Life of the Mother, Frozen Embryos, and Tough Pro-life Questions

So what I want to share with you today is the dynamic Q&A session that I did with the students on pro-life, because they asked really good questions related to the pro-life worldview. And actually, I have a new course at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics called Arguing Against Abortion that if you want to learn how to engage pro-choice advocates like I do, I highly recommend checking it out at schoolofapologetics.com. But this will give you a neat insight in how to answer these tougher questions that come up when you present the pro-life worldview. So I wanted to share that Q&A with you, but there’s also something really special about going to do this event because one of the other speakers was Catherine Pakaluk who gave a talk on why Catholics can’t be socialists. That name should ring a bell for you, if you’re familiar with my work, because Catherine is my co-author on, Can A Catholic Be A Socialist?

Here’s what was so funny about this? So Catherine and I got on the phone, gosh, what was it, a year and a half ago? She’s a professor, by the way, of economics at the Catholic University of America. And I knew I wanted to write a book on socialism, but I was worried people wouldn’t take my book seriously if I didn’t have an economist working with me. And so Catherine and I, we spoke on the phone and we really clicked on a lot of different levels, and so we embarked on writing the book. And we did everything either over the phone or by email and a little bit of Skype sessions here and there, but we did everything by distance. And then we thought we would finally meet each other once the book would be released. We were scheduled actually to go to EWTN to do an episode of, what is it? It’s the show with Father Mitch Pacwa.

And so we did the show with him, but we had to do it by Skype because the pandemic had just started. I think it was in March of 2020 and so we weren’t able to go to EWTN to film. And so now I feel like it’s been years since we started writing this book and Catherine and I had never met in person. And so, finally, I got to go to this event and she gave her talk on socialism and, actually, I got the chance to hang out with her and then gave my talk on advancing the right to life. So it was just neat because we embarked on this journey together. And while we were hanging out, we were talking about either doing a second edition of Can A Catholic be a Socialist? because we’ve gotten a lot of feedback and criticisms since the book has come out, unwarranted that I would say, but still worth addressing, of course. Or maybe even continuing it to discuss the flip side to talk about capitalism from a Catholic perspective.

So who knows what the future may hold. That’s why it was just really cool to be able to go to this YF event. I hope to do more with them, and I hope you enjoy this collection of really good questions. The students were super engaged. That’s what made me happy. One of my things that I really enjoy doing the most when it comes to doing talks is doing pro-life talks for high school and college students, because that’s how I got involved. I mean, I didn’t start doing Catholic apologetics. I got really involved in apologetics defending the unborn, and from there, I really grew into my role as a Catholic apologist. And so I think one way with young people to help them to grow into defending the faith is to defend this important part of it, the right to life, and then everything else flows from that sometimes.

Once again, it was a lot of fun. If you want to learn more about how to argue abortion, check out my course, Arguing Against Abortion at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. And without further ado, here is my Q&A session with the YF students on defending the pro-life position.

Shawn:

Hi, my name is Shawn. I’m from Indiana. I go to Gerring Catholic High School, and I was just wondering, I have a friend who I’ve talked a lot about. She’s pro-choice and she always brings up the argument that Catholics are against contraceptives. So how do we defend our side of that faith at the same time as defending the right of?

Trent Horn:

Yeah, I would say that that is a deeper issue to address with the person. I think you can say that to them, “You can be opposed to abortion and that’s separate from being opposed to contraception.” So if the person is not sold yet on being opposed to contraception, they can still oppose abortion. So I think sometimes you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew with somebody. I think it’s easier once someone sees that it’s wrong to take an unborn human life, they can wrap their head around the wrongness of having an anti-life attitude in the marital act. So some people though will say, “Okay, but here’s the thing, if you are against abortion, don’t you want to reduce abortions. So wouldn’t you want to promote contraception, so you’ll reduce abortions,” and they try to get us into saying, “If you’re really pro-life, why aren’t you for contraception to reduce abortions?”

And my answer is, “My goal is not to reduce abortion per se. My goal is to restore the legal protection the unborn once had. My goal is to make it unthinkable to kill an unborn human being. So I do not want a world where it’s okay to kill the unborn, but people just don’t happen to choose it. That would be better than what we have now.” It’d be like saying, “I don’t want to live in a world where slavery is legal, but man, we got so good with our cotton gins, no one enslaves anybody anymore. Thank you, Eli Whitney.” Even if slavery didn’t happen, I’d want it to be illegal, because it’s a matter of justice and the same is true for the unborn. So I would say to that person, “Look, my goal is to get people to say it is morally wrong. It should be illegal to take the life of the human being through abortion. How does contraception get me to that goal? It doesn’t, and it could possibly be a hindrance to it as well if it makes people not take the marital act seriously based on what it does.”

Is that a helpful answer?

Shawn:

Yes. Thank you.

Trent Horn:

Okay, cool.

Mary Purcell:

Hi, Mr. Horn. My name is Mary Purcell and I’m from Ave Maria University. I was wondering, as pro-lifers, how do we defend that the right to life begins at conception in the case of identical twins?

Trent Horn:

Hmm. Well, it is the left-handed twin is not a person. With twins, there is always an evil twin and it’s important to discover it. No, I am just kidding. Yeah, so when we say the right to life begins at conception, well, those phrases, we have to be careful with that because if we say every human life begins at conception, that’s not necessarily true. Because there are cases where embryos within the first 14 days of their life can twin, monozygotic twinning. So an embryo can split and become two embryos. Now, we’re not entirely sure what happens. What happens with twinning? Does Bob exist, and then at twinning, Bob dies and we have Fred and Tim? Do Bob and Fred share a body, and then when they twin, Bob and Fred go their separate ways? Or is it Bob, and then at some point, Fred just jumps out of him?

That’s beyond our ability to answer with science, the philosophical question. I think the best track is to say, “Well, every individual human organism is a person, they have a right to life, and it could be the case that some human organisms can become more than one human organism.” If the ability to twin means you’re not a person before the twinning event, that would be strange. Ramesh Ponnuru, in his book, The Party of Death, says, “I mean, you could take one of my cells right now and make a clone, but that wouldn’t mean I’m not a person right now, just because you could make a twin from me. If you take a flatworm and cut it in two, you will have two flatworms that will grow from that. But that doesn’t mean prior to the cutting, you had no flatworm.” So I would say that every human organism is a person. In some rare circumstances, some organisms, human organisms, can become two, but they’re at least one person, is the way I would put it. Is that helpful?

Mary Purcell:

Yes, thank you.

Trent Horn:

Okay, sure. Yeah.

Emma Raymond:

Hi, I’m Emma Raymond and I’m from Our Lady of Mercy. And my question is just about how society has really ruptured the family structure today and how that relates to abortion, really. So what would you say to people who don’t believe that family is important and that it is indeed holy to start a family and that people have a responsibility beyond their own self-interest?

Trent Horn:

Yeah, that is an entire other talk right there. You know who would be good to ask that? My coauthor, Catherine, who you listened to today. She talked about socialism, but she’s been doing some great research projects on large families. And I think what we’re dealing with today is the fruit of many people for whom family has failed them, things like divorce. Research has shown that divorce causes more trauma in children than the death of a parent, because at least, if a parent dies, they didn’t walk out on you. So I mean, divorce, abuse, neglect, even just families that are just very hands off like, “Other people raise my kids.” I think the problem today and what we’re seeing, take the example of the Defund The Police movement. So controversy, but that’s here, that’s fine to do.

I try to give any idea of fair shake, because when I say things about the Catholic faith that can sound cuckoo to people. So I give people a fair shake. So I’ve read people who’ve written about Defund The Police and what their goal is, and I mean the real abolitionists who want to get rid of the police. And I think what they’re saying is, “Look, if we had a just society where you didn’t have poverty and you spread wealth and income and resources around, and everyone had what they needed, they wouldn’t commit crimes. So you wouldn’t need police.” And the problem, of course, of that argument is, a few names pop up to contradict that thesis, Bernie Madoff, Enron. Think about all the people who have more than they need and still commit crimes.

There’s this idea, and the error goes back to Rousseau and The Enlightenment, and this is the idea, the Christian view of man is that we are not fundamentally broken, but we veer towards evil. We have original sin. Doesn’t mean we’re just totally depraved, but we veer towards it. So we are born guided towards evil. We need society to civilize us and the primary entity that does that is the family. And society exists so the family can exist, because sometimes a famine wipes out the crop and you’ve got to turn to other people in the town to help you, and learn from others and grow in a train and contribute to society. So we’re born bad, asterisk mark, not totally, but bad, and society civilizes us. Rousseau believed the opposite. He thought that Indigenous people lived in this Noble Savage myth, is what they called it, this idea that in hunter gatherer societies, there was no crime, there was no poverty.

It was when we started making cities and civilization, society that Rousseau said, “Christianity says, ‘Born bad. You’re civilized in the family, in the church, and in society to become good.'” Today, the spirit of Rousseau lives on saying, “You’re born good and it’s society that makes you bad. So if you’re bad, that just means something in society is broken. You didn’t get the right thing from society.” In some cases, that is true. But they think to fix people, we have to fix society. And that has it backwards. Never has worked, never will work. Sometimes it’s important for certain systemic injustices like slavery and things like that. But really, it’s backwards. It’s not fixing society to fix people. It’s more efficient to fix people than to fix society and the place to do that is to have a family that is supported and capable of doing that. Is that a helpful answer?

Emma Raymond:

Yes. Thank you.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Let’s see how we’re doing. We’ve got a few more. Let’s keep it going.

Victor:

Hi, I’m Victor. I’m from Ave Maria, and I’m also from Poland, which is a country that has one of the most restrictive laws in the Western world on abortion.

Trent Horn:

Sure.

Victor:

And we’ve got two premises. One, what is the threat of the life of the mother? And second one it whether the pregnancy is caused by a criminal act, such as rape. And I’ve got a question about talking about the ethical aspect of abortion in terms of rape. Would it be to an extent ethical to provide a woman after rape with chemicals that could terminate the concepted life or we don’t know whether it’s concepted in the early days?

Trent Horn:

Sure. The Catholic Church’s position on this, which I think is one that many pro-life advocates would hold is this, that if someone has been a victim of rape, it is acceptable to give them medication to prevent conception from occurring. This would not be an act of contraception between a married couple, rather this would be preventing the rapist’s attack from continuing. So it would be permissible to administer drugs if you have a moral certainty that you’re only preventing conception, but once the child exists, no matter how the child came into existence, they have a right to life. So whether the child came from a loving marriage or an act of adultery or a night stand or prostitution or rape, no matter how the child came into the world, once the child is here, we cannot kill them. We cannot kill him or her.

And so one story, a hypothetical story, imagine a married woman is raped. And when we talk about rape on campus, we have to always be extremely empathetic and find common ground wherever possible with people, but for the sake of brevity in Q&A, I’ll get right to the hypothetical. She’s raped by a stranger, but she’s married and she’s pregnant. The doctors do a paternity test. They say, “The baby is from your husband, not the rapist.” She gives birth. Doctor’s call back, turns out the baby is from the rapist. Would it be wrong for her to kill the product of rape that is now in the crib? Most people would say, “No, that would not be okay.” So I would say, “How is it different if the product of rape, or the child, is in the womb?” And that might be an approach and I would go with that. Is, does that make sense?

Victor:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Okay.

Victor:

Thank you.

Trent Horn:

Thank you very much.

Margaret:

Hello. My name is Margaret I’m from Fairfax High School. And I was just wondering, I see this argument used a lot, what if the mother is going to be killed because of the birth of the child? And I see different answers from different pro-life people across the board, so I’m just wondering what your thoughts on that are.

Trent Horn:

I think when answering the question, what if a woman’s life is in danger? We should say, “All right, we have to answer the question, what of the unborn first?” That question has to be answered first. If the unborn are not human beings, doctors should be free to do whatever they think is necessary. So it doesn’t matter, if the unborn or not human beings, who cares? Do what you want. Do whatever the doctors say is fine. If the unborn are human beings, then that would mean every other abortion is wrong, and then in this case, we might have a strange case where we act in a certain way that results in the child’s death that we don’t intend. So you’re right, pro-life advocates do differ on the ethics of if a woman’s life is in danger. And I would just say, there can be cases, hard cases, where we’re not sure what to do when two lives are in danger. We might only be able to save one.

But I would say it’s a good ethical principle to say, “You should not kill one person in order to save another person, even if that person’s going to die anyways.” So if Bob is dying of cancer and he’ll be dead in three months or he’ll be dead in six months, but Fred needs a new heart and he’ll be dead in a month. So Bob is dying of cancer, six months. Fred needs a new heart, one month left to live. Would it be okay to kill Bob to give his heart to Fred because Bob’s going to die anyways? What do you think? No. So if a woman’s pregnancy has gone awry, it would not be justified to kill the child to save her, because they’re going to die anyways. However, you could be justified in treating the problem, whatever the medical problem is and the child dies indirectly. Because there are times where we engage in acts that are moral, knowing that death is foreseen, but not intended.

If it was always wrong to act and the result was a dead innocent person, in war, the bad guys would always win, because the good guys could never bomb a military target, because what if there’s a janitor inside? In war, you couldn’t bomb a hospital to make them give up quickly, but you could bomb a radar station and there’s a bike messenger going by. You see the difference there? You can’t directly intend the death of an innocent person, but you could act in a moral way even if you foresee an innocent person might die. With abortion and pregnancy, let’s say a woman has uterine cancer and is pregnant, you could use chemotherapy to attack the cancer cells and the child might die unintentionally as a result. But you can’t kill the child to save the mother and you can’t kill the mother to save the child. Does that make sense?

Margaret:

Yeah, thank you.

Trent Horn:

I cover it more in my book also.

Margaret:

Thank you.

Trent Horn:

Yeah, sure.

Mary Lynn:

Hi, my name is Mary Lynn and I go to St. Agnes High in the Twin Cities. And my question is just that, sometimes pro-lifers get a really bad rap for just being pro-birth, where we just want to pump out the baby and we only care about it before it’s born, and then once we aren’t, I mean, then we don’t care. How do we combat that? Or is that just an insult we have to accept because it’s not necessarily true? I mean, what are your thoughts?

Trent Horn:

I believe it’s important to always reframe things to one’s advantage. So if someone says, “Are you pro-birth when it comes to abortion?” I think I might say, “If the only other position to pro-birth is pro-dismemberment, I would like to be pro-birth then. Are you pro dismemberment?” It’s a weird thing to say, “You’re only pro-birth.” Well, what happens if the baby isn’t born. They die, right? Should I be pro the death of babies?” Sometimes abortion, we’ve talked about it for a long time and we will keep talking about it for a long time, but sometimes it’s helpful, you have to walk the line when doing this, but to put forward almost a childlike sense of naivety when forming your response. You just have to be careful because you can come off smug if you do that. But it’s not always helpful to say, “What’s wrong with being pro-birth?”

Now, if what that means is, I should force every woman to conceive and have a baby. Well, that’s wrong. Sure. But if by pro-birth you mean saying it should be illegal to kill a child before they’re born. Absolutely. What’s wrong with that? And then put it back to them, “What’s wrong with that?” And if they say, “Well, you don’t care about them after they’re born. How do you know that? How do you know that? Are you saying, because I disagree with you about politics. And let’s say I didn’t, are you saying it’s okay to kill babies because other people don’t care about them? And I think, remember, always stay on, what are the unborn? So I think that’s the approach I would take in that regard. Is that helpful?

Mary Lynn:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Sure.

Catherine Renard:

Hi, I’m Catherine Renard from College Station, Texas, and I wanted to veer a little bit from the idea of abortion and pro-choice and everything and talk about in vitro fertilization and your ideas on the idea of freezing embryos.

Trent Horn:

Ooh, controversial. Now, I know there might be a different religious or even non-religious groups here today and I think that’s helpful. Pro-life advocates are going to disagree about the morality of in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization is when you take sperm and egg out of the body, fertilize them in a lab, put them together in a laboratory to create embryos. The embryos are implanted in a woman’s body and then the child is born. I think pro-lifers would agree that if in that process you directly kill an unborn child it’s wrong. So if the process requires killing an unborn child, I would say every pro-lifer would by necessity be against IVF. Now, some IVF technicians and clinics want to try to make it so that every embryo is either implanted or frozen, that none are directly killed. So their pro-life advocates are going to disagree.

I’ve actually thought about writing a book. Once I get done my popular books that I’m writing, I can just sit down and write my 500 page one that eight people will read. But I wanted to write something like human rights before birth and before conception, because I believe unborn children have a right not just to life, but they have a right to be created from the marital act and a right to live in their mother’s body. And I think IVF violates those rights. Not everyone agrees unborn children have those rights, but I think it makes sense based on who we are as persons. And that’s also the view of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church would say that fertility treatments are moral if they assist the marital act, but not if they replace it. So the Catholic Church would say, “If you take drugs to stimulate ovulation or you use surgery to get rid of scar tissue, that assists the marital act, it doesn’t replace it.”

But if you take sperm and egg and mix them in a lab so that the technician causes the child to exist that’s replacing the marital act and every child should come from the marital act, be a gift of self from husband and wife. So I would say that my position is IVF would be wrong. Other pro-lifers though might disagree with that. When it comes to freezing embryos, I’d also say that that’s wrong as well. Children have a right to live in their mother’s body and to run and play and not be in freezers. Now, some people, the trickiest one will be, “Well, Trent, do you think pro-lifers should adopt children that are frozen and have been abandoned by their parents? Would that be wrong?” Now, pro-lifers disagree about that. Even Catholics disagree about that. The Catholic Church, the teaching office of the Catholic Church, has not issued a judgment on this question. Some Catholic ethicists say it would be wrong to adopt these frozen embryos because only the husband should impregnate his wife, not a lab technician. And so that’s contrary to natural order.

Other Catholics would say that it’s moral because you’re not seeking to commodify the child. You’re seeking to act in the child’s benefit by rescuing them from this situation that they’re in. So Catholics disagree and I don’t have a fully definitive thought on that myself. I see the merits of both positions. I lean towards that it would be wrong to rescue these children, but I’m not fully settled. But part of it is, honestly, even if it were morally permissible, adopting these frozen embryos I believe practically would lead to even more problems because it would still encourage their creation. And so that’s why even if it were right in principle I think it’d probably be wrong to practice. Was that helpful?

Catherine Renard:

Yes. Thank you.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Cool. All right. Well, thank you all very much.

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