How could you keep from going totally insane in our crazy culture on the topic of abortion? I’m going to give you five ways to sniff out bad arguments that will help you be clear, help you maintain your sanity, and help those you’re talking to to understand the issue clearly. I’m Scott Kluzendorf, president of Life Training Institute. Welcome to the Case for Life podcast. Again, I want to thank our prime sponsor, Life Training Institute. You can visit them at prolifetraining.com. Lots there to help you in defending your pro-life view. Also, if you have not yet already gotten a copy of the book, The Case for Life, second edition, I encourage you to do so, especially in these crazy times we live in today. We’re right and wrong on abortion or being clouded and being obscured. This book will help you keep the main thing, the main thing. You can get that at scottkluzendorf.com. Okay, looking at the headlines right now, you can’t help but notice that everybody’s talking about abortion, and yet nobody’s talking about abortion. What do I mean by that? Well, if you look at what our political candidates are saying, especially on the Democrat side of the aisle, here’s what they’re saying. Well, pro-lifers are only pro-life because they bought into a Southern Baptist strategy in the 1980s that was really about segregation, not saving unborn humans. Their whole motivation, their whole intent for being involved in abortion is strictly a religious attempt to legalize segregation. Yeah, that’s what’s being said right now. I know you’re shaking your head going, that’s crazy. Let me just back that up a little bit and help you understand what’s going on here. One of the bad ways that people argue about abortion is they attack the person rather than the argument. Now, we all know the pro-life argument. It goes like this, it is wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Abortion does that, therefore it’s wrong. If we were to state that formally, it would go like this, premise one, it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Premise two, abortion intentionally kills innocent human beings. Conclusion, therefore abortion is wrong. Now, that argument either stands or falls based on its merits, nothing else. You cannot defeat that argument by saying, “I don’t like the person making it.” That’s irrelevant because arguments don’t have gender, they stand or fall apart from the people who make them. You’ve got to do the hard work of evaluating the argument itself. Notice what this latest attack on pro-lifers does. It doesn’t evaluate the pro-life argument for soundness or validity. Rather, all it does is say, “Well, the motives and the origins of the pro-life argument are flawed.” By saying that, you may attack the individual pro-lifers, but what have you gained? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t motivated by segregationist sentiment. Now, they’re not, but say they were. Could their argument that abortion is wrong still be valid in sound even if pro-lifers have a character flaw? And the answer is yes, because their argument stands or falls on its merits, not the people making it. But let’s take a look at this in a little closer detail. What’s really going on here is a classic example of what we call the genetic fallacy. This is where you fault an idea based on its origins rather than its merits. And this is just epidemic in debates over abortion. People say, “Well, you’re only pro-life because you’re a misogynist and you hate women. You just want to oppress women.” Well, maybe I do, maybe I don’t. How does that refute my pro-life argument that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings? Abortion does that, therefore it’s wrong. The answer is it does nothing to refute the pro-life argument, it’s just changing the subject. So this is one of the most common things we see, people changing the subject. They’re not even talking about abortion at that point. They’re talking about the person instead. And this is what I mean when I say everybody’s talking about abortion and yet nobody’s talking about it. If you want to talk about abortion, you’ve got to deal with that pro-life argument we just made. Is that argument sound and valid? If so, then the issue is what does that mean for us in terms of our ethics? The issue is not the people making the argument, it’s the argument itself. So this idea that we can just attack the person rather than refute the argument is one of the common ways that people argue poorly. Here’s another one I’ve seen lately. People will say the following. Well, reproductive health care, by which they mean abortion, okay, let’s just strip away the deceptive language. Reproductive health care, so the argument goes, is good for quote everyone, unquote. I’ve heard President Biden say this, I’ve heard Kamala Harris say it, I’ve heard journalist, an author, Katha Pollitt say it. I’ve heard others say it. Now notice what this does. This assumes the unborn aren’t human and this is the second bad way people argue. They simply assume the unborn aren’t human. They don’t actually make an argument for it. So notice when Kamala Harris says reproductive freedom is good for quote everyone. She doesn’t answer the question, do the unborn count as part of quote everyone? Are they part of us? Is reproductive freedom good for them? Is it good for the unborn to be systematically dismembered in a second trimester abortion? Is it good for them to have their limbs sucked off in a first trimester abortion or be poisoned through a medical abortion, through a chemical abortion? The answer, of course, is no. It’s only if you assume the unborn aren’t human that you can claim that abortion is good for everyone. It only works if you assume that everyone does not include the unborn. This is a bad way to argue. Another way that people argue or try to argue that really isn’t an argument is they simply assert rather than argue. Well, women have a right to choose. Well, first of all, choose what? Make them spell out what the choice is they’re advocating for. Make them spell out that the choice they’re offering is the intentional killing of a human fetus. Once that’s been spelled out, you can ask the question, where did this alleged right to an abortion come from? And when do we get this right to an abortion? Now, again, people love to make an assertion. If I say a woman has a right to choose, is that an argument? No, it’s not because I’ve given you no evidence, no support for it. I’ve just made a claim with nothing under it. It’s thin air under it. That’s it. If I say to you, for example, as a realtor, hey, I have found a new house for you. You’re going to love it. And I drive you out to a vacant lot and you’re stretching your eyes going, where is this new house? I don’t see it. And I point over to the far corner of a vacant lot and say, see that roof on the ground over there? That’s your new house. Well, you would look at me and say, excuse me, that’s simply a roof on the ground. In order for that roof to be a house, we need walls and a foundation supporting it. You would never buy a house that had no walls. Why should we buy assertions with no evidence? And that’s what a lot of people do. Or they’ll say things like, well, that embryo is not self-aware. Notice the hidden and undefended premise in that claim. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that self-awareness matters in the first place, but this hasn’t been argued for. It’s merely being asserted. And we want to make sure we don’t accept that assertion without challenge. They need to tell us why self-awareness matters and how much of it I need to have in order not to be killed. But these are undefended assumptions that are just put out there as if somehow that’s, you know, an argument. Or people will say things like, I heard one evangelical leader recently say, well, our Jewish friends don’t agree that life begins at conception. Why should we as Christians make that claim when it’s just our particular theological view that other religious traditions don’t hold? Now, pause for a moment before we get into whether or not the claim life begins at conception is scientific or theological. It’s scientific, but set that aside for the moment. Notice the hidden and undefended premise in this pastor’s argument that somehow the absence of agreement means nobody’s right. He doesn’t defend that claim. People once disagreed on whether slavery ought to be permitted or whether women should have the right to vote. They once disagreed on the earth being round or flat. Did that mean there were no right answers to those questions? Clearly, right and wrong exist independent of my thinking at so. They are principles I’m to line up with. They are not based on consensus. That is a worldview known as relativism, which we’ve dealt with on this podcast before. I won’t revisit it right now. Now, another thing you’re going to hear in this political season is people hiding behind hard cases. They’re going to bring up cases of rape. They’re going to bring up cases of life of the mother. They’re going to make the very dubious claim that women cannot get life saving medical treatment in red states that have passed laws restricting abortion. This is false. I have looked at the laws, the language of the laws of the red states that have passed protections for unborn human. Not one of those states says that if a woman needs life saving pregnancy ending surgery to save the mother’s life, she can’t get it. In fact, they all go out of their way to state she can get it. And these states, several of them do really good work defining abortion as the intentional killing of an innocent human being. And they make the point that when you have surgery for a topic pregnancy, for example, the death of the unborn may be foreseen, but it’s not intended. Whereas with abortion, we not only foresee the death of the unborn, we intend it. So a lot of times people are going to hide behind these hard cases and try to get you to believe that somehow you’re not being pro-life and you really don’t care about life when you’re going to let women die because pro-life laws prevent them from getting the surgeries they need. That’s a bunch of hogwash. That is simply not the case. I have challenged critics. Show me the language in any bill that says that because we’re protecting unborn humans, if you need life saving surgery that requires ending a pregnancy, we’re not going to let you get it. It’s going to be a felony. You’ll go to jail for it. You’ll be prosecuted. We’re not going to let you get that life saving surgery. You’re not going to find it because none of those bills say that. This is misinformation. We are being led astray by people who are really trying to change the topic. Again, everybody wants to talk about abortion without talking about abortion. This was one of the things I really appreciated 30 years ago when feminist author Naomi Wolfe in an article entitled Our Bodies, Our Souls challenged her liberal audience to start talking honestly about abortion. And she said a couple of things. Number one, let’s acknowledge it involves a real death. Quit pretending it doesn’t. Secondly, she said, let’s be honest about the gruesome nature of abortion. If the abortion procedure is in fact grisly to look at, maybe we need to look at why it’s grisly. Maybe because it involves intentionally tearing apart an innocent human being. I appreciate that kind of candor. It’d be nice if we brought it back into the debate today instead of trying to talk about everything but abortion. Thanks for joining us, friends. I look forward to seeing you the next time on the Case for Life podcast.