The Atheist’s God-Free Argument for Ending Abortion

I am an atheist, a 29-year-old woman, well-educated at secular institutions, and I lean liberal on many issues, including same-sex marriage and climate change.I am also a dedicated pro-life activist, working to make abortion unthinkable.

The abortion industry would have you believe that people like me do not exist. They would have you believe that the pro-life movement is almost exclusively old white men, with a few pearl-clutching church ladies thrown in. This characterization is insulting to both young and old. The older pro-life leaders of today are the pioneering young adult activists of the 1970s, who courageously dissented from Roe v. Wade. And they have recruited new generations of pro-lifers to follow in their footsteps; millennials in the movement call ourselves the “pro-life generation.”

The abortion industry would have you believe that people like me do not exist. They would have you believe that the pro-life movement is almost exclusively old white men.

There are important differences between the millennial generation and those that came before. One of the biggest is religion. The well-reported decline in church attendance is driven largely by young adults. Over a third of millennials tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation, compared with 23 percent for Generation X and 17 percent for baby boomers. And even among millennials who have maintained a religious affiliation, many favor same-sex marriage and show less appetite for the “culture war” than their elders do.

Yet this more secular generation still shows up to save preborn children and their mothers from the tragedy of abortion. This puzzles some abortion supporters, who had assumed they would benefit from demographic changes. The key to understanding this discrepancy is to realize that it is not a discrepancy at all: We see abortion not as a culture war issue or as a religious issue but as a human rights issue.

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