Is the Movement to Ban Abortion Really about Babies?

00:00

Is the Movement to Ban Abortion Really about Babies?

June 16, 2022

Questions about why pro-lifers don’t support making everything that has to do with having and raising a baby free if the movement is really about babies and whether there are times when Christians should use rhetoric as a tool of persuasion.

* If the movement to ban abortion were really about babies, wouldn’t pro-lifers support making everything involving babies free (prenatal care, delivery, medical care, and schooling)?

* Are there times when Christians should use rhetoric as a tool in a situation where giving a detailed answer wouldn’t have as powerful an impact?

Transcript

[Music] [Bell] Welcome to Stand to Reason's #STRask podcast with Amy Hall and Greg Koukl. Greg, we're going to start with this first question now if you're ready. Yep, I'll sit.

Always ready. Alright, this one comes from L.S.J. In response to abortion fuhrer, a friend shared a post stating that if banning abortion was really about babies, everything involved in having a baby would be free from prenatal care and delivery to healthcare and schooling. I think it's a non-sequitur, but not sure how to respond.

I don't even understand the connection, so yeah, it's probably a non-sequitur. If abortion was about babies, then everything regarding babies medically would be free medically, right? Is that my understanding the question properly there? I think it probably comes from the idea that if you're going to make me have a baby, then you need to pay for everything. Well, okay, that's a straw man because make me have a baby doesn't apply when a woman's already pregnant.

Alright, first of all, a woman already has a baby. It's just inside her womb. Alright, it doesn't become a baby or of course the terms we're using now are somewhat flexible.

One might say it's not a baby till it comes out of the womb. Well, okay, my point is babies are human beings and it doesn't become a valuable human being when it comes out of the womb. And in fact, most women, when I say most, I mean like every woman who is pregnant, who wants her child, refers to her unborn as a baby.

My baby's kicking me. My baby's in the first trimester. My baby's in the third trimester, whatever.

It's a common way to refer to it. The question here is not forcing people to have a baby. They already have it.

It is preventing them from killing the baby they already have. So the challenge then, if it's the way you characterize it, Amy, then it applies to newborns. It applies to toddlers.

It applies to teenagers, for goodness' sake. If you're forcing me to keep my teenager alive so I have to take care of this teenager, then you have to pay everything. It's so, you can tell in my voice, I'm getting a little annoyed.

It's such a stupid way of arguing. Nobody's forcing anyone to have a baby. When a man and a woman climb in the sack together, they are participating in a behavior that naturally produces babies.

Apart from the rare circumstance of rape and pregnancy, no one's forcing this woman to participate in that activity. When it results in the kind of thing that is natural for the behavior, no one is forcing that either. Now, it may not be what she expected or what she wanted, but it certainly is naturally connected to the behavior.

The only issue here is whether once a woman has her offspring. Baby, if you will, fetus if you will, zygote if you will, whatever you want to call it. It still is her individual offspring, whether that offspring is in her womb or not.

That's the issue. And the question is, what is the right way for us to behave towards children we have that are burdensome in the way expensive or we just don't want? Well, killing them is not a legitimate option. That's what abortion does.

But because the killing is under the cover of the womb in which the child is placed or is growing, I should say, it's not placed there. The mother is producing this child. Then it's easy to dismiss because we're not looking at it.

Like a person, a B-29 bomber who doesn't feel he's killing anybody because he's at 40,000 feet or something dropping bombs on cities. He might theoretically be aware of the fact that he's killing people, but it's not the same visceral impact as if he's doing hand-to-hand combat. And so it's easy to take that lightly or be dismissive.

Same thing, true, and abortion. It happens under cover of the woman's body. And so therefore, at least when we think about it or she thinks about it, it's not the same as killing a one day old infant.

Although that's being promoted now to by many given the logic of abortion. So I think that it certainly is a non-sequitur because the same kind of logic would apply to a 10-year-old or a teenager that parents have obligations to care for. But that doesn't place an obligation on the rest of society to give them free care.

Parents have responsibilities. That's what it means to be a parent. To do things for your family, for whom you're responsible, that you don't want to do much of the time.

Any parent can tell you this, all right, that does not change our responsibility. They've tried to make an exception with regards to abortion because it's easy to dismiss a child you can't see. However, even when that happens, women have difficult emotional problems as a result.

They're PTSD-related to abortion. It's a matter of fact, all right? So this is another one of those kind of suspicious dismissals of the foundational pro-life argument. And it's wrong to take the life of an innocent human being without proper justification if you want to add that.

Abortion does that. It takes a life of innocent human beings for reasons we would never take the life of other human beings who are standing there in front of us. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

There's a denial here about, again, like you mentioned, Greg, the responsibility of parents towards their children. And that's the way this has always worked. That's where society has always worked.

We have always held parents responsible for their children. So the fact that we will not allow someone to kill their child does not mean that then suddenly someone else is responsible for paying for everything in that child. As if the starting point is no child and the fact that you can't kill them means that I'm forcing you to have a child.

It makes no sense. And I suspect another thing going on here is if they're saying that if banning abortion was really about babies, in other words, what they really think it's about is controlling women and forcing them to do things and keeping them from making choices. So with that in mind, instead of the idea of you're forcing me to have a baby, with the idea that what's behind here is, it's really about controlling women and not about babies because you will not pay for everything for the babies.

That's another specious response for a couple of reasons. Where else in a woman's life is anyone seeking to control her for the sake of controlling her? If that was the big concern of society, I mean they want to make it of men, but massive numbers of women are pro-life. Okay, so who is the ones who are trying to seek control women and where are the other areas where there is this kind of control on women? It's not there.

There's no good reason to believe that the animus is to control them. Plus this ignores the moral logic of the pro-life view. It's just a, which I cited a moment ago, a trauma to take the life of an intimate being, abortion does that, therefore abortion is wrong.

Now that's the syllogism that is valid. In other words, the conclusion follows the premises if the premises are true. But this kind of rejoinder completely ignores that.

Oh, what you're really trying to do is control me or whatever. By the way, this rationale applies to other kinds of objections too. If there was a baby and a burning building that had a lot of embryos, you'd say the baby, not the embryos.

So there, you know, well wait a minute, you're talking about a psychological response to a circumstance. You've not addressed the logic of the pro-life view. Okay, this goes back to something C.S. Lewis talked about ages ago.

In an article titled "Bulverism" and simply put, he said, "First you gotta show that a person is mistaken, before it's meaningful to say why he's mistaken." They haven't addressed the moral logic of the pro-life view to show that it's wrong. It's mistaken, it doesn't work. Rather they just say, "We know what your real motives are.

Your real motives are to do control women or whatever." And then they're dismissive. Notice the move. Yes, it's a non-sequitur.

It's an avoidance of the real issue. And there's been a slew of these kinds of things that have come out just in the last few weeks because of the challenge in SCOTUS, the Supreme Court, apparently to Roe versus Wade. All of this squawking that is unrelated to the issue, but it is heavily laden rhetoric that is meant to move people emotionally instead of meant to address the real issue of the full humanity and the full value of every single human being, regardless of where they're located, in this case, in the womb or out.

Most people do not know what the pro-life arguments are. I've interacted with people online and they honestly have never heard our arguments. And I'm not sure exactly why that is.

I think a lot of pro-lifers maybe aren't even aware of the arguments. The media certainly doesn't ever give the actual arguments that pro-lifers give. And so there's just a lot of ignorance out there.

So maybe if somebody asks you this or somebody posts this, that's the time to start asking questions and find out what their understanding is of the pro-life. Excellent. What do you think the pro-life view is? I remember Kathy Ireland who we had some influence in training on this issue, powerful, the former model and now, you know, captain of industry, you know, on her field of interior decorating and all kinds of things.

But she's a wonderful Christian and certainly a staunch pro-lifer and we've had some role in her life in training on how to represent this in public. And she was on Huckabee's show and she gave this very straightforward characterization of the pro-life view. And remember, Huckabee is a pro-life who ran for president and he said, "I've never heard anything like this before." So I think you're right about this.

Christians think, "Well, it's wrong. The bar is wrong. Why?" because it takes a human life.

Well, we take human lives all the time and other circumstances. Well, life is sacred. All life is sacred.

Well, the Bible says, "I formed you in my inward parts." Or until they come up with all of this, a scattering of loose justifications through the pro-life view and nothing like a coherent approach that deals with the issues. And this is where our material making abortion unthinkable, the art of pro-life persuasion, or the same material in abbreviated form like precious unborn human persons and the like can really help make the case for the pro-life view. I also have a talk.

I'm not sure if it's available here, but it's the one that I stand to reason on our website in our store. But it's called only one question, and that's really meant to zero in on the thing that really matters. The question, "What is the unborn?" And I think it's the case in a lot of moral issues that people haven't thought through them because they seem so obvious.

They haven't thought through them rationally. We can look at the fact that somebody is killing a baby. And without making an argument, we can see that that's wrong.

And I think unless you start to add all these different things into it to try to obscure the real issue, it's very obvious that it's not right to pull the limbs off of an unborn child. So I think a lot of people, they stop there because it's obvious, right? And they think that they can just say this and it'll be obvious to others. But the fact is, there's been so much obscuring of the truth using euphemisms, using different arguments that we do really have to make a case.

We have to go through the reasoning and hopefully Christians will get better at this and pro-lifers will get better at this. And it's not that hard. It's not that tricky, the basic argument.

Meghan Almond, during our last series of realities, she spoke to that from the main stage that may be available to us. She did a fabulous job and outlining it. We've done it in a lot of different particular areas, but it's just not that difficult.

And if we don't get grounded in this, we are not going to do a good job. By the way, this is why the graphic pictures are so helpful, the reason that you just mentioned. A lot of people can't articulate the problem in a clear way in a discussion.

You show the pictures, people can see, that ain't right. Whatever you're doing, they're dating right. And so it's an end-around, not an illicit end-around, but it's another way of accomplishing the same end without having to articulate all the particulars.

You see what's happened in there, you see what happened to that baby? That's a baby. There it is. It's obvious.

All torn into pieces. That's what abortion does. That's when people see, wow, wow, that ain't right.

It's hard to just call that a pregnancy when you see the actual baby. A piece of tissue, yeah. The euphemisms go away.

Another great resource is Scott Clusendorf's book, "The Case for Life." That's true. It's excellent. And one last thing on this topic, I think it's also really hard for people to face this because so many people have been involved in having abortions, including Christians.

So there's also a very, there's an emotional reason to hide these things from yourself. Nobody wants to face that. In fact, I don't think you can face that, the truth about that, unless you also know the truth about forgiveness.

Because it's too much. It's too much. And so at this point, there are so many women and men who have participated in this that to actually accept the truth about it would be so painful.

And difficult. So we have that extra level of resistance to the truth here. And which means you need to do this with grace.

And hopefully with the gospel, hopefully you can actually tell them the gospel as part of this if you think that's what's holding them back. Because this is not an easy thing to face. Okay, Greg, here's a question from Ethan.

"Rhetoric versus logic. How should we engage out in the field where the rhetoric of our challengers, though illogical remains powerful? Are there times Christians should use rhetoric as a tool in situations where taking time to line by line answer isn't as powerful an impact?" Yeah, well, the word rhetoric is actually a neutral word. And when you look classically the ancient Greeks, rhetoric was a way of speaking persuasively.

So you employ different techniques to be a persuasive speaker. We do that at standard reason all the time. We study some of those things so we can be more effective communicators.

However, in recent times the word rhetoric has come to represent sophistry, which is manipulative use of language to distort the truth. And I think that's the way it's commonly understood now if we see distorting rhetoric, or that's just a rhetorical flourish meant to obscure the truth, etc. So I think definitely Christians should be using rhetoric in the best sense of the word to make their points more clearly.

I'll give you just one example. We can say that thousands of kids are destroyed every day in the United States of America through abortion. So that's a factual thing that may have some impact.

But what if I said the same number of people, the same number of human beings that died on 9/11, 2,977, die at the hands of their own mothers every single day through the world. That's a rhetorical thing. That's a rhetorical thing.

It's a rhetorical thing. It's a rhetorical thing. It's a rhetorical thing.

The numbers are changing a little bit. The numbers used to be higher in the past and a little bit lower based on what CDC reports, although California and other states, where arguably they have the most abortions don't report at all. So these are conservative figures.

But the point of making by using that number connected with that event that people understand is a horrible event is meant to capture, apply the horrible reaction to 9/11 to abortion because it ought to be just as horrible because the same numbers of people died actually more horrible when they died at the hands of their own mother. Who is a decision maker in the process? That's a rhetorical flourish, but it's not deceptive. It's not distorted.

It's meant to underscore the real impact what we are actually facing when it comes to abortion. Who was it? Stalin who said, or maybe it was Lenin who said, "You murder a hundred people. That's a tragedy.

You murder a million people. That's a statistic." Okay. And so we use rhetoric to take statistics that are true, but there's no emotional impact to what's really going on.

We find a way to help people feel the appropriate emotional response given that statistic. Now, oftentimes though, people are using distorted, twisted, sophistic rhetoric to make a terrible thing seem innocuous. Oh, that's just a piece of tissue.

We're just destroying a piece of tissue. Was that factually correct? Sure. So are you a blob of tissue? Okay.

That's my response. You're a blob of tissue too. So, I mean, if you just want to call it a blob of tissue, it feels like not so bad.

Okay. But when you realize that every human being is also a blob of tissue, there's more going on than just tissue. Now you've taken away the thrust of that rhetorical move.

So part of what we're trying to do and standard reason is, yeah, standard reason is facing these things all the time and in our shows and in our articles and especially on Mr. B, Tim Barnett on red pedologic, we are trying to show the foolishness and vacuous nature of these rhetorical flourishes that are meant to obscure what is actually true. Go after those. Show how the rhetoric distorts the truth.

So you're using logic and reason as your foundation and then you're watching for when rhetorical flourishes, sophistry are being used to make something ugly and evil look just fine and then you expose that. And that's what we're here to do to help you to do that. Just keep in mind, are you using the rhetoric to obscure the truth or are you using it to clarify the truth because those are two different things.

And if you're using it to clarify the truth, then that's completely legitimate. Right. Right.

Well, thank you for your questions. Jay and Ethan, we really appreciate hearing from you. And if you would like to send us a question, send it to SDR on Twitter with the hashtag #STRask or you can go through our website.

We'd love to hear from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Cocle for Stand to Reason.

[Music]