The Best Pro-Life Arguments for Secular Audiences

Abdulali Almabek

Writing Center Program, Nazarbayev University

WCS 150: Rhetoric and Composition

Professor: James Swider

September 12, 2021

There is an issue nowadays whether or not to illegalize abortions, which is important though

becoming highly distributed only recently. Cathy Cleaver Ruse and Rob Schwarzwalder, who are

against abortion, have written an article called “The Best Pro-Life Arguments for Secular

Audiences” in 2011. In this article, they give the arguments of abortion defenders as well as state

counterarguments of another side. They argue that abortion makes womens’ lives worse and it is

a matter of saving lives of children, who are alive and human beings as well as adults. The main

purpose of the article is to persuade readers that abortion should be outlawed. The authors of the

article have used all three rhetorical strategies to convince readers in their position well.

However, in this paper, I will mostly focus on the logos which were efficiently used throughout

the passage.

The main argument of this article is that the fetus is a human being, although not born yet. Ruse

and Schwarzwalder argue against abortion defenders giving facts and data that support their

point of view. Firstly, they state that zygote after fertilization is a living organism, because it

consists of human DNA (Ruse & Schwarzwalder, 2011, p. 1). Secondly, they introduce zygote’s

development stages giving facts that prove it’s alive. These arguments are logos, because they

include numbers and factual data which are scientifically proven. People cannot argue that these

facts are not correct, and therefore by using them, authors make their argument reasonable and

therefore faithful. Next, they state that most of the abortions made are not due to such important

reasons as health problems or rape. Ruse and Schwarzwalder (2011) declare that “ the vast

majority of abortions are “purely elective” abortions, done on healthy women with healthy

babies” (p. 4). They prove it by using researches of Guttmacher Institute, who give statistics

where only about 7 percent of all abortions were made because of important problems mentioned

above (Ruse & Schwarzwalder, 2011, p. 4). Also, they give a reference to a website where about
2.5 million women described their abortions were not their own choice, but rather people around

forced them to do so (Ruse & Schwarzwalder, 2011, p. 6). This information is used in a correct

way, because by seeing such small percentage of abortions being made by really important

reasons and such a big number of women describing their reasons make a reader support the

author’s point of view. Also, authors not only give evidence for their arguments, but also do they

look at the opposing arguments before making arguments. So, the authors did a great job by

using a lot of evidence and statistics to bolster their standpoint.

In conclusion, by analysing this article, we can learn that evidencing your argument in an

appropriate way can do a good job in convincing your audience to support your viewpoint. Also,

we should look at both sides of the issue, and to strengthen our argument we should make a

counter argument for opposing arguments. This can help your readers understand why your

argument is better and reliable.

Reference:

Ruse, C. C., & Schwarzwalder, R. (2011). The best pro-life arguments for secular audiences.

Family Research Council.