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In this episode, Trent takes a sober look at the pro-life movement and offers suggestions for moving forward.
Transcription:
Trent:
Tomorrow is election day and no matter who wins, a lot of people feel like the pro-life movement is going to lose. Kamala Harris wants to codify Roe versus Wade into federal law and Donald Trump says he’ll veto a national abortion ban and pay for IVF treatments that destroy human embryos. And worse, in state after state pro-lifers have failed at the ballot box and legal abortion has remained the status quo. In most states, we are, as St. Paul says, struck down but not destroyed. There is reason to hope and there are things we can do to advance the pro-life movement. First, we need to recognize that overturning Roe v. Wade through Dobbs versus Jackson was a huge victory for the pro-life movement. It was something I thought I’d never see in my lifetime and more than a moral victory, studies have shown it saved thousands of lives.
That alone made the decision worth it. Now, some people say that after Dobbs abortions increase in the United States, so the pro-life movement failed. Some of them even insinuate that pro-lifers caused this increase. But it’s a logical fallacy to say that because abortion rates went up after Dobbs, that means Dobbs caused the abortion rates to go up specifically, that’s the after. Therefore, because of fallacy abortions were going up before Dobbs, as shown in this article, published before the ruling and pro-abortion research organizations say this was due to a variety of factors. For example, between 2017 and 2020 abortions increased by 25% in the state of Illinois because state and Medicaid funds can now be used to pay for abortions and the number of abortion facilities in the state increased by 20%. And in 2021, the FDA removed the in-person requirement for dispensing abortion pills, making chemical abortions available by telemedicine.
So while other factors caused the rates to go up in general, it would’ve been worse if pro-life advocates had not passed laws to protect unborn children. So that’s good news, but there is bad news. In 2022, abortion won or pro-lifers lost in Kansas, California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont. In 2023, we lost in Ohio this year, we could suffer similar losses in a variety of states. Why is that? Well, the number of people who identify as pro-life is at one of the lowest levels since the mid nineties, 39% according to Gallup polling. But that does not mean we should just give up. This is what we’d expect in a fallen world if people just voted on virtue or vice, vice would often win. That means we have to take a sober look at why this is happening and reflect on the most prudent path forward.
And to be clear, the goal is not to merely reduce abortions. Just saying we should fight poverty doesn’t mean abortion will go away. There are states and entire countries that have economies that pro-choice or love, but there abortion rates are equal to or higher than the uss besides even pro-choice can support reducing abortion. It’s the pro-life goal of protecting the unborn under the law that I’m concerned about. What’s the path to that goal? Now, right off the bat, I want to say that I’m not an expert in policy or strategy. My book, persuasive Pro-Life teaches people how to show the pro-life position is true, but you could have all the right arguments and still lose if you have the wrong strategy or if you miss other problems. For example, there’s the problem of pseudo pro-lifers. These are people who say, but they vote pro-choice. These voters may say they’re because that’s what their church teaches or it’s what their community believes or they would just never personally have or pay for an abortion, but they don’t want to impose that on other people so they don’t vote.
Pro-life. We didn’t notice the prevalence of these people in the past when it was just polls asking people if they were pro-life or pro-choice. But the only polls that count are elections and ballot initiatives that have shown that when it comes to abortion, we are outnumbered more than we thought A large contingent of are really pro-choice on abortion. There’s maybe like what a handful of people who are secretly pro-life, but publicly pro-choice. That’s not enough to balance out the harm of these many pseudo pro-lifers. This is like how false Christians reveal themselves when times of persecution come. Pseudo pro-lifers falter when someone tells them their pro-life vote hurts women, and so they end up voting pro-choice. Instead, these people have also realized that they’ll be held accountable for their views, and so they’re finally motivated to come out as who they really are.
Why at least for now, pro-lifers should focus on achieving success through state legislatures. This happened in Texas and Georgia and the politicians that passed these laws did not lose their seats in the following election cycle, which shows protecting the unborn is not a toxic issue even though some politicians act like it’s toxic. There was a time when Democrats feared mentioning the A word and Bill Clinton was successful because he argued for abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. But now pro-choice have abandoned that language. They champion abortion as a good thing and they see it as a helpful issue in political debates, but it shouldn’t be that way because killing unborn children is indefensible. Matt Walsh reaches a similar conclusion.
CLIP:
There are so many landmines for the left on this issue that they’re able to just jump over because we don’t guide them into it. I’ve been waiting for someone to do this and I guess it’s not going to happen this cycle, but in one of these debates sometime I would love for a Republican to just turn to the Democrat and say, okay, what we’re really talking about here, this is the fundamental issue here, is what is a person? When is a person a person that your next movie, right? Well, maybe it will be When is a person, a person? So turn to the Democrat and say, this is what we’re talking about. So at what point is the baby in the womb a person? Can you answer that? And they won’t be able to answer it. They’re going to say, Obama famously said above my pay grade.
Okay, so you can’t answer. You don’t know when the baby’s a person and yet, so you’re just saying, well, we don’t know, but let’s make abortion legal through all stages of pregnancy anyway, which is so even from your own position by your own premise, that’s analogous to throwing a hand grenade into a dark room not knowing if there’s a person in there or not. Well, guess what? If you kill a person in there, you are morally responsible for that because even according to you, there might have been. So I understand the difficulties of maybe articulating some of this in this kind of environment, but we just let them off the hook completely on this stuff. Totally agree with this, and it
Trent:
Drives me nuts. We need to act like the unborn are actual human beings. And I think many people who are pseudo pro-lifers don’t really think the unborn are human beings. They just think abortion is a kind of sad thing and that’s why they end up being pro-choice. Think about it. When someone says it’s okay to kill two year olds, we don’t argue with them about adoption or family tax credits. We just say, what the hell is wrong with you? And we don’t have that attitude often when it comes to abortion. For a while I worried that pro-lifers were too in your face, and so I wanted to help people explain their passionate view with less emotional language. But now I worry that we have the opposite problem. Pro-lifers, especially politicians, are two milk toast and pro-choice are the confident ones. So when we are faced with bold pro-choice rhetoric, we need to be even bolder in response. Look at this clip with Scott Jennings on CNN and see how he deflects a harsh pro-choice, rhetorical attack with a stronger pro-life counter attack, attack
CLIP:
Trump. This is what Kamala Harris and Tim Wal believes is that is none of your business what women do with their body. And so stay out of our doctor’s offices and stay out of our bed.
Trent:
Well, I guess I’ll have to speak up for the babies. They’re not here to speak for themselves. The Lord have mercy. Notice Jennings doesn’t shrink back, but he strikes back and he doesn’t do it in a cruel way, but just by saying, you know what, I’m just going to be a voice for the babies. He didn’t even have to talk about babies being killed or murdered. He just used the word baby. Now, in my arguments in debates in other forums, I’ve tended to not use the term baby because it’s an imprecise emotional term, but I still try to use vivid, accurate and graphic terms. So I might talk about how abortion dismembers tiny human beings, but maybe we should just be bold and talk about killing babies because the word abortion itself has become so abstract when many people think of the word abortion. They just think of a woman walking into a doctor’s office by talking about killing babies. People have to confront the blunt truth of the matter, and it is definitely a huge error though to only speak about the topic using abstract terms like life. I’m because I want to protect life. Here’s JD Vance using this language with Joe Rogan and Rogan using it in response.
CLIP:
I genuinely want people to choose life, and I’m a big believer in families, and I think there are all these things we can do to make it easier for young women, young families to choose life.
What this choose life thing is about, that life is precious and life is sacred and life begins at the moment of conception. And some people agree with this, but other people disagree with this
Trent:
When it’s a choice between protecting women and protecting life, people will choose women because they can envision a woman, maybe a woman they know. But life is really vague. When people think of life on Mars, they think of cells or life on earth as studying flowers or bugs or insects. We are not pro-life in the sense that all life should be protected. Nobody is. We are pro every single human being. Having the legal right to life compare that to Trump and JD Vance who make the main issue federalism letting the states decide abortion law.
CLIP:
I think my attitude is I’m running for vice president. I’m not trying to tell you how to strike the right balance, but we want to preserve the right of states to make these decisions.
I think what people are afraid of is men telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. That’s
The autonomy value. I get it, man. Look, I get it. And I think that there is a very real and valid argument here that autonomy should take precedence here. But I also think if we’re being honest, there is an argument that life matters too, and that’s the balance that people are trying to strike.
It’s very complex, but
Trent:
Pro-choice, don’t talk about balance. They aggressively push women’s rights as a fundamental good. Every state needs to protect and they’re winning. Why shouldn’t pro-lifers be just as bold and say, science proves the unborn of human beings? And all human beings should have equal basic rights, including the right to not be dismembered, especially as a baby. Now, it is important to remember that having a conversation with someone who is ambivalent about abortion is going to proceed differently than a political debate on the subject. You probably wouldn’t change your mind if a pro-choice person was just belligerent and harangued you about oppressing women, but you might change your mind if they asked you questions you could not answer. We need to do that for the unborn. We need to teach pseudo pro-lifers how to do that and to be bold, and we need to act with an urgency so that people see, we really believe the unborn are human beings.
However, some pro-lifers who claim to be doing just that actually undermine the pro-life movement. They say that if we really believe the unborn were human beings, then we wouldn’t compromise. We’d only vote for a full national ban on abortion or a full state ban on abortion. No exceptions. They even claim it’s immoral to vote for a law that has exceptions for things like pregnancies that result from rape or even if the mother’s life is in danger. However, it is not immoral to vote for a law that protects more babies, even if it doesn’t protect all of them in the gospel of life. Pope St. John Paul II said the following, when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known could elicitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality.
This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects. Other absolutist, pro-lifers say you can’t vote for laws with exceptions because the Bible says you cannot do evil, so that good may come, but making it illegal to kill at least some children is an act of good. It’s not evil. To give you an example, imagine all pornography was legal including stuff with children, and you have the chance to outlaw at least the child stuff even though most people are not going to go far enough to outlaw adult pornography. You could at least get enough people to outlaw the child stuff. Why wouldn’t you? It would be awful if you said, Nope, all pornography is evil, and so I will only vote for a total ban on pornography. No exceptions that might make you feel good and consistent, but is that worth keeping violence against children legal?
And you can make other analogies too, like outlawing rape. Even if you live in a culture that demands an exception for marital rape, it would be better to at least outlaw 99% of rape and leave this evil exception to deal with at a later time. And in fact, this was the case in the United States because marital rape was legal until the 1990s. It would be better to outlaw nearly all of this kind of violence against women instead of leaving all that violence to be legal just because you want to be consistent. And we also have to remember that we live in an evil world. So sometimes in order to accomplish good, we have to be cunning. Our Lord said, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. One example of Christians being wise as serpents can be seen in the 2006 film, amazing Grace, which portrays how 19th century British abolitionists first used innocuous legislation to undermine the slave trades profitability, thus making it easier to outlaw slavery in the future.
A modern parallel would be how age verification laws can prevent pornography from being accessible and serve as a backdoor way to outlaw it. Likewise, in my episode on in Vitro fertilization, I discussed how allowing IVF parents to sue for the wrongful death of human embryos can bankrupt the IVF industry without relying on an unpopular IVF ban. One way to effectively ban something is to first make it culturally and economically unpopular so that it’s easier to outlaw in the future. So there is room to debate lots of different methods and proposals to ly decrease abortion rates and help women not kill their children, which by the way is better than saying help women choose life. Remember, life is an abstract term. We should talk about how abortion kills children. If we can make abortion something that people don’t choose as often, it will make it easier to outlaw in the future.
So the two go hand in hand. And in using those methods, we need to be as wise as serpents. And sometimes to do that, we need to copy the non evil successes of evil people. Our Lord put it this way. The sons of this world are wiser in their own generation than the sons of light. For example, in states where pro-abortion ballot initiatives have won, the media and materials used by the pro-abortion side are often very sleek and appealing in comparison to pro-life materials or think about the tactics of the LGBT movement, they did not start with transgender athletes and drag queen story hour. They started with just saying they only wanted something innocuous. They wanted what everyone else has and they tolerated small incremental wins. For example, in 2008, Joe Biden and Barack Obama both said they opposed. So-called Same-sex marriage
CLIP:
Do. Do
Trent:
You support gay
CLIP:
Marriage? No. Barack Obama Norra support redefining from a civil side, what constitutes marriage? I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.
Trent:
I’m sure some supporters of gay marriage wanted to withhold their votes from Obama, but their friends probably reminded them that it’s better to have a lukewarm ally than a hostile enemy. And their strategy paid off because Obama changed his public position on marriage. In his 2015 book Believer, the Obama White House senior advisor, David Axelrod, said that Obama hid his support for so-called Same-Sex Marriage because he knew at that time it wasn’t politically viable and it could have cost him the election. And he went on to pave the way for all kinds of federal impositions of the LGBT agenda. So we need to be bold in our rhetoric, but also cunning in our tactics, especially when it comes to advancing legislation and pro-life candidates. It’s a simple plan, but it’s far from an easy one. And don’t be discouraged if the fight feels like it’s getting harder.
Before Roe was overturned, the pro-abortion strategy was to just ignore the issue because they’d won. Now that they’ve suffered a major blow, this has galvanized them. There’s an old saying, if you only wound the devil, then there’s hell to pay. In addition, standing up for the unborn is harder now than it was just a few decades ago. Back then, I could draw a huge crowd on a college campus to dialogue about abortion and pictures of aborted children would shock people, but now young people are so stuck in their phones, they don’t even care, and the violence of abortion isn’t that shocking to them. When I was a kid, if you wanted to see video of somebody dying or a dead body, you needed somebody’s older brother to go to the independent video store and sneak you a copy of a forbidden film like Faces of Death.
But now people on X can scroll and see nonstop clips of people being maimed and killed. When you become numb to death, you become numb to claims about death, such as the death of children from abortion. And let’s not forget that people are desensitized to sex because porn use has skyrocketed, and abortion will always be seen as a safeguard that allows for fornication. People are numb, they’re stuck to their phones, and they’re easily programmed, especially by groups that spend a lot of money to program them. One reason pro-abortion ballot initiatives succeed is because wealthy out-of-state donors and groups fund these initiatives like in Michigan where they spent $40 million to protect abortion. In many cases, the pro-life movement is an army of part-time volunteers against an army of full-time operatives, often with government funding. And if they’re willing to defend child killing, what kind of deception would they be unwilling to engage in if it advanced their cause?
The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once said this, though, those who fight monsters must take steps to ensure they don’t become monsters. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. What that means is that we cannot allow this fight against evil to cause us to become evil and deformed in our own hearts, know that God has the ultimate victory and he will right every wrong. But God has tasked us, you and I, with doing justice in the here and now. So we need to not just trust Him, we need to fully rely on God so that we don’t puff up with pride and then come crashing down in despair and please pray for me and for the work that we do here at Catholic Answers to continue to shine the light of Christ into such a dark world. So thank you all so much for watching, and I hope that you have a blessed day.