I intend this as a GQ, but if a mod thinks it’s better placed somewhere else, or if it degrades, feel free to move it.
From what I’ve been able to tell, it seems the majority of pro-lifers are religious, to the point where I often see it assumed that if someone is pro-life, they are religious. Are there really that few pro-lifers that are agnostic, atheist, or otherwise non religious?
I’m sure there are many of them, though the religious pro-lifers get all the attention. What’s preventing a non-religious person from believing that life begins at conception?
Nothing. However, an argument for sanctity of said life usually depends on a religious claim. The question becomes not what it is, but rather why not kill him or her? For example, just as an example, I won’t argue about it in GQ: I’m pro-choice but I firmly believe abortion is homicide, and life begins at conception - I just think of it as good kind of homicide.
More than life, you could ask when does personhood start. At that time, however you might define it, the developing baby is a person with legal protection.
It doesn’t take much religion to believe that a baby the day before being birthed is as much of a human person as it will be the next day at birth. Once you give that step into the womb, determining exactly when that lump of cells becomes a person gets very tricky. But either way, you are already into “pro-lifer” territory where you ask protection for an unborn baby. No god needed.
Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League
While the member list is not huge by any stretch, (236 members), it is mildly impressive given that one has to stumble onto the (not well-advertised) site to even sign up.
On the other side of the coin, many people assume that pro-choice folks are not religious. The *Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice *is a group that’s eager to tell you that lots of people of faith are pro-choice. Forty different denominations are allied at www.rcrc.org
One thing to keep in mind that is that one can believe that life either begins at conception or before it (those spermatozoa and ova are alive AFAIC), consider the embryo or zygote or whatever to be “a person” or “human” or whatever term the RTL folks in the debate are using today, and still not be opposed to abortion.
I know lots of people who think soldiers are alive, human, and even “persons” and yet consider war to be an exceptional case in which it is permissible and occasionally necessary to kill some of them.
From what I can tell, practically everyone alive is pro-life. Just about all the anti-life people have committed suicide, or have tried to do so.
Maybe what you meant was not “pro-life”, but “anti abortion-on-demand”?
Thank you, sir, for clearing up the tremendous confusion that readers of this thread would otherwise have grappled with while trying to answer the OP’s question.
I might fall into the OP’s category. I’m an atheist, and while I oppose abortion-restricting laws for practical reasons, I do not for a moment believe that an abortion is as morally neutral as many pro-choice apologists claim.
The only relatively famous non-religious pro-life person I know of is Nat Hentoff. He has described himself as “a Jewish atheist civil-libertarian pro-lifer.” Nat Hentoff - Wikipedia
The arguments of Dr. C. Everett Koop persuaded him to re-examine his pro-choice viewpoint.
Indeed. I for one was very puzzled. [/heavy sarcasm]
That pretty well sums up my position as well.
You also have Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL. He switched over to the pro-life side after watching ultrasound footage of the unborn during an abortion.
He’s Catholic now, but he was an atheist when he switched sides, and he remained an atheist for years after that.
The dominant reason why most pro-lifers are religious is the simple fact that most people, period, are religious. Most pro-choicers are probably religious, too.
I hate to do this, but do you have a cite for the fact that most people are religious? I was under the impression that even though a lot of people identify as members of a religious group a very small minority answers “Yes” to the question “Are you religious?”
I am not sure how to parse that one. The vast majority of people in the U.S. say they believe in God (90% or more in the huge number of polls out there) and most people identify with some established denomination. That is all that is needed for the definition of “religious” as it pertains to this topic in my mind. A survey of church attendance and religious habits doesn’t seem very relevant to me. Are you thinking in the direction of correlating bible thumping with abortion stance? I don’t think that is what this is about exactly.
Ok I figured out why I was under this delusion in the first place. I often see quotes (don’t know how accurate) of up to 25% of US population identifying as “Spiritual, not religious” and up to 15% as “Atheist/Agnostic” and it didn’t really register with me that they’re probably entirely overlapping groups.
I knew someone who was a pro life atheist. He was a vegetarian too. He donated his entire inheritance from his grandparents (1Mill+) to the American Cancer Society. He was anti smoking too.