by Randy Alcorn

When I wrote the first edition of this book in the early 1990s, I wanted to supply people with a carefully researched, highly useable resource. I had no idea the impact it would have. The book sold over 75,000 copies, a huge number for a book on this subject. Most importantly, it has been repeatedly used by thousands of people in their attempts to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. 

Many prolife groups use the book to train their volunteers and their speakers. College ethics classes use it as a textbook. I have received letters from hundreds of high school and college students who've used the book to help them prepare speeches or write term papers and editorials for their school newspapers. I've spoken to three thousand public high school students at a single convention, distributing free copies of the book, which they eagerly snatched up.1  Pastors have asked to use it in their sermons, people write and ask if they can use it to construct letters to newspapers, family members, and representatives. (The answer is always yes.) 

One church took out full-page ads in their city's daily newspaper, each presenting the answers to various prochoice arguments. Internet groups have posted portions of the book, and discussion groups have systematically gone over its logic. Individuals have bought hundreds of copies and donated them to public libraries across the country. ProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments has been translated into various languages, and won a national book award in Italy.2

Some readers have completely changed their mind about abortion. While working on this revision yesterday I received an email from a young woman saying, After reading your pro-life book, I went through a belief change. I used to be strongly pro-choice. Now, I'm strongly pro-life. (She then asked for a recommendation of a local prolife group where she could volunteer.)

A large number of readers who are nominally prolife have picked up the book, but discover they have never understood the issues, arguments and strength of the prolife case. They were intimidated by the prochoice assumptions in the media, on campuses and in workplaces. Many have written to express how they've been equipped to defend the prolife position for the first time. They say they are now speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves. 

For the last four years I've been acutely aware of the need for a new edition of this resource. While the overall structure of the book remains the same, updates and revisions have been made on virtually every page. Dated materials have been removed and treatment of current issues added. About 300 of the nearly 800 endnotes are brand new, from more current sources, many of those in the 2000s. 

Because of all the speaking opportunities, radio interviews, panel discussions, and personal conversations that came as a result of the first edition, I felt much more prepared to write this revision. Having received a steady stream of input from people about what is most helpful in the book, I know what people are looking for and what they can use. This book is a tool, a resource not only to be read and contemplated, but to be used. As I complete the exhausting process involved in this extensive revision, I honestly believe it is a more helpful resource than ever, perhaps the most thorough and useable prolife resource available. In any case, I hope readers will make frequent use of it.

How Has the Book Changed?

Statistics have been updated and new charts have been added. The resource materials in Appendix K have all been double-checked and corrected, with many new additions, including Internet websites. The four appendices from the original book are now accompanied by seven new ones, and the old ones have been revised. Some people may find the appendices to be the most useable resources in this book. (See additional resources at www.epm.org.)

New subjects have been added, including partial-birth abortion, fetal tissue research, and frozen embryos. I've included significant material on the Hippocratic Oath. I've included the remarkable court testimony of abortionist Leroy Carhart. I've added the accounts of Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) and Sandra Cano (Mary Doe of Doe v. Bolton), who in 1995 both came forward to tell their stories of having been deceived and used by their attorneys and abortion advocates. (See Answer 37e.) I've quoted from the unforgettable speech the late Mother Teresa made in 1994 at the annual Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. Standing tiny and hunched over before some of the most powerful political figures in America, including the president and many members of Congress who pride themselves on their prochoice viewpoint, she rebuked them for their callousness to the unborn, and called upon them to change their hearts and actions and reach out their arms to embrace our tiniest children. (See Answer 20f.)It was a breath of fresh air, one of the finest messages of hope in the recent history of a nation's capital that has been under a shroud of darkness on both sides of the political aisle.3

In stark contrast to Mother Teresa's words, a year later Jocelyn Elders, then Surgeon General of the United States, said, "America needs to get over its love affair with the fetus." The two women held up to the country two different visions of our moral obligation to our weak and small citizens.

Several significant books and articles have been written since the first edition of this book, among them philosophy professor Francis Beckworth's Politically Correct Death 4  and Mark Crutcher's Lime 5 5, a startling expose of abortion clinics in America. What may be the most significant essay on abortion ever written is feminist Naomi Wolf's 1995 article in the New Republic, acknowledging that prochoice advocates such as herself must finally admit truths about the unborn they have long denied. 6 I quote from each of these writings in this book. 

How Has the Nation Changed in Regard to Life Issues?

Every day news clippings remind us of our moral decline in the respect for human life:

Doorsteps and trash bins are more suitable for daily newspapers than what many Houston residents found in those places last year—abandoned babies. Residents found thirteen discarded babies over a period of ten months in the nation's fourth largest city. Three of the thirteen were found dead. The sheer number of abandonments left citizens and city officials stunned. 7

In November of 1996 a teenage girl delivered a child in a Delaware motel, then she and her boyfriend allegedly put the living baby in a plastic bag and dropped it in a dumpster. 8

In June of 1997 a New Jersey teenager gave birth to her baby in a bathroom stall at her high school prom. She dropped the baby in the trash, then returned to the dance floor, where she asked the band to play her favorite song, "The Unforgiven." 9

In June of 2000 a seventeen year old mother who was attending night school hurled her baby into the Passaic River after she couldn't find a baby sitter.  10

In the wake of the school shootings and a generation of violent and self-absorbed children, many Americans have become less flippant about the moral reference points offered by the Christian faith, and are taking them more seriously than ever. Some are realizing that we are facing the terrible consequences of a generation that has grown up under abortion on demand. The power of the strong to determine the fate of the weak has been inbred through laws and policies and classroom discussions on abortion. What would have been repellant to previous generations simply seems normal to them—and it is we who have made it seem normal. 

But there is good news. Among both the young and the old, a backlash is taking place. People are sensing that something is desperately wrong when the strong dehumanize and kill the weak, inventing sanctimonious slogans to justify it. Included in this backlash is a reexamination of the possibility that prolife advocates, many of them Christians, may have been correct to defend the rights of unborn children and to warn that if we fail to do so, our society will lose its soul. 

In 1994, then reaffirmed by another popular vote in 1997, my home state of Oregon became the first jurisdiction on the planet to officially legalize physician assisted suicide. 11 The warnings of Francis Schaeffer in the 1970s, that abortion was part of a slippery slope that would surely lead to the legalization of killing adults, were fulfilled right before our eyes. For the moment, this killing remains voluntary. But we have already seen cases where family members are coercing elderly parents to agree to be killed by their doctors.

A recent Oregon case involved an eighty-five-year-old woman with growing dementia. She was originally denied eligibility for assisted suicide by the psychiatrist who evaluated her, due to her cognitive impairments and the fact her family appeared to be pressuring her. A second opinion was sought, and although this psychologist admitted the patient's "choices may be influenced by her family's wishes and her daughter, Erika, may be somewhat coercive" she nevertheless approved the suicide. 12 The final call came down to a single hospital administrator. He approved the lethal overdose to this elderly woman. 13

Some states have passed special laws against partial-birth abortion and fetal tissue research. State laws requiring twenty-four-hour waiting periods, informed consent, and parental consent for abortion have made limited strides in reducing the numbers of children killed. Beginning in May of 1998 the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) brought to twenty-tree college campuses a startling depiction of abortion that visually connected it with the holocaust, the killing fields, and the racial atrocities in American history. (See Answer 32b.) The revival of moral discourse has encouraged the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform to bring GAP off the college campus and into mainstream America. A new project is in the formative stage, "The Reproductive Choice Campaign," which involves semi-trucks displaying large graphic abortion billboards and traveling on densely populated freeways in an effort to reach larger numbers of people and make it impossible to ignore and impossible to trivialize the horror of abortion. 14

Feminists for Life has provided pregnancy resource kits to college heath clinics, advisors, and counselors across the country, and is leading a discussion on developing practical resources for pregnant and parenting students on college campuses including housing, child care, and maternity coverage in health care. Planned Parenthood's Insider calls Feminists for Life's College Outreach Program the "newest and most challenging concept" in student organizing, and predicts that it "could have a profound impact" on colleges "as well as on Planned Parenthood's education and advocacy efforts." 15

In the midst of an ethic dominated by Darwinian thought, one of the most significant recent developments is the intelligent design movement within the field of biochemistry. Scientists who include Michael Behe are arguing that Darwinian evolution simply cannot begin to account for the extreme complexity of the machinery within cells, now visible at the subatomic level. 16 A number of mainstream scientists have now gone on record as rejecting the randomness of evolution in favor of intelligent design. 17

This movement away from Darwinian evolution at the very least may serve to challenge people to rethink their fatalistic and nihilistic assumptions about human behavior. The unspoken but underlying belief of abortion is survival of the fittest. That dogma is being challenged as people reconsider whether there is in fact an "Intelligent Designer" behind our intelligent design. By acknowledging a Creator some are beginning to return to the concept of a moral Judge, whowill hold us accountable for our actions toward the youngest and weakest of our kind.

In the first edition of this book I quoted several times from Peter Singer, who was then still a fringe figure in bioethics. I cite him a number of times in the revised edition, now that he has become bioethics professor at Princeton University, a platform he is using to give credibility to beliefs that the unborn and many infants and handicapped people don't deserve to live and should be eliminated. (The scariest thing about Singer is not that he is so far "out there," but that he is one of the few people willing to honestly take the abortion mentality to its logical conclusions.)

There are some positive developments related to the status of the unborn. A 2000 Gallup poll indicated that 19 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances."  18 That is the highest percentage in the previous fifteen years. While the same Gallup poll indicated that Americans are evenly split on the issue, it said that "two-thirds of those who hold the prolife view say they feel very strongly about it compared to just over half of prochoice adherents." 19

States are routinely allowing prosecutions for acts which result in the death of the unborn. Kentucky's House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approved a 2000 bill giving legal status to unborn children. It will allow parents to sue for the wrongful deaths of babies while in the womb. Under the bill, the unborn would be recognized as a "person" from the moment of conception, "without regard to age, health, or condition of dependency."  20 The proposal would allow parents to file lawsuits claiming that wrongful acts by others led to their unborn babies" deaths. Significantly, abortionists would be specifically exempted from liability! But surely some people will begin to see the moral schizophrenia reflected in this exemption.

On a national level, a bill called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act would dictate that if an unborn child is injured or killed during an act of violence, the attacker could be charged for both harm to the mother and to the unborn child. This means that an assailant who kills a pregnant woman and her unborn child would be guilty of two murders not one. The House passed this bill by a 254-172 margin and at press, it is scheduled to appear before the Senate. 21

Every day about eight thousand American young people are infected with a sexually transmitted disease. 22 Despite this fact, there is some very good news. A third of all school districts now require abstinence-only programs, and more than 80 percent require that their programs emphasize abstinence. Only 14 percent still require comprehensive safer-sex programs.

"Abstinence has exploded over the last ten years," says Mr. Brandt, who serves as acting director of the National Coalition for Abstinence Education. The new emphasis comes alongside a drop in teen pregnancy and sexual activity rates, which have fallen for the first time in two decades. The Centers for Disease Control report a 9 percent decrease in teen pregnancy and 28 percent decrease in teen abortions during the 1990s. According to the CDC, the percentage of teens abstaining from sex rose from 46 to 52 percent from 1995 to 1997. 23

Adults tend to underestimate young people's ability to stand up for what's right, and to hold to high standards. We tend to lower the bar, but many of them want to raise it. The extreme popularity of Joshua Harris's I Kissed Dating Goodbye (over 800,000 copies sold) testifies to this fact. 

Fetal Tissue Research

In 2000 paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve asked a Senate subcommittee hearing, "Is it more ethical for a woman to donate unused embryos that will never become human beings, or to let them be tossed away as so much garbage when they could help save thousands of lives?" 24

Reeve's question supplies a noble-sounding reason for aborting babies, one which will likely persuade many women wrestling with their consciences that abortion, after all, will really help save other lives. It appears to take the moral high ground by making it sound like one side in the debate wants embryos to "be tossed away as so much garbage" while his side wants to save thousands of lives.

The logic was reminiscent of those who justified the Nazi doctors' experimentation on prisoners by saying people were being killed anyway, so why not help others by benefiting from the research and remains?

Stem cells are versatile master cells from which a variety of tissues and organs develop. They are considered prime prospects for effective biomedical research. They are available from a variety of benign human sources, including consenting adults, umbilical cord blood, and placentas. 

But government scientists in the National Institute of Health are determined to use stem cells from embryonic human babies, who lose their lives in the harvesting. As I write, debate is raging and the NIH is forging new policy on use of the unborn in stem cell research. 25 The NIH promises that federally funded human embryonic stem cell research will be "conducted in an ethical and legal manner." It also claims that it "understands and respects the ethical, legal, and social issues" associated with it.  26

The question is whether it is possible to deliberately destroy a human embryo—meaning a small young human being—in an ethical manner.

Frozen People

In February 2000, Dr. Bernard Nathanson testified before Congress on reproductive technologies. He said, 

"There is a very large market in frozen embryos. There are about 50,000 embryos in various cryobanks across the country. What are we to do? Freezing can only preserve an embryo five or six years. Some entrepreneurs have the answer: Sell them. One enterprising reporter showed that if you go to Columbia University, you can tell them what kind of baby you want, matching your physique, your ethnic background and your educational background, and they will pick out a frozen embryo that perfectly matches what you want and sell it to you and implant the embryo in the womb of your wife or girlfriend for all of $2,750."

There is technology such as posthumous sperm removal. If a man dies and the widow wants to become pregnant, within a reasonable period of time, the urologist puts a needle into the testes, pulls out some sperm and fertilizes her egg. So the dead man is a new father, reversing all normal familial relationships and procedures. 27

Gonads are being sold for $550 each, and research has been done to extract ova from aborted girls and use them for in vitro fertilization. 28 How would you like to explain to a child that his biological mother was an aborted baby?

The much-heralded $250 million Human Genome Project has sequenced over 90 percent of the human genetic code. 29 In March 2000, the British government announced it will begin conducting routine genetic testing on pregnant women. Health authorities have been instructed to offer a range of genetic tests to pregnant women who could be carrying a disorder. They have also been advised that pro-abortion counseling should be given as a matter of course if the unborn child is found to be abnormal. 30 Bioethics professor C. Ben Mitchell says that prenatal genetic screening "targets fetuses for destruction, since we don't have cures or treatments for most genetic anomalies." 31

Genetic manipulation and the abortion mentality are combining to pave the way to designer babies, commercial products to be bred and marketed, leaving other people—both unborn and born—to be regarded as inferior and disposable. 

In 2000 an Ohio couple filed suit against their two doctors because the doctors allegedly did not warn them of their daughter's spina bifida, for which they would have aborted her: 

"They are saying the child should be dead," attorney Michael Lyon stated. "What would have avoided the damages to this child? Death, termination. I can't imagine the child standing here ten years from now saying, 'I want to be dead.'" Ann Ruley Combs, lawyer for the other doctor, Leela Dwivedi, warned that if the family wins its suit, "we're creating an expectation that every child has a right to be born perfect." 32

Baby Sarah & Baby Samuel

In 1999 an unborn child named Sarah Marie Switzer, twenty-one four weeks after conception, was operated on for spina bifida. A photograph published in Life magazine captured the world's attention. That photograph appears on the back cover of this book. It won Life's award for picture of the year in science and technology. Sarah was put back inside her mother, and was born two months later, nine weeks premature. 

Another unborn child named Samuel Armas was operated on in 1999 at twenty-one weeks for spinda bifada. When he saw a picture similar to that on the back cover, family advocate James Dobson called it this photo it "the photograph of the decade."

Chuck Colson described it this way:

As the surgeon was closing the womb, the miracle happened. Baby Samuel pushed his hand out of the womb and grabbed the surgeon's finger. Photographer Michael Clancy caught this astonishing act on film. And in that instant, Clancy went from being prochoice to being prolife. As he put it, "I was totally in shock for two hours after the surgery—I know abortion is wrong now—it's absolutely wrong." 33

Samuel Armas was sewn back into his mother's womb, then born nearly four months later in December 1999. Unfortunately, many people have not looked at these pictures. Nor have they considered the implications of what it means for physicians to be treating a patient, giving him anesthetics to dull the pain, performing a life-saving or life-enhancing surgery on him, watching him grasp the surgeon's finger, then turning around and saying it is perfectly acceptable to kill that same patient for the remaining four months until he is born. 

The good news is that some people are finally starting to see the self-evident moral inconsistency of this position. The bad news is, other people remain blind. A stunning example of this (as I point out under 8d, "Abortionists know that human life begins before birth") is that the surgeon whose finger was grasped by both bbabiesaby Sarah and Samuel is grasping in the picture performs abortions on spina bifida children of the same age!

It is not just abortionists who prefer not to deal with this evidence. Journalist Matt Drudge, author of the "Drudge Report," attempted to use Baby Samuel's photo on his Fox News Network television show, but was forbidden to do so by network management. They feared he might use the photo as "a jumping-off point to talk about partial-birth abortion." 34 Due to the network's censorship of the photograph, Drudge resigned.

20/20's expose on the illegal sale of fetal body parts

One story provides an example of the good news/bad news aspects of the current discussions concerning abortion. The television news program 20/20 conducted a three-month investigation on the fetal body parts industry, and revealed their findings on the March 8, 2000 telecast. They reported that a black market industry has grown up around tissue and organs from aborted unborn children, donated "to help medical research," then marketed for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Correspondent Chris Wallace interviewed a Missouri medical technician, Dean Alberty, who said that two tissue-retrieval companies he worked for encouraged him to take fetal tissue obtained from women who had not consented to donate their unborn children to medical research.

20/20 found that some companies are charging very high fees and showed price lists charging $325 for a spinal cord, $550 for a reproductive organ, and $999 for a brain.

How are these prices determined? One 20/20 producer went undercover as a potential investor to meet Dr. Miles Jones, a Missouri pathologist whose company, Opening Lines, obtains fetal tissue from clinics and ships it to research labs. "It's market force," Dr. Jones told the producer, explaining how he sets his prices. "It's what you can sell it for." He says he hopes to run his own abortion facility in Mexico where he could get a greater supply of fetal tissue by offering cheaper abortions: "If you control the flow, it's probably the equivalent of the invention of the assembly line."

"That's trading in body parts. There's no doubt about it," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. 35

While ABC's program was an eye-opener for many, it failed to air Alberty's eyewitness accounts of babies who were dissected and their organs harvested while still functioning. In these cases, according to the eyewitness, abortions were not performed instead, babies were born alive in order to procure undamaged fetal specimens. ABC shed no light on the connection between partial-birth abortion and fetal tissue marketing, though evidence points to a direct connection between the late term abortion method that delivers a whole and unfragmented child for the intended procurement of limbs and organs... 36

ABC also ignored other significant allegations brought to its attention by Life Dynamics, and chose not to identify Planned Parenthood's direct involvement in the scandal. 37

Ironically, the report expressed no concern whatsoever that children were being brutally murdered and dismembered, only that some people are improperly making money off donated body parts. This is equivalent to not being upset that Holocaust victims were dying to provide lampshades made of human skin, but only that entrepreneurs were making too much money from the sale of the lamps. As Life Dynamics put it, "20/20's focus on the money trail is like pointing out that smoke from the ovens at Auschwitz violated Germany's Clean Air Act." 38

On the one hand, we must be grateful the abortion industry is finally being exposed. On the other hand, those exposing it are focusing on secondary issues which pale in comparison to the primary issue of what's being done to children. 

Where are we going?

In his monumental work How Now Shall We Live?, Chuck Colson points to indicators that the secularization of America is grinding to a halt. He suggests that despite many of our alarming social problems, "some of the most destructive pathologies are beginning to decline." These include the decline in birthrate among unmarried teens, the decline in surgical abortions, and the reductions in the number of people on welfare. Colson asks,

Why are cultural trends shifting? Because modernity has played out its destructive logical consequences. All the ideologies, all the utopian promises that have marked this century have proven utterly bankrupt. Americans have achieved what modernism presented as life's greatest shining purpose: individual autonomy, the right to do what one chooses. Yet this has not produced the promised freedom; instead, it has led to the loss of community and civility, to kids shooting kids in schoolyards, to citizens huddling in gated communities for protection. We have discovered that we cannot live with the chaos that inevitably results from choice divorced from morality.

As a result, Americans are groping for something that will restore the shattered bonds of family and community, something that will make sense of life.  39

My hope and prayer is that this book, in its new and improved form, will be a tool in the hands of both church and culture. May it, by God's grace, help us restore the respect for human life that resides near the core of any good nation.