(LifeSiteNews) — The 2022 March for Life in Washington, D.C., recently gave America a powerful reminder of the incredible dedication of the pro-life movement. But caring and doing are two different things, and with newcomers joining the cause every year comes the need for guidance on how to channel their enthusiasm into productive advocacy.
Adam Peters, proprietor of Right Edge Magazine (and a former colleague of mine at Live Action), offers exactly that in Pro-Lies: How to Expose the Pro-Abortion Deception. Written with philosophy professor Robert Alexander, the book is a concise, accessible guide for making the pro-life case and countering pro-abortion sophistry that is far more comprehensive than any book clocking in at just 134 pages has any right to be — all argued clearly and logically, with no single topic overstaying its welcome.
All the essentials you’d expect are here: when life begins, what personhood means, why “bodily autonomy” isn’t a license to kill, and how the judiciary twisted the law to protect abortion. Plenty of secondary talking points are deftly dispatched, too, including the claims that banning abortion would increase maternal deaths and crime or overwhelm the adoption system. There’s also a wealth of useful information on botched abortions, infanticide, abortion’s usefulness to sex predators, and more.
But even veteran pro-lifers are likely to learn a thing or two, such as the fact that the outdated “quickening” standard of ascertaining human life was already disputed as far back as the 17th century; that Justice Harry Blackmun privately admitted that his first-semester dividing line in Roe v. Wade was “arbitrary”; or that Chief Justice Warren Burger would go on to express regret about voting for Roe.
Ultimately, though, information is just trivia if you don’t know how to use it. Fortunately, Pro-Choice Lies also offers useful pointers on how to debate abortion, whether in-person or online, complete with a demonstration of how to dissect a sample article. Most impressively, the authors teach readers that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to debate, and different situations call for different tactics (for instance, persuading a confused neighbor one-on-one as opposed to discrediting a zealot for the benefit of an audience) … something not every pro-life apologetics outfit recognizes.
Finally, the book offers direction on specific areas where readers’ passion can be put to good use, from the obvious (supporting crisis pregnancy centers, passing pro-life laws) to the novel (like making business harder for abortionists by pushing new regulations on medical waste companies).
Readers have a lot of options when it comes to pro-life apologetics books, but would be hard-pressed to find one that packs as much value into as digestible a form as Pro-Lies.
