Self Defense: An Absurd Defense For Abortion

Viral abortion activist Bronte Remsik has sleek hair, smooth words, a large online following and a fancy doctorate degree. What she doesn’t have is a basic grasp on self-defense law.

In December 2024 on the Ellen Fisher Podcast, Remsik debated former Students for Life Ambassador Isabel Brown on the issue of feminism, and of course the topic of abortion surfaced. During their dialogue, Brown claimed that abortion is a unique type of killing because nowhere else does the law allow people to intentionally destroy another “unique, living, human individual.”

Remsik agreed that the unborn are individual humans. She then made the trendy argument that abortion is like self-defense: “You can end someone [in self-defense]. That is what it is ultimately. You are defending yourself, you are defending your body. You are defending yourself against physical, emotional harm.”¹

Remsik’s reasoning sounds convincing at first, but there are major problems with her conclusion. Self-defense, as described by law, involves using violent force against someone who is believed to harbor the intent to harm either yourself or someone else. Cornell Law School explains it as “a defense to a number of crimes and torts involving force, including murder, assault and battery” while another legal site defines self-defense as “the use of reasonable force to protect oneself from an immediate threat of harm. The key word here is ‘reasonable,’ which means the force used must be proportional to the threat faced.”²

Abortion is always the use of deadly force. And from these definitions, it’s a perplexing response to a human doing somersaults, napping or sucking his thumb in the womb. Saying abortion is self-defense is like shoving a square peg through a circular hole. The debate could end here, but the more specific applications of self-defense law are worth investigating in order to highlight how desperate the abortion “self-defense” plea is.

Basic Criteria in Self-Defense Cases

State rules outline what qualifies for using deadly force against someone else, but the courts still struggle with distinguishing between appropriate levels of violence and straight-up murder. Often the line is thin between the two. However, the most basic criteria considered in self-defense cases are:

The danger must be imminent, meaning the defendant believed they had to act when they did to avoid danger.
The act of self-defense must be proportionate to the danger.
The fear of the perceived harm must be reasonable.

If someone kills a born person, they don’t get to walk away without an investigation or trial. The justice system is immediately involved to determine if the killing was justified or not. Despite abortion activists claiming abortion is self-defense, abortion is not treated as such because the courts are not involved in the killings of preborn children. There is no legal inquiry to determine if an abortive killing qualifies under the above legal considerations. If abortion was treated under self-defense law, it would have trouble standing up under scrutiny.

Danger Must Be Imminent

In order for the threat of danger to be imminent, it must be certain to occur now, and the victim's response to the threat must also happen now – not sometime in the future.

Threats can be verbal or physical. Someone who yells “I’m going to kill you!” may demonstrate imminent danger to you in that moment, as does someone pointing a Beretta 92 at your face. Yet abortion advocates argue that women who fear for their lives due to pregnancy complications are also justified to use deadly force against their preborn children.

Because the danger must be imminent, there must also be no time to take any other action in order to save yourself. Here, the abortion “self-defense” argument falters. Abortion is not a quick solution to a true medical emergency. Both surgical and medication abortions may require scheduled appointments, necessitate travel to another state, and take days to complete – all of which undermine the claim of imminency.

If you have to make an appointment to defend yourself, you are not in imminent danger. If you have to consult your pro-choice girlfriends on which abortive method to use, you are not in imminent danger. If you have to make a trip to the store for some abortion pills and a latte, you are not in imminent danger. On top of that, thousands of doctors don't even believe abortion is needed to save a woman's life.

In 2012, over 1,000 medical doctors signed the Dublin Declaration on Maternal Health which states that abortion is never needed to save the life of a woman. The declaration reads:

As experienced practitioners and researchers in obstetrics and gynecology, we affirm that direct abortion – the purposeful destruction of the unborn child – is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman. We uphold that there is a fundamental difference between abortion, and necessary medical treatments that are carried out to save the life of the mother, even if such treatment results in the loss of life of her unborn child. We confirm that the prohibition of abortion does not affect, in any way, the availability of optimal care to pregnant women.³

Since a large part of the medical community testifies that abortion is never needed to save a pregnant woman in a life-threatening situation, the case for imminent danger crumbles even more.

The bottom line is, if you have days to carry out your planned deadly force, you are not in imminent danger. Planned deadly force also doesn’t fit the definition of self-defense anyway. There's already a category for that: It's called premeditated murder, something Remsik overlooks.

Force Must Be Proportionate to the Danger

In addition to proving imminent danger, the act of self-defense must be proportionate to that danger. This means if a man throws a shoe at a woman and she shoots him to death in response, her actions would not be seen as “like force.” Comparably, a woman who kills her preborn child has to prove that her child was about to do the same to her.

Legally, acceptable force requires “the response to match the threat level in question. In other words, a person can only use as much force as required to remove the threat. If the threat involves deadly force, the person defending themselves can use deadly force to counteract the threat. If the threat involves only minor force and the person claiming self-defense uses force that could cause grievous bodily harm or death, their claim of self-defense will fail." This means if someone slaps you across the face with their hand, you cannot slash their neck with a knife.

Remsik’s statement of using abortive “self-defense” to protect oneself from “emotional harm” would fail in the courts. People simply cannot kill another human because their emotions are fragile. Likewise, a woman suffering from treatable issues like gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, hyperemesis gravidarum, depression, varicose veins, sciatica pain, ectopic pregnancy and so forth who “defends” her health by killing her preborn child would also fail to meet the proportionate force criteria. Throwing up, swollen legs, high blood pressure and a bad mood simply aren’t legal excuses for murder. Deadly force used against a preborn human would be excessive in these instances.

Fear of Perceived Harm Must Be Reasonable

Since abortion does not qualify under imminent danger, nor is it justified as proportional force, any woman who believes she must kill her child to save her own life does not demonstrate reasonable fear of any perceived harm.

It’s not enough that a woman may be disillusioned and truly think her preborn child is going to kill her. Proving reasonable fear to avoid a murder charge hinges on showing that the average person would also have reacted with deadly force in the same situation. The fact that many women choose not to kill their preborn children in risky pregnancies and survive just fine, cripples this defense.

Even if it can be proven that an abortive woman had genuine fear, however unreasonable, it would at best be considered an imperfect self-defense case. This isn’t something pro-abortion advocates should hang their hats on. An imperfect self-defense case may only lessen the charge from murder to manslaughter, and not every state allows imperfect defenses. You might just be stuck with a murder charge for your delusion.

Awkward Silence and Unwitting Allies

The attitude that abortion is self-defense should be strongly rebuked. Brown missed a perfect opportunity to point out self-defense law and reinforce her original position on the podcast that abortion is a unique type of killing. It actually aligns with the definition of premeditated murder and not self-defense, yet it’s still legally allowed. Instead, Brown had little recourse to the legal dialogue.

There is likely a good reason for Brown’s silence. She may not agree in conversation that abortion is a form of self-defense, but if she’s consistent with Students for Life’s stance on criminalization, then she does agree with the sentiment of it in legislation.

Students for Life supports women having the legal right and protection to kill other humans in certain locations (in utero). And in a sense that’s what self-defense is too: the legal right and protection to kill another human in certain circumstances (imminent danger).

Brown’s tongue-tie gave Remsik the opportunity to control the conversation, which at least revealed how poorly thought-out her pro-abortion views are. While arguing for self-defense against preborn children, Remsik declared:

“You as a living individual are not allowed to use someone else’s body against their will. And if you wanted to do so, you would be criminalized for that. And so we are granting fetuses the exact same rights that everyone else here has and that is to have autonomy. If you do not have autonomy – meaning your body is not biologically autonomous, it can not run its own biological systems without relying on and potentially harming another individual – then you do not have the right to infringe on somebody else’s body to sustain your own life.”⁴

Of course, abolitionists know preborn humans don't have the same protections under the law as other humans do. Their murders are not investigated, parents are not legally compelled to care for the well-being of their preborn children like they must for their born ones, and women have carte blanche permission to kill their preborn children without legal consequence – something not granted in self-defense killings of born humans.

It’s clear when Remsik asserts that abortion is a case of self-defense, she appears to have no clue how far off base that is. In fact, if she's not careful she might just turn out to be an unwitting ally of the abolition cause. If she’s confident in her position, then she should join abolitionists on the front lines to call for equal protection and justice under homicide law for all humans. After all, according to Remsik’s logic, an abortive woman should be able to prove that her fetus was violently attacking her and she would have been murdered by her child if it hadn’t been for an open clinic 200 miles away or the online abortion pills that took a week to be delivered.

Or perhaps the abortive “self-defense” argument is merely a smokescreen, and what Remsik really means is she just supports murder.

Kayla Suderman is a member of abolitionist organization AIM KS, a signer of the Norman Statement, and author of the book Post-Roe Reformation.