Abortion advocates need to check their privilege

These days, it’s all the rage in some quarters to tell people to “check their privilege”—i.e., to feel guilty about all the many, many, many, many ways (real and imagined) this eeeeevil society of ours allegedly advantages us over others. Usually this “privilege deficit” can be rectified by supporting a variety of policies that tend to all be supported by the same people. Total coincidence, I’m sure!

The privilege craze has plenty of its own problematic contradictions and ramifications, but it also provides a new opening to illustrate pro-abortion hypocrisy. Author and Union University Associate Provost Hunter Baker did just that in a recent tweet:

I love it. It’s basically a restatement of one of President Ronald Reagan’s most famous pro-life lines, simply phrased in a way abortion advocates themselves often think:

With regard to the freedom of the individual for choice with regard to abortion, there’s one individual who’s not being considered at all. That’s the one who is being aborted. And I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.

This formulation also provides an obvious counter to the tired, demeaning line that men need to shut up about abortion because we’re “privileged” to not have to worry about getting pregnant. Sure, abortion advocates will certainly try to deny they’re the privileged ones in abortion, but how can they, based on the rules they themselves have established?

At Everyday Feminism (a pro-abortion website which abortion advocates will presumably accept as fairly representing the concept), Sam Dylan Finch defines privilege as “an unearned advantage, in comparison to other people” that benefits somebody “only because there are aspects of our identity that society values over others.”

I defy any abortion advocate to explain how that doesn’t fit the born versus the preborn like a glove.

We all start out exactly like abortion’s victims; the only thing separating the born from the preborn is a minimum of nine months. But once you clear that window, odds are overwhelming that you’ll never again have to worry about the possibility that anybody could make it legal to kill you—solely because society has accepted the objectively-baseless notion that the preborn aren’t as valuable.

So pro-“choicers” feel perfectly content to resign defenseless, disregarded babies to a violent fate, safe in the subconscious confidence that society will never decide that their own rights don’t matter anymore because somebody finds their lives to be inconvenient.

In fact, the only people in the abortion debate not acting out of privilege are pro-lifers. Aside from cases such as fathers grieving over lost sons and daughters, the vast majority of us who oppose abortion don’t get any direct benefit from whether a child we don’t know and aren’t related to lives or dies. If anything, we are denying ourselves the potential use of abortion as an escape hatch from our own decisions’ consequences—women from pregnancy itself; men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Lastly, there’s one final way to determine which side’s position is rooted in principle and which is in privilege. On Monday, Blaze columnist Cullen Herout had a great column explaining how he could theoretically be persuaded to support abortion:

My belief that abortion is wrong rests on two logical premises. Consequently, you could convince me that abortion is okay by disproving either one of my premises. It’s logic 101. You don’t even have to disprove both of them, just one will suffice. In fact, my whole argument for why abortion is morally wrong would crumble to pieces if either of these premises were disproven.

Here are the two premises, and the conclusion, that my beliefs are built on:

1. Abortion takes the life of an innocent human being.

2. Taking the life of an innocent human being is wrong.

And, therefore, abortion is wrong […]

If there is a God, but the unborn is not a human being, I’m okay with abortion. If the unborn child is a human being, but there is no God and thus no objective truth, morality is relative and I would be unable to say that abortion is absolutely wrong.

So that’s my answer for what it would take to get me to change my mind. What’s yours?

When your positions come from earnest attempts to know what’s right and wrong, you develop clear criteria by which your mind could be changed. But if your position comes from selfish efforts to protect a privilege you enjoy, then the criteria you try to pass off for principles is subject to change whenever convenient, no matter how contradictory.

Abortion is okay because life doesn’t begin at conception—until so many pro-aborts admit it does that you have to switch gears and decide it’s okay to kill living babies because of bodily autonomy. Early-term abortions are okay because weeks-old fetuses are nothing like born babies—until the subject turns to aborting late-term fetuses virtually indistinguishable from newborns, at which point banning is still unthinkable. Even purely hypothetical thought experiments about artificial wombs ending pregnancies without death have to be opposed, despite giving pro-aborts everything they claim to want, because… they just do, okay?

So let’s follow Hunter Baker’s example and get #bornprivilege trending, because it’s long past time for pro-aborts to check their privilege.