Michael Knowles to young pro-life leaders: Our humanity doesn’t exist on a ‘sliding scale’

Author and commentator Michael Knowles joined Live Action for its 2025 Young Leaders Summit on March 22, speaking to 1,500 young pro-lifers about the natural law argument against abortion.

“The abortion industry, we know, peddles all sorts of lies: the lie that babies aren’t babies, that murder can be justified, that infanticide constitutes health care, that licentiousness is liberty, that women have the right to do wrong, and on and on,” he said. “But the lie that the abortion industry peddles that I think is least refuted is the lie that abortion is a women’s issue. The lie that men don’t have the right or even the ability to weigh in on it. But abortion is as much a men’s issue as it is a women’s issue.”

This statement, he explained, is not meant in a political sense, or even one of injustice. Instead, Knowles said the issue is one of fundamental human nature, and this is what the abortion industry so often misunderstands.

“The notion that men should not express an opinion about abortion because men don’t experience pregnancy and, therefore, can’t experience abortion directly… even this narrow claim is not true,” he said. “Reliable data are difficult to come by, but by all accounts, most abortionists are men. Some studies show that three-quarters of abortionists are men. Of course, roughly half of the babies who are aborted are male. So right off the bat, we see that many, if not most people involved in abortions are men.”

He said that not being directly involved in something doesn’t mean a person can’t have opinions on the subject:

We all form opinions about all sorts of things that we have little or no involvement with all the time. That is, in fact, one of the key attributes that makes us human. We have a rational nature. Like the lower animals, we’re incarnate creatures. You know, we’re not just spirits flitting through the ether. We got bodies and stuff. Like the lower animals, we have appetite and instinct.

But unlike the lower animals, we possess intellect and will. So when I see a jar of cookies, for instance, I have an instinct, which tells me to eat all of the food available to me whenever I see it. I have an appetite for tasty little treats — don’t we all? But I also have an intellect which tells me that I’m getting kind of fat. You know, maybe my suit isn’t fitting right, or maybe that I don’t want a tummy ache or these days, it would tell me that it’s Lent and I shouldn’t eat the cookie.

… In any case, I’m Catholic and it’s Lent so I can’t eat the cookie. My will, will allow me from my reason to override my base passions.

The Natural Law Argument Against Abortion: Michael Knowles at the Young Leaders Summit

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Our intellect and capacity to reason make us capable of overriding our instincts, which is what allows so many to justify abortion. And, according to abortion activists, it is reasonable to have abortions because preborn children are not human beings. Knowles continued:

They will claim that the babies are a mere clump of cells, or alternately, parasites because they depend upon their mothers to live. Some abortion activists will even go further. They will claim that the babies in the womb are a part of the mother, like the mother’s liver or the mother’s fingernail or something.

None of these claims withstand even the slightest scrutiny.

The babies are, in a reductive sense, clumps of cells, but then, so are you. So am I. We’re actually more than clumps of cells, but we are at least clumps of cells. All living things comprise cells, but not all living things are the same.

So when we’re trying to ascertain what kind of living thing a living thing is, the question is not, does it have cells? Rather, the question is, what kinds of cells does it have? And what are those cells doing together? The answer, in this case, is that the baby has human cells, and the human cells are doing human cell things. It’s not a part of the mother, like a fingernail.

A preborn baby has different DNA than his or her mother and is growing and developing as a living human being does. Preborn babies are small, but as Knowles pointed out, size does not determine one’s value.

“The dignity and rights denoted by personhood do not exist on a sliding scale based on size,” he said. “They don’t depend on any accidental characteristic, such as height, weight, race, sex, nationality, or anything else. They derive from our human nature.”