#disquisitions

thoughts from a pro-life activist

Our strongest secular claim against elective abortion is this: it is a human rights violation – namely, a violation of the right to life and the right to be free from abusive violence. But when pro-life advocates conflate opposition to abortion with rejection of transgenderism, they undermine the very framework that makes this claim persuasive. To understand why, we must examine the three common comparisons: both are sexual, both are medical, both are harm.

Both are sexual. Some reject transitioning because it departs from natural law, treating it as a sexual or moral deviation. When pro-lifers equate abortion to transitioning on these grounds, they shift abortion from a human rights issue to one of sexual morality. In doing so, they suggest that opposition to abortion is based on personal or cultural values rather than universal ethical principles. In a pluralistic society, moral codes cannot be legislated wholesale. So if abortion and transitioning are framed as equally self-determined acts of consenting adults, we lose our ability to argue that abortion is a grave injustice – not just a private vice. We risk confirming the narrative that we’re trying to control others’ sexual behavior, not defend human rights.

Both are medical. It’s true that both abortion and transitioning occur in medical settings. But when we emphasize this, we again remove abortion from a rights-based framework and place it in a health-based one. If both are “bad healthcare,” then abortion becomes a misguided medical choice, not a violent act. Transitioning may involve medical misjudgment or even malpractice – but it is not homicide. Abortion is the deliberate killing of a human person. Framing both as abuses of medicine obscures this essential distinction. We end up implying that abortion is simply poor treatment – not an act of lethal injustice – and reinforce the belief that we are just trying to restrict healthcare access, not stop mass killing.

Both are harm. Some forms of medical transition may potentially be harmful, particularly for children who cannot fully consent to irreversible procedures. Abortion is also harmful – it kills children. So why not group both as acts that harm the vulnerable? Because the harms are not the same. Transitioning may result in regret or bodily damage. Abortion results in brutal death. When we present them as equivalent, we dilute the moral urgency of abortion and suggest it, too, is just unfortunate or regrettable – not the systematic destruction of the most defenseless. Again, outsiders infer that we don’t actually believe abortion is the most pressing human rights crisis – we just find it morally distasteful.

In a batch of freshly released FOIA documents, journalist David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress has pieced together a horrifying reality: Planned Parenthood harvests organs from viable, nonanomalous fetuses with documented heartbeats from abortions with labor induction for research at the University of California San Diego in exchange for IP rights. In other words, PP dissects healthy premies who are old enough to live outside the womb after making sure they are alive and delivering them intact, per their contract with UCSD, in which PP gets to keep all royalties for patents developed from experiments. And the Spanish-speaking mothers didn't give informed consent to this. In other words, and they prey on vulnerable minorities for their babies.

How do I know this is true? It's because I am the associate reporter in this video, and David emailed me the documents to read for myself.

Evidence includes:

Transfer agreement outlining the exchange of fetal tissue for ownership of research IP

Research plan approved by the UCSD Institutional Review Board requesting organ samples from nonanomalous fetuses up to 23 weeks gestation (that's nearly 6 months old; periviability begins at 21 weeks)

Same research plan calling for verification of a heartbeat immediately before the procedure to ensure the fetuses are living (this keeps their tissues fresh; the fetuses cannot be given a feticide to "euthanize" (poison) them before the procedure, because this would contaminate the tissues; this means the fetuses are either bled out or dismembered alive)

Did I mention this plan calls for up to 2,500 samples from 2,500 fetuses?

Email chain discussing the use of heavy doses of misoprostol before abortions after 12.5 weeks (forces labor contractions to deliver the baby — may result in live birth)

Donation consent forms in English which state the tissue may be used commercially, but in Spanish exclude this info entirely (San Diego has a large immigrant population, so this is racist targeting)

No, I cannot say for certain that PP actually did cut up healthy premies. But I am saying, it is documented that they were willing to do so, and that should be enough to cause alarm.

Protecting premature infants is a nonpartisan human rights issue. Everyone should be outraged about this violation of the vulnerable.

We write as pro-life members and allies of the LGBTQIA+ community to express our concerns about hostility towards queer inclusion and queer people themselves in the pro-life movement. In particular, we are concerned about the recent trend of tying the pro-life movement to unrelated anti-trans politics.

Many of us have been very active in defending life, whether as writers, protestors, sidewalk counselors, or simply quieter, non-public pro-lifers, who work behind the scenes to provide logistical support to larger groups. We believe that the hostility towards queer inclusion is both harmful and counterproductive. This is the wrong way to encourage more people, and youth in particular, to see abortion as unthinkable and to build a culture of life. Gallup polling shows that more women (10%) than men (6%) identify as LGBTQ+. Polling by the Pew Research Center shows 5.1% of Americans aged 18-29 identify as transgender or non-binary, compared to a national average of 1.6%. Fifty-two percent of 18- 29-year-olds personally know a transgender person. A 2025 Gallup article determines that women and youth are, broadly speaking, more likely to affirm queerness than men and older people, upon comparing Gallup Polling data from 1997 to 2025.

To attack queerness, when the demographics, most likely to self-identify as pro-choice (younger people, socially liberal or left-leaning people, women and LGBTQ+ people themselves, according to Gallup polling and the Public Religion Research Institute) are much more queer-affirming than the average member of the public, is a strategy perfectly calibrated to drive them towards the pro-choice movement and to close them off from considering pro-life arguments. It will alienate them from resources and drive them away from pro-life organizations that would help them keep their babies.

The pro-life movement frequently opposes access to PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) and trans-affirming hormone replacement therapy while explicitly opposing LGBTQ+ identities, further cementing this alienation and helping pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood falsely portray themselves as queer allies by selling these medications. And additionally, broader narratives are circulating that attempt to associate trans people with acts of mass violence that have been actively pushed since the murder of Charlie Kirk, with the mass shooting at The Parochial School at Annunciation Catholic Church also often cited to justify them. These are similar to misleading narratives pushed in the 1990s that attempted to associate pro-lifers with such acts because of the murders of abortion providers, later repopularized after the murder of George Tiller. These narratives are dangerous and have no benefit and are contradicted by the Gun Violence Archive’s data. James Densley, the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University’s co-founder and deputy director, states that trans people comprise at most 0.1% of mass shooters from January 2013 to September 2025 despite comprising an estimated 1.6% of the US population, making trans people 16 times less likely to perform a mass shooting than a typical American.

Furthermore, affirmation of queer identity, if anything, naturally fits into a life-affirming culture, as such affirmation substantially reduces suicide rates. Greta R. Beaur and colleagues published a 2015 study in the BMC Public Health journal, which studied 380 Canadian transgender people over the age of 16, showing that high levels versus low levels of social support were significantly associated with reductions in suicidal ideation and attempts. The estimated reductions were around 10 cases of suicidal ideation per 100 trans persons. This study estimated that high levels of social support prevented 22 suicide attempts for every 100 trans people who were considering suicide. Also, lower anti-trans prejudice overall was significantly associated with a potential prevention of 16 cases of ideation per 100 trans persons and a further prevention of 20 suicide attempts per 100 trans persons considering suicide. Similar results were found among a sample of about 26,000 LGBTQ+ youth aged 13-24 in The Trevor Project’s 2019 national survey, where transgender people’s rates of suicidal ideation and attempts are shown to go down significantly following gender-affirming medical care and regret rates are below 1%. We also strongly suspect, despite no research on the topic that is known to the authors of this letter, that transphobia worsening gender dysphoria among pregnant transgender men and non-binary people may cause larger numbers of them to have abortions.

In addition to trans people, discrimination against intersex people, including those diagnosed with Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome and 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, bleeds into their destruction in utero. A 2011 systematic review published in the Genetics in Medicine journal by Kwon Chan Jeon and colleagues states that a diagnosis of Klinefelter syndrome leads to average abortion rates of around 61 per 100 intersex babies (estimates ranging from 44 to 85 per 100), with Turner syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome and 45,X/46,XY mosaicism listed as “main factors associated with parental decisions to terminate an affected pregnancy,” compared to around 21 out of 100 babies being aborted in general and compared to around 40 out of 100 children in unwanted pregnancies as reported in a 2016 study. This is due to the dehumanisation of intersex persons as abnormal: in the 2011 systematic review, some sources “identified that the fear of abnormal development among children would more likely lead parents to elect pregnancy termination.” An end to this and the eugenic screening of intersex embryos is a demand of Europe’s largest intersex rights organization, Organisation Intersex International Europe (OII Europe).

Our opposition to abortion comes solely out of concern for the protection of unborn human beings from the violence of abortion, not out of any wish to uphold traditional gender roles. There is a current and pervasive trend in the pro-life movement of linking issues surrounding abortion to transgender issues, so the topic deserves special attention and calls for specific scrutiny. Our strongest secular claim against elective abortion is this: it is a human rights violation. But when pro-life advocates conflate opposition to abortion with rejection of transitioning, they undermine the very framework that makes this claim persuasive. To understand why, we must examine the three common comparisons made:

Claim 1: Both are sexual. Some reject transitioning because it departs from (real or perceived) natural law, treating it as a sexual or moral deviation. When pro-lifers equate abortion to transitioning on these grounds, they shift abortion from a human rights issue to one of sexual morality.

Claim 2: Both are medical malpractice. Both abortion and transitioning indeed occur in medical settings, but when we emphasize this, we again remove abortion from a rights-based framework and place it in a health-based one.

Claim 3: Both are harmful. All medical procedures, including gender-affirming procedures, come with a risk of harm and abortion directly causes harm to the preborn. But when we present these circumstances as equivalent, we dilute the moral urgency of abortion and suggest it, too, is just unfortunate or potentially regrettable – not the systematic destruction of the most defenseless.

Abortion is the defining human rights issue of our time. If we want to persuade others of this, we must stop distracting people by conflating it with concerns over transgender affirmation. Public-facing pro-life leaders should resist the urge to bundle these issues together because doing so does tangible harm and alienates potential pro-life allies. It reinforces false narratives about our movement’s intentions and weakens the clarity of our moral witness. We must let abortion stand alone so that others can finally see it for what it is and act accordingly.

Against this backdrop, we want pro-life leaders and organizations to publicly commit to the following specific actions:

Cease promoting anti-trans, anti-intersex and anti-gay narratives in the pro-life movement. We do not wish to see pro-lifers speak of homosexuality as unnatural/sinful/illegitimate, or of marriage as only between a man and a woman. We do not wish to see pro-lifers speak of transition, whether medical or social, as intrinsically harmful; of transness, in any form, as being a mental disorder or a potential danger to cis women; or of intersex people as freaks or aberrations. We do not ask that conservative views on sexuality are never expressed, only those that attack queerness

Publicly state that LGBTQ+ people are fully welcome in the pro-life movement and that they do not have to hide their queerness when doing pro-life activism.

Commit to intentionally and equally platforming queer pro-life voices.

Commit to not intentionally misgendering anyone, regardless of whether they are pro-life or not. Specifically, we ask that you use the names and pronouns that people want you to use, rather than any former names or pronouns they may have gone by in the past. This includes not intentionally using they/them pronouns to avoid using someone’s explicitly stated pronouns, and it also includes using they/them pronouns for people who wish to be referred to in this way.

Publicly call out the dehumanizing and discriminatory narrative that queer people are groomers, pedophiles, terrorists, deviants or the like, and speak out explicitly against any attempts to define queerness as pornographic, such as those expressed in Project 2025.

Signed,

Dane Rogers (he/him)

Elise Ketch (she/her)

Abigail Scott (she/her)

Sarah Terzo (she/her)

Paityn J. Bowen (he/they)

Miles Bedlan (he/him)

Add your signature at the link below!

IT IS NOT "PRIORITIZING THE LIFE OF THE WOMAN" TO KEEP ELECTIVE ABORTION LEGAL.

We should not legally coerce people into unwillingly taking on health risks extraordinary to pregnancy. As a pro-lifer, I'm comfortable saying that. This is granting maternal primacy.

However, keeping the means by which to kill babies under ordinary circumstances accessible so as to keep pregnant people "safe" is not morally tenable. As long as there is legal access, there will exist an exploitative industry that preys upon vulnerable people in crisis. That is unacceptable. We shouldn't accept it.

We can borrow from drug harm reduction frameworks and prostitution liberation models to structure our response to the fact that pregnant people will keep procuring abortions, regardless of their legality. If we see abortion as a form of self-harm, then it logically follows —

Providers of abortion should be held strictly accountable. Here, we treat abortion like a controlled drug. It must only be offered by trained professionals in hospital settings. These designated healthcare professionals must be protected from being prosecuted for abortions, but the hospital institutions may be sued if abortions are provided for reasons outside of medical standards of care. Medications which can be used to cause abortions must be provided to those who need them for other health conditions, but with close regulation.

Abortion trafficking must be illegal. Here we treat illicit abortion providers and accomplices like pimps and johns. They should be held accountable under the law, and their operations must be shut down. They take advantage of vulnerable people and are dangers to our communities.

Abortion procurement must be decriminalized. Here we can look to both drugs and prostitution — don't criminalize users, don't criminalize prostitutes, realize that they are more often then not victims themselves and give them the means to step forward and get help without fear of persecution. See people who are aborting/have aborted this way too. Like a suicide/overdose prevention line, have a number people can call if they are going to attempt an abortion. Have widespread public education campaigns about the dangers of abortions, and about appropriate intervention when you think someone is at risk of aborting. This will also protect people experiencing miscarriage from unnecessary investigation.