I have a new article up at NewEvangelizers.com.
As I wrote in my last article, the culture war surrounding abortion has heated up.
One of the things that I’ve noted is new and strange memes that the pro-abortion side has unleashed. A meme is an idea that gets passed along to individuals in our culture by coming into contact with it. Most of the memes that people are familiar with are pictures like “Grumpy Cat” or “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” But memes can also be slogans that get filtered through social media.
Over the last few weeks, with more and more states passing stronger restrictions to abortion, these memes have been saturating the internet. I have noticed them filtering down into the classroom setting with students bringing them up in class.
In this article, I will go over the most popular ones I have seen and I will refute them. Please keep in mind, most of the people who use these slogans are not arguing from reason. No matter how logical your arguments are, chances are you will not be able to change their minds.
So why bother? My experience tells me that while the person spreading this meme is closed-minded, many people who are listening to the discussion or observing on social media are open-minded. The refutations are for the rational, not the irrational.
“YOU WANT TO FORCE RAPE VICTIMS TO BE PREGNANT”
This is one is the only meme that has any weight to it, because it deals with a very serious emotional and moral dilemma. I dealt with the pro-life side of the argument in my last article. But this meme is meant to shame pro-lifers into shutting up so that they don’t further injure the survivor of a terrible crime.
But this meme is a complete distraction. As March For Life speaker Ben Shapiro pointed out, going to the extreme case makes no sense if the common case is still in dispute. If someone sends out this meme, respond by asking, “So you are against abortion in all other cases besides rape and incest?” They will most likely respond, “No!”
“Well,” you should reply, “Why in the world are we talking about the extreme cases! If abortion should be legal in all circumstances, then the extreme case doesn’t matter. It is only when we get to a place where all other abortions are illegal that cases of rape and incest should even be an issue.”
“THE FETUS IS A PARASITE”
This one is particularly noxious because of how self-satisfied the memers present themselves, as if they have come up with a devastating, unanswerable analogy. A professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine recently compared the fetus to an invading parasite that feeds off of the host. I read one meme on Twitter that said something akin to this: “If you get a tapeworm, remember that tapeworm is alive and living off of your body just like a fetus, so if you are pro-life, it would be wrong to kill that tapeworm life.”
First, the fetus is human life. It is not a virus, germ, bacteria, or any other kind of life.
Second, the human body is designed to fight off parasites. A parasite invades the host and drains its life unnaturally. But the human body is designed for reproduction. Particularly, the woman’s body is designed to conceived, grow, and birth a child. Her body is not designed to take in, grow, and flourish a parasite. The parasite is foreign. The fetus is natural. It is true that there is strain on the woman’s body. But strain is not a sign that something is working against nature. If that were the case, no one would experience growing pains.
“IF ABORTION IS MURDER, THEN MASTURBATION IS MASS MURDER.”
You can read the whole article here.
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