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In this episode Trent rebuts the arguments made in a recent essay in The New Yorker that claims having a child might be worse than aborting a child and that some Pope’s thought abortion wasn’t a sin.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.
Trent Horn:
Today, I’m going to be rebutting an essay in The New Yorker called “Is Abortion Sacred” by Jia Tolentino. And so it has a lot of the standard arguments I’ve been hearing lately. One of them among pro-choice individuals I find surprising are claims that abortion is not actually against biblical teaching. The Bible supports being pro-choice. The Catholic Church hasn’t always been against abortion. And maybe it’s because they think that abortion is just a religious issue. It’s true that many religious people, many Christians, are pro-life. It’s probably true the majority of people who are pro-life are Christian. Although, the majority of people in this country still identify as believing in God, I think a majority of them still say that they’re Christian.
Trent Horn:
But most of the people who made up the opposition to racial segregation were Christian. Think about the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and he led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Just because you’re religious doesn’t mean you can’t have a view on a human rights issue.
Trent Horn:
So instead of just engaging the basic human rights arguments, they try to muddy the water by saying, “Oh, well, the church isn’t really against this, and there’s all these other factors we have to consider.” So let’s dive into it, and see what this says, and how we can take it apart.
Trent Horn:
So, going down here. I’m not going to read everything in the article by the way, but I’ll go through it a bit. She begins talking about how when she was in Bible class, I think she was 13, you had to go across the room, agree or disagree to a proposition. And our teacher said proposition was abortion is always wrong. And we all walked to the side of the room and said, “Agree.” Then I raised my hand and I said, “I think it is always morally wrong and absolutely murder, but if a woman is raped, I respect her right to get an abortion.”
Trent Horn:
Also, I said, “If a woman knew the child would face a terrible life, the child might be better off.”
Trent Horn:
“Dead?” the teacher asked? Yeah, good question. Better off what? If someone’s going to have a bad life, should we kill him or her?
Trent Horn:
My classmates said I needed to go to the other side, and I did. Well, not just my classmates. That’s how the game works. You either agree abortion is always wrong or it’s not always wrong. Imagine if we put something else in here besides abortion, like rape or lynching. Well, what about in these very certain circumstances? My classmates said, “You need to go to the other side.” No, that’s the position that you took.
Trent Horn:
“I felt guilty and guilty and guilty, I wrote on my journal. I didn’t feel like a Christian when I was on that side of the room. I felt terrible actually.” Now, what’s interesting here is people talk about guilt, right? Now, this is at a evangelical church, but Catholics talk about Catholic guilt, right? And so guilt can serve a useful function when it reminds us that we are in contradiction to God’s law, to God’s will in our lives. And so we need to turn things around, and hopefully we accept that, and we don’t use it to actually distort what is right or wrong.
Trent Horn:
So when we feel guilty, the natural thing is to change our behavior and mindset to be in accord with what God wants. What the world would like us to do is to change what God wants, which we can’t, we only pretend to do that, in order to satisfy our guilty conscience.
Trent Horn:
And so she goes on. Now, it’s interesting in here, she talked about the issue of rape, and I understand how that’s a difficult situation. Well, what about in the case of rape? But that’s why you still have to get back to the question, while graciously addressing the injustice of rape, to ask, well, look, what is abortion? Why do you think abortion would be okay in the case of rape but not in another very difficult circumstance where a person chose to have sex? It’s a child in either situation.
Trent Horn:
So she goes on, let’s see here. “I had always thought of abortion as it had been taught to me in school. It was a sin that irresponsible women committed to cover up another sin, having sex in a non-Christian manner. The moral universe was a stark battle of virtue and depravity in which the only meaningful question about any possible action was whether or not it would be sanctioned the eyes of God.” Well, that’s a fair question to ask, right? Is this good or evil? And if God is pure goodness itself, shouldn’t we ask him?
Trent Horn:
Notice though this idea that, oh, well, abortion is tied up in sexual sin. Now, in one sense, it is. I believe that if abortions occurred outside of the context of sexuality, like if you just pushed a button, and it took your DNA, and a baby was growing in an artificial womb, and some people said, “Well, I would like to dismember that baby. I don’t want him or her anymore,” there would be much, much more outrage. But because it’s connected to sex, people go haywire in their thinking.
Trent Horn:
Just like people will reject the idea of being transracial, that a white person can be black just because they say so, people see the reality there because sex isn’t involved. But they accept transgender ideology because if something is related to sex, our brains just aren’t really great at processing it. We’d rather follow our desires than what makes logical sense.
Trent Horn:
So let’s see. “America’s a deeply religious country.” It’s interesting what she says here, “Two-thirds of the national population and nearly 90% of Congress affirm a tradition in which a teenage girl continuing an unplanned pregnancy allowed for the salvation of the world in which a corrupt government leader who demanded a massacre of the innocents almost killed the baby Jesus and damned us all in the process. And in which the son of God entered the world as what the godless dare to call a clump of cells.” So this part right here, I’m not sure if she’s trying to make fun of Christianity through this description, because you can through any description make something look silly. I could say, look, under atheism, we are just the accidental byproduct of an unintended, accidental universe. You and I are the products of nuclear waste and stars, and we are just clumps of cells. Under atheism, we really are just clumps of cells.
Trent Horn:
And of course that’s an uncharitable description, because even under atheism, we can see we are biological organisms. A watch is not a clump of gears unless you smash it with a hammer. So seeing this, well, okay, you’re trying to uncharitably describe our view. Instead, just address it for what it is. “In which a teenage girl continuing an unplanned pregnancy.” It’s like when people say that Mary was an unwed mother. She was not, by the way. She was betrothed to Joseph, and in Matthew’s gospel, the angel Gabriel tells Joseph, “Take Mary, your wife.” They were already married under Jewish law, they were just not at the point where they were living together.
Trent Horn:
And so continuing an unplanned pregnancy, it’s not like Mary just woke up and was like, “Oh my goodness, I’m pregnant. What happened?” That was the point of the enunciation and Mary’s fiat. Her yes to God that brought our savior into the world.
Trent Horn:
Continuing on. So I just don’t like when people try to turn, well, Mary had an unplanned pregnancy. Catholics can make a bad argument here. Like, well, what if Mary had had an abortion? Yeah, that would be bad. Obviously. But I just feel like an argument like that’s not going to make a ton of traction with someone who’s pro-choice because they think anybody should be able to get an abortion. Focus on what the unborn are.
Trent Horn:
All right. “For centuries, most Christians believe that human personhood began months into the long course of pregnancy.” That’s right. There was a dispute throughout human history about when a human being comes into existence. Because for thousands of years, so from the time of Christ until about the 17th century, we were pretty in the dark or mistaken about human development and biology. And that’s going to come up here when I talk about different teachings on abortion.
Trent Horn:
“It was only in the 20th century that a dogmatic narrative in which every pregnancy is an iteration of the same static story of creation began both to shape American public policy and to occlude the reality of pregnancy as volatile and ambiguous.” Well, no, in the 20th century, what becomes a dogmatic narrative, the idea we should protect human life, well, that’s not true. If you read the Dobbs versus Jackson opinion, you see in the 19th century states outlawing abortion, doctors taking a stance. This will come up later in the article, and this becomes dogmatic because you have the rise of industries and individuals who are killing the unborn on a scale that had always been known. There had always been abortion and infanticide in human history, but it had risen to a scale and a social acceptability that had not been seen before.
Trent Horn:
So goes on to say … Some of the things the way this is written. “Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer. Each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this.” Kernel of truth amidst a pound of lies. It’s true, there really is no human relationship like between a mother and her unborn child. The closest we can find, maybe conjoined twins. Even there, it’s not the same thing.
Trent Horn:
So you’re right. And we should admit, yes, pregnancy is the one of the most or the most unique human relationship on earth. There’s nothing like it, that is true. But it doesn’t mean that it’s more morally unstable than this. That should give us more stability in seeing the intimacy between a mother and her child. So seeing these, “host and parasite,” that’s such an ugly thing to say. Imagine if you said this. The relationship between a mother and her toddler, it goes from mother and child to friend and enemy.
Trent Horn:
In fact, there is a series of books called Your One-Year-Old, Your Two-Year-Old, Your Three-Year-Old. They’re great. My wife and I really enjoy them. And they have little descriptions of what life is like at different ages. So we have a seven-year-old now. The book on the seven-year-old is your seven-year-old, life in a minor key. They want to be a grownup, but they’re not nowhere near there yet. But they really want to try. Others, I think, your one-year-old is fussy and fun-loving. It’s your two- or your three-year-old is friend or enemy.
Trent Horn:
But imagine if you referred to other human beings as a parasite. First, this is also inaccurate. A parasite is an organism of another species invading a host, sapping their health and nutrients for its good alone. But the unborn belong to the human species. They cannot fall under the definition of a parasite. They’re not an invading, other species to someone’s body. In fact, they are necessary for a person’s health. If you are a woman that is unable to gestate a child, then that means you have a health problem. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Just like if you’re a man who cannot impregnate someone, well, you suffer from something that’s debilitating, an impediment. You have infertility. And so we devote medical resources and we have compassion on someone.
Trent Horn:
So like for me, for me, I can’t fly by flapping my arms. That’s not a disability. It’s not an impediment because me, by my nature, I can’t fly. I can’t get pregnant, and so I’m not sad about that, because it’s not within my nature to get pregnant. But for a biological woman to be unable to become pregnant, that is sad. It is a part of her nature, even if it’s never actualized. If she becomes a consecrated religious, for example.
Trent Horn:
But where was I going with this? Oh, so having a child is the natural fulfillment of bodily health operating properly. So to call the unborn parasites, I would say, through human history, the Nazis called the Jews “parasites.” Is that really the route that you want to go? In the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, the the Hutus and the Tootsie, I think. The Tutsis were one of them. They’re called “cockroaches.” In order to kill other human beings, we have to de dehumanize them first. And so do you want to continue that relationship?
Trent Horn:
So going through here, “For most of history, women ended unwanted pregnancies as they needed to, taking herbal or plant-derived preparations. They were likely enough to think they were restoring their menstruation, treating a blockage of blood. Pregnancy was not confirmed until quickening, the point at which the pregnant person could feel movement.” It’s so funny. Whenever I hear these arguments, people having abortions throughout most of human history. Well, people have been enslaving others throughout most of human history. People have been exposing infants in the wilderness and killing them through most of human history. People have been killing the elderly members of their community through most of human history. But we don’t do that anymore. It’s called progress. And so we should make progress when it comes to treating the unborn as well.
Trent Horn:
“Yeah, but back then, they didn’t know that it was a human being.” Okay, they were ignorant. Then that makes them less culpable. But we know now, so shouldn’t we follow the signs? Shouldn’t we be grateful of that? This idea, “Back then, they didn’t know.” Usually in articles like these, we praise the fact that modern science when it tells us, hey, this chemical actually makes a hole in the ozone. Oh, aren’t we so grateful? Science showed us the error of our ways, and we can change them, and not hurt other people. Or science showed us that lead paint is bad for kids to chew, so we take it out of the paint. But only with abortion do somehow people lament that science has proven the unborn are biological human beings. And instead, “Remember the good old days when we were ignorant, and we thought that a baby came into existence five months into a pregnancy? And it was just a bag of blood before that point? Why can’t we go back to that kind of ignorance?” Only with abortion do you have arguments like that.
Trent Horn:
“Ancient records of abortive patient medicine are plentiful.” That’s correct. That’s why it talks about the Code of Assura in the 11th century BCE. Right, that’s why in, I want to say, the fifth century BC, 500 BC … BCE. I hate that by the way. CE and BC. Remember, it’s BC and AD. Before Christ, anno domini, year of our Lord. Now it’s, well, it’s BCE, before the common era, and then CE, common era or current era. To which I have to ask, what divides the current era from before the current era? It’s just so silly to have that there, but that’s a talk for another time.
Trent Horn:
But the Hippocratic oath says “I will not give a woman a pessary to induce abortion,” so even the ancients recognized it being problematic.
Trent Horn:
Here we go. “Likewise, the early Christian Church opposed abortion not as an act of murder but because of its association with sexual sin.” That’s not true. When you read St. Basil the Great, for example, Tertullian, one, they don’t wait till quickening. They say “You have killed a man who is to be a man.” St. Basil says “With us, there’s no nice inquiry between being formed and unformed.” So you had some people who said it wasn’t murder until quickening. Others just said, “No, this is a little man or human that’s forming, regardless of whether we can recognize it or not.” That often was connected to sexual sin. That’s true.
Trent Horn:
But it’s also related to the sin of homicide once one can determine there’s a human being here. Now, scientific knowledge had to advance over time to discover that truth, but it was still always true.
Trent Horn:
“The Bible offers ambiguous guidance on the question of when life begins.” Well, yeah, because the Bible’s not a scientific textbook. We don’t look to the Bible to tell us whether African-Americans are people, or pygmies are people, or people with dwarfism are people. We look to the Bible, it says “All human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.” So if someone is a human being, then they’re made in God’s image, and they have dignity, and ought to be treated as such.
Trent Horn:
“Genesis 2:7 arguably implies it begins at first breath.” No, it doesn’t. It says in Genesis 2:7 that God breathed the breath of life into Adam. He made him from the dirt. Adam was the first human being. He doesn’t have a mother, according to the Genesis account. So God has to breathe life into him. That wouldn’t apply to his descendants.
Trent Horn:
“Exodus 21, 22 through 24 suggests an Old Testament law of a fetus was not considered a person.” No, it does not. It says that if two men struggle, and they knock a pregnant woman, and she miscarries, that they are guilty and shall be punished. All right. Now, the punishments differ. If they kill the woman, they could be liable to the death penalty. If they kill the unborn child, it says in the text, “a child is brought forth. The punishment is less,” but there is still a punishment.
Trent Horn:
So I never get citations of this verse. In Exodus, people are not punished … They could be punished with the death penalty. We don’t know. But it says “They are given a lighter punishment for accidentally killing an unborn child.” But think about it. In Exodus, there is a lighter punishment for accidentally killing a slave, but slaves are recognized as people. You couldn’t directly kill them. And we do this in today’s law. If you accidentally kill someone, the punishment is less than if you directly kill them. And that’s what’s applying here in Exodus.
Trent Horn:
So it does not show the fetus is not a person. The Book of Numbers, for example, doesn’t include any child under the age of one month after birth in the census. Doesn’t mean they weren’t persons. It just means you wait until they’re definitely going to make it in a time with very high infant mortality.
Trent Horn:
“Jeremiah 1:5 describes God’s hand in creation ‘even before I formed you in the womb.'” And, yeah, Jeremiah 1:5 is not a great argument for the person or the unborn. Just stick with the science.
Trent Horn:
“Nowhere does the Bible clearly indirectly address abortion.” Correct. The Bible does say it’s wrong to kill human beings. Science says the unborn are human. Ipso facto … That’s probably not the correct usage there. Therefore, abortion is wrong.
Trent Horn:
“Augustin in the fourth century favored the idea god endowed Apphias with a soul only after its body was formed in line with Aristotelian tradition,” and that’s the same with the goes down here. “This was more or less the church’s official position,” but the church doesn’t have an official position. Even in 1974 in the CDF’s declaration on procured abortion, it says in a footnote, “The church does not take a position on ensoulment because God has not revealed the exact moment when ensoulment occurs.”
Trent Horn:
If you say the moment of fertilization, by the way, that’s not a moment. That’s a process that takes 24 hours. So God hasn’t told us exactly when a organism gets a soul, but a lot of theologians say what makes sense is, well, the soul is what animates the body. So once the human body comes into existence, you have a rational soul. And science now tells us there’s a human body that exists, an individual organism, at successful fertilization. At least once fertilization is successfully completed.
Trent Horn:
So “In the early modern era, European attitudes begin to change. The Black Death dramatically lowered the continent’s population, and dealt a blow to most forms of economic activity. The Reformation weakened the Church’s position.” So this basically Silvia Federici’s argument that they’re trying to prop up birth rates to support capitalism, and that’s why abortion is wrong. That doesn’t really make sense, because you can find condemnations of abortion that are severe both before and after this point.
Trent Horn:
What really changes the condemnation of abortion is the development of understanding of human biology. So this one comes up a lot. Catholics for Choice loves to bring this one up. Let me go down to this here. So there we go. “Catholic doctrine started to shift around after the reformation,” they say. “In 1588, Pope Sixtus the Fifth labeled both abortion and contraception as homicide. This pronouncement was reversed three years later by Pope Gregory the 14th, who declared that abortion was only homicide if it took place after ensoulment, which he identified as occurring around 24 weeks into a pregnancy.”
Trent Horn:
Now, when you read this, it gives you an impression of something that didn’t actually take place. The primary reason for the reversal was that Gregory the 14th believed that Sixtus’s, the punishment he gave, was too severe. Like requiring excommunication for abortion at any stage that could only be lifted by the Holy See. So Gregory wanted to allow other bishops to be able to do that against what Sixtus allowed, and he can do that. You can make disciplinary reforms.
Trent Horn:
If a regular person just read this, they would take it to mean abortion was a sin in 1588, and it was not a sin before 24 weeks into pregnancy under Gregory the 14th. False. It was still a grave sin. It wasn’t considered homicide because there was still debate about whether the unborn child had a soul, whether it had a rational body, but it was still a grave sin. Contraception and abortion were both considered, and still are, grave sins because they’re an attack on human life. Contraception is an attack on a life that’s going to come to be. It is a way of saying, “I don’t want you here. I reject you before you even come into existence.” Contraception is an attack on life before it comes into existence. Abortion is an attack on life in its earlier existence.
Trent Horn:
“Still, it was not until 1869 that Pope Pius the Ninth affirmed this doctrine.” I guess going back here, the soul was present from the moment of conception. He’s not affirming that doctrine. “Proclaiming abortion at any point in pregnancy to be a sin punishable by excommunication.” That’s the other issue. It was a grave sin before 24 weeks of pregnancy. You just weren’t excommunicated. So some people when they read church documents, they’ll see, oh, well this Pope didn’t excommunicate people for abortion. Well in canon law today, there are a ton of grave sins you’re not automatically excommunicated for. Murder, rape adultery. It’s only under certain circumstances. If you murder the Pope, you’re excommunicated. Attacks on the Pope. But grave sins don’t always incur excommunication. They’ll still damn you to hell if you commit them. They’re still bad for you.
Trent Horn:
Excommunication is a medicinal punishment for people to see the specific gravity of certain sins. So the reason that canon law actually, in 1983, the revision of the Code of Canon Law still maintained excommunication for abortion. But why do we excommunicate related to abortion but not murder? One reason is that the church wanted to be a witness that even if civil governments will not stand up for the unborn, the church will through its law, through whatever means that it can.
Trent Horn:
But, still, through all of this, we have to remember this principle. Just because the church changes punishments for sins, it doesn’t follow it changed its teaching that something is or is not a sin. That’s important to remember, because in church history, you’ll see penances and punishments for sins changing. Penances in the early church were really brutal. They could last for years at a time or decades even. And those were lightened because some people will think, you know what, I’m not going to confess to this sin if I have to have a five year penance. So the penances that were meant to inspire people to holiness became a barrier to forgiveness, and so those developed, and those have changed over time. But the sins are still sins. Abortion was a sin in the first century at any stage just as it is a sin today at any stage. What’s codification in canon law developed as canon law itself developed, but the teaching itself, it never changed.
Trent Horn:
All right. Finally, I’m just going to scroll down a little bit here to the part that I think is really sad. “Abortion is often talked about as a grave act that requires justification, but bringing a new life into the world felt to me like the decision that more clearly risked being a moral mistake. I gave birth in the middle of a pandemic that previewed a future of cross-species viral transmission exacerbated by global warming, and during a summer when 10 million acres on the west coast burned.” Our third child was born in the midst of the pandemic, and really what made that hard where nonsensical pandemic policies that risked me not even being present at the birth itself. Thankfully, I was because we accidentally gave birth at home. So it’s all good.
Trent Horn:
But just seeing this here, you also live in a time where a vaccine that was created for this was developed in months. It was an amazing technological achievement.
Trent Horn:
Let’s see here. Oh, in the west coast. “10 million acres burning on the west coast.” That’s not a modern global warming thing. When you read the diaries of people, settlers on the Oregon Trail who were moving out to California, they would talk about how the sky was orange and filled with smoke because there were raging wildfires during the 19th century in California. That’s a part of the natural ecosystem, and really it’s a lot of our forest policies that contribute to wildfires, not so much climate. Watch, see if this episode gets dinged for climate misinformation.
Trent Horn:
Talked about an essay in the London Review of Books, Is It Okay to Have a Child?” The title eludes to a question that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asked in a livestream. Well, we should have abortion because look at how the world is going to end because of climate change. I can’t stand these kinds of arguments. When you actually read climate change reports, I’m not going to get into all of climate change, but the worst case scenarios talk about the number of deaths increasing, but they don’t talk about global extinction or even human extinction. They talk about things like slow GDP, and maybe an increase of deaths in the hundreds of thousands or millions, but there are also tens of millions of people that die every year. There’s 46 million abortions that occur worldwide every year.
Trent Horn:
Obviously, if there’s something we can do to prevent loss of life from climate issues, we should do that. Honestly, one of the big things we have done in human history to prevent climate killing, to prevent the climate from killing us, are fossil fuels. More people die from cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths. More people die from blizzards than heat waves, and fossil fuels have given us an ability to protect people from extreme cold weather events. And less cold weather events end up being better for people.
Trent Horn:
“Trent Horn is a crazy climate change guy. I’m Kermit the Climate Change Frog. I don’t like what Trent Horn is saying.” Now, I’m going to cover this in a future book on Catholics and social issues. It’ll be fun.
Trent Horn:
“In late 2021, as omicron brought New York to another peak, a Gen-Z boy in a hoodie uploaded a TikTok captioned, ‘Y’all better delete them baby names out your notes. It’s 60 degrees in December.'” Here’s the problem. This is crying wolf. If people are being told the world’s going to end so don’t bother having a child, get an abortion. This is an attack on human life through alarmists, and there have always been alarmists. There were people in the 1970s who thought there was going to be a new ice age. In the early 20th century, Eugenics said we’d be overrun with the poor and the mentally handicapped if we didn’t sterilize people. Don’t give into the alarmists.
Trent Horn:
And so it’s sad to see somebody talking about this. There’s unknowability in every reproductive choice. Like, well, this is so sad. I guess she had the baby. “My baby had become a toddler. Every night as I set her in the crib, she chirped goodnight to the elephants, koalas, and tigers on the wall, and I tried not to think about extinction.” Oh my goodness. Just play with your kid. Even if the world is going to go extinct, eventually it will, love your child. You need to have an eternal perspective. If this life is your only life, this life becomes an idol for you.
Trent Horn:
We see that. If you don’t have a proper understanding of life, mortality, and destiny, this life will become an idol. Or you’re either a nihilist who doesn’t give a rip about anything, or you idolize life. Even if it saves one life, Governor Cuomo, before his scandal and everything, we’re going to do everything we can. Even if it saves just one life, it’s worth it. Even if you cause absolute human misery, it’s worth it to save one life.
Trent Horn:
Now, I agree we should not directly kill one person to achieve certain goods. Do not do evil so good may come. But we also have to balance competing goods. You could take away all of our freedom to give us safety, reduce the speed limit to 25 miles an hour, make everybody wear a helmet when they go outside. That will save lives, but it’s not the kind of lives we really want to have, is it?
Trent Horn:
So is there anything else in here? Yeah. So it talks about how the fetus developing, and I don’t know, is there more that I can … Yeah, there is a little bit more.
Trent Horn:
“By the time that the Catholic church decided that abortion at any point for any reason was a sin,” bam, that’s where you’re wrong. It had always taught that. The question is, how severe is it? Is it homicide? Is it some kind of contraception? Is it somewhere in between? Should it be excommunicable offense? Is it not? The gravity of the punishments have changed, but it was always considered a sin, even from the first century. So there’s that distinction between just because punishments change does not mean the teaching changes.
Trent Horn:
And it’s important because, look, remember, we go to science to say, all right, well, what does science tell us? And especially you look at Pope Sixtus and Pope Gregory, what really changed our understanding of unborn children was Anton van Leeuwenhoek I think was his name in 1670 to 1680, end of the 17th century. You had the discovery of human sperm. And then, later, the human ovum. Now, we can see the Aristotle thought that the man’s semen entered the woman, and I think it’s supposed to be a kind blood, and if it takes or doesn’t take from the blood, you get a vegetable life, then an animal life, then a human life.
Trent Horn:
We saw, no, when sperm and egg come together, we have a complete human body at this moment that just grows and develops like you and I. So shouldn’t we follow the science then and just respect and affirm that life?
Trent Horn:
“At the time, abortion was largely unregulated in the United States, a country founded by Protestants, but American physicians from the American Medical Association mounted a campaign to criminalize it led by Horatio Storer. He called the typical abortion patient ‘a wretch whose account with the almighty is heaviest with guilt.’ Storer, raised Unitarian, later converted to Catholicism. They also don’t mention here that the American Medical Association called abortionists modern day Herods. That, for them, it’s because this kills a human being, we should protect human beings. Oh, how they have fallen from that point.”
Trent Horn:
And then she just goes on to complain about the laws and how they’re put forward. Ultrasound imaging in the late 1950s. This is interesting. “Ultrasound imaging, invented in the 1950s, completed the transformation of pregnancy into a story that, by default, was narrated to women by other people. Doctors, politicians, activists.” So only with abortion, right? Isn’t it great when science … And you don’t see these people saying “Astronomy in biology changed a story about the earth that was revealed to us by God.” And instead it’s scientists that tell us things. Well, they will say that, but what they mean is we’re glad we don’t have the story god tells us and we have the scientific evidence. They take the point that God’s story is wrong, the scientists are right, and we should just go with the science on this when it’s something like that.
Trent Horn:
Cardinal Caesar Baronius put it well, “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” So the Bible is not a scientific textbook. It tells us who made the world, why they did it, and where human beings fit into the big picture. But how it developed over time, science tells us that. And that’s a good thing. But with pregnancy, they want us to turn pregnant women into mystical shamans that she can tell us with her feminine wisdom, is this a life or not? Only she can know. No. Pregnant women do tell us their unique experiences they undergo that non-pregnant individuals … Not saying pregnant people. There are pregnant women and non-pregnant people, because there are women who don’t get pregnant and men who don’t get pregnant. There aren’t pregnant people.
Trent Horn:
Actually, I think that is in here. I think. Is it? Let’s see. Oh good. Yeah. I think I missed this. I missed this. All right. “Pregnancy was not confirmed until quickening, the point at which the pregnant person could feel fetal movement.” The pregnant person? And yet what’s interesting here is through the rest of the article, they say women give birth. Women. As it happens to many women though.
Trent Horn:
It’s so funny at that one point, maybe she didn’t mean the transgender thing. Because if she just wrote pregnant people over and over and over again, it would be quite obvious how silly it is. So you just have to have pregnant person in there just once.
Trent Horn:
All right. Did I cover everything else in here? Oh, here’s an interesting point. I’m going to end with this and then we’ll be good.
Trent Horn:
Talks about how “In 1965 Life magazine published a photo essay by Leonard Nielsen called Drama of Life Before Birth, and it put the image of a fetus at 18 weeks on its cover. The photos produced an indelible deceptive image of the fetus as an isolated being, ‘a space man,’ as Nielsen wrote, floating in a void independent from the person whose body creates it. They became totems of the anti-abortion movement. Life had not disclosed that all but one had been taken of aborted fetuses.” But you should remember that if you look, and they’re beautiful images, Life Before Birth from Leonard Nielsen. Nielsen is pro-choice. I wrote to his foundation once if I could use the pictures for a project. They said, no, they don’t grant permission for them to be used for pro-lifers. But the truth is there, even if the person showing it is completely opposed to it. So that’s an interesting thing.
Trent Horn:
The Drama of Life Before Birth, Leonard Nielsen. Still some of the greatest photos of unborn children. Let’s see if I can bring that up actually. Will that come up here? Ah, yeah, there it is.
Trent Horn:
So yeah, there you go. Wow, and that was in 1965, before we really took off on in utero photographs and ultrasounds. So I’m so grateful for the victories that we have managed to secure recently for these children. So let’s continue at them, shall we?
Trent Horn:
Thank you guys so much. I hope that this was all helpful for you all, and, yeah, I hope you have a very blessed day.
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