The secular pro-life viewpoint holds that induced abortion unjustifiably ends the life of a distinct, living member of the human species, and that this conclusion follows from biology, ethics, and human rights reasoning alone, without reliance on scripture, religious authority, or theological premises about ensoulment. Holders of this view include atheists, agnostics, humanists, and religious people who deliberately set aside faith-based premises in public argument, organized in the United States chiefly through groups such as secular-pro-life (founded in 2009 by Kelsey Hazzard as a secular anti-abortion organization) and affiliated academic and legal advocates. Proponents distinguish their position sharply from the religious pro-life movement's rhetoric, arguing that the wrongness of abortion is a matter of applied ethics and developmental biology, comparable in kind to other human rights questions rather than to doctrinal disputes.

The biological premise. Advocates argue that embryology settles, as a matter of science rather than opinion, that a new, genetically distinct, living human organism exists from fertilization (or, in some formulations, from the completion of the process that produces a single unified genome). They hold that this organism is self-directing its own development according to its own genetic program, metabolizing, and growing - the hallmarks of a living being - and that calling it “potential life” mischaracterizes an actual, if immature, member of the species Homo sapiens. This premise is treated as empirical and uncontroversial among embryologists, distinct from the separate, genuinely philosophical question of that organism's moral status.

The moral status argument. Because the biological premise alone does not settle ethics, secular pro-life writers supply philosophical arguments for why this early human organism has a right to life. A prominent version, associated with philosopher Don Marquis, holds that what makes killing an adult wrong is that it deprives the victim of a “future like ours” - a future of experiences, projects, and relationships - and that this deprivation applies equally to a fetus, since the fetus has the same kind of valuable future ahead of it. A second, “equal rights” or anti-discrimination argument contends that drawing a line of moral worth at any point after fertilization (birth, viability, brain activity, sentience) is arbitrary and functions analogously to other historically rejected exclusions from the human community based on size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency - summarized by proponents in the mnemonic “SLED.” Proponents argue that if none of these differences justify killing a human being at other life stages, they cannot justify it in utero either.

The bodily rights response. Secular pro-life writers engage directly with the argument, associated with philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, that even granting the fetus full moral status, no one is obligated to sustain another's life with their own body, so a woman is not obligated to remain pregnant. Advocates respond in several ways: some argue that pregnancy typically results from a voluntary act whose foreseeable consequence is the presence of a dependent human being, generating a distinct obligation not present in Thomson's stranger-violinist analogy; others argue that abortion is not merely a withdrawal of support but an act that directly and intentionally ends the dependent human's life, which they treat as morally distinct from allowing a death to occur; still others contest the analogy's premise, arguing that a mother's relationship to her genetically related offspring differs relevantly from a stranger's relationship to an unrelated violinist.

Human rights and consistency framing. Advocates frame the position as an extension of a broader human rights commitment - protecting the vulnerable, weak, or dependent regardless of their usefulness or wantedness to others - and argue explicitly that this commitment does not require religious premises. Many secular advocates present the view as continuous with progressive or humanist values such as nonviolence and concern for the powerless, and reject the claim that opposition to abortion is inherently a religious or conservative position.

Secular arguments against abortion predate the contemporary movement (some nineteenth-century feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are cited by advocates as having opposed abortion on grounds unrelated to Christian doctrine), but organized secular pro-life advocacy as a distinct identity emerged mainly in reaction to the post-Roe v. Wade movement's heavily religious, and especially Catholic and evangelical Protestant, public image. Advocates argue this religious association obscured a genuine secular case and discouraged nonreligious people who held pro-life views from identifying with the movement or engaging with its arguments. Secular Pro-Life was founded in 2009 to supply campus outreach materials and public arguments free of scriptural reference, and secular philosophical arguments such as Marquis's “future like ours” argument (1989) and later “equal rights” formulations were developed and popularized specifically to give the position an independent, non-theological foundation.

• Don Marquis - philosopher whose 1989 paper “Why Abortion is Immoral” is widely cited by secular advocates as the leading purely philosophical case against abortion, resting on the “future like ours” argument rather than theology.
• Kelsey Hazzard - attorney and founder and board president of Secular Pro-Life, a prominent public advocate for framing opposition to abortion as a human rights and consistency issue independent of religion.
• Christopher Kaczor - philosopher whose academic work systematically defends the pro-life position against standard bodily-rights and personhood objections using secular ethical argument.
• Nat Hentoff - journalist and civil libertarian, self-described secular humanist and atheist, known for arguing that consistent civil-libertarian and human-rights commitments extend to the unborn.
• Monica Snyder - executive director of Secular Pro-Life, who has written extensively on secular framing of prenatal development and abortion statistics.

Secular pro-life advocates disagree among themselves on several points. Some hold a strict view that moral status and full legal protection attach from fertilization, while others argue for protection beginning at a later marker, such as the point of individuation (twinning becoming impossible) or early neural development, while still calling themselves pro-life. There is also internal debate over legal strategy: some advocates favor an incremental approach (parental notification, gestational limits, restrictions on particular procedures) as the most achievable path, while others hold that any legal compromise concedes the core premise and argue for immediate, comprehensive protection. A further debate concerns exceptions for rape, incest, or threats to the mother's life: most secular pro-life advocates support an exception where continuing the pregnancy poses a serious risk to the mother's life, reasoning this from self-defense or double-effect principles, but disagree over exceptions grounded in the circumstances of conception, where some hold that the fetus's moral status is unaffected by the circumstances of conception while others favor allowing such exceptions on compassion or political-pragmatism grounds. Secular advocates also debate how much emphasis to place on distancing the movement from religious pro-life organizations versus building coalitions with them for shared political goals.

• Abortion
• secular-pro-life
• Abortion - Religious Pro Life Viewpoint
• Abortion - Pro-Choice Viewpoint
• abortion-bodily-autonomy-viewpoint
• Abortion - History
• abortion-fetal-personhood-debate
• abortion-viability-debate

1. Don Marquis, “Why Abortion is Immoral,” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 4 (1989): 183-202.
2. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47-66.
3. Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018).
4. Secular Pro-Life, “About Us,” accessed 2026, https://secularprolife.org/about/.
5. “Secular Pro-Life,” Wikipedia, last modified 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Pro-Life.
6. Nat Hentoff, “The Indivisible Fight for Life” (address, Americans United for Life Forum, Chicago, October 19, 1986).
7. Kelsey Hazzard, interview by Live Action, “An Interview with Kelsey Hazzard, Founder of Secular Pro-Life,” Live Action News, https://www.liveaction.org/news/an-interview-with-kelsey-hazzard-founder-of-secular-pro-life.