“What about a mother who can’t afford to raise a kid? It’s better for her to just get an abortion than for the child to be born into poverty!”
Economic justifications for abortion are among the most common arguments you will come across. The good news is that these arguments quickly collapse under scrutiny.
First, let’s address something of an elephant in the room. Assuming all the described conditions are met, and the mother is truly not capable of raising her child outside of extreme poverty, she is not legally required to raise her child. As we have all heard, adoption is an option. She can lovingly place the baby with a good adoptive home where she will be raised by a family that can afford it. In addition, all 50 states have safe haven laws which allow a child to be left at designated safe locations like fire stations or hospitals, and the mother will not face any prosecution.
Now that we have addressed the practical reality, let’s contend with the attempted moral justification.
At its core this argument appeals to a form of mercy killing. In its purest form, the pro-abortion supporter does not need to deny the humanity of the child to make this case, though often you will find that those you engage with will deploy something of a grab bag approach using various unrelated arguments simultaneously.
The claim that it is better for the baby to be aborted than to grow up poor is framed around the best interest of the baby, not the mother. All you must do to refute this argument is to highlight where this logic leads.
For logic to be sound, it must be applicable across the board in analogous (directly comparable) situations. Special pleading is a logical fallacy.
The logic that would permit an unborn baby to be killed “for their own good” to avoid negative economic circumstances cannot stop with the unborn! This line of logic would necessarily justify the murder of toddlers born into poverty, homeless adults with a grim economic future, and millions of people in underdeveloped nations.
If the pro-abortion advocate deploying this argument does not agree with “mercy killing” toddlers, they must abandon this “justification” or highlight a fundamental difference between the two scenarios, which proves the two instances are not comparable. Spoiler alert, there is none.
As you will read throughout our catalog of pro-life apologetics, the right to life does not scale up or down based on location, size, level of development, dependency or any other arbitrary difference between a child in the womb and a child outside the womb.
We should all agree that no one wants a child to grow up in poverty. However, the answer to the threat of childhood poverty is not to preemptively murder children.
The same principle used here to refute this justification applies to a similar argument surrounding so-called “unwanted” children.
As we continue to expand our growing catalog of pro-life answers to pro-abortion arguments, please feel free to submit suggestions at info@lifeissues.org. We will happily refute any arguments that you need help with.
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