The ProLife Team Podcast
The ProLife Team Podcast
The ProLife Team Podcast 121 | Dr. Marc Newman
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Welcome to the Pro Life Team Podcast. In this episode, we're using footage of a live interview with Mark Newman with questions that are designed for footage for the abortion museum. As the interviewer, I was not Mike. The just Mark was Mike. And so the interview questions are going to be not nearly as loud, but Mark's voice came in perfectly clear. And so I hope you enjoy this episode with Mark Newman. So Mark, please introduce yourself and explain your connection to the issue of abortion and also maybe speak about your experience and education that would be relevant.
SPEAKER_04Okay. My name is Dr. Mark Newman. I am the president of Speaker for Life. For about 40 years of my life, I was a university professor. I am semi-retired. Started my career at the University of California at Irvine as the director of speech and debate. Finished my career many years later at Regent University teaching in their doctoral program. By training, I am a rhetorician. I got involved in the pro-life movement in the late 1980s when Arthur Ellison, who at the time was working with an organization called Alternatives, asked me to come out and train some of his staff members. Well, I'm sorry, later on in his life. He worked with alternatives. At the time, he actually had taken a one-year leave of absence from his church, and he was the director of this weird thing called a crisis pregnancy center. So he said, Would you come down and train my people? He knew I trained people in public speaking. So I went down, I didn't know anything about the issue. I said, Would you just give me some articles or some books or something? And so he he gave me Kurt Young's The Least of These, a book by Bernard Nathanson and a number of articles, and my jaw dropped. I could not believe what I was seeing. So we developed this course and we taught it to his people. And I kind of thought I was done. And then a little bit later, I realized there was a real need here. So I crafted a pro-life speaker seminar and met with some directors of centers, and I just walked them through it over lunch and said, if we offered this, do you think anybody would come? And uh one director, her name was Grace Denny, she ran an organization which became Birth Choice in Southern California. She said, I'd send seven people tomorrow. And so that's how things kind of got started. And uh over time I started off just by crafting arguments because you know I spent my time as a I'm trained as a rhetorician, so I study argument. And so we would craft arguments, and I would look at the kinds of argumentation coming out of the other side, the kind of argumentation coming out of the pro-life side, and we'd uh start, you know, creating briefs and uh helping people to argue more effectively. And so I would teach this. And then after a while, I found myself doing fundraising banquets for pregnancy centers, and then I began training more and more pastors. I was speaking at uh the National Right to Life National Conference. I spoken at uh Heartbeat and CareNet, uh, and now here I'm I'm here at NIFLA and uh been doing that for many, many years. And then we just started going out and training pastors and doing three-hour apologetics classes to help people learn how to make the scientific, the moral, and the biblical case for life, helping them to understand how abortion ideology puts all human beings at risk, not just the unborn, and what we can ourselves do about it. And a lot of that, of course, is just finding ways for us to connect with the pregnancy center movement because they are literally the boots on the ground people making the life-changing decisions for women who are currently experiencing untimely pregnancies. We also, of course, need the uh the advocacy side, so I work with that as well. But I have a special place in my heart for people who are doing uh pregnancy help organization work.
SPEAKER_03Okay, this is question number two. Okay How has the abortion debate evolved since the 1960s to today?
SPEAKER_04Oh goodness.
SPEAKER_03Take your time if you want to think about it. Really, we're trying to say we also could just phrase it since rovers is way too much.
SPEAKER_04I'll tell you what, I'll I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna twist it a little bit. That's fine. You ready? Okay. Um I think one of the best ways to look at how the abortion debate has evolved is by looking at it backward. So, what I'd like to do, if you if we've got the time, is I want to talk with you a little bit about kind of where we are now and then how did we get there. And so usually when I talk with people about um, for example, the nature of the un of the unborn child, I I tell people I don't want to listen to you know uh to journalists talk about this. I want to listen to embryologists talk about it. And so one of the things that we do is we start right off by um by looking at embryology textbooks. So, for example, more persontorship in the latest edition of their long-standing textbook, the developing human clinically oriented embryology, right? This is obviously it's an embryology textbook used at medical schools, and it's longstanding. It's been through many editions, and uh, in every edition, this sentence goes virtually unchanged. Human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, the zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell, capable of giving rise to any cell type, marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual. So when we're talking about the humanity of unborn children, I'm saying game over, right? This is not my opinion, this is not my perspective, this is a medical fact, and I could easily cite probably a dozen other similar textbooks, all of which would say the same thing. But, okay, well, maybe people are thinking this is maybe this is a new idea that somebody just came up with, because after all, we spent all these years being told that it's just a blob of tissue, it's an undifferentiated cell mass, it's pregnancy tissue, it's the uterine content. So let's go back a little bit farther and let's look at California medicine. This is from 1970. In California medicine, they put out this essay and they talk about, they say, well, since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous, whether intra or extra uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics, which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but the taking of a human life would be ludicrous, they write, if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested by the authors that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while an old while a new ethic is being accepted, the old one has not yet been rejected. Listen to what they're saying here. They're saying, who knows? Everybody knows that human life begins a conception. And what we have to do is we have to engage in considerable semantic gymnastics. This is just a fancy word for we're gonna lie to people, because people have this natural intuition that what's in their body when they become pregnant is a human being. So the only way that we're gonna overcome that intuition is if we lie to them routinely, often, under socially impeccable auspices. In other words, if we can get the government to say it, if we can get the schools to say it, if we can get the medical community to say it, and if we can get the entertainment folks to say it, oh, it'd be great if we could get some churches to say it. And what are they gonna be doing? Oh, they're gonna be engaging in a schizophrenic sort of subterfuge. Because while a new ethic is being accepted, the old one has not yet been rejected. Well, what was that old ethic? Well, in the essay, they identify it. That old ethic is the Judeo-Christian ethic that says that all human beings have objective moral value. What is the new ethic they want to take its place? It's the idea that humans have relative value. And I do find it fascinating that by the end of the essay, they identify who they think ought to make the determinations about who has value. And amazingly, you'd be surprised to know in a medical journal it's doctors, they say. And they make the argument that in in order to become at the forefront later of death selection and death control, they have to first be at the forefront of birth selection and birth control. Now, this was written in 1970, and look at where we are now. We can go back a little bit farther. So um, let's go to 1951. This is a booklet called The Gift of Life. It is a flip chart. If you look carefully, you'll notice it looks like people going to or coming from church. So, of course, uh, this is a sex education manual. Um page 21, it says, if one of the male sperm meets and unites with an egg cell, a new life begins. Sounds remarkably, doesn't it? What like what Moore, Prasad, and Torcia said. Everybody believed it, including this pamphlet which was distributed by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. It's not a photocopy, this is an original document. So when Planned Parenthood says we don't know when human life begins, uh they must have amnesia because they used to teach it all the time. And they not only taught when human life began, they also taught about what abortion was and what abortion was not. So here's a photocopy of a brochure called Plan Your Children for Health and Happiness. A lot of pro-lifers are familiar with this document. It's been going around for a long time. They asked, it's it's about birth control. They asked the question, birth control, is it an abortion? This is how they answer it. Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it's begun. It is dangerous to your life and health. It may make you sterile so that when you want a child you cannot have it. Now, I gotta tell you, I've used these documents like in a debate or in a discussion. I've had people for starters uh argue that this was photoshopped, which is why it was so exciting to me to be able to locate and purchase an original. Now, the only difference between this one and the one I just read from is this one does have an extra sentence. It says an abortion requires an operation, but the rest of that language is identical in these. You'll also notice that these two brochures have different covers, which means this was a long-standing document that went through multiple editions. I also know that it came out prior to 1963 because while this pamphlet was distributed by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and it has an address, it has no zip code. Zip codes were introduced in 1963, so I know this is older than that. So when we look at the case for human life, which I think was brilliantly uh laid out by Scott Klusendorf, he just calls it the syllogism, right? If you can't remember what a syllogism is, you know, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, right? That's a syllogism. The pro-life syllogism runs this way it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Now, almost everybody, by the way, will stipulate that, right? You just shouldn't go out killing human beings, and by the way, if people won't, you know, move away slowly. Um but so if it's wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings, and abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being, then therefore abortion is wrong. Now, that second premise is where people give you a lot of pushback, but you might notice we've proven that second premise. And did I cite from the National Right to Life? Did I cite from NIFLA or Karenet or Hart? No. I cited from a well-regarded, long-standing embryological textbook. I cited from a pro-abortion article in California Medicine, I cited from two separate planned parenthood documents, original documents, all of which conclude human life begins at conception, is continuous, whether inside or outside the womb until death, and that abortion intentionally puts that human being to death. So if we want to talk about how things um morphed over time, Planned Parenthood used to argue that abortion kills the life of a baby. Planned Parenthood no longer argues that. So everybody knows this. And now we just we deny that they ever said this. They now refer to the contents of a woman's uterus or the pregnancy, or my favorite one, of course, is pregnancy tissue, because pregnancy, by the way, is not a thing. It doesn't have tissues, it's a condition. So there's no such thing as pregnancy tissue. Um, but they use this as ways to dehumanize the nature of unborn children to make it morally acceptable to put those children to death. And so this is kind of where we're at. It also all used to be that they would describe themselves as pro-choice. Well, Planned Parenthood says that if you call yourself pro-choice now, well, that we don't use that language anymore because it might seem to kind of indicate that maybe there's something wrong with abortion. And it kind of makes you an abortion stigmatizer. And so on their action webpage, they write, be proud to be pro-abortion. And now we have people no longer saying, like Bill Clinton did in 1993, that abortion should be safe and legal but rare. Now, instead, if you go to uh to rallies, you'll see people holding up signs that say abortion on demand and without apology. So this is the sign of an emboldened movement who knows, medically speaking, that they're killing children and just don't care. I have an essay in here from Salon Magazine where the writer talks about the fact that she must admit that the unborn are indeed a human life, and then she ends it by saying a life that uh can that should be sacrificed. And so this is the kind of world that we're inhabiting right now where people are very boldly saying, I know this is a human child, but I have goals, I have aspirations, or I have a life that I want to maintain. And so I'm going to be willing to sacrifice the life of my child in order to get that. And by the way, that's the rationale people have been using for millennia. We've just become very shy about calling abortion what it is, which is intentional child killing. And so that's this is kind of where we are, and this is the battle that we're in.
SPEAKER_03That was amazing. Call this the kill shot. That was so good. Right? Thank you.
SPEAKER_04We don't plan.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so the next question I'd like to ask you is uh number four on this list. How significant is the Dobbs decision? Or how would you just speak about the significance of the Dobbs decision?
SPEAKER_04The Dobbs decision was incredible. Almost nobody believed it was going to happen. I always knew it was gonna happen because with Ruth, when Ruth Brader Ginsburg says this is a badly decided, I mean she liked the outcome, but she recognized that the logic deciding it was bad. So I I knew it was just a matter of time before it would be overturned. When it got overturned, interesting things happened. For starters, it gave states the ability to prohibit abortion inside of their states, uh inside of their state borders. And that, of course, was a phenomenal thing. A number of states took advantage of it. You had Texas, who kind of let out in a lot of ways with their heartbeat bill. Uh Alabama, abortion is virtually impossible to have a legal abortion in Alabama. Tennessee is an abortion-free state, and many other states are working hard to um I I hate the word restrict abortion, uh, because I'm not interested in abortion restrictions. I'm interested in life-affirming legislation. So more and more states are passing these life-affirming legislation, uh, this life-affirming legislation, and um, of course, the people who are uh abortion advocates are going nuts. So on the one hand, it gave us permission to go ahead and pass whatever kind of life protection laws we wanted to. Conversely, it gave death states the ability to pass whatever legislation they wanted. And so, for example, over in California, in California, abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever at taxpayer expense if the woman involved is a minor without parental knowledge or consent, right? That is the truth of the matter in California. Governor Gavin Newsome put together a group of people called the Future of Abortion Council, and they have they put out an initial report and then an addendum report that has literally dozens and dozens of legislative objectives. Over 25 of those objectives have already been turned into law. California fully intends to be an abortion destination state. They call themselves an abortion refuge, which helps me to understand they have no idea what the word refuge means. But that's what they're arguing for. They've got laws that allow their physicians to engage in telehealth, reaching across state lines to provide abortion pills for women in pro-life states where those pills are illegal, and then they passed laws shielding their physicians from any civil or uh or um or tort, any kind of lawsuit against them. So they are really doubling and tripling down and are probably the most notorious death state in the United States, and given the fact that we have New York and Illinois, that's saying something. Um, Governor Newsom started a uh reproductive freedom council, which I find interesting uh nomenclature. You can't call these guys. Number one, you don't need freedom to reproduce. I mean, everybody reproduces, nobody's got to tell them they've got the freedom to do it. We've been doing it for millennia. But what they really mean by reproductive freedom uh council is that they don't want anybody to reproduce, which when you think about it, it's the exact opposite of what they claim to be. Twenty-one governors are signators now on that in that group. So we now have very clear opposition, and it's it's intriguing. A number of people have begun voting with their feet. So they live in abortion states that have decided they don't want to support that anymore and are literally packing up and moving to pro-life states. Now, a lot of people are saying, oh, it's about the economy. I don't think it's only about the economy. So I think what you're gonna see is the line of demarcation between life states and death states is only going to become increasingly more clear, but only if we recognize that the battle is not over. So when I speak in places like Texas or Alabama or Tennessee, or even now in Florida where Governor DeSantis signed the six-week heartbeat bill, but it's now enjoined in the courts, uh when we look at that, we cannot believe that we're okay now because our kids and our state is safe. So a state-by-state solution post-DOBS is not going to work because our opponents don't think about this state by state. They literally will not give an inch until there is a national right to an abortion. So my response then is what we need to do is strategically respond. And that means we got to not think about abortion currently as a state-by-state issue. We have to think about abortion as a regional issue. So, for example, right now everybody's afraid of Illinois because it's a hardcore pro-abortion state. And my response is we have them surrounded. There are pro-life states literally all around uh Illinois. So I'll tell you what, why don't we lock down our states really well, the pro-life states? Let's make sure that our people have everything that they need. California has an abortion.ca.gov website, which means that California's official position is to drive people toward abortion. Oklahoma has a pro-life website that has been sponsored by their government. So you see, right, the dividing line becomes clearer. So what we need to do is lock down our states and then begin evangelizing death states. We need to be funding uh more and more messaging in those states, billboards, sending out speakers, doing more and more uh media campaigns, and then we need to help those people to establish more and more and more pregnancy care centers throughout their state. I am a firm believer that as the ratio between pregnancy care centers and abortion clinics become inversed, right? We have more pregnancy centers than we have abortion clinics, more and more life stories are gonna come out. And I think this is how we can start building this community. But I'll tell you, it's gotta start in the church. I if you're a pastor watching these interviews, what I want to tell you is I get it. I know every 501c3 on the planet wants to get into your pulpit. And so in your mind, it's like, oh, this is just somebody else who wants to do it. And you know, uh uh a lot's expected of you as a pastor, right? You're supposed to knock it out of the park every Sunday, right? You're supposed to be a spellbinding public speaker, you have to be a deep moral philosopher, a brilliant biblical exegete, you've got to be an incredible counselor, and then on top of that, you've got to be a geologist, a biologist, and an astrophysicist. And then after all of that, you've got to be able to look over the span of popular culture and parse all of the ideologies so that you can help reveal dangerous worldviews to your people. I mean, I get it. But abortion's not like all those other things. Abortion is not primarily an action. Abortion is not primarily an issue, it's primarily an action. When people engage in the action of abortion, it produces casualties. Abortion is most like of anything else in the Old Testament. Modern-day abortion is most like Molech worship. And so if we have true idolatry invading our churches, we have to stand up and inoculate our people against abortion ideology. And it's not hard to do, it's not a difficult task to master, but we do have to have the courage to stand up and say what is true. And what that means, of course, we have a lot of hurting people. We have millions and millions of women who have experienced abortion in their life and they're hurting, and a lot of them are private about it, won't open up. They carry this burden, they never find the healing, the forgiveness, and the restoration that comes through the blood of Jesus Christ. And that happens if we keep our mouths shut. But if we will open our mouths and we'll speak to these people and we'll speak about this issue, people will come, they will repent, they will be renewed and restored. And if we do that, I honestly believe it's got to start in the church. Once it starts in the church and we continue to build a life-affirming culture, then we will be able to export that culture out into the world because the world will see what kind of life happens here and all of the death that happens there. And so as we continue to fight this battle, as we can, as the battle moves from surgical abortion to uh to abortion pills, and then of course it used to be abortion pills, right? Now they're saying, well, you got abortion pill reversal, we're just going to use the uh mesoprostol. Yeah, and so we're just gonna have induction abortions. We have sewer systems in this country filled with over a million dead bodies of children created in the image of God. We have to step up and speak because if we won't do it, no one else will do it. The federal government won't do it, our educational system won't do it, the medical community won't do it, TikTok's not going to do it, the mass media is not gonna do it. It has to happen in the church first. When it happens in the church and we build a life-affirming culture in the church, then we will have the moral high ground to export it out into the world.
SPEAKER_03Wow, that was really good.
SPEAKER_04Sorry, I I have when I get tired like this, I get verbal incontinence, so stop me anytime you want.
SPEAKER_03We don't get to cover all the questions. Well, I think you covered, yeah, we got two of them covered there. Um what are some of the biggest, what are some of the largest lessons that you've learned over the course of your experience in pro-life work?
SPEAKER_04I think we greatly underestimated just how diabolical the abortion industry is. I think that when you deal with adults who are professionals, you expect people to be honest and forthright and will and willing to say, when confronted with the evidence, that they're wrong. And over and over again, as I've watched Senate testimony, I have watched people uh fudge the truth, I have watched them equivocate, I have watched them be unwilling to admit what is plainly before them. I think that we have underestimated, I think for the longest time we viewed this as primarily as a political issue. And it is not primarily a political issue. It's only a political issue because of the distinction between people who believe in a spiritual transcendent worldview and people who believe in a materialist worldview, right? That's the only way in which it's a political issue because politics is all they've got over here, at least uh apparently. But I happen to believe now, after all these years, reading Michael Heiser's book, uh, there is a spiritual undertone here. And the more research I did into, for example, Old Testament Molech worship and seeing the comparisons between that and modern day abortion, you don't even have to go all the way back to Molech worship. You can look at the parallels between modern day abortion and the rationale for American chattel slavery. And the uh the connections are so clear. Or even what happened in Nazi Germany, right? What's the modus operandi of the enemy? We find the weakest, most defenseless image-bearer of God, and we find a way to dehumanize them and then experiment on them, put them to death. Because once you're dehumanized, we can do anything we want to you. So our opponents have literally created an entire class of human beings that it's morally permissible to kill. Now, it's nothing new. We've been doing this forever. The battle over abortion is our turn at this. That's all it is. So don't think that you're unique and that the problems that are facing us are unlike any problems ever faced before by the history of humankind. No, these are the perennial problems that have always existed. It's just our turn. And we have to have the same kind of courage that the people had that put away chattel slavery, that the people had who won World War II and liberated the Jews from the concentration camps. We have to have that kind of courage. I believe that the church still has it in them. I hear people all the time speaking apocalyptically, uh, you know, Jesus is gonna come back any day now, and I'm kind of thinking, well, maybe he will, and certainly nothing would stop him from doing it. But I will tell you this: when Jesus does come back, what's he gonna find us doing? And I happen to believe that we have already had four or five, depending on how you count them, great awakenings in the West. There's no reason in the world, right? God is not limited. We could certainly have a sixth, and it may very well be the battle over abortion that will ignite the next great awakening in this country as people truly repent. By the way, not just women, we have a lot of women who are post-abortive, but for every woman who's post-abortive, there is a man who is post-abortive. And these men are frequently ignored. And I think when people are presented the truth about what abortion is, both medically, morally, and spiritually, I think the Holy Spirit can pierce their hearts, people can confess and repent. And I'm telling you, if this could happen churchwide, when you consider, right, one out of every three to one out of every four pregnancies and an abortion, this is a widespread, devastating sin that people live with and believe they're the only ones who've ever done it, and they can't find their way to freedom. If we will be bold in preaching the gospel, identifying abortion as sin, and identifying the cross of Jesus Christ as the mechanism that God provided, the blood of Christ as the cleansing agent that God provided to forgive our sins and restore our fellowship with Him, I think we can see true revival break out in our churches.
SPEAKER_03So, yeah, so five and six, that that that'll the last response would answer that one. And then question four also does well for question eight. Okay. For question number seven is what is Speaker for Life and why does it exist?
SPEAKER_04Speaker for Life is a training firm that is dedicated to providing people in the pro life community with public speaking skills. I recognize that right now uh there's a massive move and it's a necessary move toward online and digital. But we also recognize that there are um tech giants out there throttling back messages on things like social media platforms. So we recognize that we need to help people be able to go, and I hate to use the phrase, but we'll just call it what it is, an analog approach where we actually, I know what a what a what a shocker, meet with people face to face and talk with them. When we do that, we create a connection between people in a way that images cannot provide. Uh we create trust levels. I think it's really, really important for uh speakers, especially from pregnancy centers, to get out in front of real-life people like uh youth groups and college career fellowships and congregations, right, so that those people will get to know who they are and what they're all about. Um I did a survey of about a thousand university students, and every one of the universities where I constructed this survey, uh they had a pregnancy help organization nearby. It was a survey about public speaking because uh I had heard from speech faculty members that they wouldn't let their students do speeches on abortion. Well, why? Well, because you know it's all overdone, the kids have already made up their mind, and it's you know, and so you'd expect, right, if it's overdone, the kids have already made up their mind, they would know a lot about it. So I thought I'd survey them and find out what they knew. I will not trifle with your intelligence by telling you how abysmally these students performed on this survey. But the important thing I want you to know is I asked the question if a woman came to you with an untimely pregnancy to what local organization would you refer her? At the state universities where I did this survey, I may get the numbers wrong because I don't have it right in front of me, but I believe it was about 57% of students wrote, really got the name out of their head, wrote Planned Parenthood. And then I believe it was like 39% of them said, I don't know. Even though they have a pregnancy center right there. Then I reproduced this survey at a Christian evangelical university with seven fully licensed pro-life medical clinics all around them. The number one answer to the same question: if a woman came to you with an untimely pregnancy, to what local organization would you refer her, I believe it was at 52% was I don't know. How could they not know? It's because nobody's telling them. And then the number two answer, um, so 53% said I don't know. The number two answer at 42% was Planned Parenthood. I asked them a follow-up question. If you mentioned an organization, can you tell me where it's located? 80% of the Christian students who identified Planned Parenthood knew where it was located, at least generally, but some so specifically that they gave us the cross streets and the building it was behind. We can't afford to be the best kept secret on the planet. But see, Planned Parenthood's got over 660 million taxpayer dollars to put their educational information out. Most centers don't have that kind of equipment or that that kind of equipping. They don't have that kind of money, they don't they don't have the ability to do it. But all of them can craft speaking teams. So it's an inexpensive way to get out there and then build trust with people who actually see the folks that are claiming to provide the service. And so the reason Speaker for Life exists, it was created initially, was to provide that. And then later it's grown. Uh now we do a lot of pastor training, we also do apologetics classes. Um the idea is to be in the thick of the battle and equip people to be able to make a compelling case for life. And so that's what we do.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. Um the next question I have for you is this is question number nine. Do you have any words of warning for up-and-coming pro-life activists? Or do you have any words of warning for up-and-coming pro-life workers, such as like, how might you help them get past the learning curve on a certain thing? Or what would you what how would you warn them or help help them get fast tracked to the learning curve to join the movement?
SPEAKER_04You gotta recognize you're asking a college professor this question. Back up, try that again.
SPEAKER_03Oh, do we have any water, Davy? Would you want some water? Let me ask people grow some.
SPEAKER_04I think I'll be all right. Okay. So you're asking a college professor this, so of course, my response is going to be we need to read. Um the bottom line is a lot of times when people come into the movement, they have a lot of zeal, but not a lot of experience. They what happened to that was what happened to me. You you read the evidence and you see the images, and your jaw drops, and you can't believe it, and you just want to go and do something about it. Not recognizing that there is a multi-generational history of this movement where we've already tried a lot of things, recognized what is working and what fails. And every generation thinks they've got the answer, you know, to everything. And I know it's hard looking at this white beard and this white hair, thinking, oh, it's just another guy telling me that the kids don't know what they're doing. Not at all true. I work with a lot of brand new college students helping to bring them up to speed. I work with Scott Klusendor from Life Training Institute. I've worked with John Enser from Passion Life Ministries, and we are actually building uh at Cedarville University the Defending Life Summer Institute, where we're training up this group of people. So we want you to be, when you go out, it's unbelievably important to be knowledgeable. We cannot afford to make misstatements because we live in a world where if you say the wrong thing or if you make an assertion that you cannot demonstrate, they're gonna fall on you like a ton of bricks and then try to find a way to discount you, right? Case in point, all the people who've been running around for years calling pregnancy centers who have nurse practitioners, RNs, medical assistants, and they've got doctors who are overseeing all this, they're being called fake medical clinics. Why? Well, because there was a time in which they were just called crisis pregnancy centers, and all he did was provide counseling and they didn't have any medical. And so these guys are all they're thinking about is what they used to know about the pregnancy center movement. Now they look at this, they're looking for ways to try to undermine this movement. So it's unbelievably important that we are careful in our language and that we don't make claims that we can't prove. Strategically, I've been very encouraged by what I've been watching young people do as they're growing up in this movement. So, for example, yeah, IRAPSU. Some folks are out there doing um all kinds of commercial work and helping uh centers to create branding and messaging. They're doing things that people in my generation aren't good at. And these are things that are needed because the people who are growing up now, Gen Z people, they're all digital natives. I am not, I'm a digital Neanderthal. I had to learn how to do all this stuff. But but young people, they've grown up in it, and it's the water they swim in. We need people to come in with these technical skills. And so just because you are not an arguer or a debater or a public speaker or uh you're never gonna be a politician, it doesn't mean that you don't have skill sets that people in this movement desperately need. And by the way, it doesn't even necessarily have to be tech skills. Every pregnancy center I know of needs people who know how to clean, needs people to be receptionists or church liaisons. Uh, they need people who can do gardening to make sure that the exterior of their building inspires confidence in women before they walk through the doors. There is a role for everyone in this movement. So don't ever think that because you know, I represent Speaker for Life, I want, you know, I'm the guy who, you know, I've I've only got a hammer, so everything looks like a nail. No, I recognize after being in this movement for nearly 40 years, there is a place for everybody at this table. I do think it's unbelievably important that we learn to work together. You know, there are factions within the pro-life movement. Get into that if you'd like. Um, but what I have been doing for as long as I've been involved in this is I've always told people there's a place for everybody. So if there's a birthright out there and it is still staffed entirely by volunteers, and they don't talk about politics at all, and they just try to lead that girl to make a life-affirming decision, there's a place for them in this movement. There's a place for people in this movement that are highly political. There's a place for people in this movement that want to see us go full medical and in fact replace Planned Parenthood in everything except abortions. There's a place for people at this table, and we can all sit down and talk together about what is the best way forward. But the one thing we really can't afford to do is tear each other apart with inside baseball arguments that don't matter to people who are out there actively trying to put children to death. So if we can find ways to work together, we absolutely must try to do that.
SPEAKER_03That's gonna work for questions nine and ten for the father of Frank said. Um I've got a few more questions for you. This question uh new. Uh please tell me about Planned Parenthood.
SPEAKER_04How long it got.
SPEAKER_03Um maybe within like, let's say within four minutes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this isn't gonna take me that long. Okay. Okay. Um talk with you about Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is the number one abortion. I'm gonna back that up. Planned Parenthood is the singular largest abortionist in America. As a singular organization, they put more children to death than any other abortion organization. By the way, on their site, they say that there's no such thing as the abortion industry, which I find laughable because there's this thing called the National Abortion Federation. So if there's no such thing as the abortion industry, I'm kind of at uh at a loss to understand what they represent. Okay? So Plant Parenthood started as a uh, you know, Margaret Sanger starts this organization, and what she's primarily about is um uh eugenics, and there's uh an awful lot of racism that is uh built into there. I will never forget watching Faye Waddleton, who is an African-American woman, handing out the Margaret Sanger Award at an event. And I kept thinking this would be like Ellie Wiesenthal handing out the Joseph Goebbels Award, you know, to somebody, because literally Planned Parent has been out there decimating uh the African American community for decades. Well, back then, as I I showed earlier that this uh this booklet, Plan Your Children for Health and Happiness. Now they admit that abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun, but this African-American child on the front of this, they wanted to make sure that as few of these children as possible were ever conceived in the first place, right? More children from the fit, less from the unfit. Right? I always really, you know, they they had their slogan was always, every child a wanted child. And I've always thought it would be a really intriguing thing that if there was truth in advertising, every child is a wanted child would show the child as a wanted poster. And they'd want to, you know, engage in capital punishment for that child. Planned Parenthood has morphed over the years into not only being one of the most effective killing machines known to humankind. By the way, I mean I've got to make this abundantly clear. Compared to the not abortion, the abortion industry in America makes the Nazis look like pikers. And I know it's unpopular to mention Nazis all the time, but those folks, they put six million Jews to death and about another six million other defectives, they said, to death in Nazi concentration camps. To make that happen, they had to build those camps really far away. They had to put them on trains, ship them out past churches, which by the way sang a little louder so they wouldn't have to hear. And that's what they managed to do during the time of the Third Reich. In the United States, the abortion industry has so brainwashed our people that they can build abortion clinics, right, death centers, right in the middle of suburban communities. And then we brainwash people to actually drive the victims to the center ourselves willingly, and then pay for the privilege of having those children killed. Now, Planned Parents have seen the writing on the wall in life states, right? When the Dobbs came down, I think they realized we're in trouble. By the way, found it fascinating that they always say, Oh, we're not really about abortion, right? It's only 3% of our services. An absolute lie. You can actually look at their own statistics that they will, they publish them all the time, right? You can read them out. And what I want you to focus on is the the uh the services that are offered to pregnant women, you're gonna find three prenatal vitamins, very few, referrals, they don't actually do it themselves, but referrals for adoption, and then well north of 350,000 abortions. Okay. So they said, no, but that's not what we do. And so I found it interesting. Then why in all of the states that have now made abortion illegal, why has Planned Parenthood virtually abandoned the field? They don't want a service there because they can't kill children. But I'll tell you what they've done. They've swapped it out. And now you've got a lot of Planned Parenthoods, and they're actually they're they're offering transgender hormone therapies to people. Why? Well, you can only abort a woman maybe once a year or so, but you can provide hormone therapy, cross-sex hormone therapies on a monthly basis, ongoing. They also recognize that when when these transgender kids have transgender surgeries, they're going to be a medical case probably for the rest of their lives. And so it becomes a moneymaker. And if you don't think that that's true, go type, go Google Vanderbilt transgender surgeries and see if you can find the video of the woman who was who was on videotape at Vanderbilt talking about the money-making potential of transgender surgeries. So, see, the bottom line here is it's not about a morality, it's about an ideology. And the ideology is founded in money and political power, and then under girding that, whether they're willing to admit it or not, is a spiritual ideology that is designed to transgress the image of God in this world, to identify it and then attack it because it's weak and defenseless. And so that is what we are up against. Planned Parenthood is organized, it is powerful. It gets, for the life of me, I cannot understand why they're continuing to get $650 million and up a year from the federal government to do something that the Supreme Court has said is not a constitutional right. So I really believe the backlash is going to come and eventually we'll find a way to defund this organization. But I would say if I had to pick out a group of people that are the, and by the way, they're going to say, right, oh, see, this is the kind of thing that incites violence against people who are clinic workers. Not at all. I want you to pray for people who work at plant. Parenthood. There are organizations designed to help people escape the working at Planned Parenthood. I want you to pray for the people at Planned Parenthood, and then every possible chance you get, we want to defund Planned Parenthood, and then I want to see pregnancy centers surround Planned Parenthood. I would love to see them share parking lots, as many of them do, with Planned Parenthood. And then people say, Do you want to compete with Planned Parenthood? No. I want to defeat Planned Parenthood. Because that's the only way we're going to build a life-affirming culture is when we get rid of people, we get rid of organizations, right, that want to do this. And I want to make it clear I make a distinction between what I would call abortion rights supporters and abortion rights advocates. There are a lot of people, they've just bought into this, they haven't even critically thought about it. It's just what the cool kids all think. And so they've just kind of fallen into what C.S. Lewis calls taking one side in a controversy that they've never even considered a controversy at all. But on the other side, right, we have people who are just abjectly event, and there's no other word for it, they're just abjectly evil about this. Right? People like Zoe Thill out there showing people how to do papaya abortions and then telling women when they get when they're excited about sucking the seeds out of their papaya and thinking they've done something spectacular, literally sidles up to them and says, Oh, it's so much more satisfying when it's a real abortion. Those kinds of people, they are not going to be converted. We're not going to persuade those people. Those kinds of people must be politically and economically defeated. And so that's that's the job that's ahead of the pro-life movement is to not only build our own life-affirming community, but in doing so, expose what's true about what's happening inside the doors of Planned Parenthood. Because I honestly believe once people really do know it, their support will dry up because it's just diabolical what's happening over there.
SPEAKER_03Wow. Are you okay answering two or three more questions?
SPEAKER_04I'm good. I'm on a roll lamp.
SPEAKER_03Perfect. Okay. So this question is question number one from our medical set. Uh when does new human life begin? Please explain.
SPEAKER_04I guess we can go back. When I want to find out when new human life begins, I do not go and talk to journalists. I probably not going to go speak to people who make their entire living extinguishing that human life. I'm going to talk to people who actually study human life, and those people are called embryologists. So, more persod and torture in the latest edition of their long-standing textbook, The Developing Human Clinically Oriented Embryology, in 2020, this book's been around for a long, long time. They say human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an ovocyte to form a single cell the zygote. This highly specialized totipotent cell, capable of giving rise to any cell type, marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual. Case closed. Not my opinion, not my perspective. This is a medical fact. All human lives begin in precisely the same way. A sperm fuses with a woman's ovum and it creates a zygote. It's not a fertilized egg, it's a new human being. All of us began that way. And you were every bit the human being on the day of your conception as you are today. All of your cells share the exact same DNA. And so that's how we know when human life begins. Now, I may be anticipating here. So what our opponents do is they shift ground and they say, well, okay, and by the way, in a real live academic debate, you will never find an abortion rights advocate argue that what's in a woman's body from the moment of conception is not a human being because they know they're going to get buried in evidence. And as a matter of fact, write their own documents to demonstrate that they used to argue that human life begins at conception. So what they do instead is they say, well, okay, well, they're human beings, sure, but they're not like persons. I could go through a litany of and explain to you the four standard argument types that are made to establish personhood. And they fall into size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency. They'll say it's not big enough, so it's not a human being. Katha Pollett, in her book Pro, she says, you know, when you're first created, you're no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, as if size is a determining factor on whether or not you're a valuable human. So and then level of development. They'll say you're not developed enough, you don't have enough cognitive abilities, you can't form relationships, you don't have uh wishes and desires, right? All these standards that people are going to use, or you're in the wrong environment. You're actually inside another person's body, so you can't be a separate person. Or, you know, you don't, you're you're too dependent, right? And uh because you can't live on your own. This is the viability argument. They say, so you're not a human person. Well, all of these standards are horrible standards because they catch in their net post-born people. Right? When you're trying to determine something as important as life or death, you have to create a bright line distinction. These standards don't do that. Size, you can walk into a room with a bunch of newborns, and I'm going to guarantee you you're a lot bigger than any of those newborns. As a matter of fact, in a lot of ways, they don't really look like you. And so the question that these folks will never answer is how many cells is enough? Because I got news for you. All of us are clumps of cells. We're highly organized clumps of cells. How many of them does it take to make a human person? Nobody's ever willing to say. It's an ill-defined standard. The idea of development, right? How developed are you? All of us are developed differently. Some people are developmentally disabled. And if they are, it's amazing, isn't it? The government comes and surrounds them with a whole fence of rights that are designed to protect them from people who would harm them, right? Americans with Disabilities Act, for example. So how developed is enough? Some people have advanced college degrees. Some people will never ever have an intellect beyond the fourth grade. Are we going to say that those people don't qualify as one of us, as human beings? What about environment? Well, when I walked in for this interview, I walked orders of magnitude farther than anybody traversed down a birth canal in order to be born. There's nothing magical that happens when you leave the inside of a mother's womb that suddenly turns you into from a non- from a non from a person who's a uh I keep mixing up persons and not and humans. There's nothing that that turns you from a human non-person into a human person by simply just going down a seven-inch birth canal. And then the idea about dependency, same thing, right? The more dependent you are once you're out of the womb, the more laws exist to protect you from abuse. There are elders in elder care, and they have a ton of laws that protect them from elder abuse. Why? Because they're vulnerable. So why is it that the vulnerability that you have in the womb makes you a target for death, but not protection? It doesn't make any sense. My mother-in-law lived with us for the last two years of her life. She had Alzheimer's and she was bedridden for the entire last two years. She had to live in our house because she couldn't get a house for herself. She needed help toileting, she couldn't toilet herself. We had to give her water, we had to give her food, we had to move her to keep her safe, right? So intriguingly, and we did that all the way up until the day that she died, and there was no point in time at any point that she stopped being Ginny Sosby, my mother-in-law. We went in, we talked to her, we sang uh you know hymns over her, and she was a human being and person until the day that she died. Isn't it intriguing that the very thing we provided her is the very thing that a pregnant woman provides her child? Right? Nutrition, hydration, waste removal services, and a safe place to live. So if what we're talking about is dependency, that's a terrible standard because we have tons of post-born people who are dependent. And if you wonder, you know, am I making a big deal of nothing? Take a look at what's happening over in Canada right now with the medical assistance and dying, their their program up there, MAID. Now you don't even have to be terminally ill to be a candidate for MAID. And in the coming year, they're going to open it up to minors. They're going to open it up to people whose only malady is that they're depressed. Right? You want to know why it's it's a lot more expensive to treat those people than it is to give them a medication that will put them to death, a poison pill that will put them to death. And so this is where we're going. There are countries in Europe that are that brag about the fact they don't have any Down syndrome children anymore. It's not true. They're still um creating, gestating down syndrome children. They just do a test on them, find out they have downs, and then eradicate all of them. So this is where we're going. And I have to emphasize Christopher Kayser in his book The Ethics of Abortion says that every single time throughout all of human history, whenever we create a dividing line between human persons and human non-persons, 100% of the time it has been determined that a moral catastrophe has taken place. We cannot create classes of human beings that we find it morally permissible to kill because the problem with it is since there's no bright line distinction, you will find that the line keeps moving. And it's very possible that before too long you will find yourself as part of one of these disfavored classes, and then people will come for you. So we have to create a bright line. Where's the bright line? Conception. Before conception, it's the man's sperm cell, it's the woman's egg cell. It's only when conception occurs that a new human being comes into existence, and that's the bright line we're looking for. And if we will establish that bright line and protect that bright line, are we going to be able to do it perfectly all of the time? Is it going to cause some difficulties? Is it going to cause some policy issues? Sure. But let's start at the bright line, and then we can start working out any discrepancies that might occur later on. Public policy, we're we're smart people. We can come up with answers to things, but let's not let's not decide that it's okay to kill unborn children in order to achieve uh social goals.
SPEAKER_03All right, so this is uh question one out of the legal set. What are rights? Whether civil rights, human rights, or some other kind of right, and does abortion qualify as one or more of these rights?
SPEAKER_04When you look at the concept of civil rights, one of the difficulties of civil rights is that civil rights are granted to us by governments, and since they're granted to us by governments, they can be taken away by governments. So I think we have to be careful when we talk about civil rights. Um I would prefer to talk about transcendent rights, right, which uh the Declaration of Independence would identify as as unalienable rights, right, uh amongst which are life, liberty, and uh the pursuit of happiness. So when we talk about uh abortion in this framework, what we have is we have a number of people who want to create a civil right to abortion. Now, the Dobbs decision um i it uh it vacated that idea. So there is no, there is no federal right to an abortion. But there is a federal right to life, right? It's it's it's enshrined in our founding documents. So I think it's important for us to recognize we should never do anything that would burden a woman in choosing to exercise her right to life. And I think a lot of times right now in our culture, we're doing a lot of things to burden them. We've got uh people in uh in politics who are trying to attack uh pregnancy centers, right, who's who exist solely to support a woman in exercising her constitutional right to you know have a life-affirming decision for her child. And I I think we need to be a little more clear on we ought to be you know telling people you you shouldn't do that. That should not be allowed. Um but when we talk about um about the right to an abortion, the only way that that exists right now is as a civil right, and it's existing only on the state level as certain states have uh have embodied the tenets of Roe v. Wade and Doe versus Bolton into their state constitutions, and in some cases actually gone farther than Doe or Bolton would have allowed. But this is going to cause some certain amount of difficulties because uh it's much harder obviously to uh enact or to uh overturn or uh what's the word I'm looking for? This is where time is coming in. Um it's very difficult when once once a uh once a constitutional right has been established at the state level, it's very, very difficult to uh overturn that. And uh some states have tried to make it even more difficult uh to amend a constitution. That didn't work so well in Ohio recently. But um it's important to understand that that all of the things that we talk about that are abortion rights on the states level, they are civil rights. They are not transcendent moral rights, they are civil rights. And as a result, we do have the capacity and the ability to make persuasive arguments using the same mechanism that was utilized by the people who passed those constitutional amendments and have those constitutional amendments amended so that they're removed from the constitution and replaced with life-affirming language. I honestly believe that uh there are a couple of ways that we can do this. One of the ways is by continuing to grow a pro-life consensus throughout this country. People forget it doesn't matter if California, Illinois, and New York are hyper-pro-abortion states, if there are 38 states, right, that are willing to ratify a constitutional amendment that it would be a human life amendment, then that becomes a national law and it becomes incumbent on everybody within the nation to abide by that law. So there are ways that we can use these civil rights. But it's important to remember that our opponents, they're only grounded in civil rights, whereas pro-lifers are grounded in unalienable rights, transcendent rights that are above and beyond uh civil rights. I'm not a civil rights attorney, so I don't know as much about that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_03So I've got three more questions to ask you, but I want to pick of you pick because I'm not sure which one you might. I know you were getting tired. I'll uh we're respectful. So we've got does legal equal moral? In other words, does legality entirely define morality? Which begs the question where does morality, you know, where does morals come from?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, what's the genesis of morality?
SPEAKER_03That's one option. Another option is basically explain all of the things. Uh would you explain these two positions and what difference it makes?
SPEAKER_04Have you had many people take that one?
SPEAKER_03Um this is part of the the also all the lawyers are doing in this set. Okay. And we also had Father Frank do these and the legal equality.
SPEAKER_04Okay, go ahead and give me the third one.
SPEAKER_03Uh there's also um abortion has sometimes been described with extravagant language like genocide and holocaust. Uh legally speaking, is this language more or less correct? And then is it helpful? Are there contacts where you would use this language and others where you would not use it?
SPEAKER_04Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Let's go with um are we recording?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. We're gonna I think he said he was just gonna answer them all at once.
SPEAKER_04No, no, just one at a time.
SPEAKER_03Okay. So this is question number two out of the legal set. Does legal equal moral? In other words, does legality entirely define morality?
SPEAKER_04I think almost anybody looking at the current legal landscape could immediately recognize that no, legal does not equal moral. The first question you have to ask is where do legal standards come from and where do moral standards come from? Legal standards come from human beings coming together to craft laws that represent the kinds of things that they want. Morality is transcendent and it comes down to us from God. So when we abandon God, all we are left with are these legal standards, at which point morality really goes out the window when all you're really talking about is raw power. So, for example, I think it would be very difficult for anybody to argue that uh in the county right outside of Reno, where women are literally prostituting themselves for money, that prostitution is a good and moral thing. Um, so there are there have always been laws. Uh chattel slavery in the United States used to be legal, but no one today would look at that and say it's it's moral. And yet I think in the minds of especially a lot of students today, uh they conflate the idea of morality and uh and and legality, which is why the law, I don't want to minimize the nature of the law, the law is a tutor. When the law, um when when when the law and morality are in sync, when they're working together in concert, the law can become a wonderful way to help people understand where the lines are and what the limits are. It's when we abandon morality that then it just becomes a power struggle. So I think it's really important for us to have the conversation. And I will tell you, in our in academic environments, I don't think we're having it as well as we ought to. We have to evaluate, you know, where does morality come from? I'm a big fan of C.S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man. I've actually taught it in my classes for many, many years. And he basically makes the argument that um there is a transcendent moral law. He calls it the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false about the way the universe is and the kinds of creatures we are in it. He says the uh when we abandon that way of thinking, and he says that that way of thinking enables him to understand, he says, I myself do not enjoy the society of small children, but because I speak from within this moral framework, he says, I have to recognize that that that's a defect in myself, like a man might have to recognize that he's tone deaf or colorblind. The alternative to that is what he calls the conditioners. These are people who've abandoned all transcendent vision, but they can't abandon law because people need to have laws and ways to conduct themselves. And so, conditioners, instead of doing what has historically been done when people had a transcendent moral vision, where they would say, okay, I have received this, and now I will pass this on to the younger generation, and they and we will both equally be bound by this transcendent moral law that rules over all of us. By the way, whether we acknowledge it or not. We just recognize that it that it does. People in the know recognize that it does. Conditioners, on the other hand, they recognize that people need laws, and they are going to be the ones who determine the kind of people we're going to mold. Now, they don't have to be those kinds of people. Matter of fact, frequently people who are the elites consider themselves above and beyond these laws that they pass for these folks, because in their minds they have believed there is no transcendent law. So even if we preach a transcendent law to people, we ourselves know that we are above and beyond that. And so this leads to all kinds of horrible things. For starters, it's almost impossible to ground that kind of an ethic. People will say, oh, well, you have to do it because uh, you know, uh duty to your country. And of course the appropriate response is, why should I do that? Right? So people find different try, they try to locate um morality in different areas and it just doesn't work. Either we live in a universe that is created in such a way, as our founding documents identify, right? Endowed by our creator, created in such a way that there is a moral law that people uh have to be beholden to, whether they agree with it or not, or or even if they even understand it or not. It's just it's a part of the fabric of human life, or you have to surrender yourself to a group of elites who then will feel free to make laws in their own self-interest and then impose them on other people in order to get what they want. So that I think is one of the great distinctions between um what is legal and what is moral. Um legality can be a great tutor for what is moral, but when it is when it's separated from true transcendent morality, it can really, the law can turn into uh an agent of destruction for people.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for answering that. That's really good. This is question 19 out of the legal set. Abortion has sometimes been described with extravagant language like genocide and holocaust. Legally speaking, is this language more or less correct? And then is it helpful? Are there contacts where you would use this language and others where you would not use it?
SPEAKER_04Okay, so the the question then is is what people might call extreme language, is there a time and a place for it? Is that essentially it? Um when I speak to people in the church, I will just be straight up with them, and I will do the same thing in any academic environment. I would say the abortion industry makes Nazis look like Pikers. Right? They only manage to kill a few people. We've killed millions of people, and by the way, it's not limited to the United States. This is a worldwide Holocaust, and we're better at it than they were because we've convinced people to do it to themselves. So, no, I I don't think using terms. Terms like genocide or Holocaust are, or by using those as comparative terms, are out of uh are out of play at all. I honestly think we ought to be talking about that and even more so. That being said, if I'm talking to a woman who is going to be a counselor in an abortion clinic setting, this is not the kind of way that I think that we're going to approach uh this woman. She's not interested in the moral or the legal or the political battle. She's concerned about the child currently growing inside of her womb. When we are talking with people who are in the midst of a crisis situation, we don't use political language, we don't use power-oriented language, and we don't start talking about historical destructions of entire races of humanity. You don't do that. So is there a time and a place for using this kind of language? Well, yeah. In any place where you would use academic language or you use political language, then we ought to talk about things the way they are. It's not a stretch. None of what we're talking about here is wrong. Now, I will tell you, sometimes it might be impolitic because some people have a knee-jerk reaction to a Nazi comparison, which is why sometimes it's interesting to take people a lot farther back and start talking about the comparison not between Nazism, but the comparison between slavery. Because in slavery we determined that a certain class of human beings were non-persons, and therefore we could do with them what we wanted, which is exactly what we do in abortion clinics. And some slaveholders believe that it was okay to kill their slaves, and we have people now being told that it's okay to kill their children. So there's a lot of parallels there. And then you can take it farther back, and I frequently when I speak in churches, we make the comparison to Molech worship. Uh because if you're doing the exact same behavior for the exact same reasons, I'm going to suggest it's the same thing. So no, I don't believe that those kinds of uh comparisons are extreme in any way. As a matter of fact, I would simply say there is nothing in human history that compares to the tremendous Holocaust of abortion. There's never been a human activity ever that has put this many innocent human beings to death. Ever. And so this that's why this is the moral catastrophe of our age and it falls to us to respond to it.
SPEAKER_03So there's a debate in the pro-life or anti-abortion camp between abolitionism and incrementalism. Would you explain these two positions and what difference?
SPEAKER_04Okay, um so right now there is this massive debate going on uh in the pro-life community uh between people who identify themselves as abolitionists and other people who would identify themselves as incrementalists. I think that these two labels are uh create misunderstanding. Everybody I know in the pro-life movement is abolitionist in terms of goal. Everybody wants to see an end to elective abortion in the United States. Everybody does. The difference is the people who call themselves abolitionists, a more proper term for them is immediatist. They have this idea that they can simply declare that uh we're going to nullify all laws legalizing abortion, and we have all of the power necessary, all the law necessary in our founding documents to make abortion go away today. We've got to strike at the root, they say. There's a very good debate that occurred between an abolitionist leader and uh Greg Cunningham that I would encourage any of you to find on Google and watch. I believe he does a very good job and was also very winsome and nice about it, showing them that historically their position doesn't work. Because here's the bottom line. I don't know a single pro-life advocate that would not completely join forces with immediatists today if they believed that they had a strategy that would actually work. The problem is, is there is this kind of idea, a uh I'm gonna get into trouble here, a Christmas Victor kind of idea that because we're Christians, we're simply going to declare the will of God on the earth, and this is all just gonna go away somehow. If Christians will band together, this will happen. And this unfortunately doesn't work for a variety of reasons. Number one, why stop at abortion? Why not declare adultery to be illegal? Why not declare, in other words, pick your sin and just why shouldn't we be able to simply declare and eradicate all of it instantaneously? Well, nobody's been able to do it. Now we have had successes in states. In Alabama, abortion is effectively abolished. But it's still incremental because it's still legal in a bunch of other states, and even if you could declare from on high that abortion was going to become illegal throughout the United States, it would still be legal in China. It's always going to happen incrementally, and so we should not be afraid of the term incremental. Incrementalism, what it does is it represents or it recognizes the real political environment we currently live in. So for example, if you are in a state and you have done polling and you know without a doubt, you cannot pass a bill that would eradicate abortion in your state. But you did find out that you could create a variety of persuasive arguments that would get people to agree to at least place a limit at 15 weeks. Now, I know what people are thinking who are watching who are in the know. Placing a limit at 15 weeks eliminates almost no abortions. Almost all abortions occur before 15 weeks. So what kind of a victory is that? I'll tell you the kind of victory it is. It now moves the platform from all the way through birth to 15 weeks. Now, when I get up and when I get up to argue, I'm not going to be satisfied with that, but I'm going to tell people, okay, right now the law in this state says that you can have an abortion up to 15 weeks, and I need my opponent to explain to me what is the distinction between a child that's been gestating for 15 weeks and one day and a child that's been gestating for 13 weeks and five days. And the fact of the matter is they can't because there's no clear, bright line distinction between those people. And this, by the way, is why Planned Parenthood will not give an inch on this issue ever, because they realize the minute we recognize any child in the womb as being a human person worthy of legal protection, they're done. And so that's why, even if all we can get is a 15-week ban or a 12-week ban, I'm not satisfied with a six-week ban. We eventually have to help people to understand what's true. And I also think that there are people in the pro-life movement that simply ignore the fact that we have had literally decades of education from medical professionals that people have been brought up to trust, right? ACOG, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, they are all on board with full-blown abortion. And we're telling people, you have to trust your doctor, follow the science, right? And then our government has subsidized it, and we've been told it by all of the organs of our culture. It's hard to imagine that that could be overturned overnight. It's going to be politically impossible. The other factor that people don't think often about is that once people have had abortions, they become ego involved in the abortion activity. You don't have an abortion and then suddenly go, oh gosh, now we should stop all the abortions. You have an abortion, and even if you feel a conviction afterwards, and not everybody does, but even if you feel a conviction afterwards, you feel bad about it, what ends up happening is the more people who have abortions, the more normal. It's not normal, by the way, it's just common the experience becomes, and then the more you want to justify it. People don't generally evaluate things, come up with great arguments, and then make decisions. What they do is they make decisions, usually emotional decisions, and then they craft justifications for it. So we have to understand how human persuasion works. And historically, as somebody who's studied rhetoric for most of my life, persuasion happens incrementally with most people. This idea of an overnight conversion doesn't normally happen. Even the people at your church who experience a conversion and become Christians generally is not a lightning bolt out of the blue. There have been seeds been plant. The Bible talks about it, right? Some plant the seeds, some water the seeds, God gives the growth. That sounds remarkably like things happening incrementally to me. I do not want to discourage any of my brothers in this movement. As I've already said, there is a room at the table for everybody. And I'm telling you right now, if I could be convinced that you had a workable strategy that would obtain this goal, I'd be all over it. But to date, no one has shown me how to get from the desire to the real politic event. And until that happens, I will continue to be working to save the lives of all of the children that I could possibly save now. If a building was burning and I could go in and there were 14 children in there, and I only had the power and strength to carry four of them out, I would not say, Well, you know what? It's arsonists, and we have to make sure that arson never happens anywhere. We're going to abolish arson. And anything short of that is not going to be good enough. And so, no, you can't go into that building because you're not really abolishing arson. I'm saying, no, I'm going into the building and I'm grabbing these four kids. I can't save the other ten kids. But I can save these four kids now. Now, if I can save them now and if I can manage to go back in and save another four, I'm going to do that too. I would like to have the ability to go in and save all 14 kids. But in the meantime, I'm going to get whatever I can and save as many lives as I possibly can now.
SPEAKER_03I really appreciate your time. My pleasure. The last question is whatever I didn't ask you about, please please share if it's something you'd like to really share that's really shared a lot. I'm going to do eat something. This is the final line. So whatever you would like to talk about on this topic, uh, this is the question.
SPEAKER_04One of the biggest barriers to the achievement of a life-affirming culture is a lack of courage. A lot of us feel like we um don't have what it takes. We feel like we haven't mastered the arguments. Um we feel we've been told by our culture we don't have the right to go in and be judgmental about other people's actions. And we've literally kind of bought into a very, and this includes people in the church, we've bought into a very ungodly, unbiblical worldview, and then we find ourselves operating inside of that worldview. What I would say is the way you solve problems is you identify what you're up against, you assess your abilities, and then you engage your will to do God's will. And when we do that, if we find out what we're up against, if we really know what's true about abortion, we're going to be horrified by it. All of the evidence demonstrates it is the intentional killing of innocent human beings. And all believers should oppose that. In fact, I would think all thinking moral human beings should oppose that. So we know what we're up against. Now we have to evaluate our skill sets. What can we do? And a lot of people believe that since they can't do it all, they shouldn't do anything. And what I'm saying is that all of us have a have a part to play, and if all of us will give what we can. God doesn't ever expect us to give out of what we don't have, but he does expect us to give out of what we do have. And by the way, if you're watching this video, God always holds you accountable for everything you ever learned. So too late. You need to do something. So you evaluate your skill sets and you offer what you have. Maybe it's babysitting service for a parenting class at a local pregnancy center because they've got kids and they need to be watched. So yeah, you'll be vetted, you probably be fingerprinted. And then once we recognize you're a good you're the right kind of person, you can come in and do that. Everybody's got something that they can bring to this. But for those of us who are out there arguing against an abortion industry that is literally hell bent on the destruction of children created in the image of God, what we need are more voices who are not afraid to say what is true. So we need to find, we need to get the evidence, we need to train ourselves in the evidence, we need to understand what a good argument looks like and how to make one and how to avoid making bad arguments. We need to be self-reflective so that after we have an engagement, we can look back on what we've done and determine what did we do well, what could we do to improve, and what arguments we should should we abandon because they don't work. And if we're constantly engaged in that kind of self-reflection, we'll become better and better advocates for the lives of our unborn neighbors. So I think, yeah, if everybody would simply gain the courage necessary, and then I guess finally what I would say is a lot of people complain about pastors. I don't want to complain about pastors. I want you to pray for your pastor. I want you to be willing to just because your pastor is the professional Christian at church doesn't mean he's got to do everything that's biblical. Instead of walking up and saying, hey, pastor, how come you don't fill in the blank? Why don't we walk up to our pastors and say, hey, pastor, I would like to, and then offer up opportunities to share, um to share the apologetics of life with your congregation, with your youth group, with your small group, with your college career fellowship. You can take that off of his plate. Trust me, he's got enough to. But yeah, I would like you to pray for your pastors that they will have courage. Because you know what? They are also human beings. They're also in the crosshairs of people who would like to destroy their 501c3 status. They they can't do it, by the way, just to clarify. But they'll threaten to. And they'll threaten a protest outside of their church. They'll threaten all kinds of things. Pastors need to be courageous. And I think the best way to do that is by setting a good example in the church, listening to your pastor, letting him pour the word into you, embodying the word, being formed into the image of Christ, you be bold. Nothing will embolden your pastor more than seeing a congregation filled with emboldened Christ image bearers. So if we will follow Christ, if we will bring a life of a ring community out, it will help our pastors to then realize this can in fact be done. Nobody likes to fight a losing battle. Everybody wants to take the land. So be bold, be trained, evaluate your skill sets and employ them on behalf of your unborn neighbor.
SPEAKER_02And I think you're gonna find that in the long run, I truly do believe we are going to win this battle.com.
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