Pints With Aquinas - BONUS |Making the Pro-Life Case W/ Stephanie Gray | The Matt Fradd Show Ep. 9

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

I sit down with pro-life logic ninja Stephanie Gray to discuss abortion. I think this will be the best interview you've ever heard about how to refute pro-abortion arguments and how to make the pro-life case. Thanks to our sponsors! ---------- SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

Hey, what's up? This is a bonus episode where I share with you an episode from The Matt Fradd Show. Now, just so you know, we don't always post here at Pints with Aquinas Matt Fradd Show episodes, and we're not going to be doing it for much longer. So please, if you haven't already, please go and subscribe to The Matt Fradd Show podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. It's obviously a YouTube show, but if you want to consume it as a podcast, be sure to go and subscribe. Today, I interview pro-life ninja, that's what I've dubbed her, Stephanie Gray, about abortion and the pro-life position. We get into Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about abortion. We talk about what to do if the mother's life is in jeopardy. We talk about what Joe Rogan

has said about abortion recently. We steel man the pro-choice position and then respond to it. Look, just a fantastic episode. You're going to learn a lot from it, but I want to say thanks to two of the sponsors who sponsor this show and make it possible because these videos cost a lot of money, okay? Like a lot of money. And I want to start doing more of them. And so I'm really dependent on both patrons and sponsors to make that happen. Number one is Covenant Eyes, which is the best accountability and filtering software on the web. This blocks the bad stuff. And it also has accountability software, which sends a report to an accountability partner of your online behavior. Now, if you have kids, you would be the accountability partner and you would start getting a report once a day, once a week, you

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always watching. And yeah, you can make that choice, but then you have to have a conversation with an accountability partner. And of course, the point of accountability relationships isn't to shame each other, but to call each other to be better people. I beg you to get this. As somebody who gets hundreds, if not thousands of emails and messages in my inbox on my different social media feeds from teens and college students and husbands and wives who are desperately trying to overcome pornography, I know this is a big issue and I know Covenant Eyes will help. Do not procrastinate about it. Go right now to covenanteyes.com. Use the promo code Matt Fradd. Okay. One word, Matt Fradd.

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Secondly, I want to say a big shout out to Exodus 90. Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men, okay, where men travel as if you want or journey for 90 days where they read the scriptures. They add more prayers into their daily routine. They don't drink alcohol. They don't eat between meals. They take cold showers. I mean, it's really cool stuff. I think a real manful way to respond to the current crisis in the church, to pray and

to fast for it so that the members of the church can be holy, so that the sinners in the church, which is of course all of us, but I mean those sinners who have committed criminal acts, ought to be brought to justice, right? Something we can pray for as we do that. And then also for our own sanctification, Exodus 90. It's got a marvelous app too. My friend was just showing me Exodus 90 today on his app, and I could not believe how high quality everything is. They've done a total makeover. I say this about my program, Strive21.com. It's so high quality, you'll doubt that it's Catholic.

Now, that's kind of sad to say that, but you know what I mean. Exodus 90. At least check it out. Exodus90.com. Or if you've got your phone in front of you, just download the app Exodus 90. Thanks so much and enjoy this show. Here we go. I mean, are you worried you might have food in your teeth? You do. Do I? You do. You have two black spots. So let's talk about morning people, first of all, because you're a morning person. I'm a morning person. Woo! Yes! I was in the Philippines.

You're going to find this funny. Do you speak Tagalog? No, I don't at all. But I spoke to about 10,000 people. Well done. In like two days with Sarah Swofford. We flew over there together. Nice, nice.

I do. Isn't she beautiful? Yes, yes. Met her at SEEK 2019. Okay. So Jason Everett is super great with international trips. He's like, just get me in. I'll speak immediately and get me out.

Right. I'm like, I need days to recover from the trauma and coffee. Right? And I need pancit. What's that? Pancit. It's a Filipino food. Oh, is it?

Okay. Didn't know that. All I had was the cold fish head for breakfast. Oh, wow. No, but I was like, I got this. I'm going to do a Jason Everett. I don't need to. I'm just going to for the kingdom.

Totally. And turns out I shouldn't have done that because it was really tough. But anyway, on the way back to the airport, the lady said to me, you are like a phone with many apps. I'm like, what? And she said, very exciting, but dies quickly. Isn't that brilliant? You are kind of like that. I'm very, what? And she said, very exciting but dies quickly. Isn't that brilliant? You are kind of like that. I'm very much like that.

She sucked me up entirely. It was very offensive and revealing. It's true. Because I wake up and I can crack out more work in the first three hours of a day than most people could do in an entire day. Like I am on fire. But about 1 p.m., I'm done. I'm all about siestas. Yeah, me too.

Yeah, yeah. But that's because we're morning people. Yeah. So we just like jump out of bed like a tigger. Yeah. You know? And then my wife's different. In the nighttime, she's great.

In the morning, she's brutal. Yeah, I just don't get that. So we want to talk about abortion. And you've been talking about abortion for how long? Well, on one hand, my whole life, because I was a child activist. But I have been speaking on it formally for pretty much 20 years. And I think... I am that old, Matt Fratt.

How old are you? How old do you think I am? I don't want to... How old do you think I am? Are you okay with us doing this on camera? Yeah. 37. Oh, do you actually think I'm that or are you actually...

No, I think you're that. Like, you think I look that? Yeah. Really? Is that offensive? Have we just totally derailed this interview? No, actually, it's not offensive because I'm 38 and I'm going to be 39. So you still got me...

What would you like me to say? Well, you know what... Because if I said 20, you would have been offended because you knew I was lying. Well, that's true. So what would you like me to answer? Because on a recent trip I was on, this elderly gentleman was shocked at my age because he said, you're less than 30. But you know what? He was an older gentleman, probably didn't have his glasses on.

What would you have liked me to say? No, 37 is good because it's younger than I am, but still acknowledging that I am who I am. That's good. That's good. I'm 35. Yeah. Yeah. My wife's 37.

Yeah, that's right. Well, I was going to say the same age, but not quite. So you've been speaking publicly about abortion for 20 years. Yeah. I was 18. Yeah. 20 years. I was 18 when I gave my first formal pro-life talk after hearing Scott Klusendorf and I am 38. So that's 20 years. So when you say you were a child activist, how did that happen? And what did that look like? So both my parents were super involved in the pro-life movement. Um, they went to rallies, marches, conferences. I, being born in 1980, 80s and 90s were a time in the pro-life movement of Operation Rescue. Which means?

Where pro-life activists in the United States and Canada in large groups would go to clinic doors, chain themselves together and chain themselves to clinic doors. Always peaceful, but basically shutting down the clinic's ability to function for several hours until the police would come and basically unlock them all. So my parents were friends with those people. Did they do it? Did they have a lock to the door? Well, you know what?

My parents didn't because my mom always said, I can't imagine if the government would take you girls, my sister and I, take you girls from us. And so I think my parents were afraid that if they got arrested, would social services step in and think that they weren't, you know, so they felt, yeah, they felt that they weren't in a place where they could do it, but they were friends with those people. So I grew up with, you know, the reality that my parents had friends who went to jail and I went to visit one of them in particular. And, um, so my mom volunteered at a pregnancy care

center and she was going to the hospital when her clients were giving birth. So that's what I grew up in. So do you remember a time when your parents weren't activists? I do not. No, no. I mean, I remember handwriting placards that we were going to take to the Vancouver abortion clinic and the slogan was, I was about eight years old, I was filling in the lines, be a hero, save a whale, save a baby, go to jail.

Wow. Did you come up with that? No. No, I don't know if my parents did or someone else did. That's way better than the rosary's over his thing. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Yeah. So that's where I come from, Matt. And are your folks Catholic? Yes. Okay. So you've grown up in the church. I have. Did you ever question, wander away, have a more firm kind of resolve to follow Christ? Good question. I did not wander away, but I did question. And that was at a pivotal point, pivotal point, which happens for a lot of people when they leave high school and go into university. And I moved away from home, which I call kind of like my bubble. I was raised in a small town.

I went to a good Catholic school. My friends were all raised in families similar to my family. And then I was kind of uprooted and I went to live in residence at the University of British Columbia and life was very different there. And suddenly I was surrounded by people who didn't think as I thought, who were not taught as I was taught.

And there was this whole other world going on where people were then challenging me, why are you Catholic? Why do you have a pope? Why do you think contraception is wrong? Why do you think abortion is wrong? And I remember calling one of my high school teachers, calling him on the phone and saying, Mr. Glonick, I've gone to Catholic school for 13 years of my life.

Why don't I have answers? Was he a faithful Catholic? He was. Yeah. And he said, you need to read a book by Carl Keating called Catholicism versus Fundamentalism. So I read that Catholic apologetics book. And so that sent me on a journey to understand the reasons behind the claims that I was making. So it's not that I wasn't taught the truth or even taught the reasons.

But at my age or stage, I couldn't really articulate the reasons back. And so I went on a journey to be able to do that when I was 18 years old. And then beyond just kind of apologetics from a Catholic perspective into just bioethics, why is abortion wrong? Why is contraception wrong? All of these things. And when I started seeking out answers and explanations, I found them. And so that solidified the faith that I already had, made it very strong and have kind of been going full steam ahead ever since. Yeah. So the questions that you were looking into were more sort of objections raised from our evangelical brothers and sisters? Initially, yes. And then some of the moral questions too. With abortion, I was more equipped

in being able to give explanations just because I'd been such an activist as a child. I have letters that I wrote to being a Canadian, the Premier of British Columbia, the Prime Minister of Canada, when I was 12, 13, and 14 years old. My name is Stephanie Gray, and you need to stop abortion, and you need to stop funding abortion. And then I remember at the time, the Prime Minister of Canada was Jean Chrétien, and I was not getting letters back from him. I was getting them from his assistants, which is typical if you write a member of government. And so I remember being irate that the prime minister himself was not writing

to 13-year-old Stephanie. I know. So I took those names of those assistants and I wrote them a letter. And I said, I don't want to hear from you. I want to hear from the prime minister. And that's wonderful. I was that kind of child. Did they write you back or did their assistants write you back? I don't know, but I have those letters. Who is this kid? Yeah. Beautiful. And so this passion has never left you. You gave a talk when you were 18.

Why don't we do this? Why don't we begin by just sort of maybe steel manning the abortion position, the pro-choice position, because it's always important, isn't it, that we try to understand where our ideological opponents are coming from, to not dismiss people too quickly. You know, we might not be able to agree with someone's position, but we can sympathize, perhaps to some degree, why they're at that position. You know, like people don't tend to hold to positions that they know are in direct defiance of the truth. So before we kind of get into why abortion's wrong,

would this help? To just talk about like, why do people think it's right? And by steel man, what I mean is, there's the fallacy of straw manning where you misrepresent your opponent's position and I know that the the people online pro-choice folks tend to do that in a great deal right um so you know like you hate women you're against women like yeah that's my argument I hate women Yeah, you hate women. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah, so let's do that. Why are people for abortion? What are they saying and how would you articulate it?

I think they would say it comes down to autonomy. We are a culture obsessed with autonomy, obsessed with choice and control. And so people in support of abortion would argue that it's about my bodily autonomy, my right to control my body. And therefore, if I want to have an abortion, which is something that involves my body being laid down on the abortionist table, then I should be allowed to access that. And at the very least, it shouldn't concern you, right? Right. As a pro-life activist, you might disagree with my choice to do what I want with my body, but that's not, you have no right to speak to me. Right. It's like, you know, you may not like if I do drugs, but I'm only impacting my body. Now, of course, we could argue that the choice that you make to take drugs does have a ripple effect on other people in the community and so on and so forth. But they would look at it that way, that this is a choice I'm making for my life.

Now, of course, we know where the pro-life response is going to go to that. But that's very much where the abortion supporter is focused. OK. And then, see, this is the difficulty. I think with some issues, we could steel man their positions all day because I'm very sympathetic to positions. I am somewhat sympathetic to positions that are against, say, my belief in certain things. But I'm so unsympathetic to the pro-abortion position that it's really difficult for me to spend much time propping up their argument because I just feel like I disagree with it so strongly. Well, I think it's, yes, you do disagree with it as I do so strongly, but it also comes down to the fact that it's still not a very strong argument because we know that it is not just the woman's body that's involved when she has an abortion. You know, like increasingly I'm seeing when I do debates in different lectures on the topic, I will say to the audience, when a woman takes a pregnancy test and she's not yet

seen the results, but she doesn't want to be pregnant, if the test comes up negative, will she go to an abortion clinic? And they're always like, no, obviously not. And then I say, okay, but if the test comes up positive and she doesn't want to be pregnant, will she then consider going to the abortion clinic? They say yes. And I say, okay, well, what is it that the positive test is telling her versus what the negative test is telling her? The negative test is basically saying, it's just your body. Don't worry. It's just you. But the moment she has a positive pregnancy test, that's telling her it's no longer just her body. There's another body there. That's why she's thinking about going to the abortion clinic, an action she would never take if she had the negative test. So the very fact that she's now going to the

abortion clinic is an admission there's another body present. So what about that body's bodily autonomy? What about that individual's choice? What about that? So then suddenly it becomes the choice I could make to lay my body down on the abortionist's table, is a choice that if I'm pregnant is going to impact another body. And if I believe in bodily rights, then I need to protect the bodily rights of that pre-born human being. You are so good at this. I remember. Well, thanks, Matt, if only everyone said that. I was, I mean, when I lived in Canada, you were there and you invited me to a debate you were doing on campus. And I think when people meet you, like you're so beautifully free and like joking around.

And so that's how I knew you. And I'm like, can I come to this debate? I forget what university. It was in Ottawa. Oh, okay. And you're like, yeah. And you said something like, you want to come and see how terrible the pro-choice arguments are? And you just ripped them into shreds i mean you just decimate it and i remember that i think they were bragging

about how this guy was on the debate team and he was like number one and he had gone to harvard or something but i thought you might be good at debating but if you're if you're trying to defend a position that's not true then exactly at the end of the day it's gonna fall flat i love how you put that um about the body bit. So if a woman takes a pregnancy test and she's not pregnant, as you say, her body was telling her something. There was a reason she went out. I mean, unless she just had sex and was wondering.

But often she might experience something different going on within her body and she gets the pregnancy test. Right. But her body's reacting to another body. So all of the physiological reactions a woman has when she's pregnant is because of the presence of another body. And so therefore, if there's another body, then how do we treat that other body? How ought we treat that other body? And that's actually an important distinction.

It's not what can I do. The question is what should I do? Can I have an abortion? Yes, yes, I can do almost anything. The question is, should I do that in a civil society, in a society that believes all humans are equal, in a society that believes in the fundamental human right to life? Should I take this course of action?

Okay, so the thing that's brought up immediately, as soon as you start making sense, right, what's brought up is rape and incest, right? Like someone might say, and I'm not asking you this, but someone might say, like, have you been raped? Do you have any idea the kind of trauma a woman goes through? Do you see how unloving and unsympathetic your syllogisms are to my pain? You don't. And you have no idea.

And so you really can't speak to this issue. If I'm raped and you're forcing me, that's the language, to give birth to this child, that's immoral. And then incest is also brought up as well. How do we respond to these? So there's two approaches that we need to take. There's the approach of the heart and the approach of the head. And I think we need to start with the former. We need to acknowledge that anyone who's been victimized by sexual assault has been victimized, that they've been traumatized, that that is a brutal assault for which there really aren't words to capture how vile it is. I have not been a victim of sexual assault, but I have many friends who are or who have been, and I have seen the lifelong trauma that that has brought to their lives. So while I can't say I've personally experienced it,

I have observed through friendship, the impact that that has had on people who have personally experienced that. And I can acknowledge that that is a terrible thing. And those people who have been hurt need our support. They need our love, our compassion, and counseling and so on and so forth. The question we then need to ask, moving from the heart to the head, so there's this expression of sympathy and then this introduction of logic,

will abortion unrape a rape victim? Will it undo the trauma? Will it take away the evil that has happened? No, but someone would say, but it would make it less bad. If I'm raped, terrible, nothing can take that back. But if I'm raped and then forced to bring a child to term, and I'm living with a child who's a perpetual reminder to me of the rape that I've suffered, then they'd say, well, this is worse than being raped and then being able to abort the fetus.

Right. So then if they focus on this being worse because it's the reminder, then I ask, if a woman has an abortion, will she suddenly forget she's been raped? She may not ever forget it. She won't ever forget it. Correct. Yes. But this is a very visual and in-your-face reminder in a way that if she didn't have the child, it wouldn't be. Isn't that right? So we acknowledge that there's some reminder, but we can't acknowledge that to the point that to think that if we took that particular reminder away, that we'd be eliminating all other reminders, that there wouldn't be things there.

The next point I would make is that I would ask the question, is it fair to give the death penalty to the innocent child? That's a consequence we don't even give to the rapist. In America, in the states where the death penalty is legal... Do you think we should? Do you think we should? I'm siding with... I think it's atrocious just how easy people who commit these heinous crimes get off.

I think we need more serious consequences for the aggressors. As someone who doesn't support the death penalty in general, because I think there are ways to prevent criminals from being a threat to society without having to end their lives in a form of societal self-defense, that they can, I think even in cases of murder, I actually wouldn't support the death penalty if we could protect society by putting, incarcerating the person, you know, for life or whatever the case may be. But my point would be generally abortion supporters,

I find, are not supporters of the death penalty. So these are individuals that wouldn't give the death penalty to a rapist. They wouldn't give the death penalty to a murderer. So then we ask, if you won't give the death penalty to guilty people, why would you ever consider giving the death penalty to an innocent person? That in the circumstance of rape, the guilty party is not the pre-born child. The guilty party is not the woman. The guilty party is the rapist. So we're now talking with the act of abortion about giving a consequence, a punishment to the innocent party that we're not even giving to the guilty party.

And even if we were giving that to the guilty party, I think we should all agree that no innocent person should ever pay the price of a crime that they themselves have not committed. So I would make the point that abortion is not going to unrape a rape victim. It is not going to take away the memories that she's been traumatized. rape a rape victim. It is not going to take away the memories that she's been traumatized. And then most foundationally, we in a society that supports human rights may not give punishment for a crime that the individual being punished has actually not committed, that they're not guilty of. And so, you know, it's kind of like if a born child looks like their father and the father commits a crime in a small town and, you know and the child grows up and looks like the father. Well, the locals in the town who were traumatized by that father's crime may not justifiably

attack this child of the criminal because he is a reminder of what his father did, because he looks like his father and people get memories of what evil had occurred previously, that we don't punish innocent people for the crimes of guilty people. Now, the abortion supporter will come back and say, well, a fetus isn't a person. Yeah, I want to hone in on this, because this is a question that's kind of come up a lot lately. Right. Okay, so, you know, if you say, I'm willing to grant that this is a human life because it has human parents, but that's a far cry from saying it's a person. And so now we need to define terms.

So yeah, I'd love you to spend some time on that. Sure. So then I will ask the abortion supporter, what is a person? How do you define a person? And as you- What are some answers you get? So the typical answer you get is more along the lines of Peter Singer.

Yeah, Peter Singer, who is a professor at Princeton University, kind of would argue that a person is someone who's rational, conscious or self-aware. And so the abortion supporter will say, even if biologically you're human, the embryo, let's say, in the first few weeks of pregnancy, even the fetus, you know, in the first trimester and so forth, they will say, well, that entity is not rational, conscious, or self-aware in that moment. And therefore, even if biologically human, it's not a person. So I would then say, okay, well, if our definition of a person, and therefore what gives you the right to life and what stops me from being able to kill you, definition of a person is you're rational, conscious, or self-aware right now.

What about when you're having surgery and you're under anesthetic? In that moment, you're not rational, conscious, or self-aware. If surgery is happening and I look at you and I say, can I kill you? You're not going to respond back and say, no, please don't, because you're under anesthetic. If you were sleeping and I whisper while you're sleeping, Matt, may I kill you? You're not going to say, no, please don't kill me, because you're not rational, conscious, and self-aware at that moment to the way you are right now. And we still acknowledge you're a person because we would say by virtue of being human, you have the inherent capacity built into your human nature to be rational, conscious, or self-aware, but you can't currently

express that due to your circumstances of sleeping or being under anesthetic. In the same way, by virtue of being human, the embryo or fetus of human parents has within his or her nature the capacity to be rational, conscious, or self-aware, but cannot currently express that because of her age. So when you're sleeping, you can't express it because of your circumstances, and that can change quickly. In the embryo's case, the embryo may noto cannot express it because of the embryo's age, which will change as the embryo gets older. But our right to life ought to be grounded in our existence, not in how old we are. And the embryo cannot act on certain abilities because of the embryo's age. And human rights aren't based on age.

They're based on existence as a member of the human family. Well put. I think someone might come back though and say, but isn't there something in the fact that an embryo has never been conscious, aware, or rational? So when I'm conscious, aware, and rational, I desire to live. When I sleep, I don't want to be dead, but when I sleep, I have dreams and aspirations. The embryo has never been these things. Yes. And so it would seem less evil, no? This isn't my opinion, but this is what I think someone would say.

It seems less evil to do that then. So then I would ask the individual, why is that relevant? So the fact that you have experienced being rational, conscious, and self-aware right now, and then you might lose that ability to currently act on that if you're under anesthetic, if you're sleeping. And then you're going to come out of those situations and act again. The fact that you've previously had this experience, why does that matter in contrast to the embryo who has not yet had that experience? Why is that relevant? I would ask the abortion supporter to articulate why that matters. I think for me, I would just say, yeah, I'm

definitely in a trap and I don't know how to respond in a way that would do justice to my pro-abortion position here. But I think it would be something like, it may not say anything to whether or not I or you or someone in our city has dignity, but it does seem like I have a desire to live and it would seem wrong for you to deprive me of life because I have that desire. An embryo has never had it, and so to deprive them of life is you're not kind of – they have no idea that it's happening. So they do have no idea. Just like I have no idea that it's happening under anesthesia. I get that.

Or let's go a little further ahead, but much further back from where you and I are. Or let's go a little further ahead, but much further back from where you and I are. Let's take a late-term fetus where most people, even who support abortion, would object to the abortion of that pre-born child, you know, eight months pregnant. Most people are not going to support abortion that late in pregnancy. Or let's just take a newborn baby, whether it's the eight-month fetus or a newborn child. Those two individuals are not rational, conscious, and self-aware to the level that we are. And same thing, if I am cradling a newborn baby and I whisper in the child's ear, may I kill you? That baby has no ability to comprehend or respond.

You could, with the help of medicine, kill that child in a way that wouldn't be painful for that child, presumably. Oh, absolutely. We could put the child under anesthetic and then end the child's life, but it would still be an atrocious thing. Exactly. So I would say the point is that it is wrong to kill a human, not because the human feels pain at the time of killing, not because the human is aware at the time of killing, but because the

individual being killed is a human. And so whether the preborn child feels pain or not, is aware or not, can respond or not, isn't relevant. What's relevant is, is this child a member of the human family? And that's why with abortion supporters, I like to use a reference to the United Nations, which is often perceived as being a pro-abortion institution. But if you look at their foundational documents, they are profoundly pro-life.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says all members of the human family have the right to life. And then they say in Article 6, everyone ought to be recognized everywhere as a person before the law. Well, who's everyone? Well, the preamble talks about all members of the human family. So since the preborn child is a member of the human family by virtue of having human parents, then Article 6 applies to them as much as it applies to you and me, that by being members of the human family, they ought to be recognized as persons everywhere before the law. Interestingly, the UN also has adopted a document called the Covenant

on Civil and Political Rights. So this document goes through a whole bunch of stuff. It's very lengthy, but there's one part of the document that references countries in which the death penalty is legal. And they say in countries where the death penalty is legal, it may never be done on a pregnant woman. Wow. I know. How long until that changes? Exactly. But to make that change would ruffle feathers against, again, especially amongst people who don't support the death penalty or even if they do, wouldn't support it being given to innocent people. If you could have two women in the same country who have committed crimes that according to that country's law are worthy of the death penalty.

One woman is pregnant, one woman is not. Both of them are guilty. If only one of the two under that law is going to be killed because she's not pregnant, since both are guilty, that's an admission that within the body of the pregnant woman is an innocent party, and we don't kill innocent people for crimes that they haven't committed. So interestingly, not only is it the existence of a pre-born child that saves some mothers from being killed by the death penalty, but the point is it's an acknowledgement that in her body is an innocent party, and so we don't kill innocent people for crimes they haven't committed. Very well put.

Talk to us about this violin argument, this bodily autonomy argument. Maybe tell us a bit of the background behind this argument. Perhaps state it as well as you can. Sure. And then show us how to respond. I love, as you're making the point about doing, I love taking the pro-abortion argument at its strongest. Yes. And even then showing how weak it is, even if it's stronger compared to other ones.

So I think we should, you know, so steel manning is kind of the idea where you make someone's argument as strong as possible. This is, of course, what Aquinas does in the Summa. So I think we should use a new term like Aquinas-ing. Aquinas that argument for me. Really steel man it for me. Okay, sure. So moving beyond what we've just looked at, which is the idea that abortion supporters will say the embryo isn't a person, what is happening is some abortion supporters are saying, yeah, the embryo is a person. The embryo is equal to you or me. The embryo has the same right to life that you or I have,

but they will argue. Let's just stop there for a second, because you so often do not get that admission from pro-abortion folks, at least those who haven't thought about it a great deal. Correct. It's more on the university campuses amongst the philosophers. They've kind of moved in this direction. And it's an argument that I don't know if you could say was first proposed by Judith Jarvis Thompson, but was, you could say, made famous by an abortion supporter by the name of Judith Jarvis Thompson, who in the 19, I believe it was 1970s, wrote a paper called Unplugging the Violinist or something along those lines. And she was making the point that someone can be considered equal to another,

but not have the right to another's body. And so the analogy she came up with to demonstrate that point was to say, imagine you wake up one morning and you are not at home. You're in a hospital. You don't know how you got there. And you try to roll over in the bed you're in and you see there's another human in the bed with you and you're attached to them. She said, imagine now a doctor comes into the hospital room and says,

I'm terribly sorry for the situation you find yourself in, but last night you were kidnapped. You were kidnapped by the Society for Music Lovers because you see this society knew of a world famous violinist that they loved and this world famous violinist was going to die and the Society for Music Lovers didn't want that to happen. They wanted to preserve his life and they realized that there was only one person in the entire world who had the right body type, who, if connected to the violinist, could keep the violinist alive. And so they discovered that person was you. And they kidnapped you.

And here you are. This is a world-famous violinist. He can entertain you while you're in bed. And so she says, now imagine the doctor says to you, don't worry, you're not in this situation forever. It's just for nine months. And so- This woman's clearly a philosopher.

Her point was to say, even though the violinist is a human person- Has the same dignity, same rights. Same right to life is equal to you. This living human person does not have a right to use your body without your consent. And so she argues just as you can reach around and unplug the violinist,

so too ought a pregnant woman be allowed to unplug, so to speak, her fetus, who's a living human person, because the living human person does not have the right to the woman's body. To use your body. Yeah. That's, you've put that very well.

Thank you. That feels very- I think I would have done Judith Jarvis Thompson proud. Yes, good, good, good. Okay, and so is this an argument you ever heard and were rattled by? Yes, oh yes. Tell us about that.

Yes. Well, I remember being rattled. So when I first heard the argument, I believe it was in a philosophy class at UBC. And that argument was in my textbook. And there was, in fairness, not so fair, but in fairness, there was a pro-life essay in the textbook too, but it was not very good at all. And I remember reading it being like, I need to submit a better essay for this textbook. So that's when I first encountered the argument. So then I went to my mentor, Scott Klusendorf, the pro-life speaker who really inspired me to do pro-life work full-time. And he helped me think through the argument.

Was this the first time he had heard it or no? No, so no. So he had dealt with it before. And so then the response is to say, well, several things. First of all, that there is a difference between the pregnancy in that when a woman is pregnant, she, in the vast majority of cases, has consented to the act of sex, which brought about the pregnancy. So in the case of the violinist, you were kidnapped and plugged into this person without your consent. But for the vast majority of circumstances where women are pregnant, they've consented to the act of sex. And since pregnancy is a possible consequence, they have to accept that. Kind of like if you play baseball with your child in the street and your son hits the ball and it goes

through your neighbor's window, you can't say to your neighbor, you know, I consented to playing baseball, but I didn't consent to the ball going through your window. So I'm not going to pay for your window to be fixed. If your neighbor took you to small claims court, he would be able to argue that by virtue of playing baseball in an area where there was glass, there was an inherent risk associated with that of breaking someone's window. And by entering into the game, you have to embrace the consequence and therefore pay to fix the window. Now, the abortion supporter who's hearing all of this will instantly say, okay, fair enough. That could cause us to say, well, the vast majority of abortions wouldn't be allowed

because the woman consented to the sex. She has to accept the pregnancy, but what if she hasn't consented? Okay, but would they jump there so quickly? Would they not try and hold that ground longer than that? Not in my experience, but if you wanna try to hold that ground, let's go there. I'm not sure if I would.

I suppose in our modern mind, we have really separated sex and the ends of sex. Right. So sex is no longer something that I do for the good of me and my beloved necessarily, or if it is that, it's something totally distinct from having a child, isn't it? Well, this is true. There is that divorce of pregnancy from sex so that people will say that that doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't even if it's in tied into the biology of it. I don't want that. So

in fact, they might even argue I used birth control. So I was actively trying to avoid that consequence. Therefore, I'm not responsible. But I can see how your baseball analogy would refute that, too. I mean, yeah, or driving fast on the highway. All these sorts of things have these inerrant risks, regardless of the precautions I take as I drive or as I play with my son. Or even if you think about what we do when it comes to, what's the word? I'm losing it. Not thinking of it, but when you have to pay child support, right? So imagine you have a couple have sex uh they break up woman finds out she's pregnant goes it doesn't tell something the husband was right not even the husband right they're not married right so let's say he doesn't

want the child and let's say that she doesn't tell him that she's pregnant because they broke up but she decides that she wants to carry through with the pregnancy when the baby's born she realizes i need some financial help yeah so she goes they do paternity carry through with the pregnancy. When the baby's born, she realizes, hey, I need some financial help. So she goes. They do a paternity test. He finds out he is indeed the biological father. And she says, you owe me child support. Now imagine if he came back and said, hey, I consented to the sex, but I sure didn't consent to this pregnancy.

I'm not paying for child support. Most women would want to slap him as they want to. And if she takes him to court over this matter, the court will rule in her favor that by virtue of engaging in the act of sex and creating this human being, that he has to accept the consequences, which is the existence of a human being who's vulnerable and needy and requires financial provision.

And therefore he has a duty to pay child support. So if we expect that of the men, shouldn't we expect that of the women? So that's kind of one angle we could come from. Another angle that we could come from is to say parents have a responsibility to their offspring that we don't have to strangers. So the nature of me in bed, for example, with a violinist is I don't know this person. And so it's nice of me to use my body to help them. You could choose to do that. Correct. That might be nice, but you're not obligated.

Correct. There's no obligation. There's no moral duty to do that. And that is the difference, we could say, when it comes to pregnancies. It's a parent-child relationship, which is then where we can deal with those exceptions where someone hasn't consented in the case of sexual assault and nonetheless gets pregnant. While they haven't consented to the act that brought about the pregnancy,

by virtue of being the parent of the child, biologically the rape victim is the mother of the offspring. Parents have a responsibility to care for their offspring in a way they don't have a responsibility for strangers. So if a child is starving in your city, it's nice of you to go to a homeless shelter and work to provide food. But if you don't volunteer at a homeless shelter to help starving children or adults, you're not going to be found guilty of breaking a law by refusing to serve the homeless. But if your child in your home is starving

and you're refusing to feed your child, you will be found legally and morally responsible for neglect. So. Now is this, because we've dealt with the, you've consented to this in some sense. Now it seems like we're moving over to the pro-abortionist person responds to you, the pro-choice,

however they want to define themselves, responds to you and says, okay, I get it. In the vast majority of cases, there's consent. But, you know, this woman was abducted. This wasn't her choice. So we've already moved into this. Yes, we've moved into this to say, but parents have a responsibility to their offspring. We don't have to stranger. Which sounds mean, doesn't it?

A little bit. Not generally speaking. I get that we have. It's really cruel of you to expect me to feed my children. No, but to say that, okay, you've been raped, so it's your responsibility. Do you feel that? Even though I get it, logically, that one has a responsibility. But it's like, I didn't ask for this.

I was brutally assaulted. And now you are telling me that I am obligated. Like, who the hell are you to say that? Well, I think it's to say that we have a duty to help the vulnerable. What makes rape wrong? It's that you have a vulnerable party who is attacked by a stronger party. What makes abortion wrong? You have a vulnerable party that is attacked by a stronger party.

That is in no way intended to minimize the gravity or the trauma of a sexual assault. It's to simply make the point that when injustice happens, when terrible things happen, it doesn't give the victims license to do just anything in response. I would argue that a victim of sexual assault who becomes pregnant doesn't have to raise the child. The question is, in a certain window of time where no one else can care for the child, is there a responsibility to meet the basic needs of the child? So again, by way of analogy, we could imagine,

let's say that you're kidnapped, and you're kidnapped alongside a newborn baby who's been kidnapped. And you find yourself, you've been, you know, you were knocked out and then you wake up in a cabin, which is locked. There's no way of getting out. It's like boarded up.

You're in the middle of nowhere and you discover that you're kidnapped with a child who's of no relation to you. And in this cabin, interestingly, there is formula, there's water, and there are bottles. There is a capacity. There's no great kind of heroic virtue that's required for me to support this child. Right. It's right there. And are you related to this child? No. But this is the basic needs of the child. So do you have a duty, even though you've been a victim of kidnapping, to meet the basic needs of the child in your presence

who's incapable of meeting those needs for herself? And when you're freed, hopefully, from this situation, you don't have to go on and raise the child. Yes. Now, so the abortion supporter might then say, well, then if you have to help the child in the cabin in the woods where you're both kidnapped, shouldn't you have to help the violinist because you're not related to the child and you're not related to the violinist? And so then it comes down to our basic or ordinary needs versus extraordinary needs in the case of the violinist needing to be plugged into my body.

So to unpack that a little more, I once debated a philosophy professor where I found myself temporarily stumped, where he brought up the violinist argument, but he put a variation on it. I was about to do something similar, so I wonder if it's the same thing. So he made a variation of the argument, and I remember thinking, I'm not fully prepared because I know it in this form. And so he started the debate by saying to the audience, I'm going to agree for the sake of discussion that the embryo is a human person with the same right to life as all of us, but abortion is justified in the following manner. He said, imagine this analogy. He said, imagine that you are a parent and you have a born child

and you love your child and your child suddenly gets very sick because your child has kidney disease and is going to die unless your child gets a kidney transplant. Now he said, imagine that you were the only person in the world with the right body type so as to be able to donate one of your kidneys. In doing so, save your child's life. No one else has the capacity to be able to do this. He said, would it be nice of you, the parent, to give your kidney, one of your kidneys, to your child? Yes, it would be nice. Would it save your child's life? Yes, he said it would.

Would it kill you? No, you've got two. But then he said, should the law force a parent to give their kidney to their child? That's a great question. Yeah, and he said no. And even from a Catholic perspective, we know when it comes to organ donation

that there isn't a moral obligation to donate one's organs. It can be an act of generosity in the right circumstances, but no moral duty. And so he said, just as a parent should not have a legal duty to give their born child their kidney,

a parent, in the case of the mother, should not have a legal duty to give her born child their kidney. A parent, in the case of the mother, should not have a legal duty to give her pre-born child her uterus. So I'm sitting there, Matt, in front of 200 students, dying inside, totally panicked. And, you know, having an acting background, I thought, I'm going to look calm, cool, and collected. So I'm fake note writing. Like I had this impassioned response. And being a person of faith, I immediately started praying like, come Holy Spirit, like Lord Jesus, like what do I say? And I actually, I think I've only experienced this once in my life, tangibly sensed God speak to me very clearly, not audibly, God speak to me very clearly, not audibly, but in a sentence that I can repeat exactly as he said it. He called me by name. He said, Stephanie. This is the Holy Spirit. Yeah. Okay. Stephanie,

I made the uterus for a different purpose. Now that's all God gave me. I was like, okay, now that's all God gave me. I was like, okay, give me a little more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, come Holy Spirit, you know, and, and then literally as my opponent was wrapping up his opening remarks where I then had to get up with a response, it was the moment of epiphany. The scales fell from my eyes. I had like this light bulb go off and I thought, I've got it. So I got up in front of everyone and I said, Professor Sneddon makes a very compelling remark, very strong argument. Until, I said, we ask ourselves a question. And the question we have to ask ourselves is this, what is the nature and purpose of the kidney versus the nature and purpose of the uterus. Because when we ask and answer that question, we come to see why a parent should not be legally obligated to give one,

but actually should be legally obligated to give the other. And so I said, the kidney exists in my body for my body. I said, the uterus is very different. Well, praise Jesus. I said, the uterus exists in my body every single month, getting ready for someone else's body. Every single month, my uterine lining is thickening in great expectation for the implantation of the next generation. And I said, therefore, you could say the uterus is unique from all the other body parts in that it exists more for my offspring than for me.

And they can therefore claim a right to that in a way the pre-born or born couldn't claim a right to. I get your kidney. I get this. I get that. So the good news is it was reported back to me. The professor told his class a couple days later that he was up all night trying to think of a response. I know. Praise Jesus.

So all that to say, that variation really helped me boil it down to a couple things. It's the parent-child relationship. This is back to the violinist. Yeah, violinist. And then his variation. And even once someone said to me, you know, it's nice of me to donate my blood, but I have no legal duty to donate my blood. That's true, but my blood's in my body for my body.

The uterus is in my body for my offspring's body. So therefore, not only is this a parental responsibility, you're the parent, this is your child, there is a parental responsibility to meet the basic needs of one's offspring and so it's nice for a child to be taken to disneyland but there's no um thank goodness because i hate disneyland i hate going to those theme parks it that's an extraordinary thing it's not an ordinary thing but food clothing shelter that's ordinary care. And so in the case of

pregnancy, maintaining a pregnancy, allowing the uterus to be used for the very nature of the uterus exists for, is the food, clothing, and shelter, so to speak, for the pre-born child that's needed at that stage of one's offspring's life in the way a born child who is an offspring needs that. And then, so I would argue that because the parent-child relationship, because the nature of the uterus, because it's basic care, you have to care for the child. When it comes to the violinist, that's above and beyond the call of duty. It's extraordinary. Versus the child in the cabin, that's feeding a child who's not related to you is ordinary care.

And then the added element is if you're the parent, even more. So here's a twist on the violinist argument that just came to me. Twist it up. So let's twist this up. Suppose the violinist turns out to be the son you gave away at birth

and you're now hooked up to your 30 year old son that you haven't met in 28 years. Whoa, Matt, good question. Am I now morally obligated to spend nine months hooked up to this stranger? So I would say you're not, even if you find out that you are the parent of the child because being plugged into a born person

is not the basic care humans need to grow through the stages of human development. That that's extraordinary. But wouldn't you agree that someone would look upon the woman who disconnects herself from the violinist who turns out to be their son with a lot more judgment, kind of horror? How could you do that to your son?

Maybe legally you weren't obligated, but it's your son. And I think... All that would do would strengthen the pro-life argument, though. I think you could say... people would be horrified. There's a greater responsibility there, surely. There is, but at the same time, there isn't a duty for you to give one of your kidneys to Liam or Avila or whoever.

Because you might have to be factoring in other things. You might have to be factoring in that if you give one of your kidneys up, will that put your health in jeopardy and your ability to care for your family? So when it comes to extraordinary or heroic acts, we may choose them, but there isn't a moral or legal duty to choose these things. And so even though that's your, in this hypothetical, that's your born child. In that case, the giving of your kidney or being plugged into your kidney of course this is a made-up scenario because that doesn't even exist but the point is there isn't the same duty as the basic care required for regular human growth and development and so if i wake up one day to find myself attached to my baby, you would say I have that obligation, right?

Like let's change that biome. I would say that you have an obligation to provide the basic care for your child. And again, that's not basic. So I could choose to remove myself and have the child die and that not be immoral. If the child died, the question would be, what did the child die from?

Did you kill them directly? Because is it within the nature of our species to need to be plugged into someone? It is for the first nine months of pregnancy. It actually is within our nature. And so there's nowhere else for the child to be. That's the basic care required of a child. And you could argue that even after birth, there's a little bit of that when it comes to breastfeeding.

So there is some degree of attachment. But then it comes down to is this basic care required for the natural, normal human growth and development within our species versus something extraordinary stopping you from dying from kidney disease or something else? In that case, in the case of the pre-born child, the child is just living. In the case of the scenario of the child who's got kidney disease or whatever the case may be, the child is dying from some pathology which has presented itself. And the question is, how far do we have to go in response to the pathology? But we're not talking about that with pregnancy.

Pregnancy isn't pathology. The child's need for food, clothing, and shelter is what actually any species really needs for growth and development. So we're moving in here to kind of the health of the mother. Cause I find that a lot of Christians, right? They'll say I'm against abortion. And they may even say, well, I'm even against abortion in the cases of rape and incest.

But if the mother's life is in jeopardy, then they'll say abortion is OK. What where do we stand on that? How do we respond to that? So we need to begin with by saying, well, let's even use a term that you used, which I would say to the person in conversation, which is if the mother's life is in danger. So I would say, what is a mother? What makes a woman a mother? I am a woman, but I'm not a mother. Now we could argue I'm a spiritual mother, but the point is I'm not a biological mother. I'm a woman who's not a mother. So what distinguishes women in general from mothers specifically? They have offspring. That they have mother. So what distinguishes women in general from mothers specifically? They have offspring.

That they have offspring. So therefore, we know now to be a mother involves the presence of another and it involves a very special relationship, one of nurture and care for the more vulnerable party. So starting with that, then I would say, okay, in this scenario you've described, this is cause for concern. We ought to respond. The question is how ought we respond? And in terms of figuring out our how,

the beginning place has to be two lives are involved, the mother and the child. And we have to value both lives equally. We recognize both are unrepeatable and irreplaceable. Both are willed and loved in the eyes of God. And the mother isn't more important than the child. The child's not more important than the mother. They're both equal. But we recognize because one party is more vulnerable, the younger pre-born child, that that child is actually dependent on the mother, equal to but dependent on the mother.

So if we want to preserve the child's life for a good portion of the pregnancy, we actually need to preserve the mother's life. So that would be the general information I would propose at the beginning. And then I would say, in order to determine how we ought to respond, we can acknowledge that there are some paths we could take that are immoral. And although those aren't open to us, it doesn't mean that there aren't other paths we could take that would be moral. So for example, imagine you're driving home and there's a big orange sign up that says road closed, detour ahead. And then you follow these arrows that take you all around a neighborhood you normally don't go through to ultimately get home.

Do you still get home? Yes. Yes, but not the way you normally take. That option wasn't open to you. You still reached your final destination, but you went around a longer path. So in the same way, I would say when the woman's life is in danger, we want to reach that end goal of saving her life. Yes. that end goal of saving her life.

But road closed, detour ahead, the one path that is not open to us is the path that would involve directly and intentionally ending the child's life. Because it's wrong to directly and intentionally end the life of an innocent human being. See, this is why I so appreciate

your consistency here. Because it's very difficult for me to listen to politicians who want to say that they're pro-life and then they throw up these exceptions. Yes. Because the question is, is it ever justifiable for a big strong person to kill a little weak person?

Or a little innocent person? And if it's not, then you just cannot. You've got to be consistent. I get from a legislative point of view that you might have to kind of, I don't know, play that game a little bit, so your argument is more palatable to people. But you just have to be consistent.

So if you can never directly kill an innocent human being, then that road is closed. So tell me what to do. So then we go around the bend and we say, okay, well, first of all, what is the situation? And how do we best respond to the pathology that is present? Give us a concrete pathology. So let me give you two scenarios that I think help make the pro-life position clear.

One would be chorioamnionitis, which I'll explain in a moment. The other one would be a tubal pregnancy. And that's going to happen in the first trimester. Chorioamnionitis can happen later in pregnancy. So let's start there with chorioamnionitis. So that's start there with chorioamnionitis. So that's infected membranes. That's a severe infection that results in the case of a pregnant woman. And if the infection remains in her body, she will die. And if she dies, the baby dies. So in the case of

chorioamnionitis, what you need to do is get the infected membranes out of her body. You need to get the infection out of her body. The way to do that is to induce labor, remove the infection. This is where in philosophy, of course, you would have covered this a lot. The principle of double effect comes into play, which says you may never do evil to bring about a good. You can only do good or neutral actions.

Acknowledging that when you do good or neutral actions, you can have effects. You can have a good effect and you can have a bad effect, but the effects are different from the action itself, which can't be bad or can't be evil. The action itself has to be good or neutral. So in the case of inducing labor in the presence of a serious infection that threatens two people's lives, the action is good. You're removing an infection. The good effect is the mom does not die because

the infection is out of her body. The bad effect is if it is prior to viability, prior to our ability to have technology that would keep the child alive out of the womb, such as an incubator, if it's prior to that. And viability, I mean, people generally will say 24 weeks is where a child can survive outside the womb. But there have been cases where babies have survived at 21, 22, 23 weeks. But let's say we're at 18 weeks and we don't have time to wait because of the rapidly progressing infection. The induction of labor is not a bad action to kill the child. It's a good action to remove the infection. But in inducing labor, the baby's going to come to.

The baby's too young to survive in an incubator, the child dies. Not because we've directly killed the child, but we've responded to the presence of a pathology, which if left alone, would have resulted in the demise of the child and of the mother. So this, what we're talking about for those at home, is not an abortion. Correct. It's an ethical medical response to the presence of a pathology. Pregnancy is not a pathology. A human being is not a pathology. But an infection can be a pathology. Cancer is a pathology. So let's take, before we go on to a tubal pregnancy, let's say you have cancer. And let's say a woman is 23 weeks and they find out she has cancer in her body, and the doctors say, we need to give you chemotherapy. In that case, if waiting one more week would not threaten her life, and we can say, let's wait

until the 24-week mark, then we'll induce labor to put the baby in an incubator, and then we're going to give you all the cancer treatment that you need so as to not harm the child then that's the best of both worlds we're now working to preserve the child's life with the technology we have as well as responding to the pathology within her now let's say she's maybe 15 weeks and the doctors say we don't have time to wait nine weeks it's life or death we have to administer chemo and this could hurt your child this could kill your child in that situation it would be ethical to administer chemo if the mother so chose, because we're not giving chemo to kill the child or hurt the child. We're giving chemo to kill the cancer, which is in the woman's body. And it's possible, actually. There have been cases where pregnant women have had chemo and it's actually not

negatively harmed the child. What a heartbreaking thing to have to go through, right? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Now, but let's take it to the extreme and say that it would harm the child. Even that, if you cannot wait, could be justified. Now, two things. One, you could have a situation where you could wait a week or two, and then you end up being able to preserve both lives. Alternatively, you could have a situation where a woman in an act of heroism says, if I can be alive long enough to carry this child

to term, but I'm really creating a situation where the cancer is just going to take over me. In an act of heroism, she may choose to do that. And there's a woman back in Canada where I live who found herself in that situation. She had about a two-year-old son, was pregnant, and the doctor said, look, we need to do chemo, we need to intervene, but, you know, your pregnancy will end, the child will die. And she looked at her two-year-old son and she said, I would die for him.

My wife did this, almost bringing me to tears. When Liam was born, it was an emergency section and the drugs hadn't even kicked in. It was drastic. And I remember her very much saying, and I forget exactly how she said it, but it was all about Liam. It was all about saving Liam.

And it was almost like her life was, whatever, it's fine. If I don't live, that's okay. Save him. And I'm like, I'm not okay with this. Right, right, right. Of course, you're torn. And of course, that's a heroic thing.

Yes, right, right. And that's where're torn. And of course, that's a heroic thing. Yes, right, right. And that's where we see. But the point is that either way, whether you choose that act of heroism, whether we can actually wait until viability, or whether we don't have the technology to save the child, the point is we're not acting to directly and intentionally end the life of an innocent human being.

We're acknowledging there's the presence of two parties and we're going to do our darndest to save both. We may not succeed. So now let me give a concrete case where we will not succeed, and that's a tubal pregnancy. All right, explain what that is. So people think pregnancy happens in the womb. It doesn't.

The beginning of pregnancy happens in the fallopian tube. So the sperm make its way through the uterus into the fallopian tube where the woman's egg is hanging out. Fertilization happens in the fallopian tube. Once fertilization happens, you have your genetically distinct new human being, different from the mother and father, growing as the one-celled embryo, and then two cells, four cells, eight, doubling, and so forth. In a normal, healthy, functioning pregnancy, within about a week, that embryo will move through the little hairs through the uterus, sorry, through the uterine tubes, the fallopian

tubes, will be swept through the tubes into the uterus, implant, and grow for nine months. In the case of a tubal pregnancy, the pre-born child does not make it into the uterus. For whatever reason, the child gets lodged in the fallopian tube, and that can happen for a number of reasons. She might have scar tissue from previous surgery. She might have scar tissue or problems internally because of an STI. She might have tubal structure or function problems. Regardless, there's some pathology that has prevented the embryo from going into the uterus and the embryo stays in the tube. But the embryo is going to keep growing and developing and do at the normal stages of pregnancy what the embryo would do in the uterus. So as the embryo begins to get to the stage of

implantation where the embryo is going to burrow into what would be the wall of the uterus and implant and grow for nine months, the embryo starts doing that in the tube. Well, the tube is not designed for that. And so as the embryo is burrowing in and implanting and growing, that tube is going to expand. And it will expand so much that if left alone, will burst. And if that too bursts, the mother can die and the baby is obviously going to die. So in that situation, there are a number of things that you can do. And the one that I tell people that I would do, because sometimes when you say, well, this is what you should do, people say, if you were in that situation, would you do it? And I say, yes, I would. I would have what's called a salpingectomy done. It's not

an abortion. A salpingectomy. Salpingectomy. And so that is a procedure where the section of fallopian tube that the child is in that's expanding and growing and basically is now pathological, that section of the fallopian tube is cut out and removed. If we could then take that embryo in the tube or without the tube and implant the embryo somewhere we would do that we lack the technology to be able to do that so principle of double effect unfortunately the child dies because we cannot save the child the mother lives because that section of fallopian tube which is her body which is designed for the transport of the child but not the implantation of the child which if left alone would have resulted in the transport of the child, but not the implantation of the child, which if left alone would have resulted

in the demise of the child and her. That section of the tube, that part of her body was removed. Therefore, she's not going to die. Now, some abortion supporters will say, wait, if the embryo over here is dead because you did a self-inject me, or the embryo is dead

because you directly targeted the embryo, you aborted the embryo, you tried to kill it. No difference. Same result. Exactly. And so that's where we say, okay, this is where we need to look at a situation and analyze it, not just from the end result, but from the means. How did we get there? Action and intention. What is my intention, first of all? And what is the very action that I'm committing? So in the case of an abortion, the very action is targeting the baby's body. And the intention with abortion is never to save the child. It's always to bring about the demise of the child. In the case of a cell panectomy, the action is targeting the tube. The intention is to try to save both lives, but we lack the technology to do so. So the way to round this out by way of an analogy

that I'll provide to people to make it crystal clear is I'll say, imagine two people are drowning. Actually, I was about to bring this up. Oh, were you? Oh, do you want to? What's your analogy? Well, no, I haven't thought about this a great deal, but suppose I'm out on the lake and we're canoeing

and my wife and son are in another canoe and it capsizes and they're both struggling and we're ining and my wife and son are in another canoe and it capsizes and they're both struggling and we're in the middle of the lake and i and i want to save them both desperately yeah but suppose i lack the strength to save both of them then i had two options i either save one of them yeah don't save either or try to save both unsuccessfully. Right. And so it would seem that the best thing to do in that situation would be to successfully save one.

Right. Absolutely. You try to save both. And the right thing is to never directly and intentionally kill one. So let's say they've separated. I'm not holding Liam under. Right. While you're pulling Cameron.

Exactly. And so the point is that let's say they're far apart and you swim to the closest one. Let's say it's Cameron and you've got her now on your back and you're swimming towards Liam. If you get to him, his head's above water and you push his head down, there's a problem there. You've just killed him.

But if just before you reach him, his head goes underwater and you can't find him, then you've been unable to save him. Now in both scenarios, he's dead either way. But in one case you directly killed him, in the other case you couldn't save him. So that's why when the woman's life is in danger, you do a self-injectomy versus doing an abortion,

yeah, the end result is the dead baby in either case, but the means are so profoundly different. In one case, we did not have what was needed to preserve the child's life. In the other case, by way of doing an abortion, that would be directly and intentionally acting on the child's body to bring about the child's death. So that's always wrong. Gosh, fantastic. So it's so interesting when all this comes up politically and people talk about, well, this law and that law, and we need these exceptions for the woman's life being in danger.

I always want to say, can we just slow down and talk this through? Like, we don't need these exceptions. And saying that we have a pro-life law that never permits abortion is not saying line up all these women for death because that's what will happen. No, I've just given three examples, cancer, chorionitis, tubal pregnancy, where we can intervene and save the mother

and do our best to try to save the baby too. I guess the problem is, this is such an emotional thing for many people. And what you've just laid out is a very intelligent, philosophical sort of, you know, and what we get is sound bites. Yes. So that must be so frustrating for you as someone who's studied this for so long. I want to give you a quote from Hillary quote from um hillary clinton oh boy this should be fun yeah this this came out after the alabama laws and the georgia heartbeat law yes she tweeted

this out and i want to get your response the abortion bans in alabama georgia ohio kentucky and mississippi are appalling attacks on women's lives and fundamental freedoms. Women's rights are human rights. We will not go back. What say you? To Hillary, who's obviously watching. Yes, hello, Hillary. How are you?

My first response would be to say, if you believe in women's rights, when do those rights begin? What about the woman in the womb? What about the female fetus who's being targeted for sex selective abortion in some communities in some countries around the world? So if we believe in women's rights, then those rights begin when you have a female and a female begins at the moment of sperm egg fusion, the moment of fertilization, roughly 50% of the time, unless a male child is conceived. So therefore, what about the rights of women in the womb? And when she speaks about women's rights, again, it comes down to when a pregnant woman is pregnant, is it just her or do we now have not just a woman but a mother and that's the important thing is a woman or a mother and and that's the key is what do we you know this all boils down to one question

what is the unborn well this is funny you should say that because yes it does and i've spent my career saying it comes down to the question of when does life begin and and i did a debate a year ago at the university of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, the University of Virginia Law School. And I changed my strategy. And I said, the question I want to ask us today is this. What does civil societies expect of parents? And when does parenthood begin? So we can ask the question, when does life begin? But let's actually talk about when does parenthood begin? Because if you look at news headlines about parents who starve, kill, torture their children, whether you support abortion or you oppose abortion, there's this unified horror at these types of stories.

Like there was that family, I think in California, that husband and wife that recently came out in the news. They had like eight children in their homes that were in cages. It was a nightmare story it was horrifying and even people who support abortion would agree right this is that was wrong why well it's not just it is wrong because innocents were harmed but it's not just wrong because innocents were harmed it's wrong because the innocents were harmed by their parents and there is a sense we all have that parents have a responsibility to care for, not harm their children. So more and more, I'm trying to frame the abortion debate as a question surrounding what does civil societies expect of parents and when does parenthood begin? And you become a mother the moment a preborn child comes into existence.

You become a father the moment a preborn child comes into existence. So, you know, if you're going to a baby shower, you know, people, and the baby's not yet born, people will often get these cards, congratulations mother-to-be. And I want to set the record straight. I am a mother-to-be. Yes, I am a mother-to-be. And people are like, you're pregnant? No. The whole reason I'm a mother-to-be is because I'm not pregnant and never have been. I am a mother-to-be because I'm not yet a mother. But if you're pregnant, you are not a mother to be. You are a mother. And so it should be congratulations, mother. So then it comes down to what do we expect of mothers? And so that's what I would ask of Hillary. What do we expect

of mothers? And to some extent, she should be able to answer that in a positive and affirming way because she is a mother and she's been a mother to Chelsea and she's now a grandmother to Chelsea's child or children, whatever the case is. And so we know it intuitively, and what we wanna do is tap into the intuitions people have and make the connection for them in the case of the preborn child.

What do you say to people who say, we don't know when life begins? And isn't this just a religious claim to say that there's some kind of soul thing that happens and that's just a religious idea? Right, right. When people say they don't know when life begins, I then ask a question back and say, out of curiosity, when do you ban abortion? And wherever they ban abortion, I would say, well, isn't that when you think life begins? So if they ban abortion at six months pregnancy or at birth,

then they must be acknowledging life begins there. Otherwise they wouldn't ban abortion there. So then you make that point to show them you're claiming you don't know when life begins, but you are asserting you do. Because you just drew a line. But then here's the question, on what basis do you have for life beginning at six months or life beginning at birth? Even if you look at the number six months, that label for us to get there, six months, implies that we think something significant happened six months ago that caused us to count the passage of time, that caused us to look at the clock ticking. Oh, we got to six months. Well, if we got to six months, clock ticking, oh, we got to six months. Well, if we got to six months, if fertilization is what happened six months ago, isn't that when life begins? If fertilization happened three months ago, instead of drawing the line at three months, wouldn't it be three months ago that life begins

at the moment of sperm egg fusion? If someone were to say, well, I don't know when to ban abortion because I truly don't know when life begins, then I would say two things. One, I would give them the science for life beginning at fertilization. But two, I would say, if we don't know and you don't know except the science, shouldn't we err on the side of caution? You know, if you're going to blow up an old building and you've got your dynamite all around, you're about to do an implosion, but someone says, you know what? I don't know if everyone's out of the building. There could be someone still inside here. Do you just say, well, let's blow it up anyways? Or do you err on the side of caution and say,

we're not going to blow this building up until we're sure? So to say, I don't know when life begins is different than saying there is no life here. And if someone cannot declaratively say, there is no life here, but instead they're like, I just don't know, then they actually need to err on the side of caution and say, well, if we don't know, if there's a chance, then we need to err on that side. But talk of the science for a moment. Sure. The moment of conception. What

happens? How do we know that that's when life begins? Yes. So one of my favorite papers to reference on this is a scientific paper written by a physician and scientific researcher, Dr. Maureen Kondik, who wrote a paper called When Does Human Life Begin? And in that paper, she makes an amazing case for life beginning at fertilization and for life beginning at the beginning of fertilization. The beginning of the beginning. The beginning of the beginning. Because if you know anything about science, and this is where, again, you don't know who you're talking to, you could be speaking to a med student who will say to you, well, fertilization is a process that takes 24 to 48 hours, whatever the case may be. So what hour does life begin? So Dr. Condick makes the point

that it literally begins at the beginning of that, let's say, 24 hour period. And she makes the case this way. She says, when scientists have a bunch of cells and they wanna know, are these cells all the same type or are they different? She said, scientists look at two criteria. They look at cell composition and cell behavior. So in other words, what is it made up of? What does it do? And so she said, when you look at a sperm cell,

what's its composition? The genetic material of the father. When you look a sperm cell, what's its composition? The genetic material of the father. When you look at an egg, what's its composition? The genetic material of the mother. So already with sperm and egg, we know they're different cells because of composition. She said, now let's look at behavior. When a sperm is in existence and alive, it swims to find an egg and fertilize it. That's the behavior of a sperm.

Seek out an egg and penetrate it. An egg, what is the behavior of an egg? It's to sit around and allow for penetration to occur. So by behavior, we can see the sperm cell and the egg cell are different from each other. By composition, they're different from each other. They're four different cells. So here's how that's relevant. Let's look at that criteria in light of the one-celled embryo or zygote. Is that embryo or zygote, same thing, zygote is the one-celled embryo, is that individual, that cell, different from the sperm and the egg by composition behavior? Yes, here's how we know. egg by composition behavior? Yes. Here's how we know. When you have the embryo, even before the chromosomes have intermingled, because that takes time. And so at the moment of sperm egg fusion, when you have the sperm's head, which has gone into the egg, you now in that entity have the

composition of the mother and the father, the genetic material of both. The chromosomes haven't intermingled, but they're all contained in that one cell. So by composition, we know we're dealing with something different. Then let's look at behavior. If you look at one embryo, the moment a sperm has penetrated an egg and you have the embryo, if another sperm comes along, what happens? Is it allowed to penetrate? I don't know. I guess not. It can't, and it doesn't, because this zone is created around the embryo that prevents penetration from happening. Now if that was the egg cell,

it would allow penetration. If it was a sperm, it would be swimming around. So by virtue of looking at composition and behavior of the embryo, we see it's different from the sperm cell or the egg cell. So my point is, we know that something substantively new has come into existence that we didn't have prior to sperm-egg fusion. And that new thing is the offspring, the next generation of the parents. And therefore,

if we believe parents have responsibility to their children, since we have a new child genetically distinct from mom and dad, then we ought to protect that child from that point forward. Excellent. Some people, I was listening to Joe Rogan recently, and he was talking about being pro-women, being able to have abortions. One of the things he said was, which was still an admission of some kind, which I respected. He said, yeah, if the woman is showing, then I'm not sure. And it was really a feelings-based argument, right? It's like, that feels icky. So in that situation, maybe it's not so okay.

That seems to be the way many people who are against abortion argue. It's not based on logic and reasoning and science. It's based on what I find icky or not. Right. And this is the problem with our culture generally is we have lost the inclination to reason, to think through, to argue properly. And it is very emotions-based, right? So it's like, well, if I feel affection for you, it's wrong to kill you. If I feel the presence of you in my body, it's wrong to kill you. Whereas even if I lack affection and I don't feel your presence, if you actually are there, then I have a duty to do my best to protect and respect your life.

This brings up another argument I've heard, and I'm sure you have too. You're in a burning building. Ah, let's bring it up, bring it up. I love this one. And you've got, let's say, a baby in the next room. Yeah, how old would the baby be? Let's say two months. Post birth. Yes, post birth. Okay.

And then over here, you've got a bunch of embryos. Where do they put embryos, in test tubes or? Yeah, yeah, like in the test tubes and then the incubator. Not the incubator, sorry, the little... The thing in the jig, I think it's called. So they're over there. They're frozen, right? Yeah, so frozen embryos.

The canisters, yeah. And the building's on fire and you only have enough time to save the one baby or the 20, let's say, embryos. Frozen embryos, yes. What most of us would do, including me. Let's be honest. I'll be honest. I am going for the baby.

Yes. All right, that's what I'm doing. I'm going for that two month old baby and I'm running out the front door. And I may grieve, but I probably wouldn't to be quite honest because to me, intellectually, it doesn't feel, I mean, logically I get that they're human persons. Yes.

But I don't have that kind of attachment. But isn't this proof that I really believe that they are subhuman? Go. Great. Okay. So we have to start with why is that analogy even being, or that scenario even being presented? It's being presented to get people to say what even you as a pro-lifer have said, which is I'm going to take the child after birth, not these pre-born embryos.

So therefore, it means embryos aren't human. The fact that you would grab the born child over a higher number of individuals, 20 embryos, it doesn't mean that the embryos aren't human. So the point of the scenario doesn't lead us to the conclusion abortion supporters want it to lead us to. And the way to smoke that out is to change the scenario and say, burning building, you can only save your wife or me well let's not do that that's too close to home but some strangers i've never but the point is you're going to if you know we hate these scenarios because we want to say well

of course right yeah but if you could only say right or let's make it fully parallel as you say, you could only save your wife or 20 strangers. Yes, it's a higher number of people, but you're going to save your wife. You would. Now, does it mean those 20 people aren't human? No. It just means that you have an emotional attachment, a relational connection, and an obligation. And an obligation by virtue of your marital relationship to run first for your wife. Another way to look at it is there are people, literally as we're sitting here talking, there are people dying right now. I'm not crying. No. I'm not having an emotional reaction.

But if either of us got a phone call that our parents had just died. Excellent. We would be having an emotional reaction. My lack of an emotional reaction about the deaths of others happening right now is not a proof that they're not human and is not also a proof that I can go and kill them before they die. So in the same way, yes, we're going to likely go for the born child. I would say for two reasons. One, we might feel more affection, just natural affection for the child that we've perhaps even held or comforted or played with. But two, part of it is an analysis of success, almost like a triage situation where it's like,

if I grab this child and I get the child out of the building, I've not only saved this child in this instant, but this child's going to keep living. So I have the likelihood of success in removing this child from the building. I don't have that likelihood of success when I run out of the building with 20 frozen embryos. Because, first of all, I don't want them to thaw or they're going to die. But if I'm taking the canister out of the building, does it need to be plugged into something? So are they going to die in the process of removing? Even if I can somehow use a generator or whatever is needed to, you know, keep them in their frozen state, when they're out of the building, then what? Do I have a likelihood of success?

Will they be implanted? Should they be implanted? That's a whole other ethical dilemma. Is it ethical to implant embryos in other human beings who are not their biological parents? And so part of it could be beyond the emotional connection is likelihood of success of actually saving lives. So once you start to break down the scenario, you realize this isn't a case for abortion.

I can't thaw the embryos, grab the born child and run out. I kill you and I save you. No, it's I want to save both parties, the 20 and the one. If I can, I will. But inability to save is not the same as direct killing. And it's certainly not saying that if I don't save you, that you're not equal to the one I saved. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Let's change the analogy, though, and say like you're in this building burning and there's a canister of 20 embryos.

And suppose I go for the embryos. That seems wrong. That seems wrong of me, is it? I don't know if it's necessarily wrong in the same way that someone would say going for your child versus 20 people in a way someone might say it seems wrong, like it's 20 individuals you can save, although humans aren't, it's not quite,

you know, we don't put numbers to our value. That's right. Each of those 20 individuals is unrepeatable, irreplaceable, willed by God and beloved children of the Father. But when we're in crisis, and that's what we also have to look at the scenario as, it's crisis oriented. We're emotionally charged. We're going to make decisions based on the best info we have as we're reacting in the moment.

And so if someone perhaps has opted for rescuing frozen embryos by having them implanted, they maybe think it's ethical to do so. And again, that's a whole ethical debate. But let's say they've gone through the process of having frozen embryos rescued before and they've brought a couple children to term. Maybe they would grab the 20 embryos because they think I and just some relatives are going to rescue these embryos. I wouldn't say it's wrong. are going to rescue these embryos. I wouldn't say it's wrong, but I lean to what everyone else would lean to,

which is grabbing the child who I can put in my arms and take out of the building right away. All right. Well, here's another question. Love it. This is pretty intense. This is so fun. Isn't it, Matt? I love it.

First question before we get to the intense question. Do you ever get tired of thinking and talking about this issue? Yes. Okay. I know. It seems like I get energized. It seems like I'm fired up. It's the coffee.

Yes, yes, yes. My latte's almost done. It is exhausting. And also, it's exhausting on a couple of levels. Just at an intellectual level, having to think. Yeah. You know, oh, that's a good argument. But wait, here's the weakness.

It's draining that way. But then on a spiritual level, it's like, whoa, what are we talking about? Like, we're talking about engaging someone in conversation who is making, whether they realize it or not, the most brutal and inhumane of suggestions, which is that a big, strong person who is a parent.

Is paying a hit man essentially to take out their child. Exactly, to take out their own child. And so that's disturbing and that's exhausting and that's overwhelming. And yet it motivates you because of the gravity of it is this needs to be addressed. And because someone has to, and to whom much is given much is expected.

I can't claim ignorance. No you can't. I have so much formation. You can argue so much better than I can on this issue. And I'd say you could argue on this issue much more than most people could. And so therefore, you probably do have this obligation. Yeah, I've spent a lifetime being informed and therefore have a responsibility. Again, it's the line I love from one of the older Spider-Man movies when Peter Parker's in the car with Uncle Ben.

And Uncle Ben says, remember Peter, with great power comes great responsibility. Which applies to you as a pro-life activist and the mother and father. Absolutely. I was just thinking that as I said it. I'm like, I've always used it in the context of me as a pro-life activist. So here's the intense question. Should we imprison mothers who have abortions? So my answer is always this. What is abortion? Abortion, this probably was rhetorical, but here we go. Well, and again, yeah, so I suppose it depends on how one answers that.

From a pro-life perspective, if you were to answer. It's the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being. So the question is, when you have laws against the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being. So the question is, when you have laws against the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being, and someone breaks that law and therefore directly and intentionally

kills an innocent human being, should jail time be a possible consequence for anyone who directly and intentionally kills an innocent human being? And when you put it that way, people will say yes. But the moment it's put through the lens of, should women who have abortions go to jail, people think, oh, this is gonna make me sound terrible.

And I would say, saying that women who have abortions should go to jail sounds terrible and is terrible if there's nothing wrong with abortion. But if abortion is brutally dismembering, decapitating, and disemboweling the body of a baby, and someone participates in doing that, then why wouldn't we have a consequence legally for the parties involved? Then I provide more context and say, in the present reality, women who have abortions, men who are involved in abortions, so on and so forth, are not currently breaking any law in places where abortion is permitted. So I am not suggesting that we take all women who've had

abortions and put them in jail. They have done so, unfortunately, in a climate in which that is not unlawful. And it would fill our jails with a good number of women in society. What I say is the question is, once abortion becomes unlawful, if someone breaks that law, should jail time be, and I always say, a possible consequence? Because when you kill your born children, and there was the case of Andrea Yates who horrifically drowned her, I think it was five children in the bathtub many years ago. I believe in her case she was found, at least in Canada, we would call this NCR, not criminally responsible. Sometimes they analyze the situation and find the person was not of sound mind and so on and so forth. And there often still is some type of consequence. They might be in a type of jail hospital for mental health, but it wouldn't be a type of jail per se that you and I would

envision of someone. And my point is, though, that people say, well, wait, we have laws against killing born kids. And so if you're going to drown your kids in the bathtub, this is a possible consequence. And each scenario will be looked at. Was this person of sound mind? Were they not of sound mind? And so the same would happen once abortion becomes illegal. In each case where a woman is found to have actually had an abortion, it would have to be analyzed. Was she of sound mind? Did she actually consent? Was she dragged there against her will by her parents, by her boyfriend. And all of that would have to be looked at. But I am a firm believer that we have to be consistent and we have to treat the pre-born like we treat the born. And if I believe jail time should be a possible consequence for those who end the life of born children, then consistency compels me to say jail time should be a possible consequence for those who end the life of the pre-born. I'm going to ask you a question right now, which I'm nervous to ask you. Oh, my goodness.

I'm nervous to ask you this question. And I'm going to give you full freedom to dodge. Whoa. All right? Yeah, full freedom in front of the cameras. Or if not to dodge, then to say, I'd like to think about that more. Okay? Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

If I knew that someone was coming into my house last night to dismember my children, then I would do whatever, you know where this is going, wouldn't you? Yes. I would do whatever it took to stop this person. And if the only thing I could do is to, in trying to stop him, I kill him, then this would be justifiable. Why shouldn't we or should we be attacking abortion doctors? Should we be assassinating them? Or if not assassinating them, should we be breaking their hands? And if you want to say no, because I get that that sounds rather vulgar, then you have to explain to me why. Right, right. So no, we should not be shooting abortionists and using violence as a means to achieve our end.

Why? Because you agree with me that I can use violence to stop the intruder. Right, right. So in this case, what I often point out is that we have to look at how abortion is different. So we need to look at how it's the same and where there are parallels. Like we're dealing with a born child, we're dealing with a pre-born child.

The common factor is child. Born, pre-born is irrelevant. Key issue is child. There's always similarities and differences with every comparison. And so in the case of an abortionist, an abortionist is not going to do an abortion unless a woman presents herself at his clinic and freely enters into that clinic and lays her body down and invites him to enter his body her body with the abortionist instruments and dismember the child's life so you don't have abortionists running around killing pre-born children you have them as hired hit men being enlisted by the mothers, sadly, and fathers and so on and so forth of these children. They would not be killing these children if it weren't for the parents of the children. And if I could take the party that is about to be harmed

and separate them from an environment where they will be harmed, I absolutely should do that. And I absolutely should intervene. But because, and this is where it gets different, I don't have a born child who I can remove from the harm, from the arms of a parent who is about to take that child, let's say to a clinic to have a born child killed. So I just pulled the child away. In the case of someone who's pregnant, I can't remove the pre-born child. That pre-born child needs to stay in the womb of the mother. And so I would say what I need to do is use my weapons of mass instruction. Very good. I need to use my powers of persuasion to convince that woman whose child I cannot take from her to save, to not even enter into the environment where someone will become a hired hitman. All right, let's kind of get all philosophical

and weird thought experiment. This is not pints with Aquinas, right? This is difficult to do on the spot. I mean, we've just gone over the violin argument, and that's very intricate. So let's come up with some weird thought experiment, okay? You're in a house, a mother is holding her born child. She has paid for a hitman to come into the house and kill the child, which she will hold for the duration of this procedure. Right.

You, for some reason, only have the ability to harm the doctor. Because if you were to try and harm the child, the mother, you know, you would kill the child. Right. Why not? You know, in this situation, because in the last instance, you said you don't have the ability to take the child away. Right. Well, let's say you don't in this situation have that. Maybe you're in a wheelchair or something, but you do have a gun.

Right. Why not shoot the doctor in the legs or something to prevent this from happening? I think when you're looking at not just an individual case, which is what your scenario is, but it's an overall environment where you have this legalized killing, where you have a government often funded system. I mean, I know it's a little different in the United States than in Canada. There are other factors that you have to look at when making responses to individual cases, looking at the overall picture. So the question is, are you ultimately going to succeed in achieving your end goal by way of using this almost vigilante violence? People start,

you know, shooting abortions, which is the point of the scenario to say, would it be okay to do this? We're not. When we've had cases where random individuals have gone and shot abortionists, it's not brought an end to abortion. It has not resulted in a decrease in abortions. We still have, I would say, roughly the same rate of abortions. The reason I'm firing at the intruder

isn't to prevent all murders and intrusion. The reason I'm firing at the intruder isn't to prevent all murders and intrusion. The reason I'm firing at the murderer is to prevent him killing my child or somebody else's child. So I'm pressing you here because I think there isn't... I'm not making the claim that we should harm abortion doctors,

but it seems to me that... You want to be able to make the argument why we shouldn't. So it's not that... It's not even what I'm doing. I don't even want to make, it seems to me that you want to be able to make the argument why we shouldn't. So it's not even what I'm doing. I don't even want to make that argument. It just seems to me that you as someone who is pro-life, who thinks that children are being directly targeted, it seems to me that you ought to say that we should attack pro-abortion doctors. Because the point isn't to end all abortion when I attack, and I'm not advocating this. It's going to come across like that. You're going to be quoted, Matt.

I am not advocating that anybody harm any person, to make that clear. But we're using a thought experiment, and this thought experiment has included drowning children in lakes. It has included violinists being killed. This is hypothetical, theoretical. We're having an intellectual. I find it difficult that if I was to accept your position, that I wouldn't be able to also concede that it would be morally justifiable

to intentionally attack hired hitmen. I find that hard to accept that that's not a morally acceptable thing to do if I agree with everything you've just said about taking an unborn wife. So there we go. Do you see my problem? We don't have to keep talking about this, but this is something I would like us to think about more. Here's what I could, if I'm in your shoes, I could see you not wanting to be honest about this because it affects the pro-life movement, right? If we start blowing up Planned Parenthood clinics, if we start shooting doctors, which I'm

not advocating, if people were to start doing that, that would set the pro-life movement back decades, generations. So I could see, I wonder if off camera, you or other pro-life people would be more willing to concede that this, morally speaking, could be a viable thing to do, but that on camera you wouldn't be willing to admit that. Well, no, but I think on camera versus off camera isn't the issue. The question is, because someone could say, well, you might have someone who will say, well, I don't actually think it is morally objectionable, but I think it's strategically wrong. And that's not something that they would hide. But I certainly condemn it and don't think it should happen. As we're talking it through, it sounds like I don't have as strong an argument, maybe, to actually explain the position. But nonetheless, I'm holding the nonviolent position. I mean, I guess it could kind of be like- That's an honest thing to say.

Yeah, it would be like the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He or Gandhi, they chose a nonviolent means to achieve their end. Perhaps someone could argue that when, so for example, actually let's take the cases where the civil rights activists under the leadership of Dr. King would have these non-violent seminars where they actually practiced cracking eggs on each other's heads and swearing and using vulgar comments to the other. I've had this happen to me in a men's initiation rite of passage,

which we can talk about it if you want. It was super intense, but a blessing. Right. Fascinating. So they acted this out in the safety of their own people without reacting, so that when they went to the whites-only lunch counters and the black people would sit down in those seats that were supposedly by law only supposed to be for whites the blacks would sit down and then in real life the the actual you

know racist thugs would come along and break eggs on them and and swear at them and they didn't respond and when they were physically touched and attacked and pulled they didn't react now you could argue on a technical level when you're under attack the principle of self-defense is such that i have the right to use the amount of force necessary to stop an act of aggression that's right so could those non-violent civil rights activists um used the amount of force necessary to stop the act of aggression happening but they chose not to said, we don't believe it's strategic. We're not going to choose that path. This is the path that we're going to take. And so I think perhaps in some way, as I'm talking it through with you,

that analogously is what people could say is I'm choosing the nonviolent path. I'm condemning violence towards abortion doctors. I'm not using force in response to this. I'm choosing this particular strategic path. Now, could someone come back and say, yeah, but, but, but, you know, it doesn't sound quite right. Well, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't sound like I have a solid explanation. But nonetheless, my position I'm still holding is one of nonviolence. Well, I appreciate that because just like you said, you were stumped in that debate

regarding the liver example. Suppose you remain stumped and were not able to answer him. You could still hold to the position that abortion is wrong because that is more true to you. Right. So it's like, I know this, but yeah, it doesn't... I'm going to hold and stay here until I think this through. Which I have to say as a side note is why I appreciate these shows so much. Because I mean, up until recently, we haven't had the ability to do live videos for this long.

Right, it's been EWTN interviews where you've got like three minutes, why is porn immoral? Why is abortion immoral? Go. And what I love about this is that we get beyond the soundbites. Well, and we need people to be thinking through stuff and talking through stuff and not be afraid to go places where they don't have all the answers or where they don't feel like it's

fully clear and wrestle with that and talk that through would you bring us two glasses are you saying that topic drove you to drink? It did. So I just, you know, I see that you're just diving into the Jameson. I just brought you from Ireland. Yes. Because I was just in Ireland and Scotland. Can we talk about how...

Are we going to do daytime drinking right here right now? Yes, yes. I like my whiskey neat. I'll let you pour. It's crazy that we just went from such an intense topic to this. What does that say? That says... Did you buy this specifically for me? I did, for you. Yes. Stop. That's good. You're a good woman. I normally have a policy to look at you just diving in. That is for you. So

I don't want to take too much of yours. Well, let's, we'll see. I have a policy to not drink and talk. That's been my policy my whole career. That's a great, great policy. And are we about to break it? We are. On YouTube. Yes. Is that okay? Sure. I only have a wee, what is it? I feel like you're pretending that you didn't intentionally bring this today. This has been here because you put it here. I did put it here and I intentionally brought you that from Ireland with the intention of giving it to you because of your time spent living there. I was the one who suggested that we... That we drink it on air. So I'm like, okay, I do like my whiskey neat. Cheers.

Sláinte. Oh, you gotta smell it first. It is all about... Oh, it smells so good. Does it? Yeah. What does it smell like? Whiskey, although I've never had Jameson.

I'm usually... I'm a Glenfiddich, Glenmarais. I just did a distillery tour. Did you? Yeah, I'm a Lagerbond. When I was in Scotland, have you... Oh, you like the peaty. I'm so impressed that you know that.

Now that's a woman. Do you smoke cigars? You should. You'd be perfect. I love it. Because you know, you're supposed to hold it in your mouth for as many years as it is old. This is baseline, Jameson. This isn't great whiskey. I'm criticizing the whiskey that you bought for me.

If I gave you this as a gift, would that? Oh my gosh, why are you giving me, what is it, a scrotum or something? Now you're gonna have to explain this to your audience. This is what happens when you bring out alcohol. So some people put kangaroo heads on their walls. This is a kangaroo scrotum. Wow, Matt, I have to say. It's not something that looks like a kangaroo scrotum. It's actually a scrotum wow matt i have to say it's not it's not something that looks like a kangaroo

scrotum it's actually a scrotum that was stuffed and it's a bottle opener oh it's a bottle opener yeah i thought it was does that make it okay well it's still at least it has a purpose it has a purpose yeah anything can be okay as long as it has a purpose is that our new moral statement yes let's put that up high. Let's put that up there. Yeah, so I thought you cut away from what we were saying. I thought you were supposed to hold it in your mouth as many years old as it is, but because this isn't even aged as like. Yeah, I heard, yeah.

Yeah, it's two things. So I heard someone say about whiskey. For those, we've got to get back onto the topic soon. But let's enjoy this while we've got it. You don't have to edit this bit out, but can we either leave it on or totally off? That would be the fan for those listening. Ryan Foley just messaged me.

Good. Let's just keep going and see what happens. Yeah. No, so I've heard someone say, and I've always appreciated this, that you don't drink whiskey, you taste whiskey.

No, that didn't make sense. Yes, no, it did make sense. You don't drink it, taste whiskey no that didn't make sense yes no it did make sense you don't drink it you taste it that's a good uh for someone out there who wants to get into that's why i only needed that little bit yeah and i still have some left yeah yeah we're good right we should keep going thanks um so anyway that's terrific but i okay let's get off the topic of uh whiskey alcohol abortion abortion okay so here's what here's what i want to talk about okay so that went off again is that staying off okay it's not going to come back on in like five minutes cool that would be the fan again yeah yeah for the fans watching no pun intended so i talk about porn for a living you talk about abortion for a living these things are incredibly

difficult things to talk about and maybe people are watching right now and they're a little like whoa how did you just switch so quickly? And I think that might be a defense mechanism or a coping mechanism to talk about something so difficult. Like if you were to be fully emotionally invested in what you were talking about, you know. Right, how do you go from serious, intense to light, jokey, suddenly cracking open to Jameson?

Right, it's a difficult thing. I mean, you probably have this too. You know what? Go ahead. I have people who come up to me after my talks. You know when they'll talk to me about how their husband's addicted to porn, they haven't slept together in years. I heard a story of a girl recently.

It broke my heart. The dad would use the desktop computer in the girl's bedroom to look at porn when he thought she was sleeping Oh my gosh So he didn't want to do it. He didn't want his wife to find out so he'd wait till his daughter was asleep He'd go up and he'd watch porn in her room. That is so disturbing. Well, what's more disturbing is she wasn't asleep. Ah So I just use that as a graphic, you know intense Awful example because if I was to fall apart every time I heard something like that, I would fall apart very regularly. So when I have people come up to me after my conferences and talk to me about this, I'm invested.

I'm interested. I want to love them. I want to speak blessing to them. I want to direct them to places that can help. And I wonder if you can relate to this. And I hope this doesn't sound callous, but there's almost a sense in which I have to disengage. Sure. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. And the analogy, because I live my life through analogy, that comes to mind is like being a doctor. You know, you're in an emergency room or you're in a hospital or you just day in and day

out hearing tragic stories of people who are physically unwell, who are emotionally unwell, relationally unwell, whatever the case may be. But the doctor has to be able to leave work and go play baseball with his son or have a good laugh with his wife or just hang out with friends. And so it is an intense subject, or a singer at a funeral would be another analogy.

When you're involved that intensely Yeah, and it's not a sign of callousness it's not a sign of dissing well is this I guess you aren't disengaging but it's an appropriate appropriate exactly I heard of a counselor who She said the first time somebody came to them and started sharing about how they were abused as a child, this counselor, Dr. Marianne Layden, beautiful woman, she said she broke down and started crying and immediately recognized

that's not at all what the person needed. Right. That would be another example. Yes. And also, I think when you deal with heavy stuff, you have to look for healthy ways to deal with it. And so I've often heard that counselors have their own counselors. That's right, yeah.

They have to talk through stuff. Well, you can't study therapy without realizing your own wounds. Absolutely. Your own unresolved trauma. Yeah. And I think the key is so people can have unhealthy ways of dealing with heavy material, whether it's something they teach or something they've lived, or so they can have healthy ways or unhealthy ways of dealing with it. And so it's important that we deal with things, but

in healthy ways. So for me, that's music, my ukulele exercise, hanging out with friends. All right. So we've just gone to a very light topic. Now I want to go to perhaps the most grim topic of all. Oh, wow. Are you okay with that? Yeah. So I want to know how abortion happens. I want to know what happens when an abortion happens. So maybe you can help us understand this because I know you've studied this at At the different stages, the different trimesters, what is actually taking place physically when an abortion happens? Sure. So I would say the two main abortions that come to mind would be kind of your classic surgical first trimester abortion and then your second or third trimester abortion. So in the first trimester, where the baby's heart has begun beating at three weeks, where brain waves have been detected at six weeks, at this stage and all

the way up to the 12th week, that would be the first trimester, the most common surgical abortion would be a suction abortion. So that is where the cervix, which when you're pregnant is very tightly closed, the cervix has to be forced open. And so abortionists will insert dilators to force the cervix open so that they can get their instruments through the cervix into the uterus. And the main instrument would be a suction catheter. And so that suction tube is inserted. And once it's in the uterus, the machine is flicked on and essentially a vacuum type suction is what is going to pull the baby's body out. And typically the baby won't come out whole. The baby will come out piece by piece.

And you have arms and legs. You can see the little fingers and toes. and toes. And, you know, the proof of the brutality of the procedure is seen in, in what they do in the clinics afterwards, which is that to make sure all the parts of the baby are out of the mother, because if a part is left in, it can result in severe infection, hemorrhaging and so forth. The, the, someone working the abortion industry, whether it's the doctor themselves or one of the, the assistants will, will take the contents of that jar that the uterine contents got sucked into, and they'll have to look for the baby body parts afterwards. I know why, but tell us why.

And while they're piecing these parts together to get the little head, to get the arms, to get the legs, to make sure they got it all. Because again, otherwise you're going to potentially have this hemorrhaging um so so that right there that's telling us again when you look at the nature of the act it's telling us there's someone there whose arm are they looking for it's not the mother's arm but it is an arm so it's an arm of another body the arm of a child and very specifically the mother's child. If you look later abortions, what will often happen in that case is that a chemical is injected into the heart of the child, very often potassium chloride, KCL.

How far along are we when this is happening? So this is getting into the second, later second trimester. A heart, KCL will be injected into the second, second, later second trimester. A heart, a KCL will be injected into the heart that basically induces cardiac arrest, a heart attack. So at that point, the baby's then dead. Then this can be a couple day procedure, depending if you're later in the second trimester. The cervix after that will be dilated gradually because you need to dilate it way more than in the first trimester to get the the bigger body parts out and then what the abortionist does is he inserts um a type of instrument that is almost like like a it clamps down you've got the top

and the bottom yeah and they they insert it in the uterus which is now dilated and clamp down whatever they feel twist and pull out there's an arm and then insert it backated, and clamp down whatever they feel, twist and pull out. There's an arm. And then insert it back in, clamp down, twist, pull, there's a leg. And then when they get to the head, of course the head is often larger. And so one of the actual medical documents I read in Canada when there was a medical body describing how these later abortions

should be done, it talked about using a crushing and rotating technique when removing the head of the child so that bone spicules, to quote the document directly, of the baby, the little bones of the baby's head, bone spicules do not lacerate the cervix of the mother or cut the mother's cervix. So there's a particular way you should crush the skull. Crush and rotate so that everything's finer when being pulled through the very tender cervix. So it's not to... What's the rotating? Because I get the crush makes it finer, but then you have to rotate.

The point is that there's a specific method. It's brutalizing. It's dismembering it's decapitating it's disemboweling and tell us what the body of a baby tell us what a late-term abortion is and what happens there i don't know that's partly it but well no so that that that would be late term another option would be uh to to just induce labor so rather than uh pull the parts out piece by piece it could be bring about fetal demise through KCL in the heart or whatever. And then the woman would labor like she would with a

living child, except be birthing a dead child. But there have also been, I mean, there was a case years ago that actually involved the United States and Canada because there was a woman in the around the 80s who had a late term saline abortion done in the that was where a saline solution was injected into the uterus in general. And so it would corrode or burn the skin of the baby and the baby would then swallow it. So then it would corrode inside. And this woman had done that and then crossed the border into Canada and went into labor and presented at the hospital in labor, expecting that she would deliver a dead child because of the saline injection, but remarkably that had not killed the child. And so the baby came out alive and was left for,

it was at least 20 minutes in a type of bedpan with a bunch of like towels and stuff placed on top of the child. About 20 or so minutes later, one of the nurses walked in the back room, heard a child crying. At that point, they did resuscitation. And the child survived, was adopted out, and is severely disabled all these decades later.

Do you think that mother's still alive? I don't know. I mean, she very well could be. Just pray for her healing, hey, and that the Father extends His mercy to her and that she know about that mercy and that she would respond to it and see herself as God the Father does because that could be a horrific thing.

Well, and I think we need to realize it's horrific to live with, whether it's the story so vividly as I described it or whether it's a first trimester abortion where the woman didn't even feel really pregnant yet or whether it's a first trimester abortion where the woman didn't even feel really pregnant yet, or whether it's a chemical abortion, she's just going to bleed out. Right. And so I think that's where it's like in discussing all of this and the weight of it all, we need to remember that when we talk about the killing of the pre-born, there are so many wounded

born individuals who are living with the guilt of involvement with abortion. And in my clear, consistent condemnation of abortion, I need to be clear and consistent that as a person of faith, that God is a merciful and loving God, that he is a heavenly father who views all of us as his beloved sons and daughters, even when we dismiss and destroy the gift of human life that he has bestowed upon us so for anyone you know wrestling with an abortion in their past uh the best way to healing is to own up to it to to face what one has done in all its ugliness but to not stay there to not stay in despair but to choose the path of peter okay here Here's what we're going to do. Here's what we're going to do. Which camera's on? That one? Middle one. Middle one. Could you put this camera

one on? I'm going to ask you to speak to a woman who's just had an abortion. Okay. All right. Would you be okay with that? Sure. Sure. Let it be awkward, but this is so important. There are women who might have been sent this, who've had an abortion. We'll make this a separate clip. Right. Would you mind just looking into that camera and speaking to that woman? There are women who might have been sent this, who have had an abortion. We'll make this a separate clip. Would you mind just looking into that camera and speaking to that woman? Sure. I guess where I would start is that I have friends who have had abortions. I have met many, many women in my lifetime of working in the pro-life movement who have made that choice. And in interacting with them, I have seen the profound grief and suffering that that has brought into

their lives. And so if you are one such woman who, although we've never met, is living with the grief and the pain of a choice that you cannot undo, my message for you, as painful as your past is, is a message of hope and a message of mercy. And having just come off of the Easter season where Christ died and suffered and rose from the dead so our sins could be forgiven, I just offer you that reminder that God does not want us to stay in our filth and our sin, but he came to wash us clean with his blood and to redeem us. And so I just want to encourage you to be not afraid to, if you've yet to repent, to, if you've yet to repent, to yet to confess that sin, to be bold and to be strong in owning up to that and lay it at the foot of the cross. If you're a Catholic, to enter into the profound

beauty and healing of the sacrament of reconciliation and to offer that to the Lord and trust in his mercy and trust that God will not only forgive, but he will transform. And that is something that has encouraged me in my own life, where I have to work through my own sins and past and things that I regret, is that God makes all things new. We know this in the book of Revelation, behold, I make all things new. And whatever our sin, whatever our past, whatever ugliness we have invited into our life, God will bring beauty from our ashes and he will transform what we've done and bring great good from it. It doesn't make what we've done good, but it makes God all powerful.

That he can take our ugly and he can take our mess and he can take our dirty and he can take our sin and he can say, I'm going to bring good from that. And I've seen that. take our sin. And he can say, I'm going to bring good from that. And I've seen that one of my friends, Debbie, who had an abortion, goes around and shares her story to teenagers of how she regrets having killed her child. And there was an audience member who had a friend on route to an abortion clinic, and he grabbed his phone and texted her and told her about Debbie. And to make a very long story short, that girl decided not to go to the abortion clinic and befriended Debbie. And a few months later, a baby girl was born.

That's transformation. That is God saying, Debbie, I hate what you've done. You hate what you've done, but I've forgiven you. You've repented. And so now we're gonna use this and we're gonna use it for my glory.

And so allow God to use what you've done and regret as you should regret to use for his glory and draw great good from it. Amen. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. That's so important that we do that, isn't it? Yeah. And then are there any resources for those who have had abortions that you would point them to? Yes. A few things immediately always come to mind. There's Rachel's Vineyard and Project Rachel, which are post-abortion healing programs. There also is the Sisters of Life, which are based in New York, but they're now in Canada, in Colorado, in Washington, D.C. They run beautiful healing

retreat weekends for those who are grieving the loss of their children through abortion. So I highly recommend going to sistersoflife.org and clicking on their link for post-abortion information. That's beautiful. Gosh. Yeah. clicking on their link for post-abortion information. That's beautiful. Gosh. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. I guess finally, where do we go from here? Because I heard someone recently say that they're at the March for Life in DC and someone said, see you here next year. And there was a certain sadness that came upon them that like, is this just what we do now? Right. Is this, is this ever going to be resolved? I hear people who are rather optimistic and they say that they think that, you know, that this is going to be eradicated in our lifetime that we, you know, are you that

optimistic? What do we do? What are our marching orders? Yeah. I think there, there is reason for hope for soul. There's always reason for hope because we know the end of the story and we know God, the creator and God, the father, and that he's got this and that we are to be instruments for him. It's not about you. It's not about me. Um, it's about God working his majesty in this world that he has created for the creation that he loves and is considered very good. Um, so I think we need to be faithful to the duty of the moment. What is before me? Who do I know? And where am I placed? And I can respond to that going forward in a spirit of hope that lives are being saved, that minds are being changed, and that I am confident this will end just as, as

William Wilberforce in Great Britain worked to bring about an end to the slave trade. He actually saw that in his lifetime, lifetime, but we can't kid ourselves that slavery is over because of what he did, because we know we have human trafficking, that we have modern day slavery. But he did what he could where he was at the time that he lived, and he made great strides. So it's sort of like you're saying this isn't an all or nothing battle. It's not like either we totally overthrow this or it's not worth investing our time in it. Right, because we're living in a sinful world. There's all, from the time Cain killed Abel, there has been attacks on human life. There have been people murdering people.

So murder, you know, we want to strive to see it end. But whether it legally ends, whether in practice it ends in this form, well, what about this other form that it might rear its ugly head in? Because sin in this imperfect world is still happening. So our duty is to be responsible where we can. I'm not responsible for what I can't do, but I sure am responsible for what I can. And so we have to seize those moments with confidence and hope that if we are receptive to the Spirit's promptings, who have I just

encountered? Who is before me? How can I reach out to them in an act of love? I mean, your wife told me a beautiful story last night of how she and your daughters had been at a store and overheard a couple of the workers talking about pregnancy and being single parents. And as Cam and your daughters left, they started talking, I guess it was Avila, perhaps, or Kiara had said to Cam, Mommy, do you think that woman, one of those women was pregnant? And Cam was like, yes,

I kind of did get the sense that she was. We should pray for her. And then Cam thought, no, we need to do more than that. And so Cam told me she walked, do you know this story? I love my wife. I know, I love your wife too. Do you know this story? Yeah, it's angry. She's told me a while ago.

She walked back in with the girls. And so I think this is beautiful for the sake of the woman. This is beautiful for your daughters, this witness. But Cam walked back in and said, look, this is going to seem crazy, but I just got to ask you overhearing everything, like, are you pregnant? And the woman said, yes, yes, I am. And Cam's immediate reaction was celebratory, you know, like, congratulations, you know, you're a mom. This is beautiful. And she said, look,

I overheard all you ladies talking about how hard it is to be a single mom. And she goes, look, I'm not a single mom, but it's hard to be a parent. It's hard to be a mom, even when you have support. And I want to support you. I want to encourage you in this. And Cam said that she wanted this woman to know, because she thought this is not just about using our words. It's about using our actions. And how she said to this woman, I want to, she goes, look, I've got $5 on me. She goes, I want to do more than that. I want to show you that God can provide and that people will support you in the situation that you're in.

And I'm going to get you a gift card right now for your store. I do not know this story. Yeah, well, your wife spent $200 on a gift card just so you know. Well, yeah, because the baby's not born yet. She is so amazing. I was like, Cam, that's amazing. She spent $200 on a gift card to let this woman know that she has support and she can do this. And that to me is duty of the moment. That is responding to what is before you, Whether or not your wife ended up or ends up or ended up going to a March for Life, to me, isn't as important as what she

did in that moment when she overheard a conversation and thought, I can just ignore or pray for, which is better than ignore is to pray, or I can take it one step further than just prayer. And I can do some action, some investigation and just be a light. And she was, and then, you know, to think that your daughter saw that beautiful witness and are now praying for this young woman. So I know you have a great wife. I do have a very good wife. Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for being here. And tell us, tell, tell our listeners and our viewers about your book, Love Unleashes Life. Did I get that right?

Yes, you did. About your organization, how people can find you. Yes. So I have a ministry called loveunleasheslife.com is the website. And yes, I have a book by the same title with the subtitle, Abortion and the Art of Communicating Truth, because I really believe it is an art in how we interact with others, how we have conversation, dialogue, debate, how we tackle tough subjects. We have to use the head, but we also have to use the heart. And so that's the whole idea between love unleashes life, that we can literally unleash life by saving a baby from

abortion, as well as figuratively unleash life in the spirit of the person that we're encountering, the way Cam did with that woman at the store who was pregnant, by giving someone a new perspective, new hope, new encouragement by how we love. And as we know from St. Thomas Aquinas, that to love is to will the other's good. And so that when we will the other's good in how we interact with them, with gentleness, by being patient and kind. Think of all the words used to describe love in that passage in Corinthians. The very beginning is love is patient, love is kind. So as we interact with the born by being patient and by being kind, by our actions, by how we look at them, that love will unleash life figuratively and literally in their response. So that's kind of what my focus is all about, is equipping people to be better ambassadors for the pro-life perspective in reaching the head as

well as the heart. So people can go to loveunleasheslife.com and read my blog, sign up for my e-updates, and see my schedule for where I'm speaking next. That's wonderful, because I think often people think to themselves, well, I know that it's wrong, right? So I don't need to invest time reading about things like this. Whereas they might say, well, I need to read up on how to answer atheism because they think, I don't know how to respond to this. I have my own doubts. And so they're diligent about reading books. But I think for many people in the pro-life camp, maybe they don't spend a lot of time doing that because they think, well, I already know. But you would say, well, we need, it's not that we just need to know what we believe and why we believe it. We need to know how to best communicate it. Because at the

end of the day, we all have the same goal to make abortion unthinkable so that it doesn't enter into the hearts and minds of someone in crisis to choose that course of action. But how do we reach that goal? And the person who is interruptive, who's angry, who's rude. You've seen this. Yeah, but who is against abortion has the same goal as the person who's patient and kind and calm. But if they're not reaching, if that first person isn't reaching that goal, then we need to be better equipped to better represent what it means to be pro-life, to be patient, to be kind. And so, yes, I give people basic apologetics, but I give them more than that. How to use questions and stories, analogies, to make a point abundantly clear so that it's more readily embraced. Have you ever been on the kind of front lines by an abortion

mill or something with people who have been trying to get across the pro-life message in a way that you thought was very unhelpful? And have you ever spoken to someone about why they should change their method? Yeah, so I've done a lot of work on college campuses with pro-life exhibits, and I have seen people that aren't with the exhibit

that I was doing, but people who shared our position on abortion arrive in the area and yeah take a strategy that you think that that is just not helpful but I find it hard even for me to engage those people in the same way the pro-abortion person has a hard time engaging those people because it's like they have a one-track mind and it's like I'm just going to proclaim this without thinking, am I succeeding? So absolutely a prophet isn't welcome in their own hometown and we need to be prophets and we need to proclaim. I'm not in any way saying we shouldn't do that or trying to minimize the power of proclamation, but it has to be proclamation with a purpose. And the purpose has to be that people are won over to what we're

proclaiming. And so the more that we come from a place of contemplation prior to springing into action, the more we can be receptive to the movement of the spirit to know, when should I be quiet and just let the person I'm speaking with tell their story? When should I ask this particular question? When should I be more pointed? When should I come on strong? And there have been conversations where I have taken a tactic with some people that support abortion that I wouldn't take with others, where someone might say, whoa, you were kind of being harsh, but I wasn't because I had spoken them for 30 minutes and I had built a rapport. And we had this, so in discernment as a result of prior contemplation before action, I had a sense I can poke this person a little bit.

But there are other people where I wouldn't do that because of how that conversation is going or because of how I'm sensing, you know, how they're receiving it. Prudence. Prudence. Along those lines, what are your thoughts on graphic images? Well, so I spent a good portion of my pro-life career using abortion victim photography with the ministry I used to work for, the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform, as a tool to educate the culture as to what is happening. And although I have a new ministry now, Love Unleashed Life, as we've said, I absolutely still believe in the power of that particular tool to break through the lies and to bring light onto the darkness of what is abortion and change people's minds. But I think abortion victim photography is a tool like any tool. It can be used well or it can be used poorly. How can it be used well and how can it be used poorly?

So I think a way to use it well, first of all, is to have the user be well-trained in reaching the head as well as the heart, being a very solid ambassador for the logic of the pro-life perspective, knowing how to articulate it, but also being deeply steeped in a compassionate and empathetic understanding of those who are wounded so as to know when they need to proceed more gently with people in conversation. So having the user already in holding that image or presenting that image in pamphlet form, whatever the case may be, coming from that place. Then the image themselves, I often have heard it said by one of my pro-life mentors, Greg Cunningham, who has worked in the pro-life movement for decades. He said, when you hold up a picture of abortion,

abortion protests itself. In other words, we shouldn't have to say much. The reality of what abortion does is what's yelling at people. So I think there's nothing wrong with saying abortion kills children. But what I often did at CCBR was we would actually just have the image

of the aborted child with the word choice. We wouldn't say abortion is killing. We would just take the word positively associated with it, put in the end, the image of the end result and let the passerby come to their conclusion. Is this a choice? What does this choice do? And then engage, use that almost confusing image, like the word choice, but then that picture, and draw them into a conversation. This happened recently with Miley Cyrus. I'm not sure if you saw that.

There was a cake, and I think she said abortion is health care. I heard about that. Yeah, she licks things a lot. That's weird. She does, yeah. Hammers, cakes. But someone kind of Photoshopped this and put a dead baby where the cake was. And it was her face licking the dead baby.

Oh, wow. I did not see that. Yeah. Yeah. And you think, so, but then what do you say to people who say, well, aren't you traumatizing children who may not yet be ready to view such an image? So I would say if you took abortion victim photography to an area where only children were present, that would be a problem.

Exactly. When abortion victim photography is taken to the general public, it's almost like the principle of double effect. You're not targeting children. You're targeting those who are old enough to have abortions, believing they're old enough to see abortions. That's who you're taking your message to. You just recognize that sometimes when you do that,

there will be smaller children around. And so in that case, I say, what's worse, seeing a child seeing an abortion image or a child being an abortion image? And the reality is, if, let's say, five-year-old children were being killed on street corners and you were walking down the street with a four-year-old, would your first thought be, how dare these people kill five-year-olds in front of my four-year-old? Or would your first thought be, how dare these people in the street corner be killing a five-year-old? You set your child in the arms of someone who's safe and you run to intervene. And so I think that's how we need to look at this, is that there are children being killed, just not on street corners. They're being killed behind the closed doors of abortion clinics

and people aren't responding because they don't know because they perceive it as a positive thing. And so we need to bring what's in darkness into the light and we need to, again, communicate truth and love. But if love is willing, the other's good. That means warning people. And I remember meeting a woman who'd had an abortion who through tears said to me, no one told me it looked like that. And she would have made a very different choice only a few months before I met her, if only someone had told her. And I contrast her with another woman that I met who had seen abortion victim photography and never spoke, interestingly, to my colleagues who had been showing the images. But she was pregnant and she was scheduled for an abortion and she canceled her appointment

and only serendipitously months later met some of our team members. And when she found out what they did as a job, she realized, oh my gosh, you're the people. You're the people who I saw on the street. And the day she gave birth, she invited a couple of my colleagues to the hospital where that baby was born, who would have otherwise been killed had she not seen. And looked like, right. So you're not against, say, billboards of fetuses? Because it sounded like in the beginning you were saying

there's a right way to do it. It sounded like you were saying this person ought to know how to respond and how to help people process what they're seeing. You know, I think, you know, if you, you have abortion victim photography and you say things like, uh, if you have an abortion, you're going. I like how you put that by the way, abortion victim photography. I've never heard it put that way. Right. It's a, it's a, it's a, there's a reason you're putting it that way, isn't there? Absolutely. Because I have learned time and again in this debate, language matters. What we say matters.

Words are not meaningless. And abortion supporters have been very wise in using language like choice, reproductive justice, and so forth. Health care. Because it sounds positive. You can't be against choice. Exactly. Health care, reproductive rights. Exactly. So our job is to define all their words.

And our job is to also use words to our advantage. And I think abortion victim photography focuses on the fact that, first of all, we're talking about the victim. And someone is being victimized. And we use all kinds of victim photography, and that's widely accepted. You know, people who are victims of genocide in other countries. People who are children who are starving in some parts of Africa. Images like this are actually photography, victim photography like that is often presented even in billboard form to get people like you and me to say, I need to sponsor a child every month,

or I need to send money to this campaign that is responding to this human rights violation happening in this other part of the world. So yeah, I think that images can be used on a wide scale on billboard form, but what is the text message that goes with it? What is the organization presenting it? The website that you then go to, is it going to be vicious? Is it going to be verbally vicious or is it going to be strategic and wise and thoughtful and thought provoking? All right. Because you did say that these could be used well and poorly. Exactly. So you could be vicious. You could be angry. Sure. So people who hold the images but are yelling at people or, you know, yeah, or you're going to burn in hell or different comments like that,

which give no sense of hope and mercy because God is merciful. Or the text that could go along, and I haven't thought through what negative text could be, but even just what I said, being in text form next to the image, well, that's not going to be helpful. But drawing people to think deeper with the evidence of what's going on and bringing it to an area where they're encountering it, because if you didn't, they wouldn't otherwise encounter that message. All of that, I think, is very good. What do you think, I love that about 20 minutes ago, I thought this conversation was wrapping up. Now I feel like it's just getting started. Should I take another drink? You have more to it. What do you think about people who go undercover into Planned Parenthood clinics? You know, again, I think it's an important role. It's a

strategic kind of tack to take that I would view as like being an undercover police officer who is going undercover to find out what is actually going on in the drug world or whatever the case may be. So to me, it's a way of bringing what's in darkness into the light when you're dealing with... Yeah, see, earlier in this conversation, I kind of pressed you on whether pro-lifers should, you know, kill or injure pro-abortion doctors. And you said no. And we should not, correct, we should not use violence. Just now listening to this. But, you know, we were thinking things through that maybe we would phrase more sophisticatedly, accurately later on. So here's something that I haven't fully figured out. I think I know where you're going with this.

To put myself on the wire. I find it difficult to, let's just use Thomas Aquinas, right? His understanding of lying and that it's never permissible. It seems to me that if undercover work is permissible, then it's okay in certain instances to lie. So how does he define lie? Well, so here's how I think the catechism defines it. Okay, that's a good place to go.

It's when you intentionally deceive another person or you tell a falsehood with the intention of deceiving. So let's just say for the sake of argument, as a working definition, that's what a lie is, to tell a falsehood with the intention of deceiving. Okay. So if that is, maybe it's not, but if that's how we define lying, and if we say lying is intrinsically evil and can never be justified, then it would follow that undercover work in Planned Parenthood clinics is intrinsically evil because you are telling a falsehood with

the intention of deceiving. Or could we look at it this way as it's almost like acting? Or could we look at it this way as it's almost like acting. So when I'm an actress on a stage, you know, say I'm in The Sound of Music, that's not me. I'm taking on a role and I'm presenting myself as Maria, but I'm not, I'm Stephanie. And could you argue that if I present myself as a minor who's pregnant and seeking an abortion, although I realize at this age I could not present myself that way, but you know what I mean? Could it be argued that I'm actually taking on the role of an actress not to deceive the parties that I'm talking with, but just wait, just wait. To expose their deceit. And that's why I think it's ultimately justified. Because I know that they're deceiving. And the only way to show that they're deceiving is to act, to take on a role,

to be in a play, essentially, that they don't know that they're a part of. For me to play a role to show that they're sweeping this abortion out of the rug or sending me across state lines to have an abortion or whatever the case may be. Does that work? I don't know. It seems to me that, and I'm open, of course, to being corrected because I want the truth. There's a difference there. I still think you should go undercover. I just think I have to conclude that it's okay to lie sometimes. That puts me at odds with what the catechism says on lying, so I don't say that with gusto. So the question I would ask. Let me just finish my thought here.

So if you're acting as Maria, you're not deceiving me. I'm a part of this agreed deceiving. I understand what you're doing. I understand what you're doing. It's sort of like if I dress up as Santa Claus and show my children are aware of this and we play a little game, we're in the trick together. Right. We're both agreeing to play this sort of game. Right. That's not what's happening when you go undercover.

The person is being deceived. You're saying that you are such and such. deceived. You're saying that you are such and such. And it's just different to the person sitting in a theater and to the person who's receiving you as a woman claiming to be in distress. There's a difference there. So I wonder if this were to seem almost like an inconsistency, like sometimes allowing lying when we have a declaration that you shouldn't lie, understandably, would the church not have come out and spoken against, for example, being undercover police officers? Would there not yet have been something? So perhaps it's that we're just not understanding. I think that's right. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. How this

would apply or how it maybe doesn't apply. Yeah. I i don't really i'm just trying to figure it out right i know i agree because i feel like with this i would say it sits right with me that it's okay to go undercover right if you can go undercover as a policeman right then you can go undercover as a journalist exactly yes so um but how to respond as you've defined lying. Yeah, that's one of those ones where I'd say I have to read up on it. Yeah, and earlier what you said, you know, you said, well, okay, even if I'm not able to fully explain it right now, I'm going to side with this option because it seems the most right to me. And similarly, I would say, well, even if I'm not sure about how to say this isn't lying, right?

If I want to say lying is always wrong, I still will side with the fact that you can go undercover to expose certain atrocities taking place. When you know that, I think part of it is, and I don't know if this is making excuses, but when you're dealing with evil, evil is about lying and evil is about hiding and evil is about lying and evil is about hiding and evil is about darkness and so

what we're trying to do being kind of the pro-life movement is expose the lies expose the darkness so how do you find out that the lies are happening other than to engage in situations where the lying will be seen or the deceit will be seen or the darkness will be seen. But because you're not really pregnant, right? So if I was really pregnant and really thinking about an abortion, I wouldn't have to lie by going to an abortion clinic and saying, saying hi I'm wanting an abortion and seeing how they respond to my circumstance but if I'm not really that woman right so like Lila Rose would dye her hair pretend to be correct how else do I prove what I sense is going on which is that if I said I want a sex selection or or I'm so. So it almost is like, to me, it's, again, I look at it as taking on a character.

Admittedly, they don't know. But it's acting, taking on a character to expose the deceit that is happening. Whereas if you said to me, why were you late for our interview? And I lied and said, oh, there was a car accident because I didn't want to say, well, I slept in and then I decided to sip my coffee slow or whatever the case may be. In that case, I'm not willing to own up to weakness on my part, lack of responsibility, lack of, you know, and so forth. I don't know. That just seems different. I agree. It seems different. And I'm fully, and so forth. I don't know. That just seems different. I agree.

It seems different. And I'm fully, just so everyone knows, like right now, I agree with Lila Rose and this other bloke. What was his name? David somewhere. Oh, David Daleiden. Right. Because he's done more recently with Center for Medical Progress.

Yeah. So I'm glad that these things are happening. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I just don't yet know how to reconcile what they're doing with my stance that lying is always wrong. And I need to think more about whether I do think lying is always wrong. Have you talked to Kreeft about this? I will next month when he's on the show.

Oh, wow. Great. But you hear me. You feel the struggle, don't you? Well, I. The tension? Because people will say that you have the Nazi at the door situation. Right, right.

Someone comes, there are Jews in the basement, and you have that kind of intellectual, what's the word, where you kind of hide and dodge. And Aquinas says you can do this. He says this in the Summa. So if I were to say, there are no cockroaches in the basement, that person might think that I mean Jews in saying cockroaches. And I haven't technically lied. But if I'm pressed, that's not what I asked. What I asked you is, are you hiding Jews in the basement? Yes or no. What are you going to say? I know. See, I say no and I lie. I deliberately lie. I would absolutely make that choice.

So here's a question. Have I done something wrong? I think I've heard this definition before that lying is withholding the truth from someone who has a right to it. Is that true? It's not true? That's not what Aquinas says. Okay, well. The reason Aquinas.

The reason Aquinas. But is he right on everything? Well, no, he said some things that are false. Right. He didn't believe in the immaculate conception, for example, huh, you know that? Very good, I didn't know that. But I guess, because when you're dealing with an evil party.

Yeah, no, here's why he thinks it's wrong, okay? Okay. Sex has at least two fundamental ends, right? The unitive and procreative. Unitive and procreative. To thwart one of the ends is to pervert the act. Okay. Aquinas seems to say that the end of speech is truth telling. And so to thwart the end of speech is to pervert the act. So that's sort of how Thomists would argue. That's my understanding. Now I'm not an expert in this for those who are going to pick me apart here on YouTube. Right.

But you see the logic there. So anyway. Right. So I have this sort of, I am looking forward to thinking this through more. This is nice. Which is what we're supposed to do. This is the Matt Fradd show. Think things through.

And while I think this through, I'm still going to side with people like David. And Lila and so forth. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Thanks. Yeah.

All right. Thank you so much for watching this episode. I hope it's been a real blessing to you. What we're going to do now is record an extra segment just for our patrons. Okay. So all of this work costs money. it's been a real blessing to you. What we're going to do now is record an extra segment just for our patrons. Okay, so all of this work costs money, and I am so very grateful to those who are supporting me at patreon.com slash mattfradd, patreon.com slash mattfradd. If you could, I ask you, would you please give me a dollar a month, 10 bucks a month, or more. When you do, you get certain free things

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