In this episode Trent sits down with author Leila Miller to discuss the many ways divorce parallels the evil of abortion, including in the ways some faithful Catholics try to justify it.
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Joining me today is Leila Miller, mother, grandmother, Catholic author, blogger, and co-author of our, Book Made This Way: How to Teach Kids About Tough Moral Issues. I always botch the subtitle.
Leila Miller:
The subtitle’s long.
Trent Horn:
I can’t remember it. I know it was made this way-
Leila Miller:
I have to look at the book sometimes, I’m like, “What is that word?” Oh, tough, hard, moral. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so “Made This Way: How to Teach Kids to Talk about Tough Moral Issues.” Today we’re talking about a tough moral issue. So we’re going to talk about the issue of divorce. And I really liked an article you wrote at Catholic Answers a few months ago. It really blew my mind. You made a comparison between divorce and abortion and how the two are justified in similar ways. Not that they’re the same exact kind of thing, but that the reasons people give to justify divorce are similar to the reasons people give justify abortion.
Trent Horn:
It really hit me, because there’s a lot of Catholics who are solid, they’re pro-life, those reasons to justify abortion, they wouldn’t be okay with that. But then they’ll turn around, those same solid people, and start talking about divorce in this way. So that was … I don’t know, I liked that a lot and I was hoping you could talk more about that today here on the show with us.
Leila Miller:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s the death of a family isn’t as grave as a murder of a person, but it is still the death of a family, which is-
Trent Horn:
So, we’ll start right. The similarities between divorce and abortion and the similarities between the responses, that it is a kind of killing. You’re killing this marital life that existed, this bond that exists between men and women, that you try to sever. I mean, we can’t really sever it.
Leila Miller:
Right. It’s an attempt to sever it and-
Trent Horn:
But it has real effects.
Leila Miller:
It has real effects, and actually, one child of divorce had written an article a long time ago, and I didn’t put this in my article, but she talked about the one flesh union of man and woman. You could think of it even as a mother and a child. I mean, the flesh is together. When you have a baby in your womb, your flesh on flesh, this is a baby actually attached to your flesh. Then, of course, Christ said marriage is a one flesh union. So anytime you’re ripping that living flesh apart, something is dying. I mean, something pretty serious is being lost.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, because we think about divorce, it’s always so antiseptic. Divorce is just filling out paperwork.
Leila Miller:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Maybe this is another parallel with abortion and divorce. I don’t want to jump too far ahead, but I think a lot of people won’t think that abortion is wrong… as long as abortion is an abstract word related to choice, they don’t think it’s wrong. Until they see the ugly reality of what abortion is, then they’re like, “Oh yeah, we can’t do this.” I think something similar happens with divorce. It’s like an abstraction, and until you see the grizzly reality, the effects, you’re not going to be against it. What do you think?
Leila Miller:
Right. Yeah, well, I always say that Catholics are, and I’m talking about pro-life Catholics, Catholics are against divorce in theory, but not in practice.
Trent Horn:
Really?
Leila Miller:
They will say, it’s terrible, it’s awful, we’re against it, but then if it is their own family, their own marriage even, friends who are suffering, they will make that exception for the people who they know who are suffering.
Trent Horn:
Well, it’s like the temptation being against abortion until you or your daughter’s pregnant. It’s going to put your conviction to the test.
Leila Miller:
Exactly. The thing with divorce is it’s not as bloody, it’s not as immediate the effects with abortion as well, but divorce, the real brutal effects tend to come later also in life, even decades later, really tangibly, but you don’t see that right away. Then you have the entire culture and including a lot of Catholics who will say it’s really okay, it’s really okay, so don’t worry about it. But they would never say that about abortion, because we’re still pretty uniform on that.
Trent Horn:
You’ve chronicled, let’s make sure we’re doing all right here, and you’ve chronicled these after-effects of abortion in-
Leila Miller:
For divorce.
Trent Horn:
Sorry, of divorce. So you’ve chronicled the after-effects of divorce in an anthology called primal loss.
Leila Miller:
Right. Yeah, and that was a surprise to me, because I was one of those Catholics that was like, “Oh yeah, divorce is bad, divorce is bad.” But in the meantime, oh, I had suffering people in my life, that I actually, looking back, I realized I wasn’t the voice to save that marriage. I was the voice that said, “Well, your marriage is probably not valid anyway.” That’s kind of a thought that’s out there in our minds. So I just thought, “Well, they’re suffering.”
Trent Horn:
So, we start to think there’s a marriage where it’s difficult, and this would be another similarity, when someone says, “I’m pregnant. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got X, Y, and Z circumstances.” Look, I want to be compassionate and just help you. What’s the easiest way to get through X, Y, and Z? Maybe we kind of apply that to divorce and say, “Well, maybe the easiest way through your circumstances is getting an annulment, or maybe divorce isn’t that bad.”
Leila Miller:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So, we look at the difficult circumstances rather than the moral object. Is this act right or wrong?
Leila Miller:
Right. And people don’t know, and this was actually the final parallel I think I wrote in the article, which was the argument for abortion is, well, it’s not really a baby anyway. Then we often say, “Well, that’s not really a marriage anyway.” So what we don’t understand is, number one, yes, that’s a baby. We know that biologically, we know that objectively. Number two, we don’t remember that Canon law says that marriage enjoys the favor of the law. Meaning, we are to suppose, and presuppose, and assume that a marriage is valid until it’s proven otherwise in a tribunal. But we tend to jump the gun and say, “Well, that’s why you can go ahead and get divorced and go through the process, because it’s not real anyway.”
Trent Horn:
This idea, a presumption that marriages are not valid, it would make me feel like marriage doesn’t even really exist then. What more do we have to do? I mean, I worked in the office of marriage and respect life and the diocese for several years, before I worked at Catholic Answers, doing marriage prep, and the church has a six or nine month process. What more can we do to make sure people understand what they are doing? They’re of sound mind and body. Another similarity that came up in the article were the justifications is that when you and I talk about, well, divorce is wrong, and say, “Well, is divorce okay?” No. Divorce is sinful, remarriage after divorce is always wrong, after a civil divorce. People will say, “Well, what …” Then they’ll appeal the hard cases. They’ll say, “Well, what about someone who’s being horribly abused and are you saying divorce is wrong there?”
Leila Miller:
Right. So, that’s always the first thing that comes up when we do anything, anything I write or on social media or anything, you talk about divorce being bad for the children or for society, or being wrong just as the church teaches that it’s immoral. That’s actually a quote from the catechism. Divorce is immoral, there’s no caveat to that. They will immediately bring up the hard cases. So it’s very similar to when we talk about abortion.
Trent Horn:
Right. People will say abortion is wrong. Well, what about in the case of rape?
Leila Miller:
Yeah, the what about. What about this? It’s always those hard cases that people think, “Well, wait.” You’ve got to think. Clearly the church has an answer for the hard cases. This is a 2000 year institution, we know that there are answers to that. But the discussion gets derailed so quickly that you find yourself being caught up in all these hard cases, unless you know how to pull it back and say, “Wait a second. First of all, the church has an answer for that. But that’s not the majority of the cases.” We know that most divorces are low conflict divorces. We know that most women aren’t being savagely beaten. And in the cases that they are, or there’s something unlivable, Canon law says there can be a physical separation.
Trent Horn:
Right. Similar to how people say, “Well, what about if the woman’s life is in danger?” Say, “Well, you can engage in a medical procedure that kills the pathology, but not one of the patients.”
Leila Miller:
Right, right.
Trent Horn:
So if a woman has cancer, you can kill the cancer cells, even if the child isn’t going to survive that procedure. You can carry that over to divorce to say, yes, there’s a very rare circumstance where you could tolerate physical separation or even legal divorce, but you just cannot act like the marriage doesn’t exist anymore by doing something like getting remarried, for example.
Leila Miller:
Right, right, right. Exactly.
Trent Horn:
But you’re right, this whole, well, I’m going to throw out just this hardest case. I want to say to these people, “It seems like you’re not trying to understand the truth of the issue.” Now sometimes it’s an honest inquiry. I think it’s important for us to distinguish people who are honest, like, “Yeah. I think divorce is wrong, but what about this hard case?” Well, here’s the situation. It’s still wrong. It’s something that’s tolerated, like divorce in these horrible situations. We don’t celebrate it. We tolerate it in order to avoid some kind of worse evil.
Trent Horn:
Which honestly, that was St. Thomas Aquinas his reasoning for why divorce was tolerated in the old Testament. That way the Summa Theologiae. He says, “Well, why would God give the Israelites the law of divorce and Deuteronomy?” And Thomas says, “Well, it’s probably because he knew they had hard hearts and that if he didn’t give them divorce, they would just murder their wives because you can only be convicted of murder on two or three witnesses, but you spend a lot of time alone with your spouse.” And so God says, “Look, I know you knuckleheads aren’t there yet to do the right thing. So I’ll tolerate this.” But yeah, I feel like some people, they genuinely are concerned, but others it’s like a smokescreen or derailment, like you said. It’s a way to confuse the issue.
Leila Miller:
It’s like they’re trying to shut the conversation down. And if they can do that, then they don’t have to… Usually, I find it’s people that might want to justify their own divorce or their own situation. And it’s true with the abortion as well.
Trent Horn:
With abortions. Yeah.
Leila Miller:
Yeah. Yeah. So I see that a lot. I’ve done this now for five years and it just, it’s the same thing. Or you probably do with abortion, you see that same thing. So it’s the shutting down of the discussion. And I have to tell you, the people who are contributors to primal loss, who are the adult children of divorce, they don’t put themselves out there because it’s kind of a wound that they don’t want to be on social media talking about this, getting attacked, because it’s still a wound in their life. It’s hard to talk about, but they will say things like, “Okay, if we’re talking about a divorce…” They even count it down privately to me, there’ll be like, “Okay, 3, 2, 1. What about abuse?” You know, someone’s going to say it. They know that that’s how it goes. So we have to kind of maybe move away from that. But notice that’s the same argument.
Trent Horn:
And then just to ask people, I think what we need to do is get people in the conversation, and ask them, like we do with abortion, like I say, “Look. What are the unborn? What are they? What does abortion do to them? Is that right? Let’s talk about these questions first. Then we’ll go to the hard cases.” Because if the unborn are not human beings, who cares.
Leila Miller:
Who cares. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Do whatever you want. I don’t care. The same way if marriage is just a legal contract, who cares. People break contracts all the time, or renegotiate them. So we have to ask you, what is marriage? What is it? Is it something that we created? Whereas is it something that God made? I think a lot of people, because we tie… Maybe you could see what your thoughts are on this. We tie marriage to like our tax forms and benefits. And some people have this idea that the state created marriage and God is just kind of like, “Hey, that might be good to put in the Bible.” When that’s not the case.
Leila Miller:
Right. No marriage is pre political. It’s pre societal, except for if we’re talking about the society in the garden. I mean, that’s where marriage was founded, by God.
Trent Horn:
Right. People think society created marriage, but it was marriage that created society.
Leila Miller:
Created society. Exactly. Exactly. And how was it made by God? It was made permanent. It was made permanent, conjugal, and fruitful. So those are the things that we-
Trent Horn:
I think what people don’t understand is they think that, oh, well divorce, things like that, that’s only for Catholics. Like that’s just for Catholic marriage without realizing no, no, no, no, no. We believe in a good and natural marriage is lifelong. It’s monogamous. It’s something God made in nearly every culture on earth. They figured it out. They recognize that. That’s something He put into us. Now Christ, he raises it to level of sacraments. So you can’t dissolve it. That’s the difference. But even there, a good and natural marriage is presumed to be valid.
Leila Miller:
Exactly. And we talk about this in our book because we have a couple of chapters, three chapters, on divorce because it’s a natural law issue.
Trent Horn:
That’s right.
Leila Miller:
Marriage is a natural law issue. It’s a universal, as I like to call it, it’s everybody has done it. Everybody marries in every culture, and every religion, and no religion. And so Christ elevated Christian marriage to a sacrament, which is indissoluble by man. But even those natural marriages, like two Buddhists or an unbaptized person and a baptized person, are presumed to be permanent. They are expected to be permanent by God. Even though in some cases, those can be dissolved. But when we’re talking about Christian marriage, it is indissoluble by any man.
Trent Horn:
Only death.
Leila Miller:
Only death-
Trent Horn:
Only death.
Leila Miller:
And a sacramental marriage.
Trent Horn:
That’s right.
Leila Miller:
So it’s something that we aren’t, I guess, I don’t know. We’re not catechized well on that.
Trent Horn:
But I think what’s good is we have, I think we can focus on the natural law. It’s kind of like with abortion, see, we found all the similarities. The abortion we make a natural argument. This is a human being. How do we treat human beings? If marriage just is a permanent bond for the good of each spouse and their children, what harms it if we break that? And then with abortion, we can say, “Hey, what are some empirical effects we’ve seen?” Like post abortion syndrome. What have we seen happen from abortion? And I think we can do something similar with divorce. And it’s like, well, what has happened? What have we seen? I think it might’ve been Peter [inaudible 00:14:00] who said it, but if there was a drug or a food product that caused the same things that divorced did, like low test scores, depression in children, premature mortality, the FDA would ban it immediately.
Leila Miller:
Right, exactly. Poverty. I mean everything. Yeah. They would ban it, but because it is connected to sex and peoples… We believe now that sex and marriage is a romance issue rather than a natural law issue or an issue of stability for the spouses and the children that come into that union.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Marriage and sex exists solely to satisfy the preferences of adults.
Leila Miller:
Yes. So as long as the adults are happy in their romantic relationship, which could be a marriage, then that’s all good. We support them. But as soon as the adult is not happy anymore, because it’s connected to sex, that’s what Peter [inaudible 00:14:56] was saying, because it has to do with sex, we are quite fine with them going off to be fine with someone else. And that’s because we have a completely backwards understanding now, since probably the sixties, of what marriage is.
Trent Horn:
But what’s interesting when you think about adult happiness, like, oh, people should just be happy. It’s also this idolizing of autonomy because you think in divorce, let’s say there’s the spouse who wants to leave, they’re unhappy if they stay. And the other spouse is unhappy if they leave. Well, whose happiness trumps? It’s always the one who wants to leave.
Leila Miller:
It’s always the one that wants to leave. Yep.
Trent Horn:
Because our culture says, well, I want them to get to have that, that way I’ve got my escape valve, if I ever need it.
Leila Miller:
It makes them very uncomfortable to know that you might have to stay in a marriage that doesn’t make you blissfully happy. and so we don’t want that for ourselves. We hope that there’s an escape hatch. And that’s really part of that. That’s one of those arguments for abortion too, is like, okay, there’s an escape hatch. There’s a way out. I’m suffering. This thing has happened that I no longer consent to, or I don’t want this. And this is going to tie down my future. This is going to change everything in my life if I continue on and with this natural law thing that’s happening and I don’t want that. And so we tell people, the argument is, “Well, it’s just a once and done thing. It’ll hurt. It’s a little painful and then you’ll get over it and then you’ll be free.”
Trent Horn:
You’ll be fine.
Leila Miller:
You’ll be fine. And everyone around you will be fine. In fact, everyone will be happier if you do, whether it’s the abortion or whether it’s the divorce.
Trent Horn:
One last similarity I notice. I feel like when sex is involved in a moral issue, rational thinking goes out the window. So when a white person says that they’re black, they’re actually being racist or appropriating a culture. When a man says he’s a woman, well he’s right, because it has something to do with sex. So the rational thinking goes out the window. I believe that if abortion had nothing to do with sex, almost everybody would be against it. Like if we lived in an alternative world where the way you had babies was you put your finger in the machine that takes your DNA, it grows the baby in a little tank or whatever, and people just went in and said, “Nah. I changed my mind.” And ripped it apart in the tank, but it had nothing to do with sex.
Trent Horn:
It’s kind of like, I remember a long time ago, there was someone who did a prank call to veterinarians, animal doctors, asking them, “Hey, my cat’s pregnant. Can you do an abortion?” And the vets are like, “You’re a monster. This is horrible. Why would you…” Well look, she can’t have a bunch of kittens, we’re going to get rid of them anyways. But when it has something to do with sex, the rational thinking, it just goes out the window and the same with divorce. Now sometimes it’s a living arrangement you don’t want. But a lot of times it’s so you can be freed up to have a sexual relationship, lifelong sexual relationship, with somebody else.
Leila Miller:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
And so to be able to protect those preferences, it kind of trumps rational thinking.
Leila Miller:
Right. And it’s a second chance, that’s another one of the arguments too. It’s like, well, this baby isn’t the right time, or it’s not the right one, or there’s problems with this baby, or I’m too young, or I’m too immature. Exact same thing with divorce. It’s like, well, not this marriage, it wasn’t this man, or this woman, and unfortunately it didn’t work out very well, but there’s going to be this other chance to get it right. So we feel a reborn.
Trent Horn:
Well, yeah. So an abortion treats the baby… It fails to acknowledge the baby is an irreplaceable human being. Is irreplaceable, that cannot be restored. And divorce fails to recognize how irreplaceable that marriage is. Because even if you got remarried in the future, you’re not continuing the old marriage. Well, could have been canonically obviously, if you get a civil divorce you’re still married, but you’ve done grave violence to it. It’s not really the same.
Leila Miller:
Yes. And to the child of a divorce, it can’t be rectified. That’s a family that has now been destroyed. I mean, it could be rectified if they hopefully would get back together and reconcile at some point. And some people do down the line.
Trent Horn:
It would be like if you cut your arm off and then reattached it surgically and learn to do your fingers again. It’s not going to be like how it was before.
Leila Miller:
Right, right. You can’t destroy a family and expect that, oh, everyone’s going to be fine, any more than you could expect to have an abortion and think, well, everything’s just going to go along fine and there’s no repercussions. There will always be the repercussions later on. But the arguments we use to justify it always are about freedom, and God wouldn’t want you to suffer through something you don’t want, and once and done, it’s over. And it’s the same arguments. And once I started realizing that as I went through my divorce work, I’m like, these are exactly the same arguments. And it’s pretty amazing to think about because we don’t think of those as both grave issues and yet they are.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. They are. Well, what are some resources you would recommend people who want to learn more about this issue, learn more about your work so they can understand this better and really confront this important issue?
Leila Miller:
So I have resources on my website, which is Leilamiller.net. That’s L-E-I-L-A miller dot net. The book is “Primal Loss.” Which goes through and basically gives the story from the adult children of divorce, from their perspective, not mine. Because I didn’t know anything about this subject. And then just to show that we can get over it, just like people who have abortions, there can be healing. But there can also be… We can dissuade those types of things. I have a follow-up book that was called “Impossible: Marriage is Redeemed.” And basically you can take the worst situation and God can redeem it, if we don’t do that aborting of the family, aborting of the marriage. So we just have to see that God will, just like with an unwanted pregnancy, God will see it through if we trust him and do the right thing and follow God’s law.
Trent Horn:
All right. Well, thank you all so much. And don’t forget to visit Trenthornpodcast.com. Check out our book, “Made This Way: How to Talk About Tough, Moral Issues with Your Children.” And I hope you guys have a very blessed day.
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