My Position on Abortion: A Pro-Life Commitment to Human Dignity

I am pro-life.

I believe every human life has inherent worth and that human life begins at fertilization. Because of that, I believe unborn human life deserves legal protection.

But I also believe that taking human dignity seriously requires us to consider the dignity, life, health, bodily integrity, and circumstances of the woman carrying that life.

For me, this is not a slogan, and it is not an attempt to fit neatly within any political party’s preferred position. It is an effort to apply a consistent principle: human life has value, vulnerable people deserve protection, and government should exercise its power with both responsibility and compassion.

Why I am pro-life

My position begins with the belief that human worth is inherent. It should not depend upon whether someone is wanted, independent, healthy, economically productive, convenient, or capable of speaking for themselves.

That principle applies to unborn human life.

I believe a new human organism begins at fertilization. That biological reality does not by itself answer every legal or moral question surrounding pregnancy, but it does mean that abortion involves more than one human interest.

Because unborn human life has moral significance, I do not believe abortion should be treated as an ordinary medical decision in which the developing human life has no independent value.

Government has a legitimate responsibility to protect vulnerable human life, including life that cannot protect itself.

That is why I cannot support elective abortion on demand.

At the same time, recognizing the humanity of the unborn does not require us to pretend that every pregnancy presents identical circumstances or that pregnancy somehow eliminates the woman’s own rights and dignity.

Where I draw the legal line

I believe the law should ordinarily protect unborn human life from fertilization forward.

I therefore support a general prohibition on elective abortion, accompanied by clearly written exceptions for:

• the life of the mother;

• serious threats of substantial and irreversible physical harm;

• rape;

• incest;

• genuine fetal non-viability;

• ectopic pregnancy;

• miscarriage care; and

• genuine medical emergencies.

Those exceptions should be real, understandable, and medically workable.

A physician acting in reasonable and good-faith medical judgment should not have to wait until a patient is actively dying before providing necessary care.

When a pregnancy has progressed to the point that the child can reasonably be delivered alive without imposing a substantially greater medical danger upon the mother, the law should favor preserving both lives through delivery whenever medically possible.

The purpose of an exception should be to respond to the extraordinary circumstance that justifies it—not to unnecessarily end a life that medicine is capable of preserving.

The woman does not lose her dignity because she is pregnant

A pregnant woman remains a human being with a life, health, bodily integrity, family, responsibilities, and rights of her own.

Protecting unborn life therefore cannot mean that government simply disregards her.

Bodily autonomy is an important human liberty, but it is not an unlimited one.

No human being possesses absolute bodily autonomy in every circumstance. Like other rights and liberties, bodily autonomy exists alongside the rights, safety, and legitimate interests of other people. The law regularly recognizes limits on individual liberty when its exercise directly threatens or harms another human being.

Pregnancy, however, presents an unusually difficult situation because the woman’s bodily integrity and the developing human life are physically intertwined in a way that has few parallels elsewhere in law.

That is why I reject both extremes.

I do not believe bodily autonomy means the unborn child has no moral or legal significance.

But neither do I believe recognizing unborn human life means that a pregnant woman forfeits her bodily integrity, loses her own rights, or becomes merely an instrument through which government may pursue an objective without regard for what happens to her.

The difficult responsibility of law is therefore to recognize both human interests and determine when protection of unborn life justifies limiting individual liberty—and when extraordinary circumstances place legitimate limits on what government may compel.

I believe the law should seek to protect both lives whenever reasonably possible.

But there are tragic circumstances in which those interests come into genuine conflict, in which pregnancy results from violent coercion, or in which medicine cannot preserve the unborn child’s life.

That is why I support limited exceptions.

Life of the mother

No woman should be required by law to die so that the government can say it enforced an abortion prohibition.

When a pregnancy creates a substantial threat to the woman’s life, physicians should be able to act to preserve both lives whenever that is medically possible.

When it is not possible, they must be able to save the life they can save.

That does not mean the unborn child’s life has become less valuable. It means that a commitment to protecting life cannot logically require the government to mandate another person’s death.

Serious threats to physical health

I also believe physicians should not be forced to wait until a woman is actively dying before they may intervene.

The exception should be meaningful but carefully defined.

It should apply when continuing the pregnancy presents a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical harm, loss or significant impairment of a major bodily function, catastrophic organ damage, or comparable grave medical consequences.

I do not support an undefined “health” exception so broad that it effectively becomes abortion on demand.

But neither do I believe a woman should have to suffer preventable catastrophic injury before the law recognizes that her physical health matters.

Rape

Rape presents one of the most difficult questions in abortion policy precisely because the unborn child is innocent of the circumstances in which conception occurred.

I do not dismiss that reality.

But neither can I ignore that the pregnancy resulted from an extraordinary violation of the woman’s body that she did not voluntarily undertake.

The question for government is therefore not simply whether unborn life has value. It does.

The question is also how far the state may legitimately compel a victim of sexual violence to continue using her body for months as a consequence of a crime committed against her.

I believe the law may recognize that extraordinary circumstance without denying the humanity of the unborn child.

Something can be morally tragic without the criminal law being justified in compelling one particular outcome.

A rape exception should also be workable in practice.

I would not require a criminal conviction before the exception could apply. Criminal prosecutions frequently take far longer than pregnancy allows, and such a requirement could make the exception meaningless.

The law may reasonably require appropriate medical documentation or reporting standards designed to prevent abuse of the exception, while also protecting victims—particularly minors—from unnecessary additional trauma.

Incest

The same principle applies to incest, particularly where minors, coercion, grooming, abuse, or dependency relationships are involved.

When a child or vulnerable person has been sexually exploited, government has already failed to protect that victim once.

I do not believe the state’s response should then be to impose its full coercive power upon her without regard for what was done to her.

This exception should be directed toward situations involving abuse, exploitation, coercion, and vulnerable victims—not treated as a casual expansion of elective abortion.

As with rape, the law should not require a completed criminal prosecution before necessary medical decisions can be made.

Fetal non-viability

I also support an exception for genuine fetal non-viability.

That does not mean disability.

A diagnosis such as Down syndrome, a physical disability, intellectual disability, or a prediction that a child’s life may be difficult does not make that life less valuable.

Neither predicted quality of life nor anticipated dependency should determine whether someone possesses human worth.

By fetal non-viability, I mean circumstances in which competent medical judgment establishes that the child cannot survive outside the womb or has a condition incompatible with sustained life.

Non-viability should not be defined according to disability, anticipated suffering, or a subjective judgment that someone’s future life would not be worth living.

When medicine cannot preserve that child’s life, forcing a family to continue the pregnancy does not ultimately save the child.

It may instead increase medical risk to the woman and force parents to endure circumstances in which death is unavoidable.

Human dignity still matters when medicine cannot cure.

Ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, and medical emergencies

Women and physicians should never have to wonder whether treating an ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, or genuine medical emergency will expose them to prosecution.

An ectopic pregnancy cannot result in a viable birth and can become life-threatening.

Miscarriage care should not be confused with elective abortion.

Pro-life law should be written clearly enough that physicians can provide medically necessary care without waiting for a patient’s condition to deteriorate while lawyers determine whether treatment is permissible.

The legal standard should give appropriate protection to physicians exercising reasonable, good-faith medical judgment while preserving accountability for deliberate violations of the law.

Contraception is not abortion

I support access to contraception that prevents pregnancy before fertilization.

That includes ordinary birth control and emergency contraception such as Plan B when they operate by preventing or delaying ovulation or otherwise preventing fertilization.

Preventing a human life from beginning is morally and legally different from intentionally ending a human life after fertilization.

That distinction matters.

My pro-life position should not be interpreted as opposition to responsible family planning or contraception.

IVF and fertility treatment

I also recognize that in vitro fertilization has helped many families struggling with infertility welcome children they deeply desire.

I support access to fertility treatment.

At the same time, if human life begins at fertilization, then embryos created through IVF cannot simply be treated as biologically meaningless material.

That does not require banning IVF.

It does require us to approach fertility medicine responsibly and to encourage practices that respect embryonic human life while preserving reasonable access to treatment.

The law should seek solutions that protect families seeking to have children without ignoring the moral significance of the embryos created in the process.

What my position does not support

Because I believe unborn human life has value, I cannot support abortion on demand for any reason throughout pregnancy.

I cannot support abortion merely because a child may have a disability.

I cannot support defining fetal non-viability so broadly that it becomes a judgment about whether someone’s future life would be sufficiently desirable.

I cannot support a health exception so vague that it eliminates meaningful protection for unborn life.

I cannot support treating bodily autonomy as though it were absolute or as though no other human interest exists once pregnancy begins.

But the same human-dignity principle also prevents me from supporting a total prohibition that disregards the woman’s life, grave physical harm, rape, incest, or genuine fetal non-viability.

I cannot support laws requiring physicians to wait until a woman is near death before acting.

And I cannot support treating miscarriage care or treatment for ectopic pregnancy as though they were elective abortions.

Being pro-life does not end at birth

If we say that vulnerable human life deserves protection before birth, our concern cannot disappear the moment a child is born.

The principle of human dignity must apply throughout the human lifespan.

It applies to newborn children, mothers, fathers, children with disabilities, people living in poverty, victims of abuse, people who are elderly, and people who depend upon others for care.

Human worth does not depend upon independence or economic productivity before birth, and it should not suddenly begin depending upon those things afterward.

Being pro-life should therefore also mean creating conditions in which choosing life is realistically possible.

That means supporting mothers and fathers, strengthening families, improving maternal and infant health, making adoption more accessible, supporting children with disabilities and their families, expanding economic opportunity, ensuring children receive a good education, and maintaining a responsible safety net for people who genuinely need help.

That does not mean that every human problem requires a new government program.

Families, churches, charities, communities, employers, civic organizations, and government all have roles to play.

But a society cannot convincingly proclaim the value of unborn life while remaining indifferent to vulnerable children and families after birth.

My faith and my public responsibility

My faith informs the way I understand human dignity and my responsibility toward other people.

But I do not believe anyone must share my faith in order to understand or evaluate this position.

My position can also be grounded in natural rights theory, human rights, and constitutional principles.

The American tradition of natural rights begins from the proposition that certain rights belong to human beings by virtue of being human—not because government grants them, because they are economically productive, because they are independent, or because they are wanted by someone else.

Among the most fundamental of those rights is the right to life.

If unborn human life is human life, then government has a legitimate reason to recognize and protect that interest, particularly because the unborn are incapable of protecting themselves or asserting their own interests.

But natural rights do not belong only to the unborn child.

The woman also possesses rights that government did not create and cannot simply disregard. She retains her life, bodily integrity, liberty, and equal human dignity throughout pregnancy.

That is where constitutional government becomes especially important.

Government exists in part to protect life and individual rights, but its power is itself limited. The state cannot invoke a legitimate objective and then exercise unlimited coercion in pursuit of it.

Constitutional government requires us to consider not only what government seeks to accomplish, but also what government may legitimately compel.

The protection of life must therefore exist alongside principles of individual liberty, due process, equal protection, limited government, and respect for legitimate medical judgment.

Human-rights principles point toward the same tension.

Human dignity is not dependent upon power, independence, ability, social status, or usefulness. The vulnerable do not become less human because they cannot defend themselves.

But neither does protecting one vulnerable human being permit government to disregard the dignity and fundamental interests of another.

Abortion therefore presents a difficult conflict of rights and legitimate interests rather than a question in which only one person matters.

Bodily autonomy is an important liberty, but it is not absolute when another human life is directly implicated.

Likewise, the government's legitimate interest in protecting unborn life does not give it unlimited authority to disregard the life, grave physical injury, bodily integrity, or extraordinary circumstances of the woman.

The task of law is to protect human life while respecting the limits of governmental power—to distinguish ordinary circumstances from extraordinary ones and to respond proportionately when rights and legitimate interests genuinely conflict.

That reasoning does not require adherence to Christianity or to any particular religious doctrine.

A person can begin with natural rights, equal human dignity, the protection of vulnerable human life, constitutional liberty, limited government, and medical reality and arrive at the same fundamental conclusion: unborn human life deserves meaningful protection, but that protection must be pursued within a legal framework that recognizes the rights and dignity of the woman as well.

My responsibility in public office would not be to impose my theology upon anyone.

My responsibility would be to defend a policy that I can justify publicly through reason, natural rights, human dignity, human rights, constitutional principles, medical reality, and the legitimate responsibilities—and limits—of government.

The principle that holds it together

My position is neither that bodily autonomy is the only value that matters nor that pregnancy causes a woman to surrender her own rights.

Bodily autonomy matters, but it is not absolute.

Unborn human life matters, but recognizing its value does not erase the woman.

Both lives matter.

The unborn child’s humanity does not disappear because the circumstances are difficult.

The woman’s humanity does not disappear because she is pregnant.

Most pregnancies do not present an unavoidable conflict between those two truths, and I believe the law should ordinarily protect unborn human life.

But rare and tragic circumstances can involve competing lives, grave bodily harm, violent coercion, or medical situations in which the unborn child’s life cannot be saved.

A humane legal system should be capable of recognizing those circumstances without abandoning the principle that brought us to the question in the first place:

Every human life has inherent worth.

That is why I am pro-life.

And that is why I believe defending life requires responsibility, compassion, careful judgment, and respect for human dignity at every stage of life.

With respect for all Arkansans,

Joshua Irby

Paid for by Joshua Irby