What Pro-Lifers Stand For

By Paul Stark
National Right to Life

The media often use the label “anti-abortion” to describe pro-life advocates. It’s true that we oppose abortion—and infanticide, euthanasia and embryo-destructive research. But we are only against those things because we are for something else.

What We Are For

What are we for? We are for the proposition that human life is good, that it is worth living, that it deserves respect and protection. We are for the proposition that every human being has an equal worth and dignity—that every human being has a right to live.

The pro-life position rejects all attempts to divide humanity into those who have rights and those who don’t. Our society now recognizes that past discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity and social status was deeply unjust. We recognize that the worth of a human being does not depend on such characteristics.

Nor, however, does the worth of a human being depend on age, size, ability, dependency, stage of development or the desires and decisions of others. The big are not more valuable than the small. The strong do not have more rights than the weak. The independent do not matter more than the vulnerable and needy.

No, we have value and a right to life simply because we are human—not because of what we can do, but because of what (the kind of being) we are. That’s why everyone matters. Everyone counts.

What We Are Against

It is because we support equal human dignity that we oppose the intentional killing of innocent human beings. And that means we oppose abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and embryo-destructive research.

Pro-lifers oppose abortion because it takes the life of a human being before he or she is born. The scientific facts of embryology and developmental biology make clear that the unborn (the human embryo or fetus) is a distinct and living human organism, a full-fledged (though immature) member of the species Homo sapiens. Each of us was once an embryo and a fetus, just as we were once infants, toddlers and adolescents.

And all human beings, at all stages, have a right to life, whether or not they are “wanted” or “convenient.”

National Right to Life continues 

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