By As Mexicoʼs highest court deliberates over a law that could legalize abortion on demand, a pro-life lawyer is promoting her book, which offers 20 of the best non-religious arguments against abortion.
“We’re already in the Good Friday” of the pro-life cause, said Ingrid Tapia, author of the book “Every Life Matters: Bulletproof Arguments,“ which details “the 20 best” nonreligious arguments in the defense of human life.
During her tour of Mexico to promote the book, which was released in February, Tapia spoke on April 28 with ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News, saying that the pro-life cause is a matter of “a commitment to civilization,” one that means opposing “any form of human extermination — be it abortion, the death penalty, or eugenics.”
She addressed a draft ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, Mexico’s highest judicial body, which “seeks the decriminalization of abortion and, consequently, the permission to perform abortions throughout the entire nine months of gestation.”
The ruling concerns a 2024 constitutional challenge to a state law protecting life from conception in which the court states that “removing abortion from penal codes is fundamental to precluding criminal proceedings and eradicating social criminalization and that which occurs within healthcare services.”
Defending life: ‘A commitment to civilization’
Given the current legal and cultural juncture Mexico is facing, she explained, “we have [selected] the 20 best arguments from a nonreligious perspective to come to the defense of life and seek to dismantle, because they are either false or flawed, the 20 most popular excuses we always hear to promote the decriminalization of abortion.”
“Defending life is not something proprietary to Catholics,” she pointed out, although she highlighted that “Catholics have been doing so for 2,000 years, and doing it very well.”
“We human beings are the ones who create the state and governments in any era and in any country,” she emphasized; therefore, “we must radically oppose any branch of the government of a state arrogating to itself or assigning to itself the authority to decide which humans live and which humans die.”
The discussion regarding the draft ruling at the Mexican Supreme Court was scheduled for early January but has since been postponed indefinitely.
A legal expert, Tapia served as a distinguished professor of Roman law and civil law at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and currently teaches electoral law in the master’s program in constitutional law at Pan-American University.
She has also advised the John Paul II Institute and Red Familia (Family Network), among others, on issues such as surrogacy, palliative care, abortion, advance directives, and conscientious objection. She is a member of the Interdisciplinary Family Studies Group at Pan-American University.
Keys to the ‘cultural battle’
In the “cultural battle” to defend life, she stated, “it’s essential to correctly choose the terrain, to correctly choose one’s weapons.”
“If you defend life based on your religious position and you go before a court seeking to defend life using faith-based arguments, it is highly probable that you will fail; for constitutional or constitutional-procedural language entails certain requirements that are incompatible with the language you are employing, or want to employ,” she explained.
She even warned that “it is highly probable that you will be stigmatized and dismissed right from the start,” which is why it is important to avoid — to borrow a war analogy — ‘bringing horses to a naval battle.’”
“That is why this set of arguments serves a practical purpose,” she emphasized, for it “compiles the 20 best, truly splendid arguments for defending human life without any religious basis.”
“Every Life Matters: Bulletproof Arguments,” published by Ediciones MUAC, is now available for sale in Mexico in Spanish, and will be available for purchase through Amazon in the coming weeks. English and French versions are currently in the works.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
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Reminds me of a statement from Margaret Somerville that the battle against euthanasia has to be fought on non-religious terms.