Audio only:
In this episode Trent examines why so many pro-lifers end up joining the Catholic church.
When Protestants Were Pro-Choice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkbOEnDFKdc&t=2s
Transcription:
Over the years I’ve noticed that many people who convert to the pro-life movement end up becoming Catholic. These include known figures like former abortionist Bernard Nathanson and former Planned Parenthood director like Abbie Johnson. Lila Rose started Live Action as a teenager when she was an Evangelical and then converted to Catholicism. And of course there are many people who were non-religious or even Protestant and become Catholic after spending years in the pro-life movement.
And in today’s episode I’m going to examine those reasons they convert, some of which should really move all pro-lifers to consider the moral worldview that is unique to Catholicism. But before we do that I hope I can move you to hit the like and subscribe button so you can help our channel grow and reach a lot more people.
Now, I admit that in many cases these conversions come about because of social reasons. Catholics have been overrepresented in the pro-life movement for decades and so it’s not surprising that non-Catholics entering the movement may see Catholicism as a foundational belief system within it. Kristan Hawkins, the President of Students for Life said of her conversion to Catholicism: “I think my conversion story, it’s fairly simple. It’s meeting other Catholic leaders within the movement, talking with staff members over the years, and just really hearing the truth about our faith.”
As I showed in my episode about pro-choice Protestants, which I’ll link in the description below, the Catholic Church started the pro-life movement in the United States through efforts like founding the national right to life committee. Major conservative Protestant bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention, even had pro-choice views until the mid 1980’s.
The hierarchy of the Catholic church also provides a way to mobilize Catholic pro-life activists that isn’t as robust as other Protestant denominations. Finally, if you get involved with grassroots activism like praying outside of an abortion facility, you’ll often find the people praying next to you are Catholics reciting the rosary.
So, one answer is a bit simple, there are a lot of Catholics in the pro-life movement so Protestants who get involved are likely to be introduced to Catholicism by people they already admire as comrades in the fight for life and so they are more open to learning about the Faith than if it were in a more adversarial context.
But beyond the social reason I think there is a deeper theological and philosophical reasons that become apparent when we start thinking not just about abortion, but how we should treat human beings at every moment of their life and even before they come into existence. And this comes from asking the question, how many rights do unborn children have?
Even pro-lifers mistakenly think the unborn only have one right before they are born, the right-to-life. And they often interpret that right very narrowly as simple the right to not be killed. But this leaves them open to pro-choicers who say, “I’ll agree for the sake of the argument that a fetus is a person. They may have a right to life but they don’t have a right to life support.” According to these pro-choicers, just as a dying patient in a hospital doesn’t have the right to my kidney even if it happens to be a perfect match, unborn children don’t have a right to use someone else’s body to stay alive.
But this argument doesn’t work because the pro-choicer isn’t really granting that the unborn child is a person with a right to life. How can they have a right to life if they don’t have the right to one and only they need in order to have a life, their mother’s body. My kidneys were made for my body so no one else has a right to them but what is the purpose of the uterus, who was it made for?
If you leave adults alone for a long time, you generally respect their right to life. But if you leave small children alone for a long time, you often violate their right to life. A right can make someone leave you alone, but it can also force someone to help you. Many pro-choicers even think the right to abortion can force Catholic hospitals to provide abortions. But at least with small children, the right to life includes the right to assistance from other people, primarily the child’s parents.
Bioethicist O Carter Snead says, “Our embodiment situates us in a particular relationship to one another, from which emerge obligations to come to the aid of vulnerable others, including especially the disabled, the elderly, and children.” Snead says a law that doesn’t take into account our necessary embodiment “fails to recognize these obligations, and leaves the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human community invisible and unprotected.”
As persons the unborn have a right not to be left alone, but a right to be cared for by their mother and father. They have a right to life that compels their parents make sacrifices for them, be it a father’s occupational sacrifice or a mothers anatomical sacrifice using organs designed for that very purpose.
But let’s go deeper. If the unborn are truly persons, then they have more than just the right to be kept alive. They have the right to loved and have a relationship with their parents. If they didn’t have that right, then parents could abandon their children to the state whenever they felt like it. But deep down we know that’s wrong. Parents should only relinquish custody of their children if they are unfit to care for them.
In 2008 the state of Nebraska faced the unintended consequences of having a safe haven law that allowed parents to legally abandon their child but didn’t define what a “child” was. As a result, parents came from out of state with children as old as 17-years old in order to pass them off to state officials.
Safe haven laws don’t contradict the view that children have a right to not be abandoned. In some cases, their parents are truly unfit to care for them. But in other cases, they are a social tolerations that try to prevent greater evils like infanticide. Safe havens go back to the middle ages where Pope Innocent III decreed in 1198 that foundling wheels be installed in Italy to prevent incidents of infanticide.
To summarize, children have more than just a right to life. They have a right to love. They have a right to a relationship with their biological parents. And their parents cannot abandon them simply because they no longer want to raise them. But if children have a right to be loved by his parents, then this entails that he has a right to many other things.
For example, children have the right to come into existence as the fruit of marital love and not as the result of evils like fornication, prostitution, adultery or rape. Obviously children who come into existence through evil means are still persons with human dignity, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was wrong to engage in an act that brought those children into existence by those means.
So far many protestants would agree with what I’ve said and wonder why they should be Catholic. But once again follow the line of reasoning, what else do children in virtue of being embodied persons who can obligate others, have a right to? When you think in this way, distinctly Catholic bioethics start to make sense.
For example, if children didn’t have the right to reside in their mother’s body, then there would be nothing wrong with a pregnant mother choosing to raise her baby in an artificial womb just because she doesn’t want to undergo the difficulties of pregnancies, as can be seen in the 2023 film The Pod Generation. But many Christians would consider this a selfish abdication of motherhood. But you don’t need science fiction to see that many Christians see nothing wrong with the grotesque practice of using egg donors, sperm donors, and gestational surrogates in order to birth children as long as abortion isn’t directly involved.
Pope Francis has recently called for a global ban on gestational surrogacy but I find many Protestants have a hard time articulating why it would be sinful for a married couple to use a surrogate or to create a baby through IVF if the surplus embryos aren’t destroyed. You could say embryonic human beings have the right to be mothered, not manufactured but if Protestants think the Bible doesn’t clearly condemn contraception, and so contraception isn’t sinful, how could the Bible be clear enough to condemn modern evils like gestational surrogacy?
If a protestant believes children have the right to come into existence within the safety of their mother’s bodies as the fruit of the marital act, then many of them may also be open to an argument against contraception. Specifically, the argument that children have the right to come into existence as a freely received gift from God, and not as an invader who managed to overcome birth control security defenses and infiltrate their mother’s womb. In fact, the bio-ethicist William E. May argues in his book The Gift of Life that contraception is wrong because it expresses an evil, anti-life attitude tow ards a couple’s future children. He writes:
Since contraception is specified precisely by the choice to impede the beginning of new human life, it is an anti-life kind of act, one expressing a contra-life will. It is precisely because contraception is specified by a contra-life will that it was, as we saw earlier, regarded for centuries as analogous to homicide by Christian writers . . . Contraception is always seriously wrong because it is always gravely immoral to adopt by choice the proposal to damage, destroy, or impede the good of human life.
Now one might object that natural family planning also “impedes” the good of life but that’s not true. Contraception directly attacks fertility as a bad thing that must be suppressed. NFP merely allows couples to use their natural, God-given yet unequal levels of fertility at different times in marriage. Many authors use a wedding analogy to make this point.
Imagine you and your fiancé are choosing the date to have your wedding. If you pick one Saturday, you know your 20 cousins can attend. If you pick the following Saturday you know the cousins probably can’t attend because they’re busy. If you feel like you can’t host them, you may pick the next Saturday and still send them an invitation. If they surprise you and show up, it may be stressful, but it’s still okay. But imagine how hurtful it would be if you picked the Saturday they can come and you send them a dis-invitation. Stay out of our wedding: You aren’t wanted.
Likewise, when a married couple is intimate during the wife’s fertile time of the month, that’s like having the wedding on the Saturday the cousins can probably attend. Being intimate during the less fertile period is like hosting it during the Saturday they probably can’t attend. But using contraception is like hosting the wedding on the best Saturday for them to arrive, but sending a disinvitation that says, “Stay out of our wedding, or for married couples, our bodily renewal of the wedding vows. You aren’t wanted!”
To summarize, my goal has not been to conclusively prove that contraception, IVF and other anti-life acts are wrong or that Catholic bioethics is true. I just want to point out something I’ve seen among many Protestants who spend time among Catholics and begin to deeply ponder the question: how do I respect every right an unborn child has, and not just their right to life?
Although, a Protestant who agrees with me so far might ask, “Why can’t I be a Protestant who personally rejects IVF, surrogacy and contraception? Some do and I have great respect for their virtue. But some of those Protestants believe that these things aren’t just evil for them, they are evil for everyone.
And if that’s true, then why God didn’t make it clear in scripture that Christians should oppose these evils? Well, maybe God’s ways of authoritatively and infallibly teaching his people go beyond the Bible alone? Maybe God gave us a Church with universal, binding teaching authority that can teach on novel issues facing the Body of Christ and not just make suggestions to Christians, but compel them to follow the natural law and respect the dignity of every person, from when they are conceived and even before that point to making sure they are conceived in a holy and dignified way.
I hope this episode was helpful for you and if you’d like to learn more I recommend Patrick Madrid’s book of conversions to Catholicism among pro-lifers called Surprised by life. For IVF check out Stephanie Gray Connors book Conceived by Science and for other moral issues see my book with Leila Miller Made this Way. Thank you so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.