Audio only:
Joe shares an excellent method for discussing abortion with those who disagree, bringing calm and respect to a tense and uncomfortable debate.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and the conversation around abortion can feel completely hopeless because the two sides are intractable because there’s never any seeming movement in one way or the other. And we just seem to be as a people locked into this perpetual fight over this incredibly important issue. And so today I want to share some things you can do that actually make a difference, some things you can do that actually change minds on abortion. And I’ll see at the outset, it’s not going to change everyone’s mind. It’s not a silver bullet that’ll solve the entire abortion debate. If it was, we would have already seen that. But these are things that are more effective than what most people involved in the abortion conversation on either side are actually doing. Now, I should mention at the outset that the feeling of intractability around the abortion debate is nothing new.
In 1981, Alistair McIntyre released his book After Virtue. And in chapter one, he talks about these debates that we have that just seem interminable. And one of the debates that he mentions, actually the very second one after debates about war, was the debate on abortion. And the reason that he suggested this is, is because both sides are operating within an internally coherent moral framework. What that means is this, if you’re a pro-choicer and you say, “I believe that bodily autonomy and liberty are really important values, and as a result, we shouldn’t deprive a woman from making decisions about her own body. Therefore, I’m pro-choice.” That is an internally coherent vision of the world. It makes sense. But so does the opposite vision that says, “I believe it is wrong and even criminal to intentionally take the life of a human being, particularly an innocent defenseless human being and no one is more defenseless than a baby.
And therefore, it should not be legal for someone who is stronger to kill someone who’s weaker, even if that weaker person is within their womb.” You might agree or disagree with either of those two sides, but hopefully you can at least see that they make internal sense. And so one of the reasons that the abortion debate is often so unhelpful is because we don’t actually engage with the other side’s frameworks. I’m going to show how we can do that today. But before I do that, I want to address what I think is even a bigger problem. This idea that it’s just not for me to get involved in the debate. It’s too complicated. It’s too tense. It’s too stressful. It’ll cause too much disruption in my life. And so I just don’t want to talk about abortion. And to that I would just say abortion is worse than you think and it’s more important than ever to speak out on this issue.
You should get informed. You should be making better arguments on the abortion issue. And here’s why. I recently heard a stat that I did not believe when I first heard it, but someone said more people die from abortion than everything else. And you can see this with a couple of quick Google searches. So if you just type in number of deaths every year around the world, it’s somewhere between 60 to 63 million people who die each year. Now, that death count is only counting from birth. So it’s not counting abortions. So 60 to 63 million people somewhere thereabouts. But then if you look up number of abortions every year around the world, 73 million people.
I was so stunned by this that I went and I dug deeper in the data just to see, could this possibly be true? And the answer unfortunately is yes. So as you can see, those of you watching the video version of this, I’m putting the data on screen here that this is not just an AI Google summary pulling some hallucination out of thin air. No, the actual data that we have from the UN and from the Guttmacher Institute show that more people die from abortion than everything else combined. Now look, I think even if you’re pro-choice, you should recognize if it turns out that abortion ends the life of an unborn child, if it turns out that the child is alive and abortion is the intentional taking of that life, then at least logically we should be able to agree if that biological fact turns out to be true, that abortion is the biggest social justice and moral issue facing the entire world.
It’s bigger than every war combined. It’s bigger than every disease combined. It’s bigger than everything we could possibly fathom or imagine in terms of the sheer scope and scale of the problem. And meanwhile, it’s getting worse even in countries like the United States that are fairly wealthy. So the number of abortions is actually going up and not down. It had a steady drop for many decades and that drop reversed. Now, I’ve heard people claim, oh, this is the effect of Roe v. Wade being overturned, that this is increasing the overall number of abortions. But as my Catholic Answers colleague Trent Horn points out, that is simply not true. You can check out his video rebutting the claim that overturning Roe v. Wade increased abortions. You can also just look at Guttmacher’s own data. Now Guttmacher was founded as a pro-choice data analysis kind of advocacy group, but even in their numbers, you can see that this increasing number of abortions started before Dobbs was overturned and has continued in a pretty steady stream upward.
And the reason for it is because of the prevalence of chemical abortions. As recent as 2014, about a third of abortions were chemical abortions, meaning that people can just take drugs to end the life of the child in their womb rather than what are called surgical abortions. In other words, you no longer have to go to an abortion clinic to have an abortion. And the FDA has made this easier and easier. Well, now the number of abortions that are chemical abortions has gone from about a third to two thirds in the US. So a huge part, you would close every abortion clinic tomorrow. You could shut down every illegal abortion, clandestine, back alley abortionist. You could arrest all of them. And if you didn’t stop this trade in legal FDA approved abortion drugs, even if you were somehow 100% successful on all of those things, you would only reduce the number of abortions by about a third, plus people would probably then just have even more chemical abortions.
So this is a huge problem. It is a problem getting worse. It is, I think quite seriously, one could argue, the worst problem in the world according to the numbers. How do we go about talking about it in a coherent and charitable and effective way that can actually change hearts and minds? Step one, present a straightforward, simple and secular pro-life case. If you think this is a thing that needs to be addressed, and I think the numbers make it very clear that it is, how do we speak about it in a way that will actually move people? And if you start by quoting chapter and verse, or you start by quoting this part of the Bible that you find very convincing, or if you start by just venting your anger about the issue, there’s a really good chance that all you’re going to do is alienate the other person.
Now, don’t mishear me. People need the gospel too. But if you’re trying to both win them over to the pro-life position and win them over to the gospel all simultaneously, you might be making your job harder than it needs to be. Even at a deeper level, we would recognize that sin can darken the intellect and it turns the will away from God. So someone who is addicted to sin or somebody who is deeply involved in a life of sin oftentimes is not ready to hear the gospel until they see the badness of the life that they’ve led. So it’s okay to separate out the issues of abortion from other gospel related issues. You’re not being a bad Christian, you’re not being hypocritical or false to recognize you don’t need to be a Christian to see that abortion is wrong. Now, I like Steve Wagner of Justice for All’s 10 Second Case.
I think he does a fantastic job of presenting a case that you can memorize and present. It goes like this. Number one, if the unborn is growing, it must be alive. That’s a simple biological fact, pretty easy to establish. Number two, if it has human parents, it must be human. Again, we’re just at the realm of biology here. And number three, he says living humans like you and I are valuable, aren’t they? Or you and me are valuable, aren’t they? Would be more grammatically correct. But either way, that’s the simple case. So here’s what’s so good about it. Number one, if the other person is open even to hearing your case, you’ve made a very easy to understand argument. And if they’re going to disagree with it, you can ask, well, which of those three points do you disagree with?
And you can try to have a more focused and helpful conversation. You can try to narrow in on, well, where do we actually disagree? Remember I said at the beginning, one of the reasons so many conversations about abortion, and in fact, so many conversations about morality in general tend to go nowhere is because the two sides don’t engage with the other person’s vision of the world. Now in a moment here, we’re going to talk about how to engage better with their vision of the world, but here I want to just show how to present ours in a way that they can engage with. So whether you’re pro-choice, pro-life, wherever you are, you should be able to hear this and say, okay, those three points, they seem to logically flow pretty well. They make a pretty compelling case for the conclusion. And where does that leave us?
If you deny the first point, if the unborn is growing, it must be alive, then you’re really just arguing against biology. Now on the second point, somebody could say, “Hey, there are things that are growing that are alive, but they’re not organisms.” So you’ve got cells that grow in your body, you’ve got organs that can grow, et cetera. So how do we know that it’s alive in the sense that matters for our conversation? That’s actually a perfectly fair, very good biological objection. And it’s answered in the second one. If it has human parents, it must be human. In other words, at a biological level, we could get super in the weeds that what we’re really dealing with here is the fact not only that the unborn child is growing in the womb, but also is a genetically distinct organism that is not the mother, is not the father, but is a third person.
And this is easy to establish. They have different genes than mom and dad. They might be a different gender. The limbs of the baby and the limbs of the mom are not the same. Pregnant women don’t suddenly have eight limbs. They’re not spiders. And again, we’re just dealing at the level of biology here. So a baby in the womb is genetically a different type of thing than say a tumor. A tumor is part of the mother of the host, because it’s a part of the body that is growing against the will of the person, but it’s not a unique human organism and it doesn’t have human parents. It would be absurd to say the tumor has parents. The baby on the other hand does have parents. So maybe someone wants to deny it on that level and say, “Oh, well, then born child doesn’t have parents.” Again, we’re in the realm of just silly anti-biological arguments there.
Women don’t reproduce asexually. Babies have moms and dads, and they don’t acquire a mom and dad on their birthday. They already have a mom and dad prior to being born.
This is, again, straightforward biology. You can do genetic tests on babies in the womb. I believe we’re at the point where you can actually figure out if there’s a case of questions about paternity. I believe you can already establish that before the baby is born now. So yes, in the womb, there’s already a unique human being that has human parents, and these are biological facts that it really doesn’t make sense to try to deny. That then leaves the third argument, living humans, like you and me are valuable, aren’t they? Now, this is where I think a lot of the debate has to come down. Do we value every human being, even if they’re weak, even if they’re inconvenient, even if they cost a lot of money, even if nobody asks for them to be brought into the world or no? And I think that is something that we have to seriously grapple with.
Now, one of the advantages of doing the 10-second case that Wagner has is that it forces the person to realize that that is the actual disagreement. We don’t have any serious biological disagreements anymore. Once upon a time, people though that in the womb of the mother was just a clump of cells. We know now that’s just not true. I mean, there are people who don’t know the science, but this is not a serious position. So the entire debate really involves, do we treat all human beings as having dignity or only human beings we want to have dignity? And if we’re going to narrow the scope of who gets dignity and who doesn’t, whose life is protected from being taken and whose isn’t, who gets to decide that? Historically, it is the powerful. It’s the wealthy. It’s the people who control the levers of power. And there have been plenty of examples throughout history where those lines have been drawn to cut certain people’s lives out or to present them as less worthy of protection than other lives.
I don’t think many pro-choicers would want to defend that position, but that is a possibility. So if you present this case, the thing I find happens the most is that the person just won’t engage any of those three points. The three points are logical. They seem to lead to an obvious pro-life conclusion. It’s not clear what an answer to them would be. And so there’s a lot of deflection and the deflection can be really tempting to engage. And so my second suggestion is just to avoid the abortion double blind because there’s something that the pro-choice movement has done really effectively and a lot of pro-lifers have walked directly into this trap. They’ve walked into a kind of catch-22 because the argument will go like this. If you talk about abortion and pro-life legislation and presenting the pro-life case in terms of secular policy, they’ll say, “Oh, you are imposing your religion on other people.
It is too religious for the public square. It is too religious to be enacted into law.” On the other hand, if you want to get up and preach against abortion, you’ll quickly be told that you’re preaching politics from the pulpit. So somehow being pro-life is too political for church and too religious for everywhere outside of church. Now, it’s really worth saying a few things about this. The first is, it is true that the pro-life case is both a moral case that could be recognized and should be recognized in law and a moral case that should be advanced spiritually. It’s not unique in this regard. You can think about, for example, the fact that many of the leaders of the civil rights movement were clergy. That’s not a mistake. It’s not happenstance. Many of the leading abolitionists were clergy. There are plenty of issues in which something is a moral issue that relates to public policy and religious leaders and political leaders are going to have a lot to say on the subject.
And we should just acknowledge that, which makes it appropriate for both the pulpit and the ballot box, not for neither. So the answer of shut up because it’s too political for religion and too religious for politics, that’s not the answer. It’s no, when there is that overlap, we talk about it in both contexts. And in any other issue, you’ll find many of the same people trying to shut you up with the abortion double bind only too happy to say, “Hey, preachers should be talking more about the ills of poverty and the manipulation and mistreatment of the poor, and we should have good social nets and everything else.” And nobody says, “Oh, well, because poverty is a religious issue, you can’t have any laws about it.” That would be an absurd conclusion, right? So there’s two things to recognize here. First, one of the things going on here is this idea that if something is religious, it has to be confined to the interior of your private life.
Justice Scalia Lampoon back in 1992, he said church and state would not be such a difficult subject if religion were as the court apparently thinks it to be, some purely personal avocation that can be indulged entirely in secret like pornography and the privacy of one’s room. But then he said for most believers, it’s not that it never has been. Look, we want to admit at the outset, some of the reasons we care about issues like abortion or the mistreatment of the poor or war or any of these things is certainly because of Jesus and his example, certainly because of beliefs we have about the nature of reality. My whole worldview, my whole approach to politics flows from a much deeper orientation, the orientation I have to the nature of reality, to eternity, to God. And it would be insane for that not to be the case.
Tomorrow, if you’re a diehard pro-choice person and you realize that, oh, life begins at conception both biologically and spiritually, and what I’m doing here is this mortally sinful action, would that change your opinion on abortion? Of course it would, or it certainly should. It would be absurd for it not to. But look at this. The point I’ve just made isn’t just true of the religious person, it’s also true of the non-religious person. Whatever you believe about the nature of reality influences the political decisions that you make. Of course it does. If you have a religious belief that the entire world around us is just an illusion, maybe you don’t care about politics. Now, the reason people talk about a distinction between church and state is because they recognize we shouldn’t be trying to enforce someone to have the faith. Faith is a gift from God and we can’t legislatively enforce it.
But here’s the good news. You don’t need to share my faith in order to recognize that killing people, killing innocent people is wrong. And if biologically we can establish the unborn or innocent people, that’s all we need. We don’t need to get into questions on insolment or any of these things. So to the pro-lifers watching this, I would just say, watch out for that because people will ask you these theological questions and you will naively think, oh, this is a good faith question about when spiritually the soul enters the body and all of this. And if you go down that road, you’ll have walked completely into this totally unnecessary trap. It doesn’t matter. For purposes of the pro-lifed argument, it does not matter. None of the three points we looked at depends on theological questions about insolment or any other theological issue. So when somebody says, “Oh, well, Aquinas didn’t know when the soul was in the body,” who cares?
Not part of my issue at all, not part of the case that I’m presenting. So watch out for that because it is a trap. Whether the person is conscious that they’re trying to trap you or not, it is certainly used as a trap cleverly by pro-choicers and pro-lifers regularly walk into it.
Relatedly, the famous advice, keep it simple stupid, is important for presenting the case because as you lay out this case, you’ll hear certain very predictable objections. One of them is, well, you must just be pro-birth and not pro-life because what about poverty? What about after this child is born and there’s dysfunctional family and all of these other things? Again, it is very tempting to say, “Well, here’s what I think we should do with poverty. Here’s what I think we should do with any number of situations of family breakdown or dysfunctional families or any of these things.” This is again a trap for two reasons. First, you don’t have to solve every problem to solve one problem. If you see a kid drowning and you rush over and save their life, no sane person is going to say, “Well, are you not going to take care of them for the rest of their life?
You’re not going to pay for their college? What if they have other problems? You’re going to solve all those problems?” Of course not. You’re going to just stop them from getting killed. That’s plenty. And so likewise, when we see 75 million people getting killed, you can say stop killing them without having a solution for what to do about everything else. You could oppose the Holocaust without knowing what to do with the displaced Jewish population. You didn’t have to say, “I can solve all the world’s problems. I can solve all the problems facing this group to say whatever the answer is to the hard issues, the easy issue is we don’t kill people like this. This is unacceptable.” Now, everything else, whether it’s death penalty or war or poverty or these things, frequently people are going to bring up a more complicated issue. And I think it is fine to just say those things are complicated and whatever else may be true, we haven’t found the one policy that’s going to just solve poverty.
And so if you’re telling me we can’t stop killing kids until we’ve found the solution to poverty, you’re telling me we’re never going to stop being able to kill kids. We need to put these things in order of their priority here and say, “This one is a really easy one with a black or white answer. This should not be allowed. It’s also the biggest problem. And now all the other harder, more technical problems we can try to figure out, but let’s get the first one out of the way first.” And I would just point out, this happens in other cases where there were just evils beyond defense. This was one of the arguments made in defense of slavery. Well, if you stop slavery, what’s going to happen to all of the people who’ve been enslaved? There are legitimate tricky questions in terms of how do you incorporate people where their lives are markedly improved after slavery and some of that wasn’t handled very well.
So be it. It was still good to stop the enslavement of human beings. So it’s okay to focus on one issue and say, “This one issue is wrong.” And then when somebody brings up the other issues and says, “Well, what about this?” Our point is not, “I’m so morally pure because I’m pro-life.” The point is it’s wrong to kill kids. And if the thing you’re raising about poverty or war or the death penalty or any number of other issues doesn’t show me why it is okay to kill kids, then I don’t see why it’s pertinent to this conversation. So just keep it really focused. Now, that’s all kind of the affirmative side of things where you’re saying, “Here’s the pro-life case and you’re anticipating the very obvious objections that people are going to present. Oh, your pro-life case doesn’t solve every problem.” And you say, “That’s fine, but here’s what it does do.
It stops the biggest problem facing humanity.” Now, what about on the other side? Because as I said, both sides have what seems like an internally coherent moral framework. Here, I would ask you to be curious and I would ask you to be charitable and to be generous intellectually and to always assume of the other person better than maybe you think they deserve. Assume that they’re not just cartoon villains, that even people defending grave evils do so because on some level it makes sense to them. Now, I would argue for this both on a rhetorical and a spiritual level, meaning this. Rhetorically, when you assume bad faith in the other person, it doesn’t win them over to your side. The number of times I’ve made an episode and somebody who disagreed with me though I was wrong on purpose and then just is like, “Oh, he’s arguing in bad faith.” Every time it’s like, “Well, that’s rude.
I’m doing my best. I’m trying. Maybe I’ve missed an argument. Maybe I’ve misunderstood something, but nobody’s going to just go out and be wrong on purpose like this. And it’s never moved me.” Now, I suspect you probably have similar stories where you’ve had an opinion about something, a belief about something, you’ve voiced it, and the response that you got from other people was that you were a bad person for believing that. They don’t show you why you’re wrong. They just tell you that you’re bad for this belief. They probably felt great about being able to condemn you for how horrible of a person you were for your beliefs, but did it change your views? Of course not. Cancel culture kind of fizzled out because it doesn’t really work at changing hearts and minds. It just gives the people doing the canceling a sense of moral righteousness and superiority, and it leaves these really unhelpful purity spirals.
You don’t have to do that. Treat the other person better than you think they deserve, and they’re more likely to be open to what you actually have to say. Now, spiritually, I know I’ve mentioned this passage a lot, but it’s a really important one for me. In Ephesians chapter six, St. Paul tells us we have to put on the whole armor of God because our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers of darkness. And so bear that in mind. The other person isn’t someone you need to crush and destroy. They’re someone for whom Jesus Christ bled and died. And so even if you disagree with them really passionately about the biggest issues in the world, you want to do so in a way that doesn’t cause you to lose charity for them and should instead provoke some curiosity. What are they seeing that’s making them think this is a good set of beliefs to hold?
That then leads to the second tip I’d have here, which is let them do the arguing. Many people, including many people who will defend abortion, are actually deeply uncomfortable with it and they will give cues that they’re deeply uncomfortable with it in a few ways. One, they’ll often not be abortion absolutist. They’ll say, “Well, I don’t think all abortion should be allowed, but first trimester,” or, “I would never have an abortion, but I want other people to have the right if they should decide to.” When someone gives you any indication like that, draw out what is it that’s making you uncomfortable with abortion. And I’ll get into why that’s going to be really helpful in a moment here, but let them do the talking. One of the things you’re doing there is that you’re trying to understand their moral framework. And the more you understand it, the more you can find the weaknesses and the holes in their case, but more than that, they might also.
Now, along the way, when the other person is presenting their arguments, frequently they’ll raise genuinely difficult cases. And here it’s helpful to do, as Greg Cokel says, trot out the toddler. Not my favorite expression, but it is memorable. And I think I read that 13 years ago and I still remember the phrase, so I’m giving it to you as well. The idea is really simple. Somebody will say, “Well, this woman is in a really bad situation. She’s got a dysfunctional relationship or she’s been abandoned and she is poor and she can’t afford to have another kid right now,” all of these things. And now she finds out that she’s pregnant. And it’s tempting to want to minimize and downplay that and to say, “Oh, kids are a blessing.” And kids are a blessing, but they’re all so expensive and they can be a challenge and knowing how to raise them is really difficult.
And there’s a reason adoption agencies exist because not everybody is in a position where they are capable of raising a child given the circumstances of their life. These are all true things. We don’t need to condemn the moms, but what we should do is always be prepared when somebody raises these difficult, often real life cases to say, “Okay, those are legitimately difficult. Have empathy. Lead with that, but then also recognize this doesn’t mean you kill the kid.” Yeah, kids are expensive, but if I were to lose my job tomorrow and be like, “I can’t afford these kids that I’ve got,” I couldn’t just go home and kill them, that would still be murder. And so when you try not the toddler, what you’re doing is you’re showing, yes, these legitimately difficult things that you’re raising are real, but they don’t support the conclusion you’re coming to that abortion should be legal because we wouldn’t take those same exact circumstances and justify ending the life of any of your other children.
So when people raise that, this very simple test case is just, would this argument justify killing a toddler? And if it would, then it’s not a good argument. And if someone can see why, “Well, I wouldn’t kill a kid even if my spouse left me, even if I found out that my finances were going to be really hard,” whatever the situation is, you still wouldn’t justify ending the life of the child. Then you can present this to them, but I want to really stress that. You could say as a pro-lifer, “Well, you would never do this.” It’s better to do that as a question. Again, let them do the arguing. Now, why is that? At the deepest level, as Blaise Pascal said, people are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others, that if you want the other person to see why they should be pro life, you need them to work from their own view of the world, from their own framework, and to see within that framework either that the framework doesn’t work or that the framework points to the pro-life position.
So a real life case, many years ago I was on a college campus and I was speaking to a young woman and she told me that although she’d grown up Catholic, she wasn’t practicing the faith and she mentioned abortion and I wanted to know what her views were. And she said, “Well, I don’t think abortion should be legal across the board, but I think it should be allowed in cases of rape and incest in life of the mother.” Now, I want you to remember a couple of things. One, I’m a man she has never met before, and so I could immediately jump into, “Okay, you’ve just given all of the hardest cases, so let’s talk about why in those hard cases, abortion should not be allowed.” And we don’t have an established common framework. We don’t have a shared vision of how we view the world, and I can almost guarantee that the outcome there, no matter what I said, would be that she would simply shrug off my arguments because they’re all reasons that had come into the mind of other people, me.
So instead what I did is I asked her, “Well, why are you not okay with abortion in the other cases?” And she was so caught off guard by the question that she started to answer why she thought abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest in life of the mother. And to that, I just said, no, no, no, look, I understand, but statistically that’s maybe 3% of cases. You’ve just told me you’re 97% pro-life. Why are you 97% pro-life? Now what am I doing there? What I’m doing there is I’m making her look within herself and within her own vision of the world to see, well, why am I not comfortable? Why am I not okay with abortion? Why do I want abortion illegal 97% of cases? And once she has said that, then you have the room to have a meaningful conversation about the final 3% of cases.
Because if the reason somebody is pro-life 97% of the time is because they realize this is the taking of an innocent human life, the intentional taking of an innocent human life, what we call in every other context murder. Well, does murder become okay if your dad was a pervert or a criminal? Is murder okay if you are the product of incest even? No, of course not. If a child is born and then we find out, oh no, this is actually not the woman’s husband’s child, this is the child of her assailant or this is a child who the kid does a 23andMe and says, your DNA results are looking the same on mom and dad’s side and unbeknownst to them, there’s a case of incest. The response there is not to kill the kid, even if the kid has a genetic deformity, even if the kid might die because they have some serious condition, et cetera, those kind of cases, again, what are we doing there?
We’re trying not the toddler, but notice that it works better if you’ve got the kind of common ground to build from. The final point is to correct with advantage. Now this again, I know I’ve given this advice before, but I’m a huge fan of Blaise Pascal’s counsel here. And I think this is a really effective way to do the abortion conversation, to do a lot of conversations about evangelization. And actually, this is really helpful in terms of even navigating a relationship, like a marriage. If you want to correct the other person with advantage, Blaise Pascale says you have to do three things. First, you have to notice from what side they view the issue. So if you’re a pro-lifer trying to get a pro-choicer to change their view, you have to first understand what their values and principles are, why they’ve been led to that conclusion.
So notice from what side he views the matter, from that side, it is usually true. Then step two, and this is in some ways the hardest step, admit that truth to him. But step three, reveal to him the side on which it is false. So let me give you a real life example again that you’ll hear frequently. You’ll hear slogans like, “My body, my choice.” And it’s worth digging into that. People believe there’s a general principle of bodily autonomy, that you should be allowed to do what you want with your body and therefore abortion should be, if not encouraged, at least permitted. People are making a decision about their own body and who are you to tell someone else what to do with their body? Now, frequently, the thing I find pro-lifers doing is just ignoring that framework. Someone will make those kind of claims and they’ll say, “But what about unborn life?” But they haven’t engaged with the actual framework the person has just told them they’re operating from.
And so what happens? This person has presented bodily autonomy as the guiding principle that leads them to this pro-choice conclusion. And the pro-lifer has said protection of innocent human life or whatever the principle has led me to these pro-life conclusions. And so the two just talk past each other. Stop it. Engage with their worldview and recognize why their worldview makes sense. So somebody says bodily autonomy is their big principle. If you just ignore that, they’ll just treat you like you’re against bodily autonomy. They’ll write you off as kind of an anti-liberty cartoonish villain the way you want to write them off as a anti-life cartoonish villain. And it’s just not a fair, charitable or accurate way of approaching things. You can do so much better. So say, look, bodily autonomy is good. I mean, remember when there was the whole fight about COVID vaccines and a whole different group of people were making bodily autonomy arguments?
It turns out most people know on some level, bodily autonomy is a generally good thing to have. I should be allowed to, within certain parameters, do what I want with my own body. But what are those parameters? Well, it’s simple test case. I’ve got three little kids. If one of them swings her arms in such a way as to hit her brother in the face, is that a legitimate use of her bodily autonomy? Of course not. You can’t use your body to infringe on someone else’s body, particularly in a way that deprives them of bodily autonomy. Otherwise, bodily autonomy is completely defeated. It becomes just bodily autonomy for the weak, or excuse me, for the strong while the weak can have their autonomy taken away. If you use your bodily autonomy to kidnap everybody and tie them up, you’ve violated their autonomy. So bodily autonomy, even as a moral good, has to be a self-limiting principle.
It cannot be an absolute because if it was treated as an absolute, it becomes completely self-destructive. So what are we doing there? We’re noticing, yes, bodily autonomy generally good. We’re admitting that, but we’re recognizing there’s a limitation to it. And the limitation to it is bodily autonomy doesn’t allow me to deprive someone else of their bodily autonomy. The conclusion for the abortion debate is really simple. Remember that 10 second pro-life case. The unborn child in the womb of mom has their own body and they should be given the same bodily autonomy as everybody else. Just the fact that they’re smaller and weaker doesn’t give them any less of a right to bodily autonomy. So if you care about bodily autonomy, you should be pro-life, not pro-choice. What’s happened now? I’ve engaged with the bodily autonomy framework. Now maybe somebody has a different framework and we have to engage with that.
But notice the reason people don’t use this three-step process, I believe, is because it takes keeping a cool head and stopping in the midst of what can sometimes be a heated conversation and not only keeping a cool head and stopping, but even being generous to the other person and recognizing what it is that they’re getting right. But if you do this, you can find those bits of common ground and you can start to nudge the person in the right direction. This is the kind of conversation that can actually change hearts and minds. Finally, I want to return to what I alluded to before. In Ephesians chapter six, St. Paul, because he reminds us that we’re waging not simply a war against human beings, we’re really waging a spiritual war. He tells us to put on the whole armor of God, that we can withstand the wiles of the devil.
And so he says we need to withstand an evil day and having done all to stand. What does it look like to do all? Well, he gives a lengthy set of descriptions of the things that we ought to do to put on the armor of God, but he caps it off in verse 18 with this, “Pray at all times in the spirit with all prayer and supplication.” Maybe you’re somebody who gets completely dysregulated in the midst of a conversation like this. And so try as you might, you don’t have great success with these kind of conversational moves. Keep trying. As G.K. Chesterton said, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. But whatever the case, pray for the other person, pray for yourself, pray for the unborn, pray for all the moms who are considering these permanent, tragic, unfixable kind of decisions. Pray for everyone involved in it and pray for the grace to be able to have these conversations more effectively.
For more on issues of human life, I urge you to check out this video that I did exposing the horrors of IVF. Many of you don’t realize this, many pro-lifers are even pro – IVF, but IVF is one of the biggest contributors to the destruction and commodification of human life. So I urge you to check that video out as well, and I look forward to reading your comments below. Forshem Popri, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you.