weird

All pro-abortion arguments require a staggering level of cognitive dissonance. After all, for pro-choicers, a baby is a baby when someone who is pregnant is happy about their condition, but a baby is not a baby when someone does not wish to be so. Expectant mothers carry children, university students pregnant after a one-night stand carry fetuses, or, in an entirely dehumanizing term, parasites. But as disjointed as these ideas might be, there have been times when my colleagues and I have been faced with even stranger arguments that initially have us blinking in confusion. How did this person even come up with this idea? I’ve thought. How can I even begin to unravel it? Even with all the pro-life apologetics available to us, those situations still happen, not because there are no answers to these arguments, but simply because the arguments are so illogical, so weird, that we are caught off guard. That being said, STUCK gathers a few of the weird arguments that we have heard more often. The nature of these arguments meant that they did not seamlessly fit into any place in the text, and so they became text boxes we labelled From Left Field. One such argument I have heard several times when doing presentations at high schools:

Another argument that pro-choice advocates use to prove that life begins at birth, is the fact that we celebrate birthdays. If life truly begins at conception, the reasoning goes, why don’t we celebrate conception days? why do we say that we are twenty years old on our birthday, when in reality we are twenty years and nine months? First of all, the celebration of birthdays is a cultural tradition that began long before there was an advanced knowledge of embryology. Further, even now it is often difficult to determine on what day, specifically, that conception occurred. Birthdays do not assume the day on which our lives began; rather, the world clearly states that it is the day on which we were born. It is common knowledge that we existed as fetuses and embryos before we were born.

STUCK may not have all of the answers, but rest assured, we have done our best to provide you with every pro-choice argument we’ve encountered, even the weirdest ones.

BUY YOUR OWN COPY OF STUCK—ON SALE NOW!