In this episode Trent critically reviews a Catholic theologian’s proposal for a “new pro-life movement” that may be new but definitely isn’t pro-life.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
S-M-H. Shaking my head. Isn’t that what the kids say nowadays? Well, that’s what I do when I read so-called Catholic journals that publish articles that actually undermine Catholic faith and Catholic morality. That’s what I want to talk about today here on The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.
Trent Horn:
The genesis for today’s episode came while I was researching a venue to have an in-person dialogue with Nathan Nobis. Nobis is a pro-choice philosopher. He’s written a lot on the issue of abortion and I would enjoy having an in-person dialogue with him. I always try to seek out the best people who defend, the best defenders of opposing views. I always want to seek them out. I had a great debate with David Boonin on the issue of abortion several years ago at Stanford University.
Trent Horn:
So I was looking for a venue to have an in-person dialogue with Nathan Nobis on the subject. He teaches at Morehouse College, which is in Atlanta and I want to do in-person because after doing the Ben Watkins debate, it was just so refreshing to actually do an in-person debate and I’m just so sick of Zoom. I mean I’ll do it if I have to but there is just nothing like sitting across the table from someone or right across from someone and having a disagreement, live and in-person. I think it just makes for better conversations all around.
Trent Horn:
So I was researching student groups that might want to host us and one of them had, it was I believe a pro-life group, had hosted a Catholic theologian, an Associate Professor of Theology from the University of San Diego, Emily Reimer-Barry or Reimer-Barry, Emily Reimer-Barry and they hosted her and the talk was something like beyond pro-life and pro-choice.
Trent Horn:
I kind of roll my eyes when I see that stuff because when people say we should move beyond being pro-life and pro-choice, 99% of the time, what they mean is we should be pro choice and this is especially true in Reimer-Barry’s essay that I want to go through here, that I’m presuming her talk was based on. This was published in 2019 at the proceedings of the Catholic Theological society of America.
Trent Horn:
It’s called Another Pro-life Movement Is Possible but here’s the problem. You need to define what you mean by pro-life. If, by pro-life, you just mean reducing the number of abortions that take place, guess what? A lot of pro-choice people agree with that. Think of the Clinton mantra. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare and you don’t hear a lot of politicians say that nowadays but you will hear a lot of people say they don’t like abortion or they want to reduce the number of abortions while keeping it legal.
Trent Horn:
There’s a lot of pro-choice people who would say they’re in favor of reducing abortion. So in order to be pro-life to be distinct from being pro-choice, you can’t just say well, I want there to be less abortions. You have to be committed to the view that abortion ought be illegal and that unborn children should have the legal protection under the law that they once had.
Trent Horn:
So let me emphasize this. You cannot be pro-life unless you believe abortion should generally be illegal. I’ve qualified it with the word generally there cause you could have a pro-life advocate who says hey, in this state, we can get 80% of people to vote to outlaw abortion as long as there is an exception for pregnancies that come about through rape or incest.
Trent Horn:
Now, I believe, and the church teaches, that abortion is wrong even in pregnancies that come about through rape or incest. But when you’re dealing with laws, sometimes you can’t have the ideal law. You have to put forward that which is most feasible. Pope Saint John Paul II in his encyclical The Gospel of Life, in section 73, said that a legislator could vote for a law that allows some abortions as long as his opposition to abortion was well-known and that his goal was to try to restore the most legal protection to the unborn that he could.
Trent Horn:
So if his goal is to take, here’s the number of abortions that are legal and we want to shrink it as much as possible and so if you outlawed abortion except for the hard cases, then 95% of abortions would be illegal or 98% of abortions would be illegal. But if you think abortion should just be legal in general, I got news for you. You’re not pro-life. You’re pro-choice.
Trent Horn:
That’s why when I hear Reimer-Barry and other Catholics who say things like let’s move beyond being pro-life and pro-choice, they don’t want to. They really want everyone to be pro-choice because they want everybody to keep abortion legal and I can’t do that because abortion is the unjustified killing of a very tiny human being.
Trent Horn:
So I read through this article and I think it’s important for us to go through this because you’ll hear Catholic theologians, liberal Catholics espouse some of these ideas. They’ll pay lip service to the church’s teaching on abortion and on defending human life. Reimer-Barry certainly does in this article. Pay lip service would be a good description of it. But then they’ll put forward these arguments and principles that are no different than a pro-choice advocate who thinks abortion should always be legal.
Trent Horn:
So let’s go through it. This was published in the Catholic Theological society of America back in 2019. I’m not going to go through the entire essay. I want to talk about parts that really jumped out at me. One thing that jumped out at me was the introduction. So in the introduction, Reimer-Barry talks about on November 30th, 2018, Naiad Reich was fired from her job as a high school teacher in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The diocese explained she was fired because she was pregnant and had no immediate plans to marry her boyfriend of four years. The diocese says that every employee agrees to follow the teachings and laws of the Catholic church. And then Reimer-Barry says if this is what it means to be pro-life and Catholic, we have a problem. And I would say, what’s the problem?
Trent Horn:
If you are a teacher and you are unmarried, if you’re a teacher, whether you’re married or unmarried, at a Catholic school, you agree to abide by the church’s teachings on sexuality. If you’re unmarried, you can’t have sexual relations with anyone. If you’re married, you can only have sexual relations with your spouse. If you are a married man at a Catholic school and you committed adultery, here’s your pink slip. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Trent Horn:
So everyone is expected to this but all of a sudden, there’s this argument that this isn’t really pro-life to penalize or dismiss a teacher for violating the church’s teachings or violating the code of conduct they voluntarily signed and doing things like becoming engaging in fornication, engaging in fornication.
Trent Horn:
If we talk about being pro-life, by the way, and about caring for the unborn, fornication is really, it is an act of disrespect towards unborn children. It is an act of injustice against an unborn child to commit fornication, to have sexual relations outside of marriage. Just like adultery is an act of injustice towards a child who is conceived because children have many rights, many rights that our society doesn’t recognize.
Trent Horn:
Children have not just a right to life but they have the right to be conceived within the bonds of marriage. Not by two people who are unmarried and suddenly the child comes into existence and the parents who are now irreplaceable to the child. There are other caretakers that can step in but when you conceive a child, the mother and father are truly irreplaceable. No one is ever truly like them, can be a true replacement of mother and father.
Trent Horn:
So by natural law, we can see that a mother and father, before they become irreplaceable to the child, they become irreplaceable to one another through marriage. Likewise, why adultery is unjust because now you have a child coming into existence, if it comes from that, whose parents are not bonded in marriage. Adultery is even worse because at least with fornication, maybe the child’s parents could marry later. That does happen sometimes. But in adultery, you have people already in established marriage bonds so it’s awful.
Trent Horn:
So she picks up the theme again later in her article. Let me skip down here to page 32. Talking about why it’s so unjust to require this. So speaking of Riech, that situation where she was fired because she engaged in fornication and the evidence of her fornication was that she became pregnant. Reimer-Barry writes we could call her situation a double-bind in that church teaching tells her not to terminate her pregnancy because of the intrinsic value of the life she carries while diocesan policies say that she cannot keep her job while pregnant and unmarried.
Trent Horn:
So Reimer-Barry is basically framing this as the school is the one that’s not really pro-life because they fired this teacher for not getting an abortion. I mean, she could’ve covered up her fornication by getting an abortion. She should even be rewarded for choosing to not get an abortion in this situation and instead she’s being fired and that’s not considered pro-life.
Trent Horn:
But if we change the situation, you see how silly this kind of framing is. So imagine a man is a teacher at the school is having an affair with another teacher and that teacher is going to report him to the administration or let’s say he’s sexually harassing her even. Whatever it is, she’s going to report him to the administration and if she does that, he’s going to be fired.
Trent Horn:
So what if we said we could call his situation a double-bind in that church teaching tells the man to not kill his mistress or not kill this woman because of the intrinsic value her life carries while diocesan policies say he can’t keep his job if he has an affair or if he harasses her.
Trent Horn:
So it would be like if my kids said to me dad, why are you punishing me for breaking this rule because I could have lied and gotten away with it but I chose to tell you the truth. And I would say to my son, thank you for telling me the truth. If you had lied, that would have compounded and made what you did even worse so I’m proud of you for that. But at the same time, you still have to be held accountable for your previous wrongdoing and the same goes here with someone who chooses to commit fornication, that you were supposed to be a role model to these students. People spend lots of money to send their kids to a Catholic school, presumably so there’ll be taught values that they don’t get in public school. Like don’t commit fornication.
Trent Horn:
But in any case, I don’t want to belabor the point too much. So let’s go back a few pages to an excerpt that really caught my eye. On page 23, she writes I do not challenge the magisterial teaching that there should always be a presumption against taking human life. Notice that Reimer-Barry doesn’t say I do not challenge the magisterial teaching that direct abortion is always wrong. She words it in this ambiguous way. There should always be a presumption against taking human life except abortion is the direct killing of innocent human life.
Trent Horn:
So she wants to make it sound like she’s not challenging the church’s teaching on abortion but she is. You go to footnote number 12. Right under here, she says space limitations. I can’t distinguish indirect and direct killing and then she cites an important essay on bodily life support within the Catholic tradition. That’s just set your alarm bells. Right? Who compares pregnancy to keeping someone on bodily life support? Pro-choice advocates do.
Trent Horn:
So she then tells her readers to go check out Patricia Beattie Jung’s article Abortion And Organ Donation, Christian Reflection On Bodily Life Support. That’s in readings and moral theology, feminist ethics in the Catholic moral tradition, edited by Margaret Farley, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran. Charles Curran, of course, was a moral theologian who had his license for teaching theology suspended back in 1987 because of his dissenting views and so when you read Beattie Jung’s work, it’s basically the Thomson, Boonin argument saying that if you can refuse to donate an organ to save someone’s life maybe a pregnant woman can have an abortion.
Trent Horn:
There’s a lot more wishy washy. It doesn’t come just right out and defend it strongly like Thomson or Boonin would but it’s arguing for the same principle. And so the fact that she links to this shows her sympathy towards, if not her agreement, with that argument but it’s buried here in the footnotes so it would be easy for you to miss.
Trent Horn:
All right. Let’s go ahead because I think she makes it very clear in this article. She believes abortion ought to be legal so she’s pro-choice. She’s not pro-life and we go down to page 29. And so this is what she writes here at the top. The choice to advocate against legal abortion. In other words, the choice to restrict women’s agency instead of focusing on an agenda to reduce the number of abortions is an important distinction and so she goes on to say that many feminists have noted it would demonstrate respect for women if the culture treated women as subjects, being capable of persuaded to the good, agents who make decisions for themselves.
Trent Horn:
So our argument is that if you outlaw abortion, you’re not respecting women. You’re just using the law to tell them what to do instead of treating them like agents and persons and persuading them to not get an abortion and that’s a ridiculous argument. If anything, I would say that this view that abortion should not be made illegal because women are a special case is a form of paternalism that is anti-woman. We don’t say of men. You don’t say to men, you know what? Instead of making rape illegal, we should respect a man’s moral agency and we should persuade men to not rape women. We should persuade men to not beat their wives and there was a time when marital rape was legal. It was actually only in the past few decades, marital rape became a crime.
Trent Horn:
Imagine if someone said we should not outlaw marital rape. We should persuade husbands to not rape their wives. No. Rape is an act of violence. It’s illegal. You commit rape. You’re going to face consequences for that for committing an act of violence against an innocent person. But if you say women should not be held morally responsible for acts of violence they commit or partner with others to commit against children, if you say women should not be held responsible, why? Because they’re women? Guess what? You’re treating women differently than men. You’re saying they can’t handle the responsibility, the moral responsibility of following the law like men can.
Trent Horn:
So Reimer-Barry’s argument is actually anti-feminist, not feminist because it treats women like children who shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. So my view that men and women should be held accountable if they end the lives of their children, born or unborn, that’s actually a very feminist view if you will.
Trent Horn:
And then she goes on, tries to make another example here. Let’s go on to page … oh. I’m so sorry. It’s on page 29. So she goes and talks about war. She says in the context of war, bishops acknowledge that decisions about killing are morally complex, should be approached through dialogue, moral education, and ongoing to sermon. So our idea here is well look. We treat men differently when male generals and soldiers go to war. We understand they have latitude to figure out what’s right or wrong. Why can’t women do that with abortion? The reason is the fetus doesn’t shoot back. This is like my debate with [Cecelie] Chadwick all those years ago in CSU San Marcos. She was talking about how you can kill people in war. What’s wrong with abortion? And I said well, if you show me a fetus with an AR-15 in the womb, I will change my position on this matter because I would say, look fine.
Trent Horn:
Let’s compare it. If a soldier purposely kills all of the children in a nursery in order to destroy the morale of the other side, if he puts bullets in children’s heads in order to win a war, that’s a war crime. He should be brought up to the Hague for something like that. Those are war crimes to directly target civilians, children and so we would say the same for abortion. So it’s just a very poor and sloppy summary that’s put there.
Trent Horn:
And then finally, here’s the last one that really just … I was flabbergasted to see, that Reimer-Barry talks about how well, we need to listen to people’s experiences who chose to have an abortion and I’m all for listening to people’s experiences to better psychologically relate to them but your subjective experience doesn’t change whether it’s right or wrong to kill an innocent human being, like there’s something like direct abortion.
Trent Horn:
And so, she gives different examples of women telling their stories. Let’s see. Moral discernment required. I recall the textbook my high school morality class used to teach about abortion, described abortion as an abominable crime, moral evil, grave offense. Our language about abortion fosters a discourse that labels women as sinners without taking into account complexities they face and their moral discernment.
Trent Horn:
But once again, do we do this with men? Do we say racism is a moral evil. It’s abominable. Oh yes. But the racist … think about his own personal experience with minorities. Maybe he has a good reason for feeling this way. We don’t do that. So we’re treating women differently here just because it’s abortion. And so she tries to present these examples and to her credit, she doesn’t just include ones that are more sympathetic, like one of the hard cases.
Trent Horn:
So she gives us an example of a typical choice to have an abortion. Shelly Bell met Paul on the dance floor and after a casual hookup, she discovered she was pregnant. She texted Paul feeling extremely guilty about getting pregnant by some random guy in a club. They met to talk about it. They agreed to end the pregnancy by abortion but to continue to see each other. They had second thoughts in the waiting room but Shelly did have an abortion that day. When they went out together again, they talked openly about the abortion and how it made us feel. This is apparently a real story. They laughed, talked, and fell quote in love in a way neither of us could ever have imagined happening. Shelly and Paul are still together, now with kids, and describe their relationship as a non-traditional fairytale love story and no comment by Reimer-Barry.
Trent Horn:
I feel anger when I hear a story like that and then a great amount of pity for two individuals who could so callously take a human life and then brag about a love story coming from that. It is dark and I have to always pray to not allow that cynicism to take over my heart to be hard-hearted towards others. But then when I read this, I’m like you’ve got to be kidding me. She talks about how can we find common ground with these different stories of people who choose abortion and she tries with the one with Shelly and Paul, which is the least sympathetic case. We can respect Shelly and Paul’s mutual discernment and celebrate the love they share today.
Trent Horn:
No. I don’t respect mutually conspiring together to end the life of a small child. Why would I respect that in any way, shape, or form? Where she talks about in a harder case, a woman named Miki, her self-giving love for her mother and her self-care for herself and she leaves once again, academics always [inaudible 00:19:35] their most problematic or controversial opinions within footnotes. This is in footnote 62.
Trent Horn:
And so she cites Rebecca Todd Peter’s book Trust Women. And so she writes, Rebecca Todd Peters in her book Trust Women argues that the decision to abort can be framed according to the Christian virtue of self-care and so she quotes Peters who says the decision to abort is often a reflection of self-care. This self-care may be motivated by a wide variety of circumstances. It might reflect a woman’s desire to finish school so that she can get a decent job and care for herself and her family. Then it goes on and on like this. She says self-care is not the same thing as selfishness. Well, I would like someone to tell me the difference.
Trent Horn:
Selfishness is when you care about yourself so much that you do not care how much harm you bring to other people in trying to bring about your goals. Self-care and self-interest are fine. The Bible says love your neighbor as yourself. You have to take care of your bodily needs, your own needs, and then you care for others. Put on your own oxygen mask first but self-care becomes selfish. Think about it. Who is someone selfish you know? You can tell someone is selfish when if they have a choice between their own desires and the welfare of another person, they choose their own desires.
Trent Horn:
Now we’re human beings. We’re all guilty of being selfish from one time or another and some of us have done gravely evil things because we’re selfish. So whenever any of us falls into a sin because of our selfish desires, we have to repent of it, seek forgiveness, and if our selfish decision caused grave harm, there might be trauma that we have to heal from that.
Trent Horn:
So that would be what I would say to someone who has had an abortion or knows someone or has been involved in abortion in some way, if you’re watching this, that you go to God and seek forgiveness. Go to confession and then seek healing. You’ll need lifelong healing. Just like someone who suffered the loss of a child maybe from SIDS or a miscarriage, they’ll be healing. People who naturally lose a child will have a lifelong process of mourning the loss of that child. So much more so, mourning the loss of a child through one’s own conscious decisions.
Trent Horn:
But these kinds of articles to try to justify abortion as self-care, women’s agency, women’s empowerment, this does nothing to heal the wounds that abortion inflicts upon women and inflicts upon the men who are also involved in these procedures, which also by the way, we need to talk about the men more. This isn’t just the child and the mother.
Trent Horn:
I think I was on Kristen Hawkins podcast a little while ago and she said Trent, what do we need to do to really combat abortion? I forget the exact question. But I said you know, we got to get fathers involved. It’s not just about … A lot of people will say provide women with unintended pregnancies resources, counseling, material resources, and there’s a place for all of that. But at the same time, what these women need is the man to stand up for what he has done and to discern how is he going to help this woman that he is engaged in the marital act? How is he going to help this woman? Maybe he is going to marry her. Maybe he isn’t. I don’t know.
Trent Horn:
Every relationship is going to be different but at the very least he should at least provide for her in the most basic ways a husband would financially, emotionally, helping her and his child. So we’ve got to … The men can not be ghostly figures in this anymore. We’ve got to appeal to their nobility and say you are men. Yo are protectors. You’re responsible. You’re strong. Do the right thing here.
Trent Horn:
And so Reimer-Barry just ends the article saying we can and must do better. Another pro-life movement is possible. The pro-life movement must detach from patriarchal power dynamics and refocus our efforts away from making abortion illegal. Well look, and once again, if you do that, you’re not a new pro-life movement. You’re just a different part of the pro-choice movement, if you choose to do that.
Trent Horn:
Now, if Reimer-Barry disagrees with my assessment of her article, I’d be happy to have an open public dialogue with her on this issue about what the pro-life movement needs or doesn’t need. We’ll just have to see about that. But I just wanted this to be helpful for you so that you can call it for what it is when you come across Catholics with feminist theology or liberal Catholics who say things like let’s stop trying to make abortion illegal. Let’s compromise and reduce the need for abortion.
Trent Horn:
They’re not asking for compromise. They’re asking for the surrender of the pro-life movement and we can not do that no matter what. We must work to restore the legal protection every human being deserves and the largest group that is in trouble right now that needs that are certainly the unborn. So hey. Thank you all so much. I hope this was helpful for you and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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