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In this episode Trent shares his thoughts on the greatest pro-life victory in 50 years and what this means for the pro-life movement moving forward.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I didn’t think that I would live to see this day, but I am so grateful to God that it’s here. I have so much to talk about. I mean there’s still just a rush of emotions. I’m recording now about two hours after the decision was released. So I don’t know. This might be a very stream of consciousness episode, but I think there’s just a lot to talk about and process here. For those of you who are new, my name is Trent Horn. This is the Counsel of Trent podcast. Look at me. I can’t even do the intro the way I normally do it. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m shaking a little bit. I didn’t think I would live to see this day.
Trent Horn:
Obviously what’s going on, Dobbs v. Jackson has officially come out from the Supreme Court and it states very clear Roe and Casey are overturned. The decision to restrict abortion is returned to the people of the states and their elected representatives. This has been crazy. This has been crazy. Think about everything leading up to this decision. You had a leaked Supreme Court decision. The entire decision was leaked and now I feel like the reason for that was to intimidate the justices to change their minds. I feel like … I mean we still don’t know exactly, but I feel like it was a liberal clerk who wanted to intimidate the justices to change their minds. There was an assassin, an assassin at Kavanaugh’s house. So you wouldn’t know if you watched MSNBC. I never thought that I would be telling you an episode here on the podcast where Supreme Court and assassin would be in the same sentence, but the forces of evil will stop at nothing. Evil has its day, but God has his victory. The fight continues.
Trent Horn:
Oh, my goodness. What to talk about? All right. Here, I guess we’ll go through everything. This morning, I did not think actually the case was going to be decided today. I thought they were going to push it ’til the very end of the term next week, but then I thought maybe it will be because they added this special day on Friday. I guess on Office Space, they’re like, “We give people bad news on Friday. Let’s have the weekend to cool off.” I guess maybe the justices really wanted the nation, knowing that so many people would … Well there’s going to be, they say there’s going to be a night of rage, that they’re going to burn down churches. They’re going to … Here’s the thing. Remember, we don’t respond in kind. We don’t do that. We take the moral high ground in that regard. We can protect ourselves obviously, but never to respond … We defeated violence today. At least we made a major victory against violence, I should say, but we shouldn’t respond in kind.
Trent Horn:
This morning, I was on my phone and my two-year-old wanted to jump on the trampoline. Two-year-old youngest kids, they get whatever they want. So we’re jumping on the trampoline with him and I’m looking at my phone refreshing because the decision began to be released 10:00 AM Eastern. So I’m refreshing SCOTUS blog which is a website I go to a lot when there’s breaking Supreme Court news. 9:01 AM, first case hits. It’s Medicare. It’s a complicated technical case on Medicare. I’m like, “Oh, okay. They’re probably not going to release it today.” Go back inside with my little guy, go up to our master bedroom, I open my laptop just to check, just to see what the other cases were going to be released today, and then I see it in the thing. Dobbs, Dobbs is released. I was like, “Uh!” Then the next line, “6-3 Roe Casey overturned.” I was on the verge of crying. I still am. Still those emotions rise up in me to have tears because I didn’t think it was going to happen. I’m such a pessimist.
Trent Horn:
It’s like Mary Jane in Spiderman. If you’re constantly disappointed, if you constantly don’t expect things to happen, you’ll never be disappointed. That’s how I get through life. My wife is an insufferable optimist so she’s having a great day. We both are, but I’ve been fighting this. I was doing pro-life apologetics before I did Catholic apologetics. I’ve been formally doing pro-life apologetics for half my life. I was trained by people who have been fighting Roe v. Wade since before Roe v. Wade, fighting abortions since the late 1960s. I’ve been trained by people and who are still alive and I called them and I said, “I’m so grateful you lived, that you especially, the people …” I am so grateful for the people who are alive today that were alive when Roe was handed down. I’m grateful that they are here. I never thought they would see it. I didn’t think I would see it. I thought maybe my kids would see the fruit of our pro-life activism. I didn’t think …
Trent Horn:
I saw the leak. When I saw the leaked opinion, I was shocked. The Dobbs case, I thought the Dobbs case when I first heard about it that they would basically allow the 15-week ban, but keep Roe which is schizophrenic. You can’t really do that, but the leaked opinion when Politico broke it back in May, when I read that, I was like, “This is an amazing opinion. This is great. We’re not going to get to have this. Pro-lifers don’t get to have nice things. We have been constantly disappointed for 50 years.” Planned Parenthood v. Casey was our best shot at overturning Roe and through bad decisions, bad appointments, it was a narrow defeat, narrow defeat, 5-4 with the plurality there. Honestly, my worst-case feeling, I thought what was going to happen was that it would split and it would be like 3-3, so it’d be the three dissenters and then it would be … I thought it might be like even a 3-3 split or a 4-2-3, something like that. So I thought there was going to be a split at the court where Roberts ends up writing the majority opinion and it cannot be reached because there’s a plurality and then we lost everything or he was going to peal off Kavanaugh or somebody else.
Trent Horn:
But no, and I think Roberts … The decision itself … So this morning, I read through the opening explanation. I started reading through the main opinion. I mean it’s over 100 pages long. I haven’t gotten through it. I’ll do a more in-depth analysis later down the line. A lot of people will too, but I’m surprised at least when I started reading and seeing other commentary online is that I thought the Alito draft that was leaked, it was very forthright in its declarations about how wrong Roe and Casey were. I thought that was going to be chopped to pieces if it did turn into the actual draft opinion, the actual majority opinion. It basically so far what I read at the beginning survived relatively unscathed. Roberts, Kavanaugh have their own concurring judgments, but I’m really amazed that Roberts, instead of doing just a sole concurring judgment, he joined the majority, that it was 6-3. I think he just decided to do that because I think that if he were the …
Trent Horn:
I have to have a thanks out there. I’d like to send a big thank you to Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Big thanks. Justice Ginsberg, wherever you are, I’m sure you can hear what’s going on right now. For wherever … We obviously pray for the repose of your soul. We should pray for the repose of everyone’s soul, but a big thanks to Justice Ginsberg. I’m so glad you felt it was really important for you to stay on the court and not retire and then from there, we got Justice Amy Coney Barrett and look where we are.
Trent Horn:
Another thing that this brings up, back in 2020, I did an article for Catholic World Reports. So there was an article in America Magazine that said … It was by William Cavanaugh, no relation to Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh. Cavanaugh with a C. So William Cavanaugh writing in America Magazine, he said, “Pro-lifers, it’s time to give up on the Supreme Court. You guys keep trying to elect Republican presidents and it just doesn’t work.” His argument was because Republicans don’t really want to overturn Roe v. Wade, they don’t really … They want to keep Roe forever to always have pro-lifers vote for them which is a dumb argument because if you deliver on the goods, that shows you’re trustworthy and then there’s still always going to be fights about abortion. So you want to deliver for people. There might have been some cynical pro-life politicians who only wanted votes, but there are many that were true believers. That’s how we got here today.
Trent Horn:
Then Cavanuagh’s piece for America Magazine, he was saying, he tried to say, “Oh, it’s Republicans. They don’t really want to overturn Roe. That’s why we have to give up voting for them for Supreme Court Justices.” No, it is pro-abortion Democrats who have sabotaged, they tried to sabotage Thomas, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett. They went after … Bork, Robert Bork back in the ’80s, they borked him, that he would have been … Ted Kennedy. “In Robert Bork’s America, women will be in back alleys.” They were a vicious campaign to keep Roe v. Wade. This was David versus Goliath and today, the stone hit right here in the brow, right here.
Trent Horn:
So I wrote a rejoinder to him. That was back in 2020. I responded to Cavanaugh, his article in America in a 2020 article, I’ll link to it below, in Catholic World Report. I’m pointing out, one, I said, ‘It’s not because people don’t want to overturn it. It’s because of pro-abortion Democrats as to why we haven’t made traction and missteps.” As much as I love Ronald Reagan, it was absolutely stupid that he picked Sandra Day O’Connor to be on the Supreme Court. It was a dumb pick. That set the pro-life movement back. We have shot ourselves in the foot numerous times. I would prefer we not do that anymore. Okay? But also I pointed out that we need … The pro-lifers should focus on the Supreme Court and in the piece, I didn’t really think Roe would be overturned in the near future at least. So my argument was a more modest one, saying pro-lifers should focus on the Supreme Court because the court at least restrains pro-abortion evil.
Trent Horn:
I cited the Becerra decision a few years ago, I think it was about 2018, where the … And I’ve brought this up a lot on the podcast because it’s a shocking decision. The liberals on the court, they want to pass law. They used the court to pass law, not to interpret law. So four of them voted to have pregnancy centers in California be forced to advertise abortion services as if they’re misleading people. Does your gym advertise for McDonald’s? You got to give everyone their options, right? Does your gym advertise, does a gym have to say, “Oh, there’s liposuction too. Here’s this. Here are these alternatives?” No, but they wanted to force pregnancy centers to be involved in promoting abortion to force speech upon them. It’s absurd. Thankfully, we had five justices to vote against that, but it should have been 9-0.
Trent Horn:
I said in the piece that at the very least, we need to focus on the court to keep evil from getting worse, but now I think we’ve seen that in other cases, it’s so important to protect people’s liberties, to protect liberty. To be frank, the liberal block on the court, Kagan, Breyer, and now Ketanji Brown, Sotomayor, they want to use the court to pass any law they deem fit. That’s what I found truly rich. They’re complaining in their dissent. I read through a lot of the majority opinion. The majority opinion a little. I read through a lot of the dissent by those three justices and they’re moaning and complaining that Roe and Casey affirm people have the right to control their bodies, except these are the same justices who would do anything they can to affirm the government’s right to force you to take a vaccine, force you to wear a mask, to impose all kinds of things upon people I’m sure if they wanted to.
Trent Horn:
Well here’s what’s interesting, how the court’s mentality has changed about its brazen will to power. I think that the Dobbs decision should be read like another case back in … I think it was 1999. This was a case of Glucksberg v. Washington. That was the case where the Supreme Court 9-0 said there is no right in the Constitution to assisted suicide. The court did not say that assisted suicide therefore must be illegal. The court allowed the states to decide what assisted suicide legislation they would have. So we have a handful of states that allow it. Most do not. That’s what I hope will happen at least at the outset with abortion. The parallels are very interesting here. Doctors killing human beings is bad. That’s why the Constitution doesn’t say anything about it. The states can decide. Thankfully, most states are against this atrocity. So if we can have that for assisted suicide and the nation is not plunged into chaos, we can have that for abortion. It’s not my ideal. I want abortion illegal in all 50 states, but it’s a great start that will save countless lives.
Trent Horn:
I’m going to lose track because obviously this is more stream of consciousness. I wrote my notes here. Live to see this day. I didn’t think so, but in that case … Sorry. In that article, I didn’t really put forward, “Yeah, we’re going to overturn it soon,” because I just can’t get my hopes up, but now I do. There’s a huge, huge fight ahead, but this weekend, I’m going to just be happy. I’m going to order nice food and spend time with my kids and let them have whatever they want. It’s a time to celebrate. You know why, that today is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Sacred Heart of Jesus that is so much compassion for the unborn and their mothers. It can’t be a coincidence that the court on a special day, a special day of decisions were released, chose this day, chose this day to release this opinion to give us a real chance to restore legal protection for the unborn and to overturn one of the most evil pair of decision, Roe and Casey, in the history of United States constitutional law and the history of the US.
Trent Horn:
So it’s so special. That’s why I’m recording this right now. I’m going to wrap up here relatively soon. At least I’m going to go to mass with my family. I’m going to go also because I don’t know what wackos are going to be there. I do say it’s a little bit of flattery by the way. It’s a little bit of flattery that when people are angry about abortion being made illegal, their first instinct is to attack the Catholic Church. Their first instinct is not the Baptist Church down the street even though there are many great pro-life Baptists. I have a lot of friends who are pro-life Baptists, but the institution people recognize that if someone wants to take away abortion, Catholic Church. That’s actually true. You go back in history. The National Right to Life Committee was founded basically by the Catholic Church. In the ’70s, Evangelicals, a lot of them were pro-choice. The Southern Baptists, a lot of them were pro-choice because they said, “Well the Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion so we’re not going to get in on this. That’s a Catholic thing.”
Trent Horn:
Then in the ’80s, the more Evangelical Protestants got on board, but they were kind of late to the game. It was Catholics who started the pro-life movement in America and it was Catholics who have worked to have solid constitutional thinkers in the judiciary to be eventually elevated to the federal and the Supreme Courts. We took a long, hard path for 50 years and it’s paid off as a movement. So what are some other points here to bring up? Reading through the case, yeah, I’m amazed that it stuck. I read through the dissent. The dissent by Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, it reminds me of every single nonsense argument that I heard on a college campus smashed together into one piece. It’s basically a lot of complaining. It’s complaining that, “We think these laws are important and the court shouldn’t allow the states to decide that.” It’s a lot of complaining like, “What about women? They won’t be able to make their choices. They’re not going to be able to make decisions in their lives.” It’s so over the top some of it.
Trent Horn:
From the very moment of … Under Dobbs, if a court restricts abortion, it says, “From the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term even at the steepest personal and familial cost.” So the dissent goes on and it talks about how they argue from bodily autonomy. They say, “Everyone including women owns their own bodies.” Do I have to wear a mask? Do I have to take a vaccine to work at my job? Justices, can you tell me about that? So the court has restricted the power of government to interfere with a person’s medical decisions or compel her to undergo medical procedures or treatments, except this doesn’t work because birth is not a medical procedure. It is the natural effect of life just like puberty is not a medical procedure. If you started down this line, saying that someone’s forced to go through puberty as a way to ensure you can give chemical castration … They’re going to argue that way by the way. Forced birth like forced puberty, they’re going to use that for transgender cases or at least the liberal justices will try.
Trent Horn:
By the way, it’s also funny. The case, the dissent from the liberals, it says a woman’s right to abortion, not a person’s right to abortion. I thought that was transphobic, right? It’s a woman’s right to abortion. So these justices are what? In their 60s, 70s, 80s? Ain’t nobody got time for that. But the problem is they’re argument, as they say, here are these cases where you can refuse a stomach pump, you can refuse antipsychotic drugs. Yeah, you can refuse medical procedures, but abortion is not about refusing a medical procedure. It is about the right to a medical procedure like a dilation and curettage, a suction abortion, in order to kill another human being. It’s about the right to a procedure that throughout common law has traditionally been considered illegal or at the very least there’s been no right towards it. Then the dissent says, “Yeah, but 150 years ago, yeah, there wasn’t a right to an abortion, but there also wasn’t the right for women to vote. There wasn’t the right for marriage, interracial marriage. So if you overturn Roe, those things are going to go away too.” That’s the other big argument that they’re making, except it’s not parallel, the arguments here.
Trent Horn:
The 14th Amendment guarantees women the right to vote. Men were allowed to vote, but unfortunately the facts of history prevented this from being recognized for women. The right to marry someone of the same race naturally entails the right to marry someone of the opposite race or another race, but it’s not the case that I agree the discrimination argument would work if we lived in some bizarro world where men could get pregnant and men can have abortions, but women are not allowed to have abortions. That would be unjust. That would be an injustice. Of course there the answer would be to take abortion away from men, not to give it to women. Okay. Just because one group has a right to do … Men were allowed to own slaves 150 years ago. Women were not. Let’s just say that. I’m sure that’s the case, right? Let’s say it was. Men are allowed to own slaves. Women are not 150 years ago. To achieve equality, that doesn’t mean that women should get the right to own slaves. What it means is nobody should own slaves. No one should mistreat human beings like this. Okay. So the same is for abortion.
Trent Horn:
The fact of the matter is that the courts have long upheld child support laws that men, if they get somebody pregnant and that person chooses not to have an abortion, that man has to pay child support because he’s the father. He has a duty towards that child. If that man has a duty to sustain a child through his body, he has to go to work and make extra money to support that child, so he has a duty he can’t just discharge because he wants his future … You see that here. Women won’t be able to live out the futures that they want, things like that. Well men can’t either if they’re forced to pay child support, but we recognize it because fathers have duties to their children and the same is true for pregnant mothers. Right?
Trent Horn:
They say things like, “Oh, these other rights will come down. It’s like a Jenga tower.” Should the audience for these too much repeated protestations be duly satisfied? We think not. What does it say? The dissenters, they’re so funny. “Nor does it even help just to take the majority, the people who struck down Roe, at its word. Assume the majority is sincere in saying for whatever reason that it will go so far and no further. Scout’s honor.” You can see there they’re having fun with their dissent. They’re not happy, but they should have seen this coming a long time ago. Still a little bit more to talk about, but [inaudible 00:21:48]. They make a good case, saying Roe is wrongly decided just as Plessy was. There’s the problem that the liberals can’t justify why could Brown overturn Plessy, but Dobbs can’t overturn Roe. There were a ton of people who were against racial integration in the South in the 1960s when Brown v. Board of … Or the ’50s when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, but that didn’t stop them. They can’t make an argument.
Trent Horn:
It’s the same problem I had talking to Steven Milles when we had our dialogue about Roe. Why is it that Plessy can be overturned even though there’s no really substantive changes even in political opinion, except there’s a growing civil rights movement at that time? Plessy can be overturned, but Roe can’t. There’s no good reason. That’s given, but otherwise, I think the case is great. I mean I have to obviously … I got to give a fuller account and investigation of it before I can comment on it more. I’ve read a lot. It’s only been a few hours. The entire thing with the majority opinion, the concurring opinions, and the dissent is 213 pages long, but I’m going to go through it because I’m going to include it probably in the next week or two then. I’m going to finish my second edition of Persuasive Pro-life. Got to have a second edition now. The fight continues in unexpected directions. So I’m hoping that will come out next January. We’ll see on that.
Trent Horn:
Finally … Well yeah, January. By the way, I don’t want to march in January anymore. I’ll do stuff in January that was already scheduled, but we’re done. It should be the 50th march and we walk away and I hated when I used to go to the March for Life saying things like, “I’ll see you next year,” as if we’re always going to be doing this and nothing’s going to change. I’m not going to say, “See you next year.” I want to march on June 24th. I want to march on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We should do that. You know what’s great? We can do that and we should take every Catholic high school kid, bus them up, no classes to go to, right? They have summer break, but we could take them out there. Nice to not have to march in winter either. 50 long, cold years, we were in a winter. Now, we’re in spring.
Trent Horn:
Oh, by the way talking about this going forward. The fight continues, right? Here’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to play dirty tricks. They’re going to say, “This is going to take away other rights.” No. No, it’s not. They’re going to say back alley abortion. They’re going to do life of the mother. Matthew 10:16, “Be as wise as serpents, gentle as doves.” Reminder though, if you want to … Here’s what you should do. Become a patron to the podcast. I’m not self-serving. This is not self-serving anyway. Go to trenthornpodcast.com. Trenthornpodcast.com. You go there. Everybody who signs up in the month of June gets free access to my apologetics course arguing about abortion. Watch that course. It should take you a few hours. You’ll know how to have all these … These discussions are going to ramp up a ton in the next few weeks. You got to be prepared to focus on the one question. What are the unborn? Don’t get distracted.
Trent Horn:
If you’re new to the fight, ramp up your skills in talking about this. Even if you’ve talked about it for a while, you got to do it smart so we don’t get side tracked. So go to trenthornpodcast.com. When you do that, you’ll get an access code to register for arguing about abortion. You’ll get the course free, any tier, any level of support at the podcast. I’m just … It’s here and now it’s all settled in. I know there’s a big fight ahead. I’m going to take a break from fighting just for a little bit. I got a call. It’s my mentor who had been doing this for 50 years. I got to talk to him. I’ll talk to you guys later.
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