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In this episode Trent offers his thoughts on the leaked draft of an alleged Supreme Court majority opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade and make it possible to once again restore legal protection to unborn children.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
All right, so what’s coming out of the Supreme Court on abortion on Monday, that was unexpected. I’m shocked. I’m really nervous. I’m really excited. There’s a lot to process here, so on today’s episode I just want to process that with you.
Trent Horn:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today we’re going to talk about a presumably leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s case on Dobbs versus Mississippi. This case deals with a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks, which is currently not allowed under either Roe v. Wade or the new case that governs things, Casey versus Planned Parenthood. It’s gone all the way to the Supreme Court. People are wondering about what the court is going to do.
Trent Horn:
This is just a stunning development. This has never happened before in the court’s history, to have a draft opinion, and it appears to be authentic. We don’t know… Now this where… It’s so funny, I was talking with Laura and she was getting excited, and I was excited too, but I’m such a perpetual downer. I was like I don’t want get my hopes up. I was just praying so hard about this last night, like oh, Lord, please just end the scourge of abortion in our country, although if Roe versus Wade is overturned it doesn’t mean abortion ends. It just finally gives state legislatures a real actual power to do something to protect the unborn, which Roe has prevented them from doing in any meaningful way for the past 50 years.
Trent Horn:
So I was telling her here’s the deal. This is a leaked… I believe this draft opinion, which presumably at one point in the court’s deliberation represented the view of the majority of Justices, probably about five out of the nine of them, and that would be Alito writing the opinion [inaudible 00:02:00]. I highly doubt that Roberts is involved with it. Otherwise he would have written the opinion. Sometimes he gives it to other people to write, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Gorsuch and Thomas.
Trent Horn:
Really, people, this is unprecedented, to have… There have been rumors about how the Justices were going to vote on things that have been released before cases, but to have an entire draft opinion… And this appears to be authentic, that they heard oral arguments last year, the dating on the document says that it was drafted in February. That would have given Alito and his clerks about two months to write it. It is a meticulous, well-researched, awesome, bomb decision gutting Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey.
Trent Horn:
This is not a moderate approach, and that makes me excited. I’m going to talk about what I’m excited about in the ruling. It’s just awesome, how it just goes through and just shreds those awful cases and sets a better legal precedent, to say that this should return to the state. It’s up to the state legislatures and the people to democratically decide how they’re going to approach the issue of abortion, because there is no right to abortion in the Constitution. Even defenders of legal abortion have basically admitted Row v. Wade was a castle in the clouds. It’s something that is just built on thin air, that actually has no foundation for it.
Trent Horn:
But I’m also mad that if I had to bet money, that this document was leaked by a member of one of the liberal Justices’, one of their clerks. One of their staffers leaked this to create a public backlash to maybe pressure one of the members of the majority, because if it goes through I bet it would be five/four. I highly doubt that Roberts would involved in this.
Trent Horn:
What I have heard from people is that Chief Justice John Roberts, he wanted to uphold Roe versus Wade, but allow Mississippi to ban abortion after 15 weeks. He would uphold Casey and… Remember, Roe versus Wade in 1973, Roe says that you can’t ban abortion the first… In fact, Roe invented the trimesters. The trimesters in pregnancy are not a medical phenomena. They were invented by Roe to come up with arbitrary places to set abortion law.
Trent Horn:
So the first 12 weeks, according to Roe, you can’t do anything to ban abortion at all. The second 12 weeks, you can regulate it to protect a woman’s health. The last 12 weeks after viability, you can ban abortion, but you have to leave an exception if a woman’s life or health is in danger.
Trent Horn:
Health is described… In the companion case to Roe, Doe versus Bolton, health is described as anything physical, emotional, psychological, familial or age related. I use the acronym PEPFA. So by that standard almost anything qualifies for health, so you really do have abortion in this country if… The only thing that would prevent you from doing abortions is the lack of abortion providers who don’t want to do it. But if an abortion provider wants to do abortions up until the day before birth they’re able to do that.
Trent Horn:
Don’t believe me? Go to a drhern.com, dr-H-E-R-N.com. Warren Hern does abortions in Colorado, which just passed legislation to make abortion a right there in the State of Colorado, and if Roe v. Wade is overturned you’ll see other states pass their own Roe v. Wade laws to codify into their state constitutions, and you’ll see other states restricting abortion, which is good.
Trent Horn:
That’s what we should have. We should have this democratic process to understand that certain places and regions believe in protecting life, and the will of the people should be heard in that regard. This has actually been used in another case about killing people, in another moral issue about killing people.
Trent Horn:
So, yeah, I’m concerned that this represented a past view the Justices had and that this document doesn’t reflect it anymore, but here’s the thing. If this majority opinion was dead, if it was at one point a draft opinion and the Justices dumped it a long time ago there would be no point in leaking it. There would be no point.
Trent Horn:
I suspect this was leaked because there are five votes for overturning Roe versus Wade, and the staffers in Sotomayor’s office probably are just flagrant and livid, apoplectic, and they’ll do anything, because here’s the thing. When I’ve seen online that the idea of using the public to pressure the courts to get what you want is the violation of our fundamental values as a democratic republic, where the judiciary is an independent branch.
Trent Horn:
It’s fine to pressure your elected representative. You vote them in or out. It’s fine to pressure the president. You vote him in or out. The judges are not supposed to respond to what we think. They respond to what the Constitution says. That’s their job.
Trent Horn:
But I’ve seen so many people on the other side of this issue say they don’t care. I said to [inaudible 00:07:02]… I had a dialogue with him a year ago on the Bible on Luke’s gospel. I said to him, “Do you see the danger”… Because he doesn’t care about the leak. He’s pro choice. His wife was very unhappy with me on Twitter. You can look at my Twitter thread. I guess disgusting human is what I was referred to in response to saying that I think every single human being should be protected under the law, but in any case… And I offered to go on his channel to talk to him about this, and he said he doesn’t think two men need to talk about this issue.
Trent Horn:
But you know what? Frankly, I think that this shows that’s one acknowledgement. And also at Emory, where the pro choice students didn’t want to support my debate with Nathan Novis. The other side knows they can’t win in a fair debate. They can’t win, because their position is incoherent and illogical, and I’ll prove it to them by debating any of their advocates any place and any time. Let’s go.
Trent Horn:
I’ve debated the leading pro choice advocates in the English speaking world today, Nathan Novis, David Boonin. I am happy to engage others on this subject to show you’re wrong. You’re wrong. The arguments, the logic, don’t stand up to your position, and most pro choice advocates won’t. They just use intimidation, profanity… And that’s what I’m seeing from pro choice liberals. Then half-baked arguments on bodily autonomy, or saying things like, “It’s not a human being. It’s a fetus.” I’m like, “Wow, you’re really new at this, aren’t you?”
Trent Horn:
You see people jumping in the game that haven’t really thought this out, because remember, this is not the end. If Roe v. Wade is overturned it’s not the end of the fight, it’s the beginning of 50 fights in the states to either work towards protecting the unborn, rolling back laws to enshrine abortion, or to put forward laws to protect the unborn.
Trent Horn:
I’m all amped up about this, but you should be. The pro life movement has never come this close before. We’ve never come this close to ending abortion, to making such a substantial step to protecting the unborn.
Trent Horn:
By the way, yeah… Well, you know what? I’m just going to say controversial stuff, and if people get mad at me, whatever. I don’t care. I’m just going to say it.
Trent Horn:
So, number one, this is something, by the way… Yeah, this is for liberal Catholics out there. By the way, you can be a Catholic who has liberal policies, liberal economic views. I don’t agree with them, but it’s a big tent. I recognize that, just like I don’t agree with a lot of economic and political policies on the far right. I don’t believe in distributism, I’m not an integralist. I’m not going to get into all these terms, but there’s a lot of politics on the far right I don’t agree with, or not far right, but traditionalism, what have you.
Trent Horn:
Fine. You’re Catholic. You’re as Catholic as I am. We disagree on [inaudible 00:09:41] issues. And there are Catholics who are more liberal in their politics. I don’t care. As long as you uphold fundamental teaching of that faith, that it’s wrong to kill innocent human beings, and that ego, abortion should be illegal, assisted suicide should be illegal, euthanasia should be illegal. If you’re a liberal, though, on minimum wage, whatever, I disagree with you, but you’re still Catholic. That’s fine.
Trent Horn:
But it’s hearing from some liberal Catholics right now, and seeing their responses to this online, and it’s just gross, like seeing the antipathy, the apathy, I’m worried, let’s just listen to what women say about all of this, instead of being like wow, we’re so close.
Trent Horn:
These same liberal Catholics who said that pro life politicians don’t care, that there’s some big conspiracy to get pro life votes and no one is ever going to really overturn Roe versus Wade, you hear that, like pro life politicians want you to vote for them but they’re never really going to overturn Roe v. Wade, a pox on them. Boo. Boo I say to you, saying it doesn’t really matter.
Trent Horn:
Guess what? It does matter. It does matter who you vote for. Here’s what I would say to you. I would never vote for a candidate who believed that black people weren’t people. Would you? Why would you vote for a politician who thought that some people aren’t people? I would only vote for a candidate who thought that African-Americans weren’t people if the alternative was somehow worse, somebody who thought all minorities weren’t people or something like that, so I have to pick the lesser of two evils.
Trent Horn:
So I would never vote for a candidate who believed the unborn were not persons, just as I would not vote for a candidate who thought black people were not persons. The only time I would do that would be if somehow the other person in the race who has a feasible chance of winning is worse, and I would still respect people who would just simply abstain from voting in that case.
Trent Horn:
So no, I’m sorry, who you vote for does matter, because who you vote for includes who is placed on the judiciary, and we are at a time in history where people use the judiciary as a legislative branch, where judges just… They don’t care the rule of law. They will find any legal excuse to shoehorn their opinions in.
Trent Horn:
I knew this with [inaudible 00:11:56], with the Supreme Court voting five to four to say that pregnancy resource centers should not be forced to advertise for abortion. That’s crazy. So much for pro choice. California wanted to force pregnancy resource centers to advertise abortion services for people, as if women going to these places are too stupid to look it up on Google or in the yellow pages.
Trent Horn:
It clearly is unconstitutional that you’re compelling speech from people, and no, they don’t care, because they love abortion. It’s the chief sacrament of secular liberalism. So those liberal Catholics who said, “Oh, they’ll never overturn Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t matter. We need to do something…” No. Sorry, you’re wrong.
Trent Horn:
Then, by the way, President Biden released a statement today… Let me see if I can… Let’s see if I can pull that up here. He talks about extending abortion rights, “We need more pro choice senators and a pro choice majority in the House,” because he has promised… Let’s see. I haven’t gotten… The statement was on Twitter.
Trent Horn:
The point is at the end of the statement though he… “It will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of the government to protect the woman’s right to choose,” is Biden’s statement today. Catholic preside. Oh, whoopie. “At a federal level we will need more pro choice senators and a pro choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
Trent Horn:
So there’s the other one for liberal Catholics, saying Biden can receive communion because he hasn’t actually voted for abortion and he can’t control what happens to Roe versus Wade, so you can’t deny abortion. I call shenanigans in all of this. President Biden has pledged to sign into federal law to make it legal to kill babies. Any Catholic priest, bishop, who says that he should still be able to receive communion is a joke. I don’t care who it is and I don’t care what backlash I receive, by the way.
Trent Horn:
Any bishop, if he promises and then follows through with it, which hopefully he won’t, because I’m hoping that in the fall they’re going to shellacked and lose their majorities and it’ll be a Republican majority in the House and the Senate, a pro life majority, so that that won’t happen. I’m hoping as much. And I think there’s good reason to believe that, by the way.
Trent Horn:
How have your grocery bills been lately? Ours has been pretty high. My point is that, look, there it is right there, of Biden saying he’s going to sign a federal law saying that abortion is legal in all 50 states for any reason to codify Roe versus Wade and the federal law. Why would that man… How is that any different from him signing legislation saying that lynching should be legal in all 50 states? Signing legislation saying marital rape should be legal in all 50 states? If you would deny someone communion in those circumstances, why not Biden?
Trent Horn:
So I would say this, that anyone, but especially… Yeah, because any bishops or cardinals that say, “Oh, he can [inaudible 00:14:59] communion, conscience,” blah, blah, blah, they are a joke. They’re an absolute joke, and I will give them the bare minimum amount of respect for their office that the Holy Spirit and the Catholic church says I must, but only that. Only as much as God says I need to. After that, no. You’re a joke.
Trent Horn:
I don’t care if any bishop or certain ones get mad at me. Normally I don’t rock the boat. You know me. I stick to apologetics, but here I’ve been doing pro life apologetics way longer than Catholic apologetics, something that’s been near and dear to me. This is part of my conversion experience and I’m going to say what’s right.
Trent Horn:
That’s always my policy, especially now. I’m going to say what’s right, and I don’t care of you disagree with me. If you can show I’m wrong, then I care. But if you’re just mad, don’t care, don’t care at all. It’s about doing what’s right, and we know we should do it. Don’t be a jerk about doing what’s right. Do it with an air of grace, be gracious about it. Don’t stoop to the level of one’s opponents. I think that’s something we’re going to have to keep a lookout as this continues on.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so there… If we’re getting this close, I do… Yeah, I’m peeved at some liberal Catholics and their views on this. You can look at my dialog with Steve Miles, I think, the Catholic case for Roe, where you can see just how incoherent that liberal view, and I’m happy to dialog… I will dialog with others. I have a vigorous view on this, but I can have gracious conversations about things I vigorously believe about, and I’m happy to do that with a liberal Catholic who disagrees with me on this issue.
Trent Horn:
All right, so what happened is… So last night I got home from muay thai, first muay thai class by the way… These elbow strikes are crazy to do, by the way, and I was just on my phone and there I see it, like news story, Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe versus Wade. I just hear it and my heart is like, you know, just that jump you feel inside of you, like what is this? Is this real? And I see draft leak opinion says, and I’m thinking what is this going on about?
Trent Horn:
So I read through, and I told my wife I got to be up. And I’m on Twitter and I start debating people on Twitter, which I normally don’t do, a lot of things I normally don’t do. Then I read the leaked majority opinion presumably authored by Alito and possibly five Justices are onboard with as well hopefully, if some of them aren’t pressured to changing their votes through an intimidation tactic.
Trent Horn:
So what I want to talk to you about is… I’m not going to do a full breakdown of this draft opinion. If this is the final opinion it would be just awesome. It’s an amazing opinion. I’m just going to talk about points that kind of stood out to me when I was reading through it.
Trent Horn:
It’s long. I was reading it late last night, like 11:30 at night, and it’s about 98 pages. The last 30 are appendices, citations, things like that, so it’s about like a 65-68 page decision.
Trent Horn:
What it goes through is… The basic thing is to say look, the opinion does not say abortion must be illegal. It does not say the fetus is a person. It doesn’t answer any of those questions. It focuses on one question, does the Constitution say there is a right to have an abortion? The right for abortion, is that in the Constitution? The case says no.
Trent Horn:
It says Roe and Casey were wrong when they were cited, and in fact Row versus Wade, they gave the three trimester system. It was overruled by Planned Parenthood versus Casey in 1992, which said forget the trimester system. That’s dumb. It’s viability. Before viability you can’t ban abortion, or you can regulate it, can’t be an undue burden on a woman, which is hopelessly vague. After viability it’s PEPFA, health, physical, emotional, psychological, familial, age related.
Trent Horn:
Viability is the key marker after Planned Parenthood versus Casey. But why? Where is the right to abortion? Both courts say the Constitution does not say abortion, obviously. It comes from the right to privacy. Well, where is that in the Constitution? Well, it’s not there either. It’s in the Penumbra. It’s in the first, fifth, ninth, tenth and fourteenth amendments.
Trent Horn:
So the case goes through and says no, it’s not in any of these. It’s not under the ninth or the tenth. Just because the ninth and the tenth say that rights are not reserved to the federal government, they are reserved to the states or to the people, it doesn’t mean that if the Constitution doesn’t say something, therefore you have the right to do that. That would be way too sweeping.
Trent Horn:
The same with the fourteenth amendment. They said that the fourteenth amendment doesn’t mean that you have the right to do private decision that you think you should be allowed to do. Of course abortion is not a private decision. It takes place oftentimes in a doctor’s office. It’s paid for with health insurance. It’s not private by any means, shape or form. Even if you do abortion pills at home, you have to Teledoc, they send you abortion pills. Health insurance often pays for this.
Trent Horn:
But what the court said, they went to a case, Washington versus Glucksberg. This is a 1997 case, very interesting. Washington versus Glucksberg ruled unanimously, nine to zero, 1997, that there is no right to assisted suicide in the Constitution. This is a big deal, to compare this to Roe v. Wade. That was a 9/0 unanimous decision. I do not think it would be unanimous today, given how partisan the world and the court has become.
Trent Horn:
But even back then the Justices recognized no… Because it’s funny… It’s not funny, it’s sad. Back then people were suing Washington State to make it legal to commit assisted suicide. So they brought to the Supreme Court, saying there’s a right to take your own life, a right to suicide. Now assisted suicide is legal in Washington.
Trent Horn:
But what the court said in Washington versus Glucksberg is… They came back with the decision on assisted suicide and said there is no right to assisted suicide in the Constitution, so that does not mean assisted suicide must be legal in all 50 states. That’s what the assisted suicide proponents wanted in Glucksberg. They wanted to make assisted suicide legal in all 50 states.
Trent Horn:
The court says no, we’re not going to do that. There’s no right to assisted suicide. But the court also said the Constitution does not prohibit it. The Constitution does not prohibit that, so a state could make assisted suicide legal, which happened incrementally in Washington, Oregon, California, and I want to say Michigan as well. That was where Kevorkian was doing all his stuff, which happened incrementally after that point is what we saw in Glucksberg.
Trent Horn:
What they said is you go back in common law history, there was never a right to suicide. Suicide was always treated as a crime, even if you took away the punishment. Like what are you going to do? Someone who tries to commit suicide, what’s the punishment? The death penalty? In order to understand that sometimes common law didn’t punish suicide, even if it didn’t punish it that did not mean you had a right to suicide, because that was an argument used for abortion.
Trent Horn:
Roe v. Wade gave this history of abortion law that was just wrong. It was the greatest snow job in constitutional history. This is really taking me back, by the way. When I first started doing pro life work 20 years ago I started researching this. I read a book called Abortion and the Constitution. It was written by three authors, pro life legal scholars.
Trent Horn:
When I read through it I was thinking wow, I can’t believe how wrong it is, how wrong. That’s what the Dobbs case does. It says Roe talks about things that don’t matter, like what abortion laws were like in ancient Greece, and it just gets it wrong about the common law, saying abortion was never a crime under common law.
Trent Horn:
It talks about how the belief that abortion was not illegal under common law, like under British law before the American colonies and in the early American history. That was from a bad scholarship from a pro abortion legal article.
Trent Horn:
Pro life has been saying this stuff for years, and the thing is it’s true. Roe’s legal argument, the legal history for abortion, is so bad that Casey didn’t even repeat it. Casey just ignored it. So the Justices realized you can’t defend Roe, and Dobbs does a great job of quoting pro choice legal scholars like Lawrence Tribe and former clerks and Justices of the Supreme Court who were pro abortion, saying Roe is not a constitutional… It doesn’t pass constitutional muster basically, so it goes through there.
Trent Horn:
It basically tries to argue let’s treat this like assisted suicide. When the fourteenth amendment was passed in the United States no one thought that abortion should be legal. It was not meant to protect abortion. In fact, abortion had been illegal all throughout the United States and the ruling makes it clear that this was the case almost all the way up to Roe versus Wade, that the only legal argument for the constitutionality of abortion came out just a few years before Roe versus Wade.
Trent Horn:
This is important, that there’s been this solid tradition, because this gets to the question of [inaudible 00:24:11], which I’ll talk about here in a little bit. I think the court is trying to say treat it like just how Glucksberg handled assisted suicide and let the states decide, because there’s no constitutional right to assisted suicide. I think Alito’s opinion would say say have abortion be handled by the states in the same way, because there is no constitutional right to abortion.
Trent Horn:
When you go through the case it’s great. I love seeing that the idea that citizens should settle this matter, quotes from Justice Scalia, so even though Scalia… If only he could be alive today, that he still gets to hae his say in the opinion. By the way, I’m getting excited. I’m getting excited, but this is not [inaudible 00:24:49] proof. It can change, because Roberts wants to make it so that… What observers have said is that Chief Justice Roberts wanted to uphold Roe v. Wade but allow Mississippi to ban abortion after 15 weeks. I don’t know how you can do both.
Trent Horn:
You can’t do both, because Roe and Casey say viability, you can’t ban it. 15 weeks is not viability, but most people would agree with a 15 week abortion ban, so how do you justify that the state is allowed to ban abortion at 15 weeks?
Trent Horn:
I guess you could say well, we’re going to overturn Row and say that instead of viability, 12 weeks, the first trimester, is the dividing line. Then you have to say why 12 weeks? Why not 11? Why not 10? Why not nine? It becomes absolutely arbitrary. The Justices know this and it’s a bind. It’s either full right to abortion or there is no right to abortion. You can’t cut Solomon’s baby on this one. All right, so that was great seeing Scalia being quoted in there.
Trent Horn:
A few other things that stick out to me. Oh, I loved that the case shredded the mystery passage. In Planned Parenthood versus Casey this is one of the most idiotic, asinine things in American jurisprudence, is this line. Why should abortion be legal? In the Dobbs case it says Roe says this is right to privacy. Casey says the freedom to make intimate and personal choices, and Planned Parenthood versus Casey in 1992 put it this way.
Trent Horn:
This is the mystery passage. It is an eye roller, a groaner. It’s one of the worse lines in American jurisprudence. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” What a bunch of woo-woo.
Trent Horn:
So Dobbs goes on to say, “The court did not claim that this broadly framed right is absolute and no such claim would be plausible. While individuals are certainly free to think and to say what they wish about existence, meaning, the universe, the mystery of life, they are not always free to act in accordance with those thoughts. License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of many understandings of liberty, but it is certainly not ordered liberty.”
Trent Horn:
You’re free to believe whatever you want about the meaning of life, but you can’t act as if that’s true, because some people believe that certain groups of people aren’t human and shouldn’t have a right to live, whether they’re born or unborn. Some people believe that it’s totally fine to defraud people who are not as smart because they had it coming, or something like that.
Trent Horn:
People have all kinds of weird ideas about the world, and guess what? In America you’re free to believe any weird idea that you want. That’s what’s great about the first amendment. You’re just not free to act like it’s true if it contradicts the law. So if you have the weird idea that birth magically transforms you into a person, you can believe that as much as you want. Fine. You can’t act like it’s true though.
Trent Horn:
But you can believe it. Fine. People believe all kinds of dumb things. Trent is spicy today. Yeah. It’s human life that matters here. It’s a big deal. But I believe… I always treat my interlocutors with respect, even if I have no respect for the position they’re defending.
Trent Horn:
Look at my dialog with Nathan Novis. I have respect for Novis as a person. I think he’s a smart guy. I have no respect for his position he argues for and I vigorously argue against it, and you can see that in the dialog.
Trent Horn:
Nathan has since responded to that. I may response to his response, but I prefer not to do that. I believe debates should stick to themselves. Maybe in another format we can hash it all out, maybe in a book.
Trent Horn:
Okay, let’s talk then just about [inaudible 00:28:38]. That’ll be the last thing. The big thing a lot of people say, the big argument for Roe v. Wade is just you know what? We can’t overturn Roe v. Wade, because no one will take the court seriously if we overturn our own precedence, except the court has done that time and time again.
Trent Horn:
In the Alito case there’s a giant footnote of all of these cases that have been overturned in it, and they said that if we didn’t recognize these overturned cases you couldn’t recognize the legal landscape in the United States.
Trent Horn:
Some of them are really amazing. One that I thought was interesting was they cited West Virginia Board of Education versus Barnett in 1943. That case said that students do not have to salute the flag at public schools. Students cannot be compelled to salute the flag. This was in 1943.
Trent Horn:
That overturned a case three years earlier in 1940 that said you had to salute the flag, or you could be compelled to salute the flag. They said what changed in three years? Nothing. We just recognized that we were wrong three years ago. The court does this. The court gets things wrong, and it got Roe wrong, and it’s good for them to understand it.
Trent Horn:
I guess I’ll stop there. There’s a few other things I thought were interesting in the case, talking about women’s voices being heard. The court makes it clear that women are more likely to vote than men. There are a higher percentage of voters who are women registered in the State of Mississippi. Their voices can be heard in the legislature. They can vote there to be heard.
Trent Horn:
They do a great job talking about philosophical personal arguments, saying that those could also deny a person [inaudible 00:30:20] people. Also it’s interesting, they say that there has been change in society to justify overturning Planned Parenthood versus Casey, because Casey said that women relied on abortion to have equality with men, and Row kind of takes this tact also.
Trent Horn:
But the court says no, things have changed since then. We have laws to protect discrimination. You can’t be fired for being pregnant, things like that, at least in the general workplace. There are some issues of conscience and morality clauses, things like that. We’ll talk about that on another episode.
Trent Horn:
But in general… I’ll tell you this. My mom said that when she was in the ’70s she went to get a job and an employer told her, “I ain’t hiring you because you’re going to get pregnant on me.” That was legal back then. But now there are laws to protect women from pregnancy discrimination.
Trent Horn:
There are safe haven laws, where if you give birth to a child and you do not want to care for them you can immediately take them to a firehouse, a police station, a think a Quick Trip, right? All the Quick Trips have like the safe haven thing there. All right, I guess.
Trent Horn:
But you can do that, much different than how adoption was back in the 1970s. And there are tons of people who are waiting to adopt children and there are not enough children to adopt, though if abortion were outlined the vast majority of women would just raise their children. They would just end up raising them. I remember back during oral arguments the safe haven laws, that was something that Amy Coney Barrett brought up during oral argumentation, saying things are different now to justify the overturning.
Trent Horn:
But they do a great job, saying the legal principle that you ought to not overturn previous cases [inaudible 00:32:04]… Let me see if I get this right. I think it’s [inaudible 00:32:09], or just [inaudible 00:32:10]. I think I’m pronouncing that right. What is decided, do not move it, I think. If it’s been decided we don’t overturn it, but we do overturn things, and they lay a good foundation for why things should be overturned. There’s like a five-pronged case about when… Five-pronged argument for when you should overturn something. It’s thought out very well.
Trent Horn:
I kind of had at it today, but that’s good. Look, I am committed… I went on Twitter and I said I’m going to write, speak and debate like hell so everyone has the right to life, and I will. I’m committed. I just submitted a draft actually a month ago of the second edition of Persuasive Pro Life.
Trent Horn:
I told Catholic Answers editorial board whatever happens, whether we win or lose at Dobbs, we’re going to need to keep fighting and we’re going to need to keep moving forward. I really wanted to update Persuasive Pro Life, update the facts, the statistics, and frankly it’s a total overhaul of the book. This is not cosmetic surgery. It’s reconstructive surgery.
Trent Horn:
The book is good, but I’ve learned a lot about book writing since then, so I’ve actually managed to add more content and shorten the book so I could sell it ideally as a bulk book. You buy 20 of them at 60 bucks. It would be the bomb if we could do that. With paper prices now we might not be able to, but I’d love to do that.
Trent Horn:
I’m also addressing arguments that have come forward from pro choice advocates like Boonin, Novis, Grezely, Paulis, or Pallis I should say, that have come out, because that book, I wrote it nearly 10 years ago. I wrote it like 10 years ago, Persuasive Pro Life, so it’s high time to have a second edition, to be the definitive book to teach people. The new structured format makes it so much more readable. This is the book to teach you how to talk about abortion. I’m excited.
Trent Horn:
So that’s our plan, to move that forward. I’m going to release the second edition of Persuasive Pro Life. It’s already been submitted, and there’s just blank spots I left in the book to write out what was going to happen with this case. My goal was to submit the book to print right after we got a decision like this, so the second edition Persuasive Pro Life.
Trent Horn:
I’m going to be committed to more pro life speaking, especially at big conferences. I don’t really like traveling as much, but pro life is a big deal to me, you know, so I want to do that. And debates. If you find a solid pro choice opponent who will debate me, because many won’t, they just don’t do it, and you want to host it at your university campus or host it in that way, I’ll come.
Trent Horn:
If you’re a student group, like we’re poor, we can’t afford it, I’ll come for free. I did that for Emory. I waived my honorarium, because I believe that this is such an important issue. Public debates, especially to do them on the university campus. I’ll come. Catholic Answers and I, we’ll do whatever it takes to debate, and then put it online to show the pro choice position is [inaudible 00:35:01]. It just absolutely is, and that has been proven in engagements, in philosophical works time and time again, and I’m happy to keep doing that. If you want me to help do that on your campus let me know. Reach out to me. Be glad to do it.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Well, that’s a lot. Oh, one more thing. If you want to learn how to talk about this issue go to schoolofapologetics.com, schoolofapologetics.com, and I have a course there. I think it’s called Evidence for Pro Life, so School of Apologetics, Evidence of Pro Life. Just look for the Pro Life Class, schoolofapologetics.com. Sign up for my pro life course there.
Trent Horn:
I a few hours you’ll learn how to refute the major arguments against abortion and how to talk about this issue like I do on Catholic Answers Live. All right. Make you guys pray. Pray, and look, don’t lose hope. I’m bracing myself that this gets taken away. It might happen. I’m trusting God, trusting him. I have a bad habit of not wanting to get my hopes up, but we will always move forward. Never give up. Never surrender. We can’t.
Trent Horn:
But I will tell you this. I would be… If Roe versus Wade is overturned, one, having to not march in January in DC anymore. We could march in June. That would be nice. But two, I would be… I’d probably cry. Obviously I will cry if the decision is final, tears of joy.
Trent Horn:
More so, I would be so happy for the veterans who did this long before me, for the people I know alive today who were alive when Roe versus Wade was issued, the people who have been fighting since 1972, the people who have been fighting since the 1960s, the 1950s.
Trent Horn:
Abortion laws started to be liberalized in the ’60s, so I would be so happy the people who have been doing this since 1960 and saw Roe v. Wade and have been in the trenches for 50 years, that if they could see it overturned in their lifetime, which many of them probably never thought it would… I’m still hoping it will. But for them to see it, the ones who are were alive before Roe v. Wade, that would be something else.
Trent Horn:
Pray that it happens. Even if it doesn’t pray we have the fortitude to keep fighting for life. Thank you, guys. I hope you have a very blessed day.
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