Poverty Is Hard

Remember to discuss the loving option of placing the child for adoption. Even if adoption were not an option, poverty would not justify killing a person, so from a philosophical standpoint, adoption is beside the point. But people find the pro-life position easier to swallow if they can see that we care about women in difficult situations and we have reasonable options in mind for such women.

The rhetorical technique of drawing an analogy to killing a two-year-old is called “trotting out a toddler”. The primary purpose of this technique is not to refute the other person’s argument or score debate points, so don’t pat yourself on the back when the other person agrees that we shouldn’t kill the toddler. Instead, the primary purpose of this technique is to move the conversation to the core area of disagreement, which is generally either the status of the preborn or the ethics of killing.