Abortion and Speed Limits

Pro-lifers need to understand the debate we’re in. The abortion question comes down to weighing two rights: the right to quality of life versus the right to life.

Four thousand years ago, the peoples surrounding ancient Israel had a custom of sacrificing their children to the gods (Exodus 20:31; Leviticus 18:21; 2 Kings 3:27; Isaiah 57:5) Why would someone do this? It’s because the god was appeased by this sacrifice and would reward you in return with health, wealth, and security. You purchased a better quality of life for yourself at the cost of your child.

Ancient Greek and Roman society had a practice of infanticide where unwanted children were simply exposed to the elements, left to starve, or drowned. It’s not that hard to imagine why a parent would have decided to do this. It would involve many of the same reasons why people today have abortions. They choose a desperate course of action because the alternative of raising the child feels even more desperate.

Pre-1973, abortion was illegal in America, but of course it was still happening. In 1965, an anonymous woman published her abortion account in the Atlantic to dispel the mystique about the process for women like her. What’s fascinating are the glancing details she shares about her and her husband’s line of reasoning that led them to pursue an abortion:

Three kids already; in their forties; the prospect of midnight feedings; and their earning potential maxed out. They had calculated how many years they had to wait before buying new suits and how much college tuition they could afford. She would have to quit her job. Every way they looked at it, they just didn’t have the resources. They didn’t have it in them. With a fourth kid—everyone’s quality of life would be severely impaired, they figured.

You’re Always Deciding About Quality of Life

Before jumping all over the cold calculus employed in this decision, it’s important to remember that these are conversations that every thoughtful couple has been having since the beginning of time. Ideally, having a child is a well thought out, fully prepared choice. And every conversation along the way to that decision is, in the end, about quality of life.

That term “quality of life” has fallen on hard times in the Christian world. And not without due reason—Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross and follow him, and to lose their lives in order to find them (Matthew 16:24-26). But he also warns his potential disciples to sit down and count the cost before following him (Luke 14:28) Proverbs tells us the same: gather all your materials first, make sure you have what you need, and then you start building (Proverbs 24:27).

Risk may be right, but dumb risks don’t make you holier. You might want to risk your life for someone drowning in the ocean, but if you’re in a wheelchair, that’s not a good choice. There is a time (or times) for every couple when trying for another kid is not the best choice. In a perfect world, every couple does a risk analysis before every pregnancy.

These are all quality of life conversations. What can we afford? What’s our capacity? Where is our health right now—physical, emotional, and spiritual? How will having a child affect that? After answering these questions, parents could enter the occasion with informed optimism. On the other hand, many abusive and traumatic childhoods have come from parents failing to ask those questions.

Given the monumental risk that pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing represent, we should sympathize with the paralyzing fear that accompanies an unplanned pregnancy. This is going to rock your world—not just for the next nine months or few years—but for the rest of your life.

Quality of Life Usually Means Money and Autonomy

The error in pro-choice reasoning is not defending the right to a quality of life for a woman or family. It is failing to properly appreciate that there is a human life on the other side of that decision. As a result, decisions are made in a similar way to the 1965 Atlantic article, where an abortion is merely the product of some hard math–unpleasant but irrefutable. It’s confronting the ugly sum found at the bottom of a column of plusses and minuses.

In a 2024 survey, 56% of those making less than $50k supported mostly legal abortion. That percentage rose to 69% among those making over $100k.¹ That trend makes sense if abortion is a quality-of-life decision. Higher earners have more to lose with an unexpected pregnancy. As the threat to quality of life rises, so does support for abortion.

In 2022, the Joint Economic Committee presented a paper favoring pro-choice legislation, full of financial findings. Its title was: “Abortion Access is Key to Economic Freedom.” Frankly I’m amazed that someone ever greenlighted such a study. Since outlawing child labor, has anyone, anywhere, even once had the thought: “You know what would be a great way to get more financial freedom? I should have a kid!”

Yet a woman’s financial independence remains a bedrock argument in pro-choice ideology. What grounds do I have, as a man, to make comments about what permanently affects a woman’s financial future, body, and health?

The right to one’s own body completes the circle of the quality of life arguments. One of the seven fundamental tenets of the Satanic Temple (religious secularism) is: “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” This logic lies behind their religious abortion ritual, where at the completion of the procedure, a woman says: “By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done.”²

A Battle of Rights

Quality of life decisions are deeply personal. You do not go around telling your friends what house to buy or that perhaps they should’ve stopped having kids one or two babies ago. From this vantage point, the pro-choice position makes perfect sense. It’s the classic American defense of individual liberty.

The creation of laws, however, is always a balancing act between competing rights. Tax law, for example, requires you to give up some of your rights to your money so that the society you live in gains the rights to roads, schools, and police. Property laws take away your right to enjoy your neighbor’s pool but defends your right to a front lawn free of other people’s bonfires.

I’ll steal the example of speed limits from John Piper. The government enforces speed limits on all people. The fact that some people break these laws is not a case against having them (as pro-choice people regularly cite as an argument for keeping abortion legal). But why have speed limits at all?

Don’t you have the right to get where you want, when you want, at the speed that you want to get there? Why should the government interfere with your time, your schedule, and the risks you assume in your own vehicle?

We generally accept speed limits as useful laws because we recognize that there is a weightier right being defended—an innocent person’s right to life. I can’t say: “My body, my speed,” because there’s other people on the road. I give up my right to my time and freedom as part of a society that protects innocent lives. One person’s right to quality of life is sacrificed for another person’s right to life.

So the question is: is there a person inside a pregnant mother? A person who is among the most vulnerable and marginalized of all people groups? Someone who is helpless, without voice, unable to defend him or herself? That question is the only question that matters. Everything else is secondary.

What is Personhood?

Pro-lifers can debate quality of life questions and try to make the case that self-sacrifice and caring for others through having children should weigh more heavily with parents than financial success. Those arguments should be made, but they quickly enter subjective territory. God affirms different callings and gives different gifts.

The question of what is life is more fundamental, and gets more black and white. If we adopt the historic ethic of believing that all human life has intrinsic value, and therefore murder is never okay, then abortion lawmaking must start with one and only one question: when does human life begin?

This is precisely where pro-choice people do not want the conversation to go because they don’t have good answers. The age-of-viability standard has proved slippery because medical technology keeps pushing that farther back. The viability standard also breaks down after birth. If the standard of personhood is your ability to keep yourself alive outside of the womb, then we should be free to discard infants and other sub-human lifeforms found in hospitals and care facilities. These “lifeforms” require constant external care. This would lead us back to the quasi-acceptable infanticide of ancient Rome. Some pro-choicers have had the courage to admit as much.

Bioethicist and Princeton professor emeritus Peter Singer defined personhood as a set of functional abilities. As a result, he argues boldly in favor of infanticide, particularly if the infant has a disability, because “they’re not persons.” Therefore, he concludes, the ethical reason why parents should hesitate to kill infants is because it will make them unhappy. Unsurprisingly, Singer has not enjoyed great popularity with the disabled community.

You will run into this same moral dilemma (not respecting the life of certain types of people outside the womb) if you try to peg personhood to any specific attribute, such as physical strength, rational thinking, emotional intelligence, moral reasoning, etc., which all come in degrees in different people. In times past, people have used these scales of differentiating human worth to justify slavery and genocide.

In his book The Ethics of Abortion, bioethicist Christopher Kaczor systematically demonstrates proof for what the Bible has claimed for thousands of years: that personhood begins at conception. At that moment, the zygote contains every ingredient of what we define a person to be.

“You formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:13, 16).

The Simple Question

If we agree that personhood begins at conception, we still have hard questions to deal with. What do you do when the mother’s life is at risk? What constitutes risk? What about when the baby is almost certain to not survive? How do you balance risks to the mother and the baby, or other babies, current or future? These questions require wisdom, grace, and humility.

But at least the legitimate questions become fewer. We would no longer toy with eugenics, such as the gender-selective abortions practiced in China for over a generation, killing roughly thirty million baby girls. With fewer questions, some of the million-plus abortions carried out every year in America would turn into laughing, crying human beings instead of medical waste.

Pro-lifers need to articulate this question, the question, with its due heaviness and simplicity: Which right does the government give priority to? A woman’s right to quality of life, or a baby’s right to life?

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1079527/abortion-support-income-level-legalization-us/#statisticContainer (To bypass the premium lock, try a Google search of “abortion support by income,” then go to Statista’s link) ↩︎
2. Find more discussion on the ritual through a Cosmopolitan article and American Family Association response ↩︎