Life Training Institute Blog

Evaluating Haffner's Religious Case [Jay]

2012-01-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post published a guest editorial (here) by Reverend Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister, titled The religious case for legalized abortion. Obviously, a post like this draws my attention and given the serious nature in which Rev. Haffner offers her piece I decided to evaluate her article for the blog.

It is clear that Rev. Haffner is not neutral on this issue from the outset. She describes the current climate of state legislators attempting to place limits on abortion negatively and refers to pro-lifers as “anti-choice.” None of this in any way undermines the points that she is making, but it does help to get some understanding about from whom we are hearing.

The third paragraph begins with the following:

There is a religious case for safe, legal, and accessible abortion services.

This is her thesis. The evidence she offers to support this claim is (1) that religious traditions disagree on the value of fetal human life, (2) many religious people think that developmental levels impact value, and (3) that “many religious traditions teach that the health and life of the woman must take precedence over the life of the fetus.” Scripture neither directly condemns nor prohibits abortion, but it does “call us to act compassionately and justly when facing difficult moral decisions.” She does not offer any actual scriptural references to help us understand her interpretation.

Suppose I told you that my personal religious beliefs required I burn the widows of deceased men alive on the funeral pyre. When you rightly protest that this action is immoral and violates the basic rights of the woman, would you find my response that many religions think that women have less value than men and are functionally the property of their husbands convincing? I hope not. But this is exactly the type of argument we have been offered. The religious case is based on the presence of certain religious beliefs. This is not an argument; it is an observation that tells us nothing in regards to the value of unborn human life. The fact that they hold those beliefs is not an argument in support of those beliefs, and as Hadley Arkes says an absence of consensus does not indicate an absence of truth.

She mentions that science, medicine, law, and philosophy contribute to this shared religious understanding, but without anything more than that we are left with the claim that arguments exist elsewhere and one must trust her or guess what they might be.

As to the supposed silence of the bible on the issue of abortion, Scott has written on this (here, here, and here) and Dr. Matthew Flannagan of New Zealand has done some magnificent work in this area that I intend to review for the blog later this year. I will restrict my comments here to say the bible does expressly prohibit the unjust murder of innocent human life. This means the central question from the scriptural perspective is “what is the unborn?” That argument is best made through science (identification) and philosophy (value). (See here) Once we determine the identity of the unborn as full members of the human family we have all the scriptural support we need to prohibit abortion. Simply claiming that the bible says nothing about abortion so it must be morally permissible is also a great argument for endorsing slavery. Frederick Douglass, William Wilberforce, and William Lloyd Garrison didn't need to see the express scriptural prohibition of slavery to know that the system of slavery they opposed was unGodly. They just needed to know that the Africans were fully human and were able to extrapolate from that basic fact why we don't treat other human beings in that manner.

Her conclusion from her evidence is the following:

The scriptural commitment to the most marginalized means that pregnancy, childbearing, and abortion should be safe for all women, just as a scriptural commitment to truth-telling means that women must have accurate information as they make their decisions.

I fail to see how this conclusion is supported by her previous claims, but let's break out that first line. Suppose we make every individual item on the list its own statement.

1 - Pregnancy should be safe for all women.
2 – Childbearing should be safe for all women.
3 – Abortion should be safe for all women.

Statements 1 & 2 taken on their own are obviously noble aspirations but hardly scripturally mandated. Since without serious qualification those statements are unrealizable today – much less in the more medically primitive world of biblical times – it is hard to imagine a scriptural mandate to meet these objectives. In as much as it is reasonably possible we ought to work to promote the health of the people around us, but I am not sure how we can make pregnancy and childbearing safe for everyone. Do we forbid women facing high risks pregnancies from attempting to bear children? That would keep them safe and avoid complications from diabetics giving birth, for example. If we are to let women make their own decisions regarding pregnancy are we supposed to allow them to make choices that risk their own lives or their pregnancy? To declare safety the scriptural command doesn't clear anything up at all. It only further complicates our moral decision making.

Statement 3 is fraught with complication. We are biblically mandated to make abortion safe for all women? This obviously begs the question as to the identity of the unborn. What about all of the unborn female members of the human family that are aborted. We can assume their safety is not a consideration in statement 3. This doesn't even have the virtue of being a noble desire. Pregnancy and childbearing are procreative, communal, and familial. Dr. Francis Beckwith argues that these are natural goods. Surgical and medical abortion are the violent unnatural ends of pregnancy and the willful termination of a human life. It seems hard to believe that we have been given any argument prior to her conclusion that supports the idea that scripture mandates we allow women to destroy their unborn children without risk to themselves. What scripture does this? The Christian concern for widows and orphans? The command to take care of the least of these? This is a huge leap in logic that is hidden by placing it alongside more sympathetic – though mistaken – claims.

She offers anecdotal evidence that women struggle with this decision and that they prayerfull seek to do what is best for their family. Again, this is an observation and not an argument. How effective would this argument be if it were offered up as justification for the killing of toddlers? Every woman I know that had her toddler medically killed thought long and hard about it beforehand. It sounds a little ridiculous because we accept that toddlers are fully human. So if the unborn are human in the same way that toddlers are then it is equally empty as a defense of abortion.

She claims that many faith traditions teach that abortion is always a moral decision and links to a statement paper from which much of this article was cut and pasted. The ecumenical statement defines the moral nature of abortion as rooted in the idea that it impacts the woman, her partner, and her family. The moral considerations they acknowledge never mention the unborn so this concession of the moral nature of abortion is rhetorical. There is no shared moral foundation appealed to here.

Which leads to this point. If the unborn are morally insignificant what is with all the hand wringing? Why the deeply moral spiritual reflection? Why seek to reduce the number of abortions? If we are biblically mandated to supply abortions, why is it a difficult moral decision at all? The very empathy that gives Rev. Haffner the air of credibility is rooted in the idea that something profound is being lost in abortion.

She quotes this passage from the previously mentioned ecumenical statement: It is precisely because life and parenthood are so precious that no woman should be coerced to carry a pregnancy to term. I confess that I am at a loss to address that. Life and parenthood are so precious that we must be allowed to avoid the latter by destroying the former?

And finally she closes with this:

Women must be able to make their own moral decisions based on conscience and faith. It is time for us to recognize that as a country and end the attacks on reproductive justice.

But what if my wife makes the moral decision based on conscience and faith to oppose abortion and seek to prohibit it within our community? Why do the moral positions Rev. Haffner supports enjoy a privileged position in our society? By what objective moral authority does she demand we end our attacks on what she terms reproductive justice?

Ultimately this is the problem with the article offered. We are given a point of view without support and assertions without argument. We are assured that the bible demands we do things not addressed in the bible without consideration of the central question of abortion, “What is the unborn?” And finally we are told that the presence of disagreement obligates us to honor decisions to abort unborn human beings as moral and to cease seeking to end abortion. This particular religious case for legalized abortion appears hopelessly flawed.

EITHER Not Honest OR Not Informed [Jay]

2012-01-20T17:05:00.000-08:00

I saw this article (here) written by Ms. Laura Bassett and Mr. Mike Sacks entitled Roe v Wade Still Under Siege, 39 Years Later. The first paragraph sets the tone:

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court voted to protect a woman's right to have an abortion in the early stages of her pregnancy. Before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion was banned in two-thirds of states, and an estimated 1.2 million women a year resorted to illegal, often dangerous back-alley abortions.

There is so much wrong in so short a span that it literally hurt me to read it.

Line 1 Claim 1:

The Supreme court voted to protect a woman's right to have an abortion in the early stages of her pregnancy.

Well that is partially accurate. The Supreme Court voted to protect a woman's right to have an abortion through all 9 months of pregnancy when Doe v Bolton's ludicrously broad health exception is taken into consideration, so one can say that abortion rights in early pregnancy are protected as well. Varying stages of pregnancy are certainly not limiting factors as established in Roe/Doe so the phrasing is either deliberately misleading or accidentally ignorant.

Line 2 Claim 2:

Before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion was banned in two-thirds of states, and an estimated 1.2 million women a year resorted to illegal, often dangerous back-alley abortions.

Oh my. Lets unpack this one a little. The average total number of surgical abortions in the United States for the past several years has hovered at a number similar to 1.2 million. The writers claim an equal number of illegal and often dangerous abortions per year prior to 1973. This claim is all the more remarkable by acknowledging that women had some access to abortion in 1/3 of the states including fairly unfettered access in New York, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. Understand then that the 1.2 million illegal abortions must be in addition to all of the legally obtained abortions in the 1/3 of the states that the writers acknowledge. That should cause an eyebrow to raise.

Here are links to LTI Blog posts addressing this argument in greater detail. (Scott Klusendorf here, Josh Brahm here) They include 1960 testimony from Mary Calderone, former medical director of Planned Parenthood, that 90% of illegal abortions were performed by competent physicians in legitimate medical facilities. I don't know how the writers define the word "often", but it is clear that the overwhelming majority of illegal abortions defy the seedy back alley imagery fueled by pro-choice advocates. This is all well covered by these two links.

Instead, I want to play what I call The Minimal Interest in Accuracy game. When I am reading a claim like this I try to imagine that I am writing the post in question. Then I say, "If I had even a minimal interest in being accurate I would check out that data. It looks weird." Now since I only have a minimal interest I am not going to spend hours on this so I will just Google something like "Number of illegal abortion in 1972." I immediately find this article at The Guttmacher Institute entitled Lessons from Before Roe and lo' and behold just a few lines in I find the claim that in the 1950's and 60's the estimated number of illegal abortions ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million. It even talks about a study that extrapolated data from North Carolina to reach a number of 829,000 illegal abortions nationally in 1967. There are no sources, but there are numbers.

Now in the minimal interest game I am pro-choice, so I am not likely to hunt down evidence like Josh Brahm did that acknowledges the inflated figures thrown around by those seeking to legalize abortion and to later protect Roe v Wade, but I am still a little thrown off by the disparity between 200,000 and 1.2 million. So I read a little further down and within a couple of dozen seconds I find this:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 1972 alone, 130,000 women obtained illegal or self-induced procedures, 39 of whom died.

In the year prior to Roe v Wade, when according to the authors of this article 1.2 million women a year were seeking illegal abortions the data indicates that 130,000 women obtained illegal abortions. According to a pro-choice Planned Parenthood professional 90% of those women obtained their services safely from licensed doctors. The 39 deaths are no less tragic simply because they are fewer than advertised, but it undermines your credibility from the outset when you deliberately mislead your readers as to the pre-Roe environment. In fact, the total number of all abortions in 1973 - after Roe - was 744,600 according to Guttmacher. Given that the number of women seeking illegal abortions must be added to the legal abortions for the total per this article's ridiculous claim, then they are asking us to accept that legalizing abortion dramatically decreased the number of abortions in the neighborhood of 40 - 50%!?

Dialogue is made more productive when those who seek it take a minimal interest in assuring they know what they are talking about. The first two lines of this article tell me all I need to know about these authors. They are either writing about a subject they know nothing about or are deliberately misleading their audience. Either way, I prefer honest informed dialogue.

The 2012 Elections: Five Questions for Pro-Lifers [Scott]

2012-01-19T04:04:00.001-08:00

Christian Research Journal just posted the link to the article.

Think Christianly Videos [Jay]

2012-01-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Last year I had the great pleasure of working with Jonathan Morrow of Think Christianly by doing a presentation at his worldview forum at Fellowship Bible Church in Murfreesboro, TN. They produced two short video excerpts from the 2 hour presentation that are now on his blog. The links are below.

Later this week I will begin my review of Jonathan's new book Think Christianly. The review will be more comprehensive but the short answer is that this book needs to be in the hands of ministers everywhere. It asks tough questions and provides insights from Jonathan and the many experts he interviews on how to engage our culture in an impacting manner. It is superb.

Here are the links:

The Central Issue in the Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice debate.

Do all human beings have a right to life?

Scrooge and the Pro-Choice Christians [Jay]

2012-01-08T17:05:00.000-08:00

This post is for my brothers and sisters in Christ. In the context of a family discussion there are certain agreed upon principles that bind us. We agree that Jesus is the one and only Son of God resurrected to defeat the curse of death deserved by all men. He is the perfect sacrifice freely offered by God of God so that those who deserved eternal separation might enjoy the eternal presence of the Lord of all. We agree that as God's children we bear his image and that our lives are governed by the moral standards established through his immutable and maximally excellent nature. We agree on this and so much more yet some of us have reached different conclusions on the moral nature of abortion. As many of us following the dictates of our conscience have dedicated our energies to protecting unborn life from what we understand to be the immorality of abortion, others following their own conscience determined that same act of abortion to be a legitimately moral choice or necessary evil to look after the welfare of those facing undesired pregnancy.

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is part of my personal Christmas tradition, and every year I take something new from the reading. It reminds me of the bible in one sense in that the general story is so well known that few people take the time to actually read it. They assume they know it and as a result miss the richness of thoughts and dialogue that are absent from the voluminous television and movie versions.

I have yet to meet the defender of Scrooge against the charge that he is a bad man. His combination of greed and disregard for others is fully displayed when he answers the call to contribute to a special Christmas charitable fund by saying the poor ought to take advantage of the prisons and workhouses that Mr. Scrooge's tax dollars already support. When told that many cannot avail themselves of these institutions and others would rather die, he famously responds, “If they would rather die... they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Later in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Present, his heart is moved by the plight of Tiny Tim. He asks the spirit if Tiny Tim will survive to which the Spirit replies:

“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race... will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

That dialogue makes it into most every version, but the words of the Ghost immediately following are usually absent. As Scrooge grieves to recall the harshness of his earlier pronouncement the Ghost says:

“Man... if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, and what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

There is no way to compare anyone to Scrooge without leaving yourself open to the charge of being uncharitable. Aren't abortion rights supporters acting with noble aspirations to limit the suffering of poor women and to protect the freedom and equality of a gender that has fought to earn respect and compensation on par with their male counterparts? Aren't they protecting people from the burden and pain of living an unwanted life? How are these thoughtful people in any way like Scrooge?

Another benefit to reading the book is further insight into the man being redeemed. In a seldom quoted passage earlier in the story, the woman that Scrooge intended to marry, Belle, explains the decline of Scrooge. What was it that hardened him? Why did he become what he was? The answer, the fear of being poor once again. He was once poor and happy to be so, but then she gently says:

“You fear the world too much... All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one...”

So it seems to be with those who agree about so much regarding God, Jesus, the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and the value of human life. So many of their concerns are driven by that same fear of the world and its sordid reproach.

A friend and I have both separately been asked by different pastors, “If we get rid of abortion, what are we supposed to do with all of the poor children?” A man on a mission trip with me told me that China was doing the best they could and that the one child policy – the policy that has led to uncountable abortions, many forced against the will of the parents - was a necessary evil to control the threat of overpopulation. Another minister said that as much as he hated abortion, he hated the idea of suffering unwanted and unloved children even more. These people claim to be uncertain of the identity of the unborn as fully human. As a result they assume that the best way to combat certain social ills is to champion full access to abortion.

But the argument “I don't know for certain what the identity of the unborn is so I must not force my beliefs on others” makes an elementary mistake. As Frank Beckwith points out, in an effort to remain neutral we are asked to support a policy that treats all unborn legally as if they were not human. In the face of a lack of consensus, we are told that neutrality demands the other side – the other beliefs - get every legal consideration and those who believe the unborn to be fully human can merely refrain from participating. Abortion is regrettable, unfortunate, but ultimately necessary to do good so anyone may kill them for any reason at any point in pregnancy. For those that are concerned that we are killing more than a million innocent human beings a year without proper moral justification, well that is the price of a pluralistic and secular society. After all, if we don't know for certain what they are then how can we ask others not to kill them assuming there is a “them” to kill. They may be nothing so we may have the right to do what we are doing. As Dr. William Lane Craig once told me, it would seem more appropriate that ignorance would lead us to err to the side of caution. Only in abortion do we decide it is virtue to kill what we claim to not fully understand or that we claim we cannot identify with confidence.

A friend and minister often tells me that what breaks his heart is that people cannot believe that God can handle what they failed to prevent or foresee. They are driven by fear. What about all the poor children? How will the mother support her child? What about her dreams and desires for herself? The world is a dark scary place and the more people that we add to our ranks the worse it will get especially if those children are unwanted or in some way impaired. People cannot change or modify their behavior and so by fighting abortion you consign us to a world of back alley abortions and overflowing orphanages. All fear, fear, fear.

The arguments for the humanity of the unborn and their value are well chronicled on this blog. In this post I wanted to reach out with a simple message from the pages of a ghost story. The unborn are unquestionably human life. For those that believe we have value because of what we are and not by virtue of what we can do, they must decide whether these human lives morally matter. If your answer is truly “I don't know” then I beg you to consider the advice of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Consider what the unborn life may be in the sight of heaven and how our Lord must feel about the ant on the leaf declaring there is too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.

Predictions 2012 [Scott]

2011-12-31T20:26:00.000-08:00

1. The pro-life movement will not be fully satisfied with the GOP nominee, but will recognize that its number one goal for the next eight years must be the defeat of the party that is sworn to uphold abortion.

2. President Obama will lose, unless the nominee is Ron Paul.

3. More pro-life Democrats will lose seats.

4. The pro-life student movement will grow two ways. First, it will grow numerically. Second, it will grow intellectually, moving from the mere study of apologetics to craving speech and debate training.

5. The "Friends for Life" camps will double in size this year.

6. The Dodgers will shock everyone by winning the National League West. The Angels, meanwhile, will barely finish above 500.

7. UCLA football will win 9 games in 2012 by including high school opponents and Jr. Colleges.

8. Romney-Santorum.

9. House--GOP +6; Senate GOP +4

10. Pro-life pregnancy centers will take a more active role reaching Catholic and Protestant high schools with abortion presentations--rather than merely focusing on abstinence talks.

Products of their culture [Megan]

2011-12-30T14:24:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, I stood before a room full of Fellowship of Christian Athlete students at a private high school and briefly addressed the difference between subjective truth and objective truth. Subjective truth, I told them, is truth that is created; it is a matter of preference; it tells you more about the subject than the object(s) in question. Objective truth, on the other hand, is truth that is discovered; it can be either right or wrong; it is true apart from the subject.
Afterward I borrowed a page from the playbook of Brett Kunkle from Stand to Reason and gave the students a quiz on the topic. I offered statements — “Reese’s Pieces are better than M&Ms. The leaves on the trees change with the seasons.” — and they responded with either “subjective” or “objective.”
They did great — until we got to the last two statements on the list.
When I said, “It is wrong to torture toddlers for fun” — a moral claim — only three students spoke. All three said, “subjective.”
“Interesting,” I told them, brows raised. “Let’s try one more. ‘Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’”
Silence.
These very intelligent high school students were products of their culture. They are fired upon from every direction with the idea that moral and religious truths are subjective in nature. This idea has so permeated our society that issues like abortion are only to be discussed with caveats such as, “This is my truth, but you are free to believe differently.” This thinking is not only grossly wrong — it is dangerous.
Twenty minutes later, after a brief presentation on Christianity as an objective worldview, these students were on fire. Not only could they reasonably believe that their faith and the truths it upholds are objectively true — they could learn to defend them!
Many students lingered after the 25-minute presentation to share questions and thoughts, and departed only after the bell had rung signaling their first classes of the day. They wanted more. This was unlike anything they had heard before, and after years of nibbling on the basics, they had caught a glimpse of the decadent banquet before them and yearned to dig in!
Moments like that one — seeing the hunger and excitement and passion ignited in the eyes and minds of students of all ages — are what excite me most. I'm looking forward to more opportunities in 2012.

Exactly Right [Scott]

2011-12-29T19:16:00.000-08:00

This author highlights a sad chapter in the pregnancy center movement.

My own 1999 article on the same subject caused no small stir.

Thankfully, there are many centers who buck the trend.

Debate Cross-Examination Done Right [Scott]

2011-12-13T11:26:00.000-08:00

Done right, cross-examination helps your debate presentation three ways. First, it helps clarify your opponent’s extremist position. Second, it gives you opportunity to discredit his evidence (or lack thereof) and expose his flawed logic. Third, it allows you to gain information you can use later in the debate.

The rules for cross-x are simple: The person doing the questioning controls the exchange at that point in the debate. For example, when it’s your turn to cross-x your opponent, you may interrupt him at any point and move to the next question. While you shouldn’t be rude (give him reasonable time to answer, no more), you also shouldn’t let him ramble on.

Stephanie Gray of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform presents a textbook example of how it's done:

The Relevant Study of Evangelicals and Premarital Sex is Flawed [Scott]

2011-12-13T08:47:00.001-08:00

Kevin Deyoung explains why we shouldn't buy the claim that 80 percent of Evangelicals are having premarital sex:

1. The study was conducted by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute which has deep and historic ties to Planned Parenthood. There is every incentive, then, for this study to find that almost everyone is having sex and is in need of contraceptives (or abortion rights).

2. The survey's methodology is flawed. The study intentionally over-represented African Americans and Hispanics. In the 2010 census whites made up 63.7% of the U.S. population, blacks 12.2%, and Hispanics 16.3%. Yet, in the study cited by Relevant (and others) whites account for 50% of the sample, blacks 20%, and Hispanics 22%. Given the fact that 24% of white children are in single-parent homes, compared to 67% for African American children and 40% for Hispanic children, the disproportionate sampling in the National Survey likely has the effect of skewing the numbers toward indicating greater promiscuity.

3. We should also take into account the large number of persons who refused to take the survey. According to page 10 of this report over 100,000 phone calls were made to get a sample size of 1800. At least 12-15% of those “missed” surveys were refusals. Could it be that many sexually inactive young singles were uninterested in taking a survey almost entirely about contraceptives?

Kevin concludes as follows:

Statistics like the 80% need to be taken with a generous grain of salt. I don’t doubt that fornication is a big problem, bigger than most pastors realize. But when figures like 80% get thrown around we are led to believe (or flat out told) that Christians behave no different than anyone else.

And yet, consider two points.

1. Even using the numbers quoted in Relevant, it’s still the case that the percentage of celibate singles is almost twice as high for evangelicals and for everyone else. But that will not make headlines.

2. The National Survey, like most surveys, simply measures those who self-identify as evangelical. As you can see here, Question 80 of the study asks, “Do you consider yourself to be a born-again Christian, evangelical, or fundamentalist?” Only 476 of the 1800 said yes. Of these 476 unmarried 18-29 year-olds, apparently 80% have had sex before (although only 42% say they are currently in a sexual relationship). But we do not know what sort of “evangelicals” these 476 persons are. The next question in the survey (Q81) asks about frequency in attending religious services. It would be interesting to see the percentages of fornication among weekly churchgoers. Still too high no doubt, but probably much lower. As Bradley Wright argues in his book, there is a strong correlation between church attendance and more faithful sexual behavior across the board (Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites, 138-142). There are lots of nominal Christians in this country whose commitment consists of putting on a religious label for a survey. Looking at what people actually believe and examining their actual engagement with the church is a better mechanism for making claims about the rights and wrongs of Christian behavior.

Here’s the bottom line: don’t believe every stat you read. They are sometimes false and often kind of true, but the real shocking figures are rarely quite as much as meets the eye.

In Their Own Words [Scott]

2011-12-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

One two-week period a year, we ask you to help us. Life Training Institute depends on you, our fellow pro-lifers, to reach students with pro-life presentations. The students have no money to pay us to speak. And for the most part, neither do their schools.

So PLEASE, reach for your credit card (or checkbook) and send the most generous year-end gift you can.

I’ll let the students tell you first-hand why your gift matters. These comments all come from recent posts on my Facebook wall, save the last one which was sent to Megan's cell phone:

I attended a Summit Youth Conference at Bryan College last July and heard you speak on the topic of abortion. I just recently wrote an argumentative paper arguing that abortion is wrong, and very much of my paper was made up of some of the points that you made, especially the "S.L.E.D." acronym. I thank you very much for your constant service to the pro-life cause, and to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. God has done (and will do) much good through you, and I praise His name for that. May you and your family have a blessed Holiday season.
-Ethan

The Case For Life is such an incredible book. I am currently writing a persuasive essay about ESCR and your book has been a great help to me. It is exciting to share the truth with others. So thank you! Have a good one!
-Sarah

I have been waiting to tell you the good news. I began a chapter of teens for life at my high school after attending the teens for life summer camp. We had our first meeting and without an announcement made at school, we had 10 students all dedicated to utilizing their time and talents to the pro-life meeting. The training I received from you helped me begin this club because, since it is a public school, I am not allowed to make it an official club if it has religion in it.

I just wanted to say thank you and to let you know of the progress I have made since the summer.

-Nicole

Just wanted to let you know that I used a lot of your techniques that I learned at Summit Ministries today. I gave a speech on why abortion is wrong, and there was a mini debate after I finished. So I just wanted to thank you and let you know that you had an enormous impact on my life.
-Austin

Scott, Tabby had to write and present a persuasive argument against abortion...The professor said he has taught for 30 years (college level speech classes) and has seen many presentations on this topic, but has never seen it presented in this way, nor as well done! Tabby told him that she was “Klusendorf-trained!”
-Lori (Parent)

Megan, Thank you so much for coming this morning! You were amazing. You have no idea how many people and teachers came up to me saying how much they enjoyed your presentation and how they’ve always wanted someone to explain worldview to them. Thank you so much!

-Maddie, 18

Please make your gift here.

Thank you!

Scott

Get to the Point! Pro-Life Speaking Without Losing Your Mind [Scott]

2011-12-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

I just finished the manuscript for a book that, for the moment, goes by the above title. Release date is roughly June 1, Lord willing. Below is the introduction.

In his “No More Excuses” seminar, pro-life apologist Gregg Cunningham asks this question:

“Are any of your fears about pro-life speaking worth the price of unborn lives that could have been saved if you were more courageous?”

If you are pro-life, you’ve just been summoned to speak. But now what?

The thesis of this book is that engaging pro-life speakers are not born; they are organized. They march into a speaking event knowing exactly what they will say, how they will say it, and why it matters to their audience. With a little sweat, you can be that organized. You don’t have to be cool or clever. You don’t need a graduate degree. You just need to be clear. This book will show you how. In short, my objective is to turn you from a quiet pro-life Christian to an effective pro-life communicator—whether your audience has seven people or seven hundred.

Notice I said “effective” not “professional.” Put simply, mastering this book will not land you a keynote address at a major Christian conference, or even a pro-life one. It will not get you noticed or paid—at least right away. A professional conference speaker fine-tunes his craft for years, and reading a short book like this will not make you a pro.

But it may start you impacting the very audiences most at risk for abortion. Let’s be honest: Most people attending major Christian conferences aren’t contemplating killing their unborn offspring. But three blocks over is a Catholic high school with 400 students, half of them secular. Two blocks beyond is an evangelical one filled with kids who struggle articulating a biblical worldview on a host of topics, including abortion. And in between are 20 church youth groups, almost none of which have ever featured a pro-life presentation. The keynote speaker at the Christian conference won’t be reaching those kids.

But you might.

Let’s take a closer look at your audience. Inside that Catholic school is a frustrated religion teacher who knows that many of his students are not buying church teaching on abortion, but he’s clueless how to change things. His own surveys reveal that only 25 percent of his students think moral truth is real and knowable. The rest are full-blown relativists. He’s looking for reinforcements, but the previous pro-life speaker bored the kids to tears with statistics and a disjointed personal testimony. He won’t schedule you for a full assembly until he sees what you can deliver, but he’ll let you try your stuff with 21 kids in his tenth grade religion class. You bite. This book will prepare you for what happens next.

Down the street, an evangelical youth pastor laments the loss of critical thinking in his students. He worries that once they graduate, the secular university will devour what little faith they have. Your pro-life talk is 40 minutes, but he wonders if they’ll listen beyond the 140 characters allowed by Twitter.

Is serious pro-life content dead on arrival in the age of social networking? Should pro-life speakers sacrifice truth that requires students to think? The correct response to Twitter is not surrender, but equipping. Pro-life speakers must present compelling arguments that can compete in the marketplace of ideas. It stretches the mind, but kids can take it. In fact, they want it. My own experience confirms this.

Each year I speak to thousands of students at Catholic and Protestant high schools. My talks run 60 minutes and other than a short DVD clip depicting abortion, I skip all media gadgetry. Instead, I engage students with a robust defense of the pro-life position. Almost always the schools want me back. Meanwhile, college students are showing a growing interest in pro-life apologetics. In 2011, I delivered a keynote address to collegians at the annual Students for Life of America Conference in Washington D.C. Roughly 60 students attended the 2004 conference. The 2011 conference sold out with over 1,800 registrants from 150 campuses. Twitter or not, these students appreciate clear thinking presented in a winsome manner.

Admittedly, this book is nowhere near an exhaustive treatment of public speaking. It’s more like an expanded outline, having only two major divisions. Part one gives you principles for organizing, then delivering, persuasive pro-life content to students in Catholic and Protestant high schools. Even if you’re a rookie, you can deliver a solid pro-life talk if you do five things right:

1. Ask five essential questions before you speak
2. Organize your scattered thoughts into a razor sharp focus
3. Say it well so people listen
4. Graciously use abortion pictures for maximum impact
5. Invite yourself to speak

While pro-life Christians everywhere can use these principles to great effect, pregnancy centers enjoy a unique advantage. They already enjoy excellent reputations in their communities, making access to the students easier. My hope is they will capitalize on that advantage.

Part two applies those principles to debates and is addressed primarily to pro-life college and graduate students, right to life staffers, and apologetics geeks. At the edge of town sits the state college. A student from the campus pro-life group is organizing a debate with a local Planned Parenthood official and he wants you to represent the pro-life view. I know what you’re thinking: “Okay, speaking to a 10th grade religion class at the local Catholic high school is challenging enough. Doing a debate in front of college kids is simply out of the question.” Oh? Why would you think a thing like that? First, debates are an excellent way to reach students at public universities. Second, you can engage abortion-choice advocates in a public forum—and live to tell about it—if you follow eight steps to a successful debate:

1. Define Victory
2. Negotiate a Good Format
3. Frame the Debate with Your Opening
4. Narrate the Debate with Your Rebuttal
5. Expose Bankrupt Arguments
6. Ask Good Questions
7. Take Good Notes
8. Train Harder than Your Opponent

Consider Gregg’s question again: “Are any of your fears about pro-life speaking worth the price of unborn lives that could have been saved if you were more courageous?”

If the answer is no, it’s time to turn the page on timidity. It’s time to get organized.

Election Questions [Scott]

2011-12-01T10:17:00.001-08:00

How should we prioritize election issues?

Justin Taylor answers here.

My (similar) answer is here.

Is abstinence-only killing the pro-life message? [Scott]

2011-11-28T06:38:00.000-08:00

When my daughter Emily was in 2nd grade, I spoke to her class about pro-life. Emily attends our local public elementary school and her teacher thought the students would benefit hearing from a real life author. How could I resist?

As mentioned in a previous blogpost, I began by holding up a parchment copy of “The Declaration of Independence” (which the class had been studying) and read the following: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men.”

I then asked, “What makes us equal? It can't be our body size, because some are larger than others. It can’t be how smart we are, because some have good report cards while others have bad ones. It can't be our bellybuttons because some point out rather than in. So what makes us equal?”

From all over the room, tiny voices shot back “We’re all human!” Exactly. The only thing we all share equally is our humaness.

I then held up my book The Case for Life. The cover shows a picture of two tiny feet in-utero. “What’s this?” Without a moment’s delay, kids all over that room shouted, “a baby in the mommy’s tummy.”

“Right.” And what kind of baby is this?” Again, there was no delay. “It’s a human baby.”

“Right again. But how is this human in the picture different than us?”

Hands shot up everywhere. “It’s smaller.” “It looks different than mommy.” “It can’t talk yet.” “You can’t see his eyes yet.” “He doesn’t go to school yet.”

“True. Do you think that those differences mean the baby in the picture is less human than any of us?”

A resounding chorus of voices shot back, “No!”

Notice the kids didn’t need a doctorate degree to grasp the obvious truth about our common human nature. I made a case for human equality (and thus, a case for the pro-life view) without mentioning the word abortion. More importantly, they understood perfectly what I was driving at.

But they won't for long.

By the time these same kids graduate high school, many will have talked themselves out of the obvious truths they once espoused as second graders. As Frank Beckwith and Greg Koukl point out, religion and morality will be mere preferences, like choosing your favorite flavor of ice cream. Intrinsic human value will be subject to a technological ethic that says that if we can do it, we should do it—meaning, for example, that human embryos are fair game if killing them helps us cure disease. The very definition of humanness will be up for grabs.

Sad, but many of my wide-eyed second graders will morph into full-blown moral relativists and religious pluralists! They’ll accept truth in the hard sciences, but not in religion and ethics.

Just like their secular friends, church school kids absorb relativism. True, they’re not absorbing it in the classroom (hopefully), but they are absorbing it from the surrounding culture. If you doubt this, try going into a large Catholic or Protestant high school and writing the following two statements on the board:

1. “Jesus is the only way to salvation and all other world religions are false.”
2. “Elective abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being and laws permitting it are scandalous.”

Think the kids will agree? My own experience says you will immediately take heat from a sizable minority even in those schools! “You’re intolerant to judge person’s sincerely held beliefs. So you’re saying Gandhi is in Hell?” “Who’s to say what’s best for a woman facing a crisis pregnancy. Shouldn’t we trust her reasons?” “Why are you an absolutist on human life when there could be serious consequences for a woman who’s forced to have a child?”

As for the rest who don’t publicly espouse relativism, they generally fall into one of four categories on the specific topic of abortion: 1) Those who agree with the relativists, but are quiet about it, 2) those who aren’t relativists, but support abortion because they fear bad things will happen if it’s outlawed, 3) those who agree with me, but have no idea how to refute the relativists, and 4) those who agree with me and persuasively answer the relativists. Only number four can help the pro-life cause, and number four is usually a very small group!

A short time later, these same students land at college where the assault on religion and morality goes nuclear. Are the pro-life kids in group #3 and group #4 ready for that?

So, when pro-life guest speakers visit the classroom in Catholic and Protestant high schools, what’s their primary answer to this worldview crisis?

Abstinence talks.

Admittedly, I've not conducted an empirical study to prove this and I could be mistaken, but my own experience as a pro-life speaker suggests that in many towns across America, abstinence is the only pro-life message given to students. Each year, I speak at dozens of pregnancy center banquets and most centers can’t wait to tell donors about the work they are doing in schools. When I privately ask what, exactly, they are doing in the classroom, the answer is usually some variation on the abstinence theme. That is, they are telling students why waiting for sex until marriage is a good idea. Almost never are they systematically reaching students with persuasive pro-life content on abortion.

I don’t think pro-lifers grasp the enormity of the challenge facing us. Many of these kids have fractured worldviews where right and wrong are mere preferences and human life is a mere commodity. Against that backdrop, our primary response in schools is to slip in a little behavior modification? “Hey kids, keep your pants zipped or you’ll get an STD!” Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight!

Catholic and Protestant students need pro-life talks aimed squarely at the reasons our culture supports abortion in the first place. If pro-life advocates don’t deliver those talks, who will?

I'm not saying abstinence talks aren't important. But it's hugely problematic if that's our primary message to students who will soon be dropped into a university environment where they are out-gunned and in way over their heads, where pro-life views will be under constant attack.

Again, my own experience may be mistaken, so feel free to comment away. But I fear that I'm right. With that in mind, I've begun work on a new book aimed at equipping pregnancy center staff and right-to-life affiliates to deliver persuasive pro-life talks in Catholic and Protestant high schools. Publication date is sometime before summer.

This 39 minute talk explains the problems pro-life students face in more detail.

Congratulations, Megan! [Scott]

2011-11-21T08:18:00.001-08:00

Our LTI speaking team is growing. Jay Watts, Mike Spencer, and Jannique Stewart have already begun impacting students with pro-life training, and now I'm thrilled to announce that Megan Almon--a vital member of our team--has completed her M.A. in Christian Apologetics at Biola University.

Megan, a former University of Georgia Gymdog, was a part of the 2002 SEC Championship team. After graduating in 2004 with a journalism degree, she worked three years for a daily newspaper and won awards for her feature stories. In 2008, she left the paper to pursue graduate studies--first at Mercer University, then, Biola.

Biola's graduate program in apologetics is second to none, and Megan not only completed her course work--she did so with high honors! (Confession: I graduated from the same program, and her GPA beats mine!)

Megan's graduate degree in Christian apologetics is vital to our pro-life efforts because while the street-level debate over abortion rages on, a serious intellectual discussion about the foundation for human rights continues almost unnoticed among Christians. What makes humans valuable? Can secularism provide an adequate grounding for basic human rights? How do natural rights differ from merely positive (legal) ones? How do war, social justice, and theology impact debates over abortion?

Megan is uniquely qualified to train pro-lifers to persuasively answer those questions, and I highly recommend her to you as a speaker and educator. In the months ahead, we plan to use her expertise to launch a new training seminar for pregnancy center directors and staff entitled, “Reaching Hearts, Engaging Minds: Communicating Pro-life Truth with Love and Conviction.” Her objective is to equip pregnancy center staff to reach students in Catholic and Protestant high schools with pro-life content.

In addition to working with LTI, Megan also oversees "Answers," a monthly public forum and presentation held by Four Corners Church of Newnan that addresses topics of an apologetic nature. She also has experience working with youth organizations, campus outreach, and women's groups.

Endorsements of Megan:

I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Megan Almon since 2007. She is an authentic and creative communicator of God's word to high school students. Her effectiveness comes from her passionate love of the Lord and being theologically grounded in His word. She is relationship driven and students easily open up to her. She is an amazing young woman of God who is being used by Him in wonderful ways.

Reverend Brian Morgan
Minster to Students
First Baptist Church, Newnan, GA

I am happy to recommend Megan Almon as an articulate defender of Christian truth. I have come to know Megan through teaching her at McAfee School of Theology and dialoguing with her outside the classroom. Megan is a serious student of Scripture, Christian theology, and Christian ethics. She is clear and precise in both written and oral communication. She knows both what to say and how to say it. She is able to digest multiple perspectives while being clear about the best understanding of biblical faith. I recommend her highly!

Dr. David P. Gushee
Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics, Mercer University

Congratulations, Megan! I'm proud of you!

The Inhumanity of Easy Answers [Jay]

2011-11-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

Recently, I stood in The Pit at UNC – Chapel Hill and answered challenges from the student body. Greg Koukl's advice that “if anyone gets mad you lose” was foremost in my mind as I dealt with all the common objections when the gathering crowd locked in on the rape exception. As always, I opened with the acknowledgement that rape is grave moral violation of the woman and that I understood that many women may feel that the continuation of the pregnancy is a continuation of that violation. From that foundation, I built the argument that we must address the identification of the life created during the rape and consider our duties and obligations to that life in addition to the emotional condition of the mother. With hundreds of female college students in earshot, I knew that there was probably a young woman that had endured rape listening to me as I made my case.

An angry young man yelled at me, “So you think it is fair to force a woman to have a baby when she was raped?”

This is not rhetorical tennis and it is not required that I hit back the shot served to me. Understanding that we are talking about real people experiencing real fear and pain I responded, “I have been clear from the beginning of this conversation that there is nothing fair about what happens to a woman who has been raped. Whatever happens to her from the moment some man decided to assault her to satisfy his perversity is grossly unfair. When I say that I believe our moral obligations to the unborn human life conceived in that assault require that she not be party to destroying that life, I recognize that I am saying something that is hard for you to like.”

“That said, I don't think it is constructive to argue that she will either be able to get an abortion and begin healing or she will be forced to carry the baby to term and be further victimized. I am not convinced that the seemingly clear answer of allowing abortion in the cases of rape and incest are as superior in consideration of the woman as that simple way of looking at it portrays. I believe we have a moral obligation to protect the unborn life, and I also believe that we have obligations to the born as well. A wounded and hurting woman needs us to step in and offer her love at this point. To make certain she gets counseling, reach her in her needs, and help her to place the child in adoption if she chooses. The argument that human beings matter requires us to offer help and community to these women and not to abandon them to seemingly easy answers.” As students asked what that looked like, I was able to assure them that I have seen people do exactly those things in local pregnancy centers and this was not a case of wishful thinking.

This past year offered me the opportunity to talk to a lot of people from both sides of the issue of abortion. One of the most interesting things I have noticed is how little faith both sides have in each other in general. I think that this is where my past as an atheist and pro-choicer helps me a bit. I am convinced that good arguments by good arguers can make a difference because they made a difference in my life, and when a college student comes at me with guns blazing I picture “college Jay” and think about how to reach that young person. Attitude is unquestionably as important as content in that endeavor.

When I train groups I tell them it is important not to trivialize the felt needs that drive people toward abortion. Our argument is that the unborn are fully human and possess intrinsic moral value and worth. Our argument is not that women who get abortions and people that support abortion are contemptible by nature. Though some people may hold contemptible views or express themselves in contemptible ways, the person in front of me is another human being with intrinsic value and worth and the goal is to convince them they are mistaken on a vitally important moral issue. We should not merely appear as if we care about the person in front of us but actually care about their concerns and ideas.

At a another recent event a woman raised her hand. “What do you say to someone whose argument is that the world is so terrible and awful that it would be wrong to bring a child into it?” We train people in Greg Koukl's tactical approach to conversations using questions to help progress the dialogue, and this group was working on that skill when she asked her question. They waited to hear my response, but I momentarily paused. Not because I didn't have an answer, but because it is too easy to instinctively play that perverse game of rhetorical tennis without noticing something troubling.

I asked her, “Has someone said that to you? An actual pregnant woman considering abortion as opposed to a hypothetical discussion on campus with a student that disagrees with your views?” She nodded. “It is important that you proceed in that conversation with special care. Obviously my first question to her would be to find out what she means when she says the world is terrible and awful. Certainly there are terrible and awful things that happen every day, but there are wonderful and beautiful things that happen as well including – for me – my relationships with my children. Be mindful that the person in front of you may be wrestling with profound difficulties. If someone is convinced there is nothing good in the world and the only response to this is to deny their unborn child the opportunity to be born and live their life - in essence arguing that the ultimate expression of love toward her child is to kill him before he grows to become as miserable as she is - they need more than a good pro-life argument. They need help. They need community.”

Discussing abortion effectively does not require that we immediately access easy answers that settle our every doubt. Leon Kass points out in Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity that our ethical reflections will ultimately be applied by the real human community. That community is messy and complicated and sooner or later we will be forced to confront problems for which there are no easy answers. The presence of suffering, pain, and emotional confusion is not a counter argument to the identification of the unborn as intrinsically valuable human life. The profound pain of a raped woman or the paralyzing depression of a soul that lost all hope in life are not marginalized by arguing that unborn human life has a fundamental right not to be unjustly killed. Nor does the introduction of the choice of abortion act as a magical cure for such things. They are issues for which there are no easy answers and so the pro-life view does not suffer for failing to do what can't be done. There is no world of easy answers to terrible realities.

Pro-Life Apologetics Youth Camp June 22-23 [Scott]

2011-11-18T20:07:00.001-08:00

The video from the 2011 camp is below, featuring Lila Rose and yours truly.

Topics include:

1. Pro-Life 101: Making a Case for Life on Hostile Turf
2. Pro-Life 201: Advanced Pro-Life Apologetics
3. Pro-Life 301: Speech and Debate Training

Dates: June 22-23 (Fort Wayne, IN)
Details soon here.

Helpful Links [Scott]

2011-11-18T03:25:00.001-08:00

Josh Brahm writes on blatant moral relativism found in Modern Warfare 3.

Alan Shlemon at STR has a good post on the Left's endorsement of graphic images--for cigarettes, but not abortion.

Are you a discouraged pro-lifer? Feeling beat-up? If you're a Christian, this post from Amy Hall will help you make sense of things.

Christopher Kaczor writes on the ethics of ectopic pregnancy. He makes a number of points:

1. The fact that a medical procedure brings about fetal death with certainty does not mean it’s intentional or direct abortion.
2. Removing the embryo from its pathological location is not intrinsically evil, but only circumstantially so.
3. Acting directly upon someone’s body does not, in itself, mean that all the effects which follow from acting are intended.
4. Regarding appeals to Church authority, Directives #45 and #36 are best understood to address uterine pregnancy, not removal of the embryo from its pathological location.
5. The fact that MXT acts directly upon the trophoblast and not for the benefit of the trophoblast does not indicate that it is intentional mutilation.
6. Given there is no consensus among Catholic philosophers on MXT (for example, William May has changed his position and now accepts both Sapingostomy and MXT), probabilism may be the best guide.

Stephanie Gray Debates Abortion [Scott]

2011-11-17T09:30:00.000-08:00

...at the University of Ottawa and wins, again.

The video is here.

Jivin J provides some analysis:

I like how the debate allowed the participants to question each other. That happens at about the 40 minute mark. In about a minute, Gray totally dismantles Morales' definition of person and the entire basis for his argument. When Morales' time to question Gray arrives, it becomes more awkward than some of Rick Perry's debate moments. After a couple of questions, he has no clue what to ask her. In fairness, he did step up for the debate about a week before the debate after numerous pro-choice Canadians declined the opportunity to debate Gray. The vocal pro-choice students in the audience (who frequently interrupted Gray and called her names) try to help him out and are clearly frustrated by their side's inability to put up a solid defense of the pro-choice position.

Something I found very interesting was Morales' continued attempts to argue that the unborn aren't children but at various times he would slip, call the unborn "children" and then correct himself.

Morales' knowledge of fetal development was also severely lacking. Some of his assertions about how developed the unborn are at certain stages during the question and answer time were absurd.

Every time I watch one of these types of debate, it seems like the pro-choice debater hasn't really thought through their position. One of the last questioners asks Morales how on one hand he can assert morality shouldn't be imposed but on the other hand he thinks the government should fund abortions. Morales answer is incoherent. He points out how he is anti-war and thinks he shouldn't have to fund the war (so he's opposed to that imposition of morality) but unfortunately you have go along with what the majority of the country favors ergo tax-funded abortions (a imposition of morality he favors). "Don't impose your morality" seems to be much more of a catchphrase than something he's actually thought about. It's like he sees any law against something he favors as a horrible imposition of morality but when he wants someone to accept his morals, then it's not really an imposition of morality.

Bad Reason #2 for not Showing Abortion Pictures: Post-Abortion Guilt [Scott]

2011-11-17T05:43:00.000-08:00

Here's the claim: "Graphic pictures lay a guilt trip on post-abortion men and women."

Short answer: The remedy for post-abortion guilt is not avoidance. It’s forgiveness. When set within the context of the Christian gospel, the pictures can be used to bring healing to those in denial over sin.

You can watch how I introduce a short abortion film to high school students here.

Before showing a short abortion clip, I tell those listening that I’m not there to condemn. But I don’t stop there. I tell them why I’m not there to condemn. Here's what I said at a pregnancy center banquet last week near Orlando:

The reason I’m not here to lay a guilt trip on anyone is because I’m a firm believer in the gospel of Jesus Christ. That gospel, men and women, puts everyone of us in this room on the same footing before the bar of God’s justice. The gospel tells of a good and holy God who created humans to worship and enjoy him forever. But we rebelled against our creator, set ourselves up as God, and God who had every right to destroy the race for its rebellion against Him, did something remarkable. He sent Jesus, the sinless one, the second member of the Godhead, to bear in full His righteous wrath against sin.

Now, we don’t like that word “wrath” because it reminds us of an angry parent or vengeful authority figure. But God’s wrath is not an uncontrolled explosion of rage; it’s his settled hatred of sin. And if God is holy and just, he can’t sweep sin under the rug. He must punish it. And he did punish it, by crushing His Son on a cross for your sin and mine. As the prophet Isaiah tells us in chapter 53: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by his wounds we are healed.” That’s right, God the Father crushed His Son so self-centered sinners like me can be completely forgiven.

You know what I call that? I call that incredibly good news for those who’ve sinned on abortion. Listen, if that’s you—whether you’re a man who encouraged a young woman to abort or a woman who chose that option because you thought you had no other way out—you don’t need an excuse. You need an exchange, Christ’s righteousness for your sinfulness. For those who trust in Jesus alone for salvation, God gives them that righteousness. The Scriptures speak of it in 2 Corinthians 5: 21—“God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God.”

But the news gets even better. For those who trust Jesus, God the Father not only forgives their sins; He adopts them into His own family as dearly loved children. Wow. So if that’s you, don’t try to make up for your bad stuff by doing good stuff. Your good deeds will never atone for your bad ones. Neither will mine. Trust only in the Son. Those who do are no longer condemned but have passed from death to life (John 5:24)

Paul puts it this way: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2: 4-5)

Did you catch that? God is “rich” in mercy. He has “great” love for those broken and sinful people that He saves through His Son. With that good news in mind, let’s take a minute to roll this brief clip. Again, if you wish not watch, feel free to look away…

What’s the result? After almost every presentation—whether a banquet, church service, or chapel—post-abortion men and women thank me for the gracious way I presented my pro-life case. Yes, the pictures are painful to see. But used properly, they set the stage for the good news of the gospel, which alone heals us from our sin. In short, the video does the hard work for me so that I can use my words to soothe and bring hope.

Again, please take few minutes to watch how I introduce the short abortion film. You’ll also see how I use it to point listeners to the gospel of grace: http://vimeo.com/25061075.

Get This Book [Scott]

2011-11-17T04:01:00.000-08:00

Now that the banquet and school talks are done for the year, I've turned to catching up on reading.

At the top of my stack is Jonathan Morrow's Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture.

The thing I love about Jonathan is his gift of translating. He takes weighty (and sometimes complicated) philosophical challenges to the faith and answers them in language lay people can understand. Yet--and here is the best part--he does it without talking down to educated readers. That's what set apart his excellent book Welcome to College and it's also what makes his current book shine.

Topics include (to name just a few):

--Thinking Christianly about all of life
--Cultivating a thoughtful faith
--Becoming like the Jesus the world needs
--Truth, tolerance, and relativism
--Christianity in the public square
--Bioethics in the 21st Century
--Questions of faith and science
--Rediscovering God's design for sex

I'll post a full review later. But for now, don't wait to benefit from Jonathan's contribution to the defense of the faith.

Why the Pro-Life Youth are Matchless [R.J. McVeigh]

2011-11-15T21:51:00.002-08:00

Note: Below is a guest editorial from R.J. McVeigh, who I've had the joy of mentoring through Students for Life of America. R.J. is 19 and a student at Grand Valley State University preparing for a career in medicine--unless I can talk him out of it in favor of being a full-time pro-life apologist. I'm a tough mentor: My students must read and digest lots of apologetic material, then discuss it with me over the phone. R.J. takes that challenge on with gusto, and it showed in his stellar debate performance at a nearby university, where he led the pro-life panelists into battle. Enjoy his take on the debate. I changed only a few words for word economy.--Scott

Last week, I participated in a Pro-Choice/Pro-Life debate on a university campus. The structure of the debate was two 4-person panels, consisting entirely of college students. Despite my unavoidable bias towards my own team, I think it is safe to conclude that our Pro-Life panel dominated the debate. The surveys taken from the audience at the end of the debate reinforce this opinion of mine - with all but one survey stating we were more effective. (The one other survey said it was a tie.)

I conclude that we won the debate not only on content, but also on style. For example, while the opposing panel presented their arguments by reading off a typed paper, we delivered our case while looking the audience in the eye and engaging them in what we were saying. While the opposing panel seemed to change their argument every time a different member spoke, our argument was one, singular voice coming from each member. We enunciated. We sited sources for our information. We appealed to science and philosophy, not emotion and religion. We structured our arguments. We broke stereotypes - we had more women on our panel, we didn't mention faith or the bible at all.

All of these things that gave us an edge had very little to do with the actual position we were arguing, they were merely aspects of speaking etiquette that the opposing panel seemed to lack. This made me ask myself: Why was this debate so non-conformed to the stereotypes of Pro-Life/Pro-Choice? I think we've all seen the media template: the pro-Lifer is a Christian, Bible-thumping, emotion-driven person who hasn't stopped to think critically about the issue, while the pro-choicer is an enlightened, educated, non-judgmental, accepting person. Granted, this debate is just one example, but I believe you can see many examples of my analysis if you look for it. What has changed?

1) We've been listening. The Pro-Life youth have grown up in a liberally biased environment. We've heard it all through the media and at the academic level - "Abortion is a religious belief, no one cares what your bibles says", "Empirical evidence is what matters", "Pro-Life people are extremists", "Pro-Life people are so close-minded", "You are all emotion, and no fact", "You can't even argue your case". We've listened when people tell us we are being ineffective. We've learned to base our position on science and philosophy instead of religion and emotion. We've adjusted. We've become equipped to engage at the academic level.

2) We no longer appeal to emotion - they do. When we present logical arguments from points of common agreement - like science and accepted morals (killing toddlers is wrong) - we are met with emotional appeals like, "forcing children to be born into poverty is terrible".

But wait - weren't these the exact type of emotional arguments we were ridiculed for using (and have thus adjusted)? The majority of the Pro-Choice youth only know how to parrot emotional arguments about rape, poverty, and disease masquerading as intelligent arguments. They get angry when we persist in a logical conversation about the emotional claims and what they mean. This is a complete 180 change from what the stereotypes were merely 10 years ago.

3) We are the under-dogs. We realize we are fighting an up-hill battle. Meanwhile, the Pro-Choice youth simply expect the intellectual conversation to be handed to them because they are so used to that being the status-quo. We realize that if we are going to make our voices heard, we had better have our facts straight, are arguments clearly outlined, our sources sited, etc. We prepare like professionals - because we need to be professional in order to be listened to. The Pro-Choice youth don't feel the need to think critically about their position because the media and laws currently agree with them.

4) We have become open-minded, they have become close-minded. The Pro-Life youth WANT to discuss the topics of human value and worth and how we should form our actions/laws. We want to have conversations about this. The Pro-Choice youth want to simply continue dismissing us with the condemnations of "Religious extremists", "You're over-simplifying", "You shouldn't judge others" - and thus put our opposing arguments out of mind. Very few Pro-Choice youth are willing to discuss the issue on a level playing field, without getting angry or offended. The whole idea that being Pro-Choice is the enlightened, progressive position that "fights the power" of the evil, religious, intolerant establishment is a complete illusion. There is nothing more anti-establishment than being Pro-Life, and nothing is less tolerated.

The tables have turned. Eventually, they will see the reverse of stereotypes. The religious, close-minded, extremist, emotional, judgmental zealots have become the intellectual, articulated, well-prepared, confident, charismatic civil-rights activists. It's a new generation.

Gear up, Pro-Choice Americans. We are the youth - and we will not go quietly.

Bad Excuse for not Showing Abortion Pics [Scott]

2011-11-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

From a parent upset that I planned to show a short abortion clip as part of my talk at his kid's high school:

“We certainly wouldn’t show images of a dead teen ejected from a vehicle crash to prove you shouldn’t drink and drive, or display a hanging person to teach against suicide; so then why show this?”

Me:

Well, we actually do show images like that, especially in the first case you mention. Consider this poster from the state of Texas, aimed specifically at students who might be tempted to drink and drive. Is this poster nothing but a “shock approach” or does it save lives?

True, graphic abortion images must be used properly (see how I carefully introduce them), meaning we should not spring them on unsuspecting audiences. When I use the short film “This is Abortion,” I tell students exactly what is in the clip and invite them to look away if they so desire. Nearly everyone watches and almost no one complains. I have found this to be true in diverse settings such as debates, banquets, schools, churches, etc. With Christian audiences, I introduce my remarks by stating Christ is eager to forgive the sin of abortion and that my purpose is not to condemn, but to clarify and equip. I use the sin of abortion to set the stage for a gospel presentation, one that offers sinners hope.

Links [Scott]

2011-11-15T04:32:00.000-08:00

Wesley J. Smith writes on a huge fail for embryonic stem cell research. Geron has abandoned the field:

Geron Corporation was the big hope for embryonic-stem-cell research. After years of promises, its first-ever human trial using an embryonic-stem-cell-derived product for acute spinal-cord injury made huge headlines internationally. But now, the Washington Post is reporting that Geron has abandoned the field altogether.
This is an atom bomb of a story that will have a serious effect on the entire regenerative medical sector. And it should embarrass the critics of President Bush; the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which bragged about its part in funding a scientist involved in the research; and, perhaps most of all, the fawning media that have acted as press agent for both the field generally, and Geron specifically.

Francis J. Beckwith: Debates over abortion, marriage, and welfare are not, at their roots, political. They are metaphysical--involving questions about philosophical anthropolgy.

Kathryn J. Lopez on why the failure of Personhood in MS is not a defeat.

Hadley Arkes on the Problem of Personhood Language [Scott]

2011-11-09T02:51:00.000-08:00

Speaking of a previous personhood campaign, Arkes writes:

The pro-lifers in Colorado have brought forth, for the ballot this November, a Personhood Amendment to their constitution: “the term ‘person’ shall apply to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.” The proposition is certainly correct and defensible. And yet it has the form and tenor of an assertion. Cast in that way, it promises to trigger the perversity and relativism of judges who have absorbed liberal slogans: They begin with the premise that the beginning of human life is an inscrutably religious question; that it hinges on matters of belief, not truths. They know that people are brazen enough to contend that they don’t know when human life begins – even with a pregnancy test – and so the amendment simply looks like an exercise of brute force: One faction has simply imposed its “opinion” on the community with the force of law.

I would prefer another approach. We could begin with the old-fashioned mode of a preamble, which sets forth the premises in the bill. And the trick is to set down premises that even judges would be embarrassed to dismiss, because even they could not contest their truth. The preamble could begin then by citing passages from the textbooks on embryology – e.g., “The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” [Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition]
And then:

“Nowhere in the chain of development does the offspring undergo a shift in species. It is human, and nothing less than human, from its first moments. Taller, heavier people are not more human than shorter, lighter people. No alteration in human standing can come with these changes in growth – or decline. Therefore, the ground of justification for the taking of this human life in the womb must be reconciled with the grounds that are required for the taking of any other human life in the laws of this state.”

Something in that vein – the legislative language may be sharpened and perfected. A commission could be authorized to hear cases and pass on the “justifications” that are offered. In all strictness, the legislation would still leave intact the right to order an abortion under certain circumstances – with the justifications yet to be tested. But at the same time, it implicitly calls into question many kinds of abortions now readily performed. Since there is no license to kill the children around us afflicted with Down syndrome or spina bifida, there would no longer be such a ready license to dispose of children in the womb with these afflictions.

This is not to say that judges, with more craft than shame, may not find a way to tie up these kind of law. But why not make them strain their wit to do it? And why not work, on our side, by seeking to plant in the law the truths that even the judges cannot dissolve.

The Burning Research Lab Ad Nauseam [Jay]

2011-11-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

A young man living in Georgia in 1859 believes slavery is wrong because the slaves, though differing from white people in obvious physical ways, are the same in morally important ways. His friend is not a slave owner but is intellectually committed to the position that slaves are not people under the law and that the Dredd Scott decision settled this matter appropriately by clarifying that point. He gets aggravated and presents his abolitionist friend with the following:

"Say your barn is on fire. And further say that in that barn there is a little white girl with blond ringlets trapped in one area of the barn and five slaves, adult men all, trapped in another area of the barn. The fire is getting wildly out of control. You can save the girl or you can save the slaves, but you cannot save both. What do you do?"

The young abolitioninst thinks for a moment and then begrudgingly acknowledges that he would save the young girl.

"A ha! So you acknowledge that you don't really believe that the slaves are human in the same way that we are. So if you are not convinced why should I be?"

Does anyone today read that scenario and believe for a moment that the friend demonstrated that the abolitionist movement was built upon false premises or lacked sufficient argument in favor of the ending of the evil of slavery? Does the fact that a young man grew up in a culture that imbedded in him certain prejudices and predispositions that manifest themselves in crisis situations somehow settle the argument whether or not slaves were human beings and ought to be considered people under the law? I can't see how anyone can reach that conclusion.

Now replace barn with lab and slaves with embryos and tell me if that somehow takes a bad argument and makes it good. The burning research lab is flawed on multiple levels, but the most egregious and obvious flaw is that it fails to address the core arguments of the pro-life position in any meaningful way. It is ad hominem to quoque, the intellectual equivalent of yelling, "You did it too!"

As the above example worked only to expose hypocrisy in the arguer and not to substantively address the arguments in favor of abolition, so the burning research lab seeks to expose hypocrisy in the pro-lifer that argues the humanity of embryonic humans. It attacks the arguer and not the argument. It is fallacious to its core.

And that is only one of the many weaknesses of the thought experiment. (May address others later when my schedule lightens up) It is simply not a good argument.

See old posts here and here.

The Stanford Prison Experiment and Moral Justification [Jay]

2011-11-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I talked about how Dr. Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment showed us something important about our audience as it pertains to arguments on life destructive human technologies like human embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) supports some aspects of Milgram's Obedience Experiment (MOE) while introducing other interesting elements surrounding the impact of institutions on our behavior. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo and his team chose 24 male college students from a larger group of volunteers they had psychologically profiled to assure mental health. They randomly divided the group into two groups of nine - guards and prisoners – leaving alternates on call if needed. Actual police officers arrested the prisoners who were then processed and placed into a makeshift prison over which Zimbardo was the superintendent.

To intensify the psychological effect, Zimbardo's team emasculated the prisoners by forcing them to wear gowns with no underwear, a stocking cap to cover their hair, and a chain on their ankle. The guards wore khaki uniforms, mirrored sunglasses to offer anonymity, and carried a billy club and whistle. They intended the experiment to last for two weeks. It was stopped after six days.

The guards psychologically tortured the prisoners and emotionally abused them to the extent that five healthy young men emotionally broke down within the first five days. A research assistant, Christina Maslach, confronted Zimbardo and told him, “It is terrible what you are doing to those boys.” Zimbardo had lost sight of the fact that he was a professor responsible for the well being of the students.

Elements of SPE compare to what we see in MOE. Early in SPE a student goes to Zimbardo and asks to leave. When Zimbardo encourages the student to stay he agrees but then goes back and reports to the other prisoners that, “we are not allowed to leave.” The students don't protest but immediately become disheartened and more obedient to the mistreatment. They acknowledge the authority of a college professor and other students to hold them prisoner against their will.

The accelerated rate that normal students turned into abusive guards is disturbing. The most famous of the subjects of the experiment is a guard nicknamed John Wayne (JW), who later claimed he modeled a part inspired by the sadistic guard in the film Cool Hand Luke. Even if he introduced an element of cruelty out of a desire to see how far he would be allowed to go - a startling ineffective and flawed defense that I'll address in a moment – that does nothing to explain why other guards allowed his cruelty and even joined him. Those guards that disapproved of the treatment of the prisoners – all of whom are normal college students – busied themselves with other tasks during the worst of the abuse rather than confronting JW and his cohorts.

Zimbardo became so immersed in the experiment that after releasing a student who opted out he became convinced of the truth of a rumor that the released student was coming back to break the others out and moved the prisoners. His first choice of location was the local jail but when the real authorities scoffed at his ridiculous idea he complained about a lack of “institutional cooperation.”(?!!) Ultimately he moved them to other rooms on campus and waited for the expected breakout. A colleague came by to see how the experiment was going and found Zimbardo sitting there alone waiting to surprise the former prisoner.

Zimbardo has since written about understanding the bad barrel as well as the bad apples and uses the toxic conditions of SPE and places like Abu Ghraib as evidence. In an appendix of the Schlesinger Report on DoD Detention Operations – a report birthed by Abu Ghraib – the committee sites both SPE and Abu Ghraib and writes:

Without proper oversight and monitoring, such interactions carry a higher risk of moral disengagement on the part of those in power and, in turn, are likely to lead to abusive behaviors.

Zimbardo argues that certain conditions where a group has power over another group without limitations breeds evil behavior in otherwise normal people.

But beyond that and more to the point of our discussion, a fascinating moment happened in the interviews with the participants after the fact. JW was confronted by a fellow student/prisoner that rebelled in the experiment by starting a hunger strike. JW and the guards placed him in solitary and taunted him to encourage him to give in. When confronted to defend his obviously abominable behavior, JW responds that what the student doesn't understand is that JW was conducting his own experiment.

How did he learn to excuse inexcusable behavior by pleading experiment? One can only assume that the SPE taught him that as long as you can characterize what you are doing as a scientific experiment then whatever wrong you do is justified. I can't think of any other way to understand why a normally functioning human being would think that he adequately accounts for abusing and torturing other human beings simply by saying, “It was an experiment.”

This is moral justification and it is a twist on what we saw in MOE. The Schlesinger Report sites Albert Bandura's definition of moral justification as the belief that misconduct can be justified if it is believed to serve a social good. Again, we see an otherwise normal and healthy individual appealing to our natural trust in the benefits of scientific exploration, but this time it is not someone who hesitantly and reluctantly pressed on. He is using our trust to excuse his zealous and immoral mistreatment of others by casting it in the light of experiment. Whether he legitimately believes it or not is irrelevant. He holds enough faith in other's trust of the social good of scientific experimentation - Stott's idealogical pressure – to justify his bad behavior.

Lydia McGrew once told me that she is convinced that many people that champion the pro-choice position do so from a similar point of view. They see themselves as able to push past the ugliness of it in some heroic sense to serve the greater social good. Certainly William Saletan cast George Tiller in this light as discussed in this earlier post. Saletan paints the picture of a true believer that did what others feared to do.

So this element seems present in our audience as well. Not just those who obediently acquiesce to authorities they trust, but also those people who independently excuse themselves through moral justification by way of some consequentialist gymnastics. The wrong that I do is not wrong because it serves a greater good, and we know it is good because it is scientific experimentation.

This most often comes up with the person that says things to me like, “So what if it is a human being. It doesn't know that it is alive or feel any pain and the experiments will help living people that are aware that they are in pain.” They are willing to do what must be done further to the cause even if it is objectionable. It is an experiment that will produce results that will help us all. You have to break some eggs if you want to make an omelette.

I have encountered this on college campuses which I will detail in another post as well as how I responded.

Down Syndrome, Fear, and a Young Man's Hat [Jay]

2011-11-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

I originally posted this back in April. There was some positive reaction and attempts to find a different format to publish this article, but the fact is I wrote it as a blog post and have decided that it works best in that format. I don't want to turn it into something more than what it was. Simply put, I met a lovely young man and wanted to share my thoughts after the fact. Jay

After finishing my daily swim at the local pool I was in the locker room preparing to head home and get back to work. A young man in his mid-twenties, also heading home smiled and said hello. He had Down syndrome (DS) and demonstrated more trouble with basic skills than most people I have met with DS. After we both finished getting dressed he turned to me and asked, “Do you like my hat?”

It was a beautiful Atlanta Braves hat, and I assured him that it was the finest I had ever seen. He told me me that his dad bought it for him last year at the Braves game on Father's Day. They went together to see the Braves lose to the Mets at Turner Field. We agreed that such things shouldn't happen in a just world, and then someone called him from outside the locker room. He turned to leave without saying goodbye, but even so he remains one of the top five friendliest people I have met in a men's locker room. As he walked out and the voice in the hall greeted him warmly I was haunted by the fact that our culture is largely committed to the belief that people like that young man should not be allowed to be born.

Down syndrome is most commonly caused by trisomy 21, where an extra 21st chromosome is present at conception supplied by one of the gametes (sperm or egg and most often from the egg). Other forms such as Mosaic DS and translocation account for less than 10% of all cases but all three are linked to the presence of an extra 21st chromosome. It is the most common chromosomal condition in the United States with more than 400,000 people currently living with DS. According to the National Down Syndrome Society and the National Down Syndrome Congress there is absolutely no way to predict the degree to which DS will physically impact a person prior to birth. Although 100 years ago people with DS had an average life expectancy of less than 10 years, medical advances especially in corrective heart surgery and antibiotics have extended the average life span to 60 years old. Advocates for people with DS report that, because of developmental therapy, it is increasingly typical for people with DS to be employed and live productive lives.

Even so, Physicians for Life says that 84 – 92% of all people that get a positive amniocentesis for DS in the United States choose to abort their child. This statistic is mirrored in the United Kingdom with a 92% abortion rate for DS children holding steady. For all the compassion that those who attack the pro-life position claim to have - in contrast to the supposed insensitivity of pro-life advocates - these embarrassing recalcitrant facts continue to pop up. These arguments for choice struggle to explain why things like the eugenic attack on people with DS or the sex selection abortions of China and India are wrong. Within the arguments of the absolute bodily autonomy of women and the lack of personhood of the unborn such things are simply additional considerations in the choices women must make and are completely legitimate.

After a friend's daughter was born with DS his wife became pregnant with their fourth child. The medical professionals strongly recommended amniocentesis. When asked why, they answered so my friend could decide whether or not to abort the child if it had Down syndrome. He looked across the room at his daughter and asked, “So if my next child is like that beautiful, healthy, loving little girl over there we are being offered the option of killing it?” That was all the inspiration he needed to start the steering committee that began one of the greatest pregnancy centers in the country. His daughter is now 36, in excellent health and has worked for the same employer for 15 years.

Political columnist George Will's son Jon has DS, so you understand why he takes personally the contentions that children with DS are a burden or that it would be better for all - including the children - that they not be born. In a 2005 Washington Post Editorial Will wrote:

“One mother who participated in a study of 3,000 members of five state associations of parents of Down syndrome children reported that when, in 1999, she was told that the baby she was expecting had Down syndrome, a geneticist showed her 'a really pitiful video first of people with Down syndrome who were very low tone and lethargic-looking and then proceeded to tell us that our child would never be able to read, write or count change.' Try telling that to Jon Will as he navigates Washington's subway system to use his season tickets to the Wizards basketball games and (soon) Nationals baseball games.”

“When he was born in 1972 -- a time when an episode on a network television hospital drama asserted that people with Down syndrome could not be toilet-trained -- the hospital geneticist asked Jon's parents if they intended to take him home. That question is, surely, no longer asked when Down syndrome babies are born. But there are modern pressures to prevent such babies from being born, pressures that include the perfection-is-an-entitlement attitude of some expecting parents.”

There is no doubt that DS introduces challenges. It is not helpful to characterize those prospective parents that fear how a child with DS will impact their lives and their families as inhumane or pretend that they need to simply get over it. When Scott Klusendorf, the founder and president of Life Training Institute and my boss, speaks about the so-called “tough cases” pertaining to abortion he concedes that sometimes doing the right thing requires us to take unpopular positions. Sometimes doing the right thing requires us to face challenges that others will try to convince us are not necessary. Though we don't know that everything will be okay, it is more destructive and dishonest to consider a positive diagnosis of DS as a tragedy and to characterize those with DS as suffering or the families as coping. In a 2007 press release from David Tolleson of the National Down Syndrome Congress condemning the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for tacitly approving the termination of pregnancies with a positive diagnosis of DS he writes:

“Studies have shown that parents and siblings of children with Down syndrome overwhelmingly report that having a family member with that diagnosis has been a good situation. Early intervention and inclusive education have led to largely positive outcomes for children with Down syndrome. It is unacceptable that many obstetricians present negatives -- and seem to emphasize pregnancy termination -- rather than reporting the facts, which paint a much more positive picture.”

The other children of my previously mentioned friend certainly echo this sentiment. And for whatever that young man I met in the locker room has faced and overcome, whatever hardship his condition has introduced to his life and the life of his family, he certainly wasn't dwelling on them when I met him. He wanted to talk about his favorite hat that he got watching his favorite baseball team with his dad. In this, he is just like the rest of us. It is tragic that people have learned to fear something so special and scary that we have become so comfortable with, as George Will says, searching and destroying the likes of that young man.

The Experiment Requires that You Continue [Jay]

2011-10-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me these video links(see below) on a replication of the famous Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiment. I first heard about this while in a psychology class at Kennesaw State University, but watching the videos inspired me to revisit the original experiment by Dr. Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1961 as well as the Stanford Prison Experiment by Dr. Philip Zambardo in 1971. The elements of these experiments demonstrate something important to understand as we engage the culture on issues like embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.

Milrgam's experiment worked by using two subjects - the teacher and the learner - to allegedly demonstrate the effects of negative feedback through electric shocks on memory and capacity to learn. The teacher would ask a series of questions through a microphone and the learner would respond over an intercom from another room. Every wrong answer is punished with an electric shock that increased with voltage on each corresponding wrong answer. The voltage level started at a low 15 volts, but eventually rose to a lethal 450 volts. Every switch is clearly marked with explanations of the intensity of the shock delivered except for the last three that are labeled “XXX.”

Here is the trick. The learner is an actor not a participant. He is “randomly chosen” as the learner through a rigged drawing of participant roles with every teacher. He is strapped into the chair in front of the teacher every time, and every teacher receives a demonstration of an actual electric shock on their own arm to make the experiment appear real. The learner warns the scientist in front of the teacher that he has a mild heart condition and is worried about the effects of the shocks on his heart. And finally, all of his unpleasant reactions are previously recorded and played back for the teachers so that every teacher hears the exact same objections as the experiment progresses.

The willingness of people to cast off their personal moral considerations in certain environments fascinated Milgram. Things like mob mentalities or the willingness of generally moral German citizens to participate in the Nazi atrocities seemed examples of people deferring to group think or authority in incomprehensible ways. He wondered pertaining to Nazi Germany, “How is it possible that ordinary people who are courteous and decent in every day life can act callously, inhumanely, without any limitations of conscience?” This is why he developed this experiment and when choosing the appropriate authority figure he chose the scientist.

So what happened? In his original experiment about 2/3 of the subjects went all the way through to the end of the experiment though the learner demanded to be released and told them his heart was bothering him. The last several shocks are administered to a non-responsive learner who no longer answers the questions at all but is still punished for non-participation. In the replication of the experiment, 9 out of 12 teachers went all the way through to the end.

If you watch the videos you will see that the teachers were obviously disturbed by what was happening as their moral intuitions screamed that it was wrong to hurt another human being in this manner. These weren't morally insensitive people or psychopaths, but normal men and women clearly troubled by the experiment. They all objected to the scientist and told him they thought they should stop.

So what pressure did the scientist place on them to force them to continue? He would look up from his notes and prompt them, “The experiment requires you continue.” He would assure them, “there will be no lasting tissue damage.” If necessary he would say, “It is essential that you go on.” That was it. That was all the coercion necessary to get normal human beings to override their conscience and deliver a lethal 450 volt shock to another human being for failing to answer a question in a voluntary experiment.

Why? Dr. Clifford Stott says it is because we naturally trust scientists as authority figures. We trust that they are working to further human flourishing and that their experiments are ultimately for our greater good. Perhaps the strongest prompt in the experiment is when an objecting teacher is told that it is essential that the experiment continue. The term essential plays off of what Dr. Stott calls the ideological influence. At root the issue is as follows quoting Dr. Stott:

What they [the teachers] believe science to be. Science is a positive product. It produces beneficial findings and knowledge for society that are helpful to society... science is providing some kind of system for good.

So when encouraged to continue hurting an innocent human being against his expressed will with full knowledge of the intensity of the pain inflicted - torturing someone for science - these people push past their reservations and pass off the responsibility for their actions onto the scientists or even on the learner for initially agreeing to participate. More than one teacher seems comforted that the current objections of the learner are somehow balanced against the previous agreement to participate.

So what does this have to do with stem cell research, therapeutic cloning, and human technology? We need to be aware that the people we are trying to convince of the immorality of embryo/life destructive research trust scientists to a remarkable and troubling degree. True, scientific achievement has earned good will, but even the most sophisticated science teaches us nothing about the nature of human value and objective moral duties. It may answer epistemologically interesting questions as to where our moral feelings are realized in our physical being or what part of the brain is active upon our considerations of value, but that correlation is not necessarily causal and cannot address whether those feelings correspond to real things. Value simply does not fall into the realm of things that can be measured or weighed or repeatedly observed and so reflection of this sort will require a different intellectual discipline no matter how much that observation chafes those unusually dedicated empirical research.

Knowing this, how do we diagnose where we are? We are told that embryonic stem cell research, therapeutic cloning and other advanced human technology research is essential. We are told that we must go on because the benefits will be great for all of mankind. Some of us argue in response that we must consider the object of our actions and not just the beneficiaries. Destroying embryonic humans may help others, but why are they the type of life that we can destroy? Creating and genetically manipulating human life could conceivably cure other human lives, but what makes one class of human life nothing more than a material resource for another?

The audience to our debate – those we wish to convince – are not neutral from the start. They trust science and it enjoys impressive idealogical influence in their lives. Influence that overcame what Dr. Milgram called the basic limitations of conscience in his experiment. When people are faced with a clear cut decision to either hurt another human being or stand up to the scientist telling them to hurt that other human being, we most often acquiesce to the scientist and deliver the shock no matter how high the voltage. Because science is good. That is how people behave when they have no question of the humanity of the person being hurt.

Add into that the emotional nature of a family member being promised if the experiments can continue their ailing child, parent, or spouse can be cured, and we must acknowledge that we are facing challenges well beyond the normal argument. We are asking them to go against a trusted authority that claims the possibility of doing something miraculous for the people who are most precious to them if the experiments can just continue.

I am a firm believer that before we can effectively communicate any point we need to understand our audience as best we can. What do I want to say and to whom am I saying it are the first questions that have to be answered. If I know that the argument I am preparing to make is going to meet strong opposition - both intellectually and emotionally - then it is my responsibility to be prepared to defend those arguments rigorously, graciously, and respectfully if at all possible.

In my next blog post I will look at how an element of the Stanford Prison Experiment adds yet another wrinkle to consider in understanding our audience.

Part 1 of Milgram's Obedience Reproduction

Part 2

Part 3

Why I'm Not Supporting Delta Airlines on Breast Cancer Research [Scott]

2011-10-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

LTI's Bob Perry explains why.

Jon Scharfenberger Dies [Scott]

2011-10-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Sad news from Students for Life of America.

Details here.

You can join me in contributing to Jon's burial costs here.

Advanced Pro-Life Apologetics Course--Watch for Free [Scott]

2011-10-13T04:20:00.001-07:00

The complete lecture notes for my sessions are here and the links to the videos are below. (Dr. Scott Rae taught the other half of the course. His sessions, dealing with reproductive technologies and end of life issues, are found here.)

Content Overview: Successful pro-life apologists pursue four essential tasks. First, they clarify the debate by focusing public attention on one key question: What is the unborn? Second, they establish a foundation for the debate, demonstrating to critics that metaphysical neutrality is impossible. Third, they answer objections persuasively. Fourth, they teach and equip.

Videos:

Session #1: What is the Issue--The Nature of Moral Reasoning (52 Min.)

Session #2: What is the Unborn? (1:08)

Session #3: What Makes Humans Valuable? Part 1: The Substance View of Persons (52 min.)

Session #4: What Makes Humans Valuable? Part 2: The Religion Objection (15 Min.)

Session #5: Who Makes the Rules? Abortion: Law, Metaphysics, and Moral Neutrality (38 Min.)

Session #6: What is my Duty? The Bodily Autonomy Arguments of Thomson, etc. (54 Min.)

Session #7: Catholic Social Justice Teaching and Other Common Objections (46 Min.)

Session #8: Equipping Yourself to Engage at Your Church (46 Min.)

Texts:

1. Gilbert Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primmer for Christians (Eerdmans, 2005)

2. Agnetta Sutton, Christian Bioethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark, 2008)

3. Scott Rae, Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics (Zondervan, 2009)

4. Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Crossway, 2009)

Suggested Reading:

1. Francis J. Beckwith, Dignity Never Been Photographed: Scientific Materialism, Enlightenment Liberalism, and Steven Pinker (Ethics in Medicine, Vol. 26:2, Summer 2010)

2. Francis J. Beckwith,The Human Being, a Person of Substance: A Response to Dean Stretton(You can view the chapter on-line with Google Reader.)

3. Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice (Routledge, 2010)

Cognitive Dissonance [Scott]

2011-10-10T07:45:00.000-07:00

In California, you can't get a tan if you are under 18 but you can get an abortion without parental consent.

Kortney Blythe Gordon's Death is Not a Tragedy [Scott]

2011-10-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

It's sad, and we grieve, but her passing is not tragedy. John Piper, while not speaking of Kortney, explains why.

Well done, Kortney.

A Sad, but Temporary Loss of a Pro-Life Warrior [Scott]

2011-10-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

Students for Life of America reports the sad news that Kortney Blythe Gordon, the group's field director, was killed last night in an automobile accident.

From SFLA:

The entire team at Students for Life of America is heartbroken by the loss of our dear friend, Field Director, and tireless abortion abolitionist, Kortney Blythe Gordon, and her pre-born daughter, Sophy.

At around 8:00pm on Saturday night, Kortney was involved in a fatal car accident that claimed her life, the life of her daughter and a passenger in another vehicle. Another SFLA staff member was in the car and is in grave critical condition.

There are no words to describe what a loss we suffer alongside her husband Benjamin and their entire family, but we are comforted knowing that Kortney and her daughter are in the arms of our Lord and Savior.

Please pray for the families of Kortney and Benjamin, for the family of our other gravely injured staffer and his recovery, and for healing for all who were touched by Kortney's infectious spirit and tireless efforts to stop the injustice of abortion in our nation.

If you would like to send a message to Kortney's family, please send it via Kortney's email at
kgordon@studentsforlife.org.

Kortney lived by one of her favorite sayings: "To live is Christ, to die is gain." She passed doing what she loved, and we are beyond blessed for the countless gifts that she bestowed to our staff, our students and pro-life leaders across the country.

On behalf of the Blythe and Gordon families, we are taking up a collection to help pay for Kortney and her daughter Sophy's burial costs. All proceeds are tax deductible and 100% of gifts received through this pledge will be donated to the Blythe and Gordon families. To donate, please visit us here:
https://kortneyandsophy.sagefundraisingonline.com/2

Please keep the mission of Students for Life of America as we mourn the loss of our beautiful and dear friend and a true leader within the pro-life movement.

All of our love and prayers to Kortney, Sophy, and the Blythe and Gordon families.

Well done, Kortney. You faithfully served your Lord in the cause of life.

"For God has not destined us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord, who died for us so that whether we are awake or sleep, we might live with Him." (1. Thes. 5: 9-10)

Thoughts About 180 [Scott]

2011-09-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

The post below assumes you’ve seen the film.

Thank you, Ray Comfort. I'm thankful you care enough about abortion to do something about it. I'm grateful for the resources you personally invested to make the film. I'm glad you take abortion seriously.

For our readers, here is my quick take on the film from the perspective of a pro-life apologist. Your comments are welcome.

The Good: The big ideas are there

1) The film casts the abortion issue as a human rights issue. That is the correct way to frame the debate. In an era where some pro-lifers are duped into reframing the discussion in terms of “reducing” abortion rather than legally protecting the unborn, this was indeed refreshing.

2) The film correctly states that moral conclusions (i.e., abortion is wrong) should impact how we vote. Pretending that pro-life convictions can be divorced from the political process won’t do and Comfort, unlike many evangelical leaders, is courageous enough to connect the dots. Once again, this was refreshing to see.

3) The film correctly states that discussions about abortion often lead to larger (theological) questions about human sinfulness and the gospel as the remedy. It challenges the false dichotomy between preaching the gospel and cultural reform—used by some to downplay pro-life political and cultural reform efforts. The films shows that concerned Christians both confront injustice and preach the gospel.

4) The film challenges the fear of engaging unbelievers. Ray Comfort’s tactic of asking questions to provoke conversation is an excellent way to engage. Despite asking some very pointed questions (including some I would not have asked), his listeners don’t seem to take offense. His best question (paraphrase) was to a young woman who said she didn’t know if the unborn were human, but still thought abortion was an option. Comfort asks, “Would you blow up an old building before making sure no one was inside?” Credit Comfort for asking rather than merely preaching.

My concern: The film overlooked some important distinctions:

1) The distinction between people in the film (Venice Beach?) and the public at large—The sample used in the film is not only small; it's not where most people are in terms of historical knowledge. Most people don't know who Hitler was? True, people in Venice Beach may not, but the nation as a whole? While Comfort’s tactics worked with the morally untutored folks in the film, I’m not persuaded they will provoke a 180 with more clever critics of the pro-life view found at the local university. In short, this film, while useful, is not a silver bullet that will instantly convert folks to our position.

2) The distinction between shouting a conclusion and establishing one--A sharp abortion-choicer could easily say, “Ya, I value human life. What Hitler did to Jews was wrong, but the unborn are not valuable human beings, so the comparison fails.” To succeed, pro-lifers must first establish that the unborn are indeed human (which the film does through images rather than scientific evidence), but then show that none of the differences between the embryos we once were and the adults we are today justify killing us at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency, are not value giving in the way that abortion-advocates need them to be in order to make their case. In short, jumping from killing Jews for bad reasons to killing the unborn for those same reasons leaves out important premises in the pro-life argument.

3) The distinction between killing a “baby” and unjustly killing human beings—Perhaps I am nitpicking here, but I think Comfort asks the wrong question when he points to a 6-week fetus and says, “Doesn’t that look like a baby?” What if the critic says “no?” End of discussion. Indeed, the pro-life view is not that abortion is wrong because it kills a “baby;” it’s wrong because it unjustly kills a human being regardless of his/her stage of development. That is, “baby” (infant) is just one stage of human existence on the continuum from conception to death. Therefore, killing the unborn human through elective abortion is wrong even if he’s not a “baby.” To be clear, there is nothing wrong with using pictures to convey the humanity of the unborn and the inhumanity of abortion. I use those pictures in my own presentations. But I use them to reawaken moral intuitions that elective abortion is the unjust killing of a human being, not make the case the embryo or early fetus qualifies as a “baby.”

4) The distinction between voting for pro-life candidates and voting pro-life--Put simply, what does it really mean to vote pro-life? Is it as simple as never voting for a pro-abortion candidate? I submit it is not. For example, at the legislative level in particular (House and Senate races), a "pro-life" vote usually means voting for the party that, though imperfect, will best protect unborn humans against one that sanctions killing them. The reason is simple: At the legislative level, political parties more than individuals determine which laws see the light of day.

Consider the House of Representatives. If a party committed to elective abortion controls the chamber, it will squash pro-life bills and promote pro-abortion ones. Even if that pro-abortion party has a few “pro-life” members, those members will likely never get to vote on a pro-life bill unless their party is not in power!

But it gets worse. These same “pro-life” members of that pro-abortion party almost always put party politics above moral principle when it comes to the most important vote they will cast—selection of the Speaker. Remember, the Speaker of the House ultimately determines the legislative agenda and if the party committed to elective abortion controls the chamber, its candidate for Speaker will inevitably be pro-abortion. Nevertheless, these “pro-life” members vote for their party’s candidate for Speaker, which all but guarantees that pro-life bills never see the light of day! In most cases, then, they aren’t reforming their party’s pro-abortion stance; they’re enabling it! So it's not always as simple as voting for the candidate (at the legislative level) who claims to be "pro-life."

5) The distinction between intentional killing and killing that is merely foreseen--Is it always wrong to kill an innocent human being? What about ectopic pregnancy? The medical protocols on this are clear: If the doctor does not remove the embryo (which results in the embryo's death), both mother and embryo will likely die. Given the circumstances, shouldn't the physician act in such a way that he does the greatest moral good possible--in this case, save one life rather than lose two? True, the embryo dies when the physician acts to save the mother, but the physician does not intend the embryo's death. He merely foresees it. In the case of elective abortion, the death of the embryo is both intended and foreseen. A better question for the film would be, "Is intentionally killing an innocent human being ever justified to suit our own preferences?"

Despite these concerns, the film is worth seeing and Comfort gets huge accolades for his courage in confronting abortion head-on. Say what you want, at least he’s doing something about it and for that I am immensely grateful. Before ripping him, his evangelical critics need to ask themselves what they are doing to stop the bloodshed. Are they taking this holocaust as seriously as Comfort does? I can only pray that one day they will.

Gary Should Read the Best on His Side Before Attacking Ours [Scott]

2011-09-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

I'm tied up with a writing assignment (a book project), so I won't contribute much to this discussion with Gary. However, one thing struck me about his scattered replies to Bob Perry.

Put simply, Gary claims to be knowledgable of “the other side,” but he sure isn’t tuned in to his own side, at least on the abortion issue. Indeed, anyone who spends even an hour surveying the relevant literature knows that David Boonin’s A Defense of Abortion is the most sophisticated case against the pro-life position to date. Admittedly, I do not think Boonin succeeds, but one thing he doesn’t do is claim, as Gary does, that he’s not identical to the fetus he once was. Instead, Boonin would argue that although Gary is identical to the embryo he once was—meaning he is the same being now as he was then—it does not follow Gary had the same right to life then as he does now. Being human is nothing special, meaning Gary’s right to life is strictly accidental. He has it because of some acquired characteristic he has now (organized cortical function) that he lacked then. To make sure we get the point, Boonin includes this chilling passage:

On my desk in my office where most of this book was written and revised, there are several pictures of my son, Eli. In one, he is gleefully dancing on the sand along the Gulf of Mexico, the cool ocean breeze wreaking havoc with his wispy hair. In a second, he is tentatively seated in the grass in his grandparents’ backyard, still working to master the feat of sitting up on his own. In a third, he is only a few weeks old, clinging firmly to the arms that are holding him and still wearing the tiny hat for preserving body heat that he wore home from the hospital. Though all of the remarkable changes that these pictures preserve, he remains unmistakably the same little boy. In the top drawer of my desk, I keep another picture of Eli. This picture was taken…24 weeks before he was born. The sonogram image is murky, but it reveals clearly enough a small head titled back slightly, and an arm raised up and bent, with the hand pointing back toward the face and the thumb extended out toward the mouth. There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows the same little boy at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point. (Emphasis added.)

Again, I think Boonin’s case is flawed and I've written on that elsewhere (for example, how does he account for human equality if our value is based on accidental properties that may come and go within the course of our lifetimes?), but at least he avoids the elementary error of claiming he began as one kind of thing only to become something else as he matured.

If Gary has not even interacted with the best case on his side of the abortion issue, why should we think he's done his homework understanding ours? Indeed, the shallow claims he makes against our side (for example, confusing parts with wholes, as Bob points out) suggests he hasn't.

Critiquing a Deadly View of the World [Bob]

2011-09-04T18:10:00.000-07:00

[In the response toMr. Gary Whittenberger's (GW) "critical essay" in the previous post, I offer the following with Scott Klusendorf's (SK's) permission. I will try to simplify the issues GW addresses and do my best to clarify what I see as the nature of their disagreement ... Bob]

____________________

The limits of the medium

First, GW seems to want to hold SK accountable for too much. At various points in his rebuttal, GW chastises SK for: “[not] naming or quoting even one person who holds this position [of scientific materialism (SM)];” for not offering a detailed, point-by-point review of all the assertions and implications of SM; and for“[appearing] to assign human rights to single-celled zygotes because they have received souls [but providing] no evidence for souls, no evidence that souls are inserted at conception, and no consideration of consequences of this view for actual persons in the zygotes’ environment.” And, most egregiously, GW claims at one point that SK "does not deal with the tough questions" when in fact, he has not only written a book on the subject ("The Case for Life"), but one fourth of that book is specifically focused on the tough questions GW wants answered.

Each of these points is irrelevant to the case GW makes, but he needs to remember the title of SK’s article, the audience to whom it is targeted, and the space limits of the editorial process that come to bear with publishing such a magazine article. SK does not pretend to claim that this 2500 word article is an exhaustive critique of SM or, for that matter, an exhaustive defense of the pro-life view. Its simple purpose is to point out the lessons a typical lay pro-lifer can glean from comments made by a doctor in a popular TV show, and to show how being aware of Dr. Jenner’s views can be applicable to a reasoned defense of the pro-life position.

That’s it.

That said, GW’s case could not offer a better example of the inability of SM to assess a complete picture of reality in general, or the moral emptiness one ends up with in the attempt to use SM to defend abortion specifically. Within those two general categories, there are several deficiencies in GW’s essay that come to light.

An Incomplete Picture of Reality

GW attempts to classify his own version of SM through a series of statements about what SK “would say” (as opposed to what SK did say) if he were describing SM “correctly.” This series of statements proves to be very useful in showing the gaping holes in SM.

Klusendorf, the author, claims that the character Dr. Jenner is not “doing science” but is “doing philosophy,” but might he be doing both?

The simple answer to GW’s question is, “No.” There is not single a scientifically verifiable conclusion in Jenner’s or Crick’s statements. Both are drawing philosophical conclusions that are only possible if one accepts their common philosophical pre-commitment to materialism. Yes, there may be correlation between electrical impulses in the brain and memory, personality etc., but correlation does not equal causation. In fact, if SM is true, we have no reason to accept the truthfulness of any statement that Jenner (or Crick, or GW) makes … but more on that later.

If he were accurately reflecting the view of many scientists and philosophers, he would not say that in SM everything in the universe “must” be explained in physical terms; rather he would say that in SM the use of physical terms had proven more useful than the use of any other terms in explaining the universe.

More useful? I am interested in hearing about SM’s “usefulness” in accounting for the laws of logic and mathematics, the reality of numbers (or any other kind of concept), the reality of personal identity and self-knowledge, or the physical nature and location of thoughts or imaginings. These are just a few of the things we know most certainly. Indeed, each of these is a real, non-physical thing on which science itself depends at its most basic level, but that has absolutely no hope of being explained by SM even in principle.

He would say that nonmaterial things like souls, gods, and ghosts are still hypothetical and have not been established to exist by the evidence. He would not say that in SM matter alone constitutes ultimate reality, but that matter-energy and space-time constitute important parts of reality and yet much remains to be learned about reality.

Evidence for non-material things? First, this is a thread of argumentation that appears repeatedly in GW’s essay (he keeps asking for evidence of the soul). In response, one would first have to ask what he would accept as “evidence?” Given his adherence to SM, we can only assume that he means physical evidence.

Here, the gross, blind deficiency in the logic of SM proponents, who insist on physical evidence for non-physical things, never ceases to amaze. I am reminded of Time magazine’s proclamation in July of 1995 as recounted by Greg Koukl:

Time Magazine made a stunning announcement. In an extensive article on the mind they wrote, “Despite our every instinct to the contrary, there is one thing that consciousness is not: some entity deep inside the brain that corresponds to the ‘self,’ some kernel of awareness that runs the show.” (July 17, 1995, p. 52). In other words, there is no soul.

How do they know this? “After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn’t exist.”

Like GW, these folks apparently believe that if we search really, really hard we should be able to locate and surgically remove someone’s soul.

Seriously? Is it really that difficult to comprehend that science (the study of the physical universe) is the wrong tool for assessing metaphysical or non-physical reality? This is the silliness that comes with the demand that, as Koukl puts it, we “weigh a chicken with a yardstick.” It makes no sense. Yet, materialists make this demand all the time.

Second, SM completely and continually ignores or dismisses the overwhelming implication we have for the existence of a timeless, immaterial, powerful cause for the beginning of the entire physical universe as an exercise in wishful, baseless speculation. In its place they offer their own wishful speculation about an infinite number of other universes for which the total accumulated physical evidence amounts to exactly – zero. In other words, when it comes to matters of “evidence,” SM’s proclivity for hypocrisy literally knows no bounds.

He would not say that in SM the universe looks designed; he would merely say that the universe has some orderliness which can be comprehended.

Here GW fails to appreciate the unbridgeable materialistic chasm between orderliness and design. For the record, it is not just theists who recognize the design inherent in the universe (especially in the information content and capacity of DNA). Everybody does that. The difference is in the ridiculous lengths to which SM proponents will go to explain it away. Though it is beyond the scope of this discussion to delve into this issue, let me just say that we find orderliness in the structure of snowflakes and ice cubes. We find design in the features carved into the face of an elaborate snowman. SM is sufficient in explaining the order of the former. It has no hope of explaining the specified complexity and information content of the latter.

He would not say that in SM that science alone tells us truth, but he would say that so far science has proven to be the best method for investigating the natural world or the workings of reality. Unfortunately, Klusendorf distorts scientific materialism, as commonly held, and makes it out to be more dogmatic and exclusive than it actually is.

While I agree with GW that science is the best method of investigating the natural world, the flaw in his thinking rests in the assumption that the natural world constitutes all reality. He assumes this; he doesn’t prove it. Indeed, the simple examples(above) demonstrate pretty unequivocally that SM fails miserably in that attempt. As for distorting the dogmatism of SM, I will let one of SM’s great proponents speak about that for himself:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against commonsense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs ... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated ‘just-so’ stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism … Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Richard Lewontin

January 4, 1997

New York Review of Books

The simple truth is that GW defends SM in the same ways that any member of a religious priesthood defends their dogma. I will spare the reader that discussion but those who maybe interested can read a short essay on the issue (here: Defrocking The Priests of Scientism)

Finally, and most satisfyingly, in his discussion of paragraphs 8 and 9, GW addresses the topics of determinism and rational thought and therein offers us philosophical gold –which he unwittingly uses to completely sabotage his own argument.

It is fascinating to observe the tortured logic inherent in an argument that recognizes the reality of free will (as we all do), but is forced by the implications of SM to defend determinism.

GW tells us that the humans can have beliefs that are “determined by [their] genetic and environmental history up to [a] point [in time]” (emphasis mine), but then suddenly become “more rational” in the face of new information. So, in which state do we find GW? Is the argument he is offering the result of his own deterministic past (in which case we have no reason to accept it as containing any “truth”), or from his rational present(in which case his SM is proven false)? Pick one.

Here GW makes a valid point in questioning SK’s description of the “irrational forces of nature.” I would agree that nature is non-rational, not irrational. But the minor point of SK’s word choice is soon overwhelmed by GW’s more telling statement that “nature doesn’t think.”

Exactly!

GW insists that nature is the “whole show,” admits that “nature doesn’t think,” but then offers no explanation for how all those non-rational molecules have produced rational thoughts and ideas in a subset of nature, namely his own materialistic head. The particles clashing in GW’s gray matter can’t say anything “rational” without blowing up his own pre-determined adherence to SM.

In summary, the pre-suppositions demanded by SM leave its adherents incapable of even considering how limited and closed-minded their view is. They are so trapped within the materialist paradigm they simply can’t see reality for all the molecules.

A Gross Misunderstanding of the Pro-Life Position

As expected, his blind adherence to SM transfers nicely into GW’s failed critique of SK’s pro-life arguments.

He dismisses substance dualism because he is still trying to weigh a chicken with a yardstick, and because Paul of Tarsus was not a neuroscientist – as if only a neuroscientist could possibly comment on such a thing. (This begs the question: “Is GW a neuroscientist?” Not that it matters, of course, but I’m curious … as I digress).

Where SK argues for the continuity-in-kind of a developing fetus, GW wants to talk about Darwinian speciation.

Where SK uses continuity-of-personhood as a valid justification of punishment for moral culpability, GW insists that “altering the environment of an offending person, in some cases administering punishment, lowers the probability that the offender or others will engage in similar criminal behavior in the future.” While this may be true, it says precisely nothing about the notion that behavior is simply descriptive while altering behavior does nothing to explain why a behavior is wrong or what constitutes “proper” behavior –both of which are prescriptive.

But most troubling is the chilling vacuity in moral reasoning displayed in GW’s attempt to dismiss SK’s defense of the unborn. Before I go there, and since GW is apparently unfamiliar with it, I offer a simple summary of the pro-life position as defended by SK and the LTI staff:

Human beings are valuable simply for what they are. Though Christian theists ground this notion in our being made in God’s image, it is not an unreasonable position and it does not depend on Christianity to be true. Even the most vehement materialist (Peter Singer excluded) seems to understand this simple fact.
Scientifically, it is indisputable that a distinct, whole, living human being comes into existence at the moment of conception. Those who doubt this scientific fact don’t need to read a Bible, just an embryology textbook.
Philosophically, the only differences between the unborn zygote/embryo/fetus each of us once were and the bornchild/adult we are today are matters of Size, Level of Development, Environment, and Degree of Dependency. None of these is morally significant nor would they justify killing any of us at an earlier stage in our development.

Taking these together, we argue that abortion is the unjustified taking of innocent human life. This is not a preference statement –we aren’t saying we don’t like abortion – it is a statement of objective moral truth. Taking innocent human life is morally wrong in and of itself.

Because he is apparently not familiar with this argument, GW’s reasoning does absolutely nothing to challenge any of its premises or the conclusion itself. This leaves him to ask questions and make assertions that range from irrelevant to downright bone-chilling in their moral bankruptcy.

He misunderstands some basic biological facts and this ignorance leads him to draw false moral conclusions. For instance, at one point he offers this hypothetical scenario:

If Jenner engineered human sperm, not fetuses, to eventually become adults who had ‘minimally firing synapse’ and who were trained to blow themselves up in the presence of walkers, would this be wrong?

Though the moral point he is trying to make is unclear, one wonders if GW understands that a human sperm only contains half the DNA required to “eventually become an adult.” In order for someone to “engineer the sperm” toward that end, one would first have to combine the sperm with the DNA from an egg to create a human embryo that would develop into ... a fetus. A fetus is nothing more than a stage in the development of a human being toward adulthood. But this is a concept GW repeatedly misses.

GW accuses SK of “misusing language,” and lectures us about how we should “properly” refer to early stage living organisms, all the while demonstrating that he has no apparent concept of what the language means. Zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are not different things. They are different stages in the development of the same thing – namely a whole, complete, living human being. Does GW not realize that he was once a zygote, embryo, and fetus? Does the fact that he developed from conception, through each of these stages (while unborn), until he was born mean that he was a different kind of thing at each stage along the way?

GW repeats this false assertion in several places by insisting that there is a difference in kind between an unborn human being and one who is born. This confusion about basic biological terms leads him to some rather bizarre assertions.

Contrary to the author, the “adult you” is not identical to the “fetal you”; it is similar, but not identical … in talking about the “unborn” the author is inappropriately trying to refer to fetuses as though they are babies.

Similar? True, the unborn is different in its level of development, but that does not change the kind of thing it is. What is the species and identity of “fetal you?” Is it different from “adult you?” GW seems to think so. Was GW not once “unborn?” Did his changing location 20 cm from inside his mother to outside his mother suddenly render him a "baby" that was a different kind of being or a different person than the one he is now?

It is twice as likely that a human zygote will die or be miscarried than that it will be born

It is also 100% likely that GW will die at some point. But this is hardly an argument we should accept to justify killing him earlier in his life.

Is a one-celled human zygote really as valuable as an 18-year-old human person?

Yes. There is no difference in kind between the two. If GW has evidence that there is an intrinsic difference – a difference in kind, not an instrumental difference– between them, I encourage him to share it with us.

Here the author fails to acknowledge that unlike the person who has suffered a stroke and the loss of some cognitive functions, before a certain point in development a fetus has not manifested any cognitive functions. He is trying to compare apples to oranges.

No, GW is trying to turn apples into oranges. A person who suffers a stroke – or a pre-cognitive fetus – is still a human being and therefore valuable in virtue of the kind of thing it is. On a related note, his insistence on sentience, self-awareness, cognitive ability etc., as a measure of human value fails to take into account the fact that babies do not demonstrate these traits until weeks or months after they are born. GW’s criteria for assessing human value are arbitrary and irrelevant.

[SK] asks “Could doctors have justifiably killed you during your extended sleep...” Yes, they could, if you had previously stipulated in writing that you wished to be killed while in the coma when your chances of recovery were judged to be below a certain threshold, as determined by expert opinion.

Despite the fact that this is a completely different subject from the one being discussed, I would simply point out that I am unaware of any aborted human beings who have been afforded this luxury.

Each of these empty arguments fails miserably for the same reason – because each of them assumes that the unborn is not a human being. GW gives us no explanation for why the unborn may not be a human being and thereby avoids the moral question about why he thinks we should be allowed to kill it. In this propensity, he fancies himself clever and insightful, while the arguments he advances are the same old, tired ones that SK has been proving false for years.

GW’s confusion about the reality and continuity of human nature is bothersome. But what is most disturbing are the moral conclusions he draws based on this confusion. For that reason (and because this has already gone on too long), I will conclude with the most disturbing part of his view that is revealed in this question:

Why is a human organism always more valuable than a chicken organism? Might the latter be more valuable if a person is hungry?

Apparently, GW is serious in asking these questions – which is what led me to use the term “bone-chilling.” Since we’re asking questions here, does GW tell his wife (assuming he is married) that he wonders at times(especially when he is hungry) if she is more valuable than a chicken?

That is bad enough – but it is not the worst implication of the view he is putting forward. On GW’s SM, both his wife and a chicken are simply different forms of living “organisms” – bags of bones and flesh and protein – that would be perfectly acceptable in satisfying his appetite. Getting one’s genes into the next generation is all that counts. SM can’t say otherwise.

If he wants “scientific proof” of the value of human life he will get none. This is not the result of a deficiency in the pro-life argument; it is further evidence that SM is an incomplete philosophical position that cannot even begin to answer the most fundamental, and most important, questions about the world as we know it. The fact that a human “organism” is more valuable than a chicken organism is self-evident. But there is a name we give to the kind of person who requires an explanation for such a thing: psychopath.

Let me be crystal clear in stating that I am in no way suggesting that GW is a psychopath. I say this because I do not believe GW actually believes what he is implying with his question. I am simply pointing out that this is the kind of moral reasoning one is required to use to defend SM. So-called “skeptics” and sophists spout this kind of nonsense all the time, but none of them really adheres to it when they live out their lives in the real world.

SM is an empty, false, morally reprehensible way to understand the world. For this reason, applying it to the issue of abortion leads to empty, false, morally reprehensible justifications. I would like to thank GW for demonstrating this for us so clearly in his “critical essay.” It provides us with a powerful, real world example of the bankruptcy – both logically and morally – in the ideas he attempts to defend.

Challenging Scott on "The Walking Dead"

2011-09-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

[Recently, LTI received a "critical essay" in response to Scott's recent article in the Christian Research Journal, "What The Walking Dead Can Teach Pro-Lifers." The author, a self-described atheist, humanist, skeptic, takes exception with Scott's points and asked us for an opportunity to challenge them. Though this is not a practice we have entertained in the past, we decided to allow Scott's critic a forum. Bob will be preparing the LTI response in a separate post. We invite our readers to join the discussion with their comments ...]

_______________________

Explaining “The Walking Dead”

By Gary Whittenberger

“What the ‘Walking Dead’ can tell Pro-lifers” by Scott Klusendorf appeared in the Christian Research Journal, and I intend to present a critique of this article. Even though I am a humanist, atheist, and skeptic, I subscribe to this journal because I like to read the best arguments of “the other side” and I believe that most of the articles in it are well articulated by well-educated theologians, philosophers, apologists, and pastors.

The thrust of the CRJ is summarized by this paragraph presented in every issue: “As an organ of the Christian Research Institute (CRI), the Christian Research Journal’s primary commitment is to ‘contend earnestly for the truth which was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3). In keeping with this commitment, the Journal’s mission is both evangelistic and pastoral; evangelistic in that it is dedicated to furthering the proclamation and defense of the historic gospel of Jesus Christ; pastoral in that it is dedicated to helping His followers identify and distinguish between essential Christian doctrine and doctrine that is peripheral, aberrant, or heretical.” Of course, for an atheist, humanist, and skeptic like myself, there are many problems with this statement, but I’ll not get into them at this time because my focus in on the presented article.

My comments will refer to each paragraph in succession in the article, as numbered.

¶1:

I have not yet watched AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” but intend to look at a few episodes later. However, I do not think that this is necessary for evaluating the philosophical and religious claims of the author made in the current article.

¶2:

Zombies have been a favorite topic of horror films and even of philosophers for quite some time. In AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” apparently when human persons are bitten by the zombies, they “die a violent death” but soon come back to life as zombies, compelled to bite and kill other human persons. In real life when you’re dead, you’re dead and you don’t walk, but the TV program requires us to temporarily suspend our disbelief. It is ironic that Christianity requires us to permanently suspend our disbelief and instead to think that Jesus came back to life, walked, talked, ate and drank, and levitated into the sky.

¶3:

I agree with the author that the ideas in the story are worth considering from the Christian perspective, but they are also worth considering from a general philosophical perspective.

¶4 & 5:

The statement of the character Dr. Jenner here and the author’s summary of it are similar in many ways to a quote from Dr. Francis Crick made in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: “...’You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” (P. 3)

¶6:

Klusendorf, the author, claims that the character Dr. Jenner is not “doing science” but is “doing philosophy,” but might he be doing both? It seems that Jenner is merely summarizing a large body of research which demonstrates the dependency of experience, memory, personality, and behavior on the brain, i.e. when the brain changes, the “mind” changes in reliable ways. Klusendorf presents his version of “scientific materialism” (SM) without naming or quoting even one person who holds this position, and his version largely appears to be a straw man. If he were accurately reflecting the view of many scientists and philosophers, he would not say that in SM everything in the universe “must” be explained in physical terms; rather he would say that in SM the use of physical terms had proven more useful than the use of any other terms in explaining the universe. He would say that nonmaterial things like souls, gods, and ghosts are still hypothetical and have not been established to exist by the evidence. He would not say that in SM matter alone constitutes ultimate reality, but that matter-energy and space-time constitute important parts of reality and yet much remains to be learned about reality. He would not say that in SM the universe looks designed; he would merely say that the universe has some orderliness which can be comprehended. He would not say that in SM that science alone tells us truth, but he would say that so far science has proven to be the best method for investigating the natural world or the workings of reality. Unfortunately, Klusendorf distorts scientific materialism, as commonly held, and makes it out to be more dogmatic and exclusive than it actually is.

¶7:

The author chastises Jenner for not saying how nonmaterial minds emerge from physical processes or how consciousness emerges from nonconscious brain matter, as though this fictional character should fully defend scientific materialism or present conclusions not yet even drawn by modern science or philosophy. Klusendorf simply expects too much. He even goes on to say “The interaction between nonmaterial minds and physical bodies is difficult to explain, given materialism.” It is also difficult to explain, given dualism or any other of the commonly held positions. The current lack of a good explanation does not constitute support for soul theory, as the author appears to assume later in the article.

¶8:

Klusendorf asks why Jenner is even trying to persuade the humans under his protection of his view. Well, it could be that he thinks they have a different view of the situation, possibly the view espoused by Klusendorf in the article, and that it would be helpful for them to adopt a more accurate view. The author seems to confuse two different ideas, i.e. the specific dependency of mind processes on brain processes and general determinism where a set of causes invariably leads in sequence to some effect. Even if the mind is perfectly dependent on the brain, it still might be possible for human mental events and behavior to be either free or determined. And also, if the mind is not perfectly dependent on the brain, either alternative is still possible. Even if determinism is true, this does not mean that the humans lectured by Jenner are impervious to persuasion. It just means that their belief has been determined by their genetic and environmental history up to the point that they meet Jenner. His speech becomes a new factor in their histories, a factor which might overwhelm the other factors to which they have been exposed in the past. Jenner’s thoughts can be more rational than those of his listeners. This is the case whether determinism is true or not, since the category of rational v. irrational refers to the content of behavior, not to its cause.

¶9:

Here the author talks about the “irrational forces” of nature, but he is making a category error. Nature doesn’t think, and so it can be neither rational nor irrational; it is merely nonrational. Darwin may have had the position attributed to him by the author here, but so what? Darwin is not the last word, and science and philosophy have built upon Darwin and advanced beyond him since 1859 when he first published On the Origin of Species.

Klusendorf just can’t figure out how evolution could support the ascertaining of or valuing of truth in humans. He bluntly asks “If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?” The answer is that organisms who have brain mechanisms which lead them to seek and value truth may be more likely to survive and reproduce than those who do not. By knowing truth about the workings of reality, organisms are better equipped to make predictions and control events around them; this has survival value.

¶10:

The author touts substance dualism, but he doesn’t provide any evidence for a nonphysical soul. Physical substance can be detected and measured, but how can nonphysical substance (soul) be identified? The identity of the body is preserved over time because the general structure or pattern of the body’s components remains the same, even though the underlying substance of those components may have changed.

¶11:

Substance dualism is an interesting idea and even though it has been around for a long time, evidence to support it is lacking. Some parts of the Bible merely assert the theory but do not provide evidence for it. Other parts of the Bible (more so in the Old Testament) seem to advance physical monism. Just because St. Paul assumes an identity beyond his physical self doesn’t mean that his assumption is correct. Paul was not a neuroscientist and he was not even a good philosopher.

¶12:

There are many problems with the dualist views of Moreland, Rae, and Beckwith, but among the greatest is that they are unable to provide a way to detect or identify an immaterial nature or soul. In his discussion here Klusendorf uses the concepts of substance and organism in odd ways, e.g. he says “substances are living organisms” when a more accurate description is that living organisms are composed of substances. He says “As a substance grows, it does not become more of its kind” when it is more accurate to say that “as an organism grows its kind is still determined by its DNA”. The author claims that properties don’t make the kind of thing something is, but he considers only simple cases where one property might be missing. A difficult question which he must ultimately address is “What percentage of change in properties constitutes a change in kind?” This question is relevant to determining when a new species has been identified in biology.

¶13:

Klusendorf’s discussion seems to suffer from equivocation on the use of the word “property”. At times he uses it to refer to an attribute of something but at other times he uses it to refer to something belonging to a human person, something owned or controlled. And he doesn’t seem to be aware of this equivocation.

¶14:

The author repeats a question he has already asked “If we are nothing more than physical beings, how can we account for personal identity through time and change?” The answer I gave earlier still seems valid – the overall structure or pattern of physical components can account for personal identity through time.

¶15:

No, the notions of moral responsibility and criminal justice are not based on a substance-dualist view of a person. These notions do not depend on either a monist or dualist view. They only depend on the assumption that altering the environment of an offending person, in some cases administering punishment, lowers the probability that the offender or others will engage in similar criminal behavior in the future.

¶16:

The author thinks that Jenner implies that personhood begins at birth, but where does he get this? It is surely not from the presented quotes. The author talks about “the substance view,” and he must mean “the nonmaterial substance view,” but if this is the case he should say so explicitly since even from his perspective there are two types of substance. Contrary to the author, the “adult you” is not identical to the “fetal you”; it is similar, but not identical. Klusendorf seems to confuse the ideas of “identical” and “identity” (“numerical identity”). Once again the author asserts that human beings possess a nonmaterial human nature, but he provides no evidence of this. The author provides no explanation or justification that human organisms are “intrinsically valuable” throughout the life span from conception to death; he merely asserts that this is the case and expects the reader to accept it. Ultimately, the author must deal with the questions “How is value determined or assigned?” and “Valuable to whom?”

¶17:

The concept of “human equality” describes how different persons should be treated, but says nothing about when human organisms become persons or about when equal rights should be assigned to developing human organisms. It appears that Klusendorf would like to assign human rights to single-celled zygotes because they have received souls, but he provides no evidence for souls, no evidence that souls are inserted at conception, and no consideration of consequences of this view for actual persons in the zygotes’ environment. Why is a human organism always more valuable than a chicken organism? Might the latter be more valuable if a person is hungry? Is a one-celled human zygote really as valuable as an 18-year-old human person? The author does not deal with the tough questions.

¶18:

¶19:

In the Beckwith example the victim who recovered from a motorcycle accident and coma is not like the early stage living human organism in the womb. Even though the victim lacks memories of the past, he has consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, thoughts, and new memories. Before some point the fetus has never manifested any of these things. The author asks “Could doctors have justifiably killed you during your extended sleep...” Yes, they could, if you had previously stipulated in writing that you wished to be killed while in the coma when your chances of recovery were judged to be below a certain threshold, as determined by expert opinion. Klusendorf seems to believe that human rights should be immediately assigned when an organism comes into possession of a soul (or when it is determined to have human DNA), but this is only one of many options and he fails to provide a justification for his position. The greatest flaws in his position are that a soul cannot be detected or identified and that drawing the line at conception fails to consider the general negative consequences of this to human adults.

¶20:

Klensendorf’s question about the clone scenario near the end of his article is challenging and deserves more time and space than can be given to it here. However, it seems clear to a secular humanist when the proposed actions would not be ethically permissible. It would be wrong if the cloned fetus had crossed the boundary of consciousness or sentience. It would be wrong even before then, if the persons providing the sperm and egg to produce the cloned fetus had not given their prior informed consent for the planned procedures. The author should address these scenarios similar to his own: “If Jenner engineered human sperm, not fetuses, to eventually become adults who had ‘minimally firing synapses’ and who were trained to blow themselves up in the presence of walkers, would this be wrong? Or “Would it be wrong if Jenner engineered chimpanzee fetuses (or early stage cockroaches) to eventually blow themselves up in the presence of walkers?”

¶21:

The author asserts that there is a Creator of human souls or organisms and that humans bear the image of such a Creator, but these are merely hypotheses which have little or no evidential support. Klusendorf is not justified in using these speculations to develop a theory of human value, equality, or rights. He boldly states “Humans have value simply because they are human.” And yet he does not deal with the issues of “Value to whom?” “Value under what conditions?” “Why does value depend on type of living thing or potential?” “Do organisms of other species have no value because they are not human?”

In referring to the “unborn” Klusendorf misuses language, which is typical of anti-abortion-rights’ activists. It is proper to call early stage living human organisms by their proper names, like “zygotes, embryos, or fetuses.” It is twice as likely that a human zygote will die or be miscarried than that it will be born, so in talking about the “unborn” the author is inappropriately trying to refer to fetuses as though they are babies.

If the author is wrong in his position and Jenner is right, the author’s view of human equality is a myth, but there are other versions of human equality which would not be made into myths. For example, if human rights are assigned to conscious or sentient fetuses, then they are equal under the law after that point. Contrary to the author’s view, secularists don’t justify their assignment of human rights to fetuses on the basis of quantity of brain activity, but usually on the basis of brain function, e.g. the presence of consciousness, sentience, perceived pain, or rudimentary decision making.

In conclusion, Klusendorf fails to adequately flesh out his Christian dualist view in the article, and the position itself is poorly supported by evidence.

Reasoned Pro-Life Apologetics Meets Raving Atheist [Bob]

2011-08-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

Beyond the obvious obligation we have as thinking human beings to clarify the status, and defend the value, of innocent, unborn human life, engaging in the pro-life project is also a way to make the case for the truth of Christianity in general. It stands to reason that if the scientific, philosophical, and moral arguments we offer in defense of the humanity of the unborn also happen to align exactly with the biblical notion of what it means to be a human being made "in the image of God," then the Bible might also have something to say about other things of importance.

This is a point Scott makes repeatedly but it was recently driven home in a very concrete way by, of all people, a hard core atheist in the most recent issue of Salvo magazine. A secular skeptic, law school professor, renowned blogger, and mocker of deluded "Godiots," the "Raving Atheist" attended a blogger party where he serendipitously sat next to a Catholic blogger named Benjamin. As the "Raving Atheist" explains:

At one point the conversation turned to abortion, and I asked Benjamin's opinion of the practice. I was stunned. Here was a kind, affable, and cogently reasonable human being who nonetheless believed that abortion was murder. To the limited extent I had previously considered the issue, I believed abortion to be completely acceptable, the mere disposal of a lump of cells, perhaps akin to clipping fingernails.

This unsettling exchange spurred me to further investigate the issue on Benjamin's blog. I noticed that pro-choice Christians did not employ scientific or rational arguments but relied on a confused set of "spiritual" platitudes. More significantly, the pro-choice atheistic blogosphere also fell short in its analysis of abortion. The supposedly "reality-based" community either dismissed abortion as a "religious issue" or paradoxically claimed that pro-life principles were contrary to religious doctrine. Having formerly equated atheism with reason, I was slowly growing uncertain of the value of godlessness in the search for truth.

Though the "Raving Atheist" continued to rave, there was now a stone in his God-rejecting shoe, placed there by a reasoned defense of the pro-life view. He couldn't disconnect himself from it and later admitted that the "selfless dedication [of pro-life advocates] to their cause moved [him] deeply." Later, he met a woman named Ashli whose work in pregnancy care drew him to further consider the pro-life position. Soon thereafter, the "Raving Atheist" became, in part, a pro-life blogsite ...

[This] stirred an angry mutiny among my readers. But I had become convinced that the secular world had it wrong on the very foundational issue of life ... The tangible expression of pro-life work was life itself. It was becoming clear to me that people who lived out their Christian faith were happier and better people as a result ... In June 2006 I saw [a] woman's sonogram ripen into a baby. In honor of Ashli's efforts, I vowed that the birth of the child would be the death of atheism on my blog. Late that month I announced that I would no longer mock God on my site.

And the rest, as they say, is history. The hard-core atheist became open to considering theism because of his encounters with reasoned pro-life thought. Today he is a Christian theist.

To be sure, there were other factors that contributed to the "Raving Atheist's" conversion but the simple fact remains that it was the cogency of the Case For Life and the concrete reality of the injustice of abortion that led him to doubt his atheism and consider a worldview that offered a better explanation for the world as we know and experience it.

--------------------------
For those who are interested in an eclectic approach to a defense of the Christian worldview that is far from the usual dry, stodgy material most people associate with topics like philosophy and Christian apologetics, I would highly recommend at least checking out an issue of Salvo -- a magazine produced by The Fellowship of St. James, which also publishes Touchstone. For what it's worth, I subscribe to both magazines and read every issue cover-to-cover. Salvo is targeted for a younger, more culturally connected audience. It is very well-written and often very, very clever.

Worldview training and MTV [Jay]

2011-07-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

While reading this story at Slate on what they call “advocacy” programming at MTV, specifically where shows called 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom follow actual pregnant teens and teens with babies chronicling their various struggles and challenges, I noticed a couple of things I thought worth sharing.

The writer claims that watching these reality shows increases condom use and thereby reduces teen pregnancy, but to support this claim they bizarrely link to an article about how fictional narrative shows impact teen behavior on contraception more than public service statements. There is anecdotal evidence that the $60K per year that MTV pays the girls combined with the all important mass exposure on MTV and even in tabloids(?!!) has resulted in some young girls getting pregnant for the express purpose of auditioning for the show. There will be no links to support that claim because it would require me to connect our blog to the most painfully stupid realm of media on earth, but if you are interested in looking it up on your own it took me all of 20 seconds to find.

Another claim in the article has better support. Here it is:

"research shows that viewing these MTV shows is positively correlated with support for abortion rights"

This links to an article that actually supports the claim made. In a Public Religion Research Institute study entitled What the Millennial Generation Tells Us about the Future of the Abortion Debate and the Culture Wars there is the following:

*The study identified and tested a number of hypotheses about independent influences on attitudes about the legality of abortion. The following factors are independent predictors of support for the legality of abortion, even when controlling for other demographic characteristics:

Having a situationalist rather than a principle-based approach to morality has a positive impact on support for the legality of abortion.

Knowing someone who has had an abortion has a positive impact on support for the legality of abortion.

Having seen MTV’s reality shows about unmarried pregnant teenagers has a positive impact on support for the legality of abortion.

Recently seeing an ultrasound image of a fetus has a negative impact on support for the legality of abortion. (Emphasis theirs)*

This supports claims consistently made here at LTI. Notice the first item. If you make your moral decisions situationally you are more likely to support legal abortion. This means that those who foster a greater understanding of their worldview and see their life as impacted by objective moral laws are less inclined to support legal abortion than people who decide what is right or wrong based on the immediate consequences. Christians need worldview training and my work with both students and adult classes in this area over the last year has only strengthened my resolve that this is critical to changing attitudes about abortion.

The other important point is that when the focus is on the woman, as it is when millenials are thinking of a friend that has had an abortion or are watching MTV programs highlighting the struggling teens, the result is an attitude supportive of legal abortion. What happens when they see an unltrasound of a fetal human being, though? Apparently confronting the humanity of the unborn has a negative impact on their support for legal abortion. Imagine that! Seeing the unborn human life moving and, in the case of my own children, rolling around and stretching and being rather like every other human being makes it harder to believe that it is morally acceptable to rip the life to pieces. Who knew?

So we see even more evidence that having a consistent principled worldview and then keeping the argument on the identity of the unborn changes attitudes toward abortion. And you see even more clearly why we are so passionate about what we do here at LTI.

Thoughts on Campus Crusade [Scott]

2011-07-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

I deleted my Facebook post on campus Crusade last night after it generated a slew of comments in less than two hours. I did so for two reasons. First, my strongly worded post was over the top. It is one thing to express concern over the group’s name change and the apparent motivation behind it (more about that below). It is quite another to say Christians should no longer support the group. Second, Facebook is not the place to launch a discussion where background concerns cannot be adequately expressed. In short, I was wrong on both counts. Thus, the following Blog post continues what began on FB. Your thoughts are welcome.

Most of the FB comments supported my view, but thoughtful critics asked the following question: What’s in a name? After all, many Christian groups leave out the name Christ, so what is the big deal?

They’re right about one thing. There is nothing wrong about leaving “Christ” out of the organization’s name. After all, my own organization doesn’t use the name in its title.

However, as Jay Watts pointed out, the problem here is not leaving “Christ” out; it’s taking him out—and for reasons that are questionable. The FOX story quoted a CC official as follows:

"We felt like our name was getting in the way of accomplishing our mission,” said Steve Sellers, the vice president for Campus Crusade, noting that the ministry will still be committed to “proclaiming Christ around the world.” Sellers said researchers found that 9 percent of Christians and 20 percent of non-Christians were alienated by the name Campus Crusade for Christ.

Sellers indicated several factors contributed to the name change, including overseas sensibilities. “Our name was becoming more and more of a hindrance,” he told Fox News Radio. He specifically mentioned the word crusade. “It’s reverted back to some of its meaning related to the Middle Ages – forcing Christianity on different parts of the world,” he said.

As for specifically removing “Christ” from their name, the Campus Crusade for Christ website states:

“We were not trying to eliminate the word Christ from our name. We were looking for a name that would most effectively serve our mission and help us take the gospel to the world. Our mission has not changed. Cru enables us to have discussions about Christ with people who might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name. We believe that our interaction and our communication with the world will be what ultimately honors and glorifies Christ.”

Well, if you are not trying to eliminate Christ from your name, but merely want to distance yourself from “crusade,” why not ditch the latter and keep the former? I gather from the article that CC thinks a name with Christ in it is a turn-off and smacks of intolerance. At the same time, if the big issue involves overseas sensibilities, why not change the name for foreign outreaches but leave it for U.S. ones? After all, the name Campus Crusade for Christ accurately describes the mission of the organization: 1) “Campus”—tells us your target audience. 2) “Crusade”—tells us your mission, evangelize the lost. 3) “for Christ”—tells us the main thing is Jesus and doing what honors him.

So what's to fear, that people will know what we truly stand for? Must we
accept the premises of the tolerance crowd to keep our witness?

For me, these are not good reasons to take Christ out of the organization’s name. As Gregg Cunningham once observed, have we become so seeker sensitive that we are believer worthless? My fear is that instead of engaging the culture, many campus ministries are quietly absorbing it’s premises. Is this a good witness of Christ?

To cite a related example (and this provides the background I bring to the name change issue), if you talk to any pro-life group reaching out to students, you'll soon learn that with rare exception, campus fellowship groups want little to do with the pro-life movement. Generally speaking, they're afraid they might turn people off if they get involved.

Well, at Cal Poly SLO in May of 2008, the response of Christians to the abortion controversy did in fact turn-off at least one non-Christian, but not for reasons campus fellowship groups might expect. The ASB student leader responsible for organizing an abortion debate at that campus expressed her dismay that Campus Crusade would not attend the event or get behind promoting it with its members.

She asked me directly why I thought that was so. She thought for sure the Christians would show up and she was puzzled that they didn't. Their refusal to get involved turned her off.

I didn't know what to tell her. Perhaps CC had good reasons for not attending and I hold out hope it did, though it's hard for me to imagine what those reasons might be. I suspect she is not the only secular student puzzled by CC’s non-involvment.

Indeed, according to a 2005 TIME Magazine piece, the overall trend is not encouraging. Instead of equipping students to confront the thought structures that determine culture in the first place, many of these groups help students nurture a very private and personal faith, a faith separate from the intellectual climate of the university. The TIME article states:

"But all the groups tend to go about their business quietly. "They kind of operate under the surface," McKaig says. Josh Sanburn, editor in chief of the Indiana Daily Student, notes that the number of students in the fellowships is roughly the same as the school's African-American student population, but unlike the Christians, "the black students on this campus are very good about making sure they're heard." Evangelical students, however, see their spiritual mission differently. Says sophomore CSF member Emily Hoefling: "We usually believe what affects people more than a newspaper article is to see people living Christian lives."

Question: Since when does "living Christian lives" mean checking out of the real action on campus?

I fear that the message to Christian students and the campus at large couldn't be clearer: Christianity is not relevant to the most pressing issues of our day. It's fine as a personal life enhancement, but irrelevant to the real world of ideas, politics, morality, and law where the rest of the world lives.

Again, is that a good witness for Christ? As Charles Malik pointed out half a century ago, “If you win the whole world [for Christ] and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover that you have not won the world.”

As I've said before, Christian leaders have it all wrong. My own experience suggests that far from turning people off, a persuasive pro-life case, graciously communicated, suggests to non-believers that maybe, just maybe, the Christian worldview has something relevant to say to the key issues of our day. But when we fail to even put in an appearance at key debates, the message to non-Christians is that we simply don't care about the big stuff.

Including the biggest issue of all, "Christ?"

Abortion and Evasive Thinking [Jay]

2011-07-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

The other night I took a break from subject specific study to peruse Open Letters – Selected Writings of Vaclav Havel. Havel was an outspoken young playwright that would become the voice of dissidence in Czechoslovakia and ultimately the president of his country. The second essay in the book is entitled “On Evasive Thinking” and I thought it was worth a quick discussion.

It was originally given as a speech to the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in 1965 at a conference marking the 20th anniversary of Czechoslovakia's freedom at the end of World War II. Havel criticizes an article written after a woman was killed when window ledge fell off of a dilapidated building and landed on her in the street below. The writer of the article acknowledged the window ledge should not have fallen from disrepair but quickly turned the subject matter to how great it was that they were allowed to protest at all. How wonderful it is to have that freedom and how great it is that Czechoslovakia had advanced and modernized in women's fashions. Ultimately, the writer warned that, instead of protesting municipal matters, literature ought to be focused on the hope for the future of mankind.

This is what Havel calls evasive thinking. There is an issue at hand that has raised protest. Buildings were falling into disrepair in socialist Czechoslovakia and as a result of necessary work not being done a ledge fell off and killed a woman. What does that have to do with the freedom to protest or the fashion choices of Czechoslovakian women? Nothing at all is the answer. So why is the object of Havel's criticism going on about that stuff?

Here is Havel in his own words:

This way of thinking, in my opinion, is causing immense damage. The essence of it is that certain established dialectical patterns are deformed and fetishized and thus become an immobile system of intellectual and phraseological schemata which, when applied to different kinds of reality, seem at first to have achieved, admirably, a heightened ideological view of that reality, whereas in fact they have, without our noticing it, separated thought from its immediate contact with reality and thus crippled its capacity to intervene in that reality effectively.

He says that our words become more important than the subject we are talking about such that:

It's enough to call a fallen window ledge a “local matter,” and criticism of the way buildings are maintained as “municipal criticism.” and we immediately feel that nothing so terrible has happened... And finally, when you need to save money by leaving the upkeep of buildings not to a superintendent, but to a voluntary brigade of doctors, lawyers, and office clerks working on weekends, you need only to call it “socialist maintenance by tenants” and a doctor chipping away at a rotting window ledge on his building is warmed by the feeling that in doing so, he is helping to fulfill some higher phase in the development of socialism.

What has any of this to do with LTI or the pro-life position? I think quite a lot when you look at what Havel was saying. He criticized thought that vacillated between “on the one hand – but on the other hand” and “in a certain sense, yes – but in another sense, no” saying that when we lose touch with reality, we inevitably lose the ability to influence reality effectively. Criticism must be direct and on point and must be met in the same manner. When window ledges fall and kill people from disrepair, it does no good to pontificate about the nature of comparative freedom and the hope of the future and the destiny of man because, as happened shortly after the first incident, another window ledge is likely to fall and kill someone else (this time a man). So the advice to consider broader visions of humanity rings toothless in the ears of people worried that it is not safe to walk the streets.

So what is abortion about? What is the point in contention? Simply stated, it is now legal in the United States to kill unborn human beings and because of that legality we do kill unborn human beings at the pace of about 1.2 million per year in our country. The unborn are unquestionably human and unquestionably alive and pro-lifers contend that the unjust taking of human life is a moral offense that ought to be prevented and not a legal right that ought to be granted. Human beings matter and killing them without extreme justification is wrong.

There are ways to respond to this claim, but all legitimate responses must answer the question at hand. What are the unborn and why are we permitted to do what we are doing to them? The Supreme Court rulings are an embarrassment in this regard as they continually abdicate their responsibility to successfully identify the unborn while simultaneously legalizing the massive destruction of the unborn. They are not alone.

Reading Havel's examples of evasive phrasings reminded me of some of the conversations I have with defenders of abortion rights. “The unborn may be fully human in a certain sense – but then again they may not in another sense. There may possibly be such a thing as human non-persons. Since that is possible, are you going force your unproven beliefs on others?” Or “on the one hand they are human – but on the other hand is simple genetic identification enough to make us human? How do we identify morally valuable humans really? Isn't it obvious that some human beings are not valuable? Isn't it obvious that some animals share more in common with some humans than other humans do?”

It doesn't stop there. We just keep rolling on down the hill. “I understand that the unborn may be fully human, but what about the right to economic and vocational equality for women? Don't you believe that women should be equal to men? Don't you think women should be liberated from their reproductive systems?”

Ultimately, we arrive at the sea of absolute uncertainty where we cannot know if anything is truly right and wrong so we must assume that all rights are granted and that the identity of humanity as a category is absolutely in question. They would never phrase it like this but we have moved to where the substance of their arguments is something like, “On the one hand I like laws against murder and laws that protect me and my interest, but on the other hand I cannot see why people have rights beyond what we grant them and struggle to understand what you mean by people at all.”

It looks to me like the very definition of evasive thinking with all the tell tale signs of separating thought from its immediate contact with reality. Once you have become so intelligent that you can no longer recognize and identify a human being you have become far too smart for me. I remember a Stand to Reason Blog comment thread where a clever fellow waxed on about the question of genetic variations acceptable within the category of humanity and disingenuously pleading with someone to help him understand how we can accurately identify human beings. A fellow commenter very simply replied, “They have human parents for a start.”

G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Eugenics and Other Evils how captivated and hypnotized people can become with complicated thought and how startled they can be when we use blunt terms to simplify matters. That is one of our goals here at LTI. The pro-life argument begins with a very basic observation that must be addressed. A particular class of human life is actively and legally being killed every day. Why is it OK to treat this class of humanity in a manner that we reject as inarguably immoral for most every other category of human being?

If the evasive language mentioned above is embraced then aborting human beings may be nothing because the unborn possibly do not matter. In fact, by killing unborn human beings you may be participating in the liberation of women and leveling the economic playing field. Isn't that lovely? Besides, it is questionable whether we have any real objective human rights and human life is difficult to define so there might not be such a thing as humanity at all. This is all so complicated that whatever you think we simply cannot take any actual action in the real world based this sea of differing opinions. So kill as many as you like.

That line of thinking won't do. There is an urgency to this argument. Life is being destroyed every day, moment by moment, even as I write this long blog post and as you later read it. It is not an academic exercise, it is a direct question far more harrowing than the fact that people were being killed by falling window ledges in Czechoslovakia in 1965. Human beings are being killed by the millions. Why is this OK? Havel's point on evasive thinking should be a reminder that we need to watch out for clever arguments that ultimately take us so far adrift that we are disconnected from the real question at hand and how we can influence the real world.

We know what we are doing to them, so what is it about the unborn that makes this acceptable? It is a question about the identity of the unborn, and the answer must address the unborn directly.

Is Pregnancy a Pathology? [Serge]

2011-07-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Soon insurance companies may be required to cover oral contraceptives without charging a copay for women who seek them. The reasoning behind this requirement is that giving a woman artificial hormones to trick her reproductive cycle to believe she is already pregnant is now considered important preventative care.

Medical insurance has always been a way for us to insure that a pathological condition would not impose an undue financial burden on a family. If you receive a diagnosis of cancer, and need to get expensive treatment to treat that pathology, your medical insurance is designed to help alleviate the financial burden. Insurance does this by taking all of the fees that others have paid who have not been diagnosed with a pathology and applying it to those that do. In other words, the healthy insurance carriers help cover the burden for those who get sick.

In terms of OC coverage, there are some important questions to ask. First, what pathology are we treating when we give a woman OCs? Is a woman's body which is functioning perfectly now considered pathological because it is acting a way she doesn't want it to? It seems that the desire to have sex without the possibility of children is a choice, but a healthy woman whose ovaries are working correctly are seen as pathologic?

Second, why should others who have purchased health insurance be responsible for funding the sexual behavior of others? Most drugs require a copay. OCs not only will have to be a covered benefit, but a copay will not be allowed. Why should this be the case.

If a woman wishes to have a choice to take a contraceptive - I have no problem with that choice. I don't understand why I also need to fund her choice.

Working the Gospel into a Pro-Life Presentation [Scott]

2011-07-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

A short video on offering hope without sacrificing truth. Share with your pastor.

Have You Heard the One About People and Animals? [Jay]

2011-07-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

The idea behind Commonsense Corner segments of our podcasts (they can be found here) was that our commonsense intuitions matter. How we perceive things and how the world presents itself are legitimate points to be made in discussing issues like “Do objective moral values and duties exist?” or “Do human beings have intrinsic value?” Philosophy degrees are not necessary to observe that it is wrong to torture and murder a toddler or that human rights violations, even in nations that condone brutality, violate objective and basic human rights. Those points are legitimately made by anyone. We are not saying that our intuitions are infallible and are the end of the conversation, but as my friend Scott Klusendorf said, “We have to start the conversation somewhere.”

It is true that there are very sophisticated arguments in favor of a worldview that reduces human life to a mere byproduct of blind evolutionary processes. We cannot simply dismiss those arguments on the basis that they disagree with our commonsense intuitions. That said, it is also a mistake to believe that all arguments begin on equal footing. If there are features in our worldview that are problematic, it is dishonest to ignore those features. And it seems to me that the more obvious one of those features appears to be then the greater burden we have to explain it away. This simple observation is the basis of complex academic arguments like the Arguments from Consciousness by Dr. JP Moreland or the Kalam Cosmological Argument by Dr. William Lane Craig and many others. In their full glory, these academic arguments are dense with sophistication and display the remarkable erudition of their authors, but when I am standing in front of a class of lay people explaining them I focus on the simple foundations. We seem to have a conscious mind and the ability to make choices as free agents. Anything that begins to exist has a cause and the universe appears to have begun to exist. These are simple observations that require good reasons to abandon them.

Why revisit all of this? Because in our work it can become very easy to lose sight of what is commonsense. When you read argument after argument from the other side and realize that many (certainly not all) of those that oppose the full humanity of the unborn or the concept of human exceptionalism are highly intelligent individuals it can become easy to lose sight of where all of this arguing begins. The conversation can take some strange turns and before you know it you have forgotten where it all started.

I had a fascinating reminder recently of where it starts. I was in the mountains of Central Java in Indonesia giving my testimony at a gospel rally to more than 600 people from some 20 small villages near the Wonosari area. I concentrated this presentation on my transformation from a surly atheist that made it my life's goal to be intimidating and unapproachable to working in Christian ministry trying to be the light of the world and the city on the hill that God called me to be. As I talked about my former beliefs I mentioned in passing that as an atheist I did not believe that there was any real difference between man and other animals. As products of evolution, no animal enjoyed a privileged position in any metaphysical sense and that ultimately we were no more valuable than monkeys or sharks. I have made this point hundreds of times in the US especially at universities to student groups. It is not a remarkable or novel point and it is generally met with knowing nods of the head to assure me they have heard this before. That is not the reaction I got from this crowd, though.

How did this crowd of simple villagers in the mountains of Indonesia respond when I told them I once thought human beings were no different than animals like monkeys and sharks? They laughed. They laughed loudly. It wasn't meant to be a funny line and yet it was easily the biggest laugh I got all night, and suddenly I laughed along with them. For these people that work with animals intimately every day the idea that we were the same as their cows and chickens was a joke and a good one to boot.

Their commonsense intuitions tell them that people are different in easily observable ways from other animals. They are not yet learned enough to dismiss those intuitions easily. And though this anecdote admittedly proves nothing in the greater arguments, it was a reminder for me where those arguments ought to start. It also reminded me how clear some truths are to those who do not spend their time trying to convince themselves to deny what they know.

Abortion Debate is Up [Scott]

2011-07-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

Randy Alcorn has posted the video of my debate with former ACLU President Nadine Strossen (Westmont College, 3/15/2001).

Bumper Sticker Philosophy [Megan]

2011-07-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

College campuses are like great big idea generators — lots of different ideas swirling around and giving birth to new ideas.
One of the best places to see the ideas being churned out is in a campus parking lot — namely on the backs of the vehicles in those parking lots...the ones covered with bumper stickers. And by comparing the bumper stickers adorning a single vehicle, one can discern whether or not the vehicle's owner is a careful thinker. A recent trip to the University of Georgia campus made this evident.
Case and point: the first sticker that caught my eye on one sticker-clad red sedan was a parody of the Christian fish symbol — inside the fish was "DARWIN," and the fish had stick feet. Just to the right of that sticker were two others (one placed just above the other) that respectively read, "Fight racism" and "Pro-choice." Uh-oh.
The owner of the red sedan was clearly not majoring in metaphysics. If she was — I'm guessing it was a "she" because of the nature of the remaining stickers — she might have picked up on some of the conflicts beneath the surface.
For starters, the "Darwin fish" showed her hand — she was undergirding her ideas with a naturalistic worldview. (Note: Naturalism asserts that reality can be explained by purely natural means — nothing beyond the physical world allowed.)
Not only that, the sticker — poking fun at the Christian fish symbol — implied that she believed her worldview is better than others. But "better than" depends on an unseen scale of goodness. Naturalism cannot account for goodness, much less better than. According to her worldview, ideas are just the inevitable result of bombarding particles. So ideas can be different, but none can be better than others.
The same problem extends to the views implied by the other stickers — including "Fight racism" and "Pro-choice." The best she can do is say she prefers those views to others, but she cannot explain why they are "better," or why one ought to hold them.
Furthermore, there is a gaping inconsistency between those two views. "Fight racism" implies that she thinks it is wrong to discriminate based on physical appearance — skin color, for instance. I agree.
But "Pro-choice," the view that advocates abortion, asserts that discrimination is okay on grounds of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency (SLED). Those are the only real differences between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today, and none of them are grounds for declaring embryos less human, less valuable, or less deserving of life than their born counterparts. As we teach at LTI, the unborn are unquestionably human — science has settled that for us. And human beings are intrinsically valuable — valuable just in light of being human, made in the image of God.
Ideas are powerful things, especially as they give birth to other ideas. Ideas that flow from a single falsity can be dangerous, which is evident in the web of beliefs — and actions — that flow from the single thought, "The unborn are not human."
Ideas that are grounded in the Christian worldview, however, harmonize in a way that is good, true and beautiful. They make sense of reality. As C.S. Lewis concluded, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else."

Probably the Best Facebook Status I've Seen [Scott]

2011-05-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

From Carla Stream:

A woman who was proabortion asked a prolife mother holding a photo of an aborted child, "How can you allow children to see those horrible pictures?" The prolife mother asked her, " How can you allow children to become those horrible pictures?"

Winning on the Edges [Jay]

2011-04-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

Two new articles by Dahlia Lithwick at The Slate and Sarah Kliff at Politico draw attention to the recent trend of state legislators passing bills that challenge aspects of Roe v. Wade without making a direct attempt to overturn that dreadful piece of judicial reasoning. What is interesting to me is how both articles recognize that losing the Gonzales v. Carhart decision has changed the playing field for the pro-abortion side.

Because some still insist that Carhart was somehow a pro-choice victory and that recognizing it as an advancement for the pro-life cause demonstrates that you are not really pro-life, it is helpful to look at what is happening. The pro-aborts LOST on Carhart and they know that. They are afraid of LOSING again and so they will not challenge these incremental moves all over the country for fear that it will lead to another judicial LOSS.

From Kliff's article:

_Oklahoma is likely to be the next state to ban abortions after 20 weeks, on the basis that the fetus can then feel pain, with Gov. Mary Fallin expected to sign a law imminently. Idaho and Kansas passed similar “fetal pain” laws last week. Nebraska’s law has been on the books for a year, and legislators in 14 states have introduced similar measures, according to the Guttmacher Institute, with bills in Alabama, Iowa and Indiana moving forward at a rapid clip...

It could lay the groundwork for the next challenge to Roe v. Wade — a battle they believe they can win.-

And although Nancy Northrup, President of The Center for Reproductive Rights, claims that they are not challenging because they see the new restrictions as lower down on their list of prioritites, this seems like empty bravado. They acknowledge that these new laws will restrict the access for some women to abortion and that the laws challenge particular aspects of Roe/Doe, and yet the Nebraska law has been on the books for a year and has gone unchallenged. Does The Center for Reproductive Rights not care that a small percentage of women are being denied their Constitituonal right to choose abortion? Are they really unconcerned that some women have lost their reproductive rights? How is that possible? It is the name of their organization for goodness sakes!

Perhaps they have other motivations for ducking this fight. Again, from Kliff's article:

-Abortion rights supporters also have reason to approach the Supreme Court with caution: The last abortion challenge to rise to the Supreme Court ultimately restricted abortion access. Carhart v. Gonzalez (2007) upheld the national Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, passed by Congress in 2003 which bars providers from using a late-term procedure called “dilation and extraction..."

Reproductive health groups widely disagree with this reading of Gonzalez, contending that the court will uphold the viability standard it has used for decades. Nevertheless, NWLC’s Borchelt concedes that it did “open the floodgates” for anti-abortion groups to test out new, more restrictive bans, with hopes of bringing one to the high court...

Equally alarming to abortion rights supporters: Gonzalez was written by crucial swing-voter Kennedy, who had previously supported abortion rights in other cases, like 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

“We would hope Justice Kennedy would stay with his position in Planned Parenthood,” Northrup said. “That being said, we lost the case in [Gonzalez] and would join Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg in saying we’re ‘alarmed’ at the view of women that was reflected in that decision.”-

Maybe Kliff is just exagerrating. Lithwick is an unapologetic defender of abortion as a constitutional right, so surely she will balance this take with some pro-choice optimism. From Lithwick:

-Opponents and supporters of abortion appear to have taken the position that Roe v. Wade is no longer the law of the land.-

Maybe not. Later in the article:

-The risk of challenging these clearly unconstitutional laws and then losing at the Supreme Court is evidently so high, according to Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, that it's not worth taking. As she explained last week to Rachel Maddow, the fear that Justice Samuel Alito would vote to overturn Roe is so deep that reproductive rights groups may be opting to leave the state bans in place. And, as she conceded in that interview, wherever unconstitutional state abortion bans go unchallenged, they become law.-

Lithwick quotes an article in San Diego City Beat by D.A. Kodolenko. In the article he says:

-This is a dangerous Catch-22. In order to keep in place the existing federal law protecting a woman’s right to choose, pro-choice organizations are limited in what they can do about the spate of new anti-abortion laws being passed in states dominated by anti-choice conservatives.

  What we’re witnessing is a stealth campaign to make an abortion illegal or as difficult to obtain as possible in as many states as possible, and it’s working.-

I am grateful to every pro-lifer that reminds us all that the ultimate and only true goal is the end of abortion. It is also helpful to remind ourselves that small steps legitimately get us to our destination, though not as fast as any of us would like. No pro-lifer will ever be truly happy until we live in a culture that recognizes the value of all human life and sees it as virtuous to protect those least capable of protecting themselves even when it requires that we sacrifice in order to do so. Even so, we ought to be able to enjoy moments of progress.

If the other side can be believed, we are making progress. We can press on knowing that we are making a difference.

Down Syndrome Post Removal [Jay]

2011-04-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

There was a post on the blog that was about a young man that I met yesterday that had Down syndrome and the startling abortion statistics as it relates to that chromosomal condition. I was contacted and asked to pull it off the blog because of the possibility of future publication. I apologize for the inconvenience and will repost it at a later date or update our readers on where to find it if it is indeed published elsewhere. Thank you for understanding.

Kaczor on Why Consciousness is Not value-Giving [Scott]

2011-04-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

When critics of the pro-life view assert that consciousness bestows value and a right to life on human beings, you should immediately ask: 1)“Why is that value-giving? It sounds ad-hoc to me. 2) What do you mean by consciousness? That is, do you mean one must be able to immediately exercise it or do you mean something else?” The question—“What do you mean by consciousness?”—sets up this soundbite from Christopher Kaczor:

Requiring actual consciousness renders us non-persons whenever we sleep. Requiring immediately attainable consciousness excludes those in surgery. Requiring the basic neural brain structures for consciousness (but not consciousness itself) excludes those whose brains are temporarily damaged. On the other hand, if potentiality for consciousness makes a being a person, then those sleeping, in surgery, or temporarily comatose are persons, but so also would be the normal human embryo, fetus, and newborn.

Jay's Worldview Chapel Talk

2011-03-31T18:19:00.000-07:00

I recently had the opportunity to give a basic talk to a high school co-op (9th-12th grades) about why students should study worldview. I edited out some of the direct interaction with the students because there was no sound system so it is difficult to hear them and there is an original edited copy that I had to chop up for YouTube so I lost a word or two here and there. Otherwise, I thought I would share it for those interested.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Should We Treat our Close Genetic Siblings the Same? [Serge]

2011-03-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

I hope the boss enjoyed his stay in our fair state at the best university in the nation. As a follow up, it is only in places like the University of Michigan where ideas such as the Great Ape Project can be conceived. Since academia believes that human are really no different than other apes, the Great Ape Project believes that we should give advanced primates the same type of "human" rights that we now deny to human beings in the fetal stage of development. Here is a page describing the gorilla, which shares 97.5% of our DNA, as a peaceful vegetarian who shows great emotion.

Should we grant gorillas the same human rights as we do newborn humans? If we do, I believe we have a big problem. You see, in the wild, gorillas travel in packs of a dominant male and many females. When the male dies or gets beaten in a fight, the new dominant male tends to do something that the peaceful description of these animals neglected to mention. The new male will brutally kill all of the infants that the other male had fathered. Gorilla infanticide is widely known and is not in dispute.

This may be related to high rates of infanticide documented among mountain gorillas at Karisoke. Infants deprived of protection by an adult male are almost certain to be killed and as a tactic to protect against this, females join new groups in the absence of a silverback (Watts 1989). Until recently, infanticide had only been recorded among mountain gorillas; direct evidence now exists for eastern lowland gorillas and indirect evidence has been recorded among western lowland gorillas (Stokes et al. 2003; Stoinski pers. comm.).

So, if we grant gorillas the same rights that we have as human beings, should we not hold them to the same moral standard as we do a human being that would exhibit this behavior? If a human man began a new relationship and the first thing he did when he moved in was to kill all of the children who lived in the house we would consider him a moral monster of the highest sort. However, when one of our "closest genetic relatives" exhibits this behavior we don't treat them the same way. If they are deserving of human rights, we should this be so?

Still think there is little difference between human beings and other animals?

Humans no Different than Animals? [Scott]

2011-03-30T12:21:00.001-07:00

I’m speaking tonight at the University of Michigan. One objection I’ll almost certainly get during the Q&A will be that the unborn are human but not persons.

Whenever I hear this, I ask, “What’s the difference? Do you mean there is a class of human beings whom we can set aside to be killed while others can’t be? And who exactly qualifies not to be killed?”

The answer as to who qualifies will inevitably be ad-hoc and disqualify many people outside the womb. Once that point becomes clear, my interlocutor will try and turn the tables on me. “So why do you assume that humans have more value than animals? Isn’t that ad-hoc?”

Setting aside for the moment that if all animals (including humans) are equal, this undermines the case for elective abortion rather than strengthening it, do our intuitions really suggest that species membership is morally irrelevant? For example, is there really no difference between a man who kills the family dog to feed his starving son and one who kills the son to feed the dog? And if humans are no different than animals, why are we outraged at Michael Vick who clubbed pit bulls to death for losing fights? Isn't it because we expect better of him as a man?

Truth is, while it’s commonly asserted that species doesn’t matter, it’s seldom argued for. Indeed, our intuitions scream otherwise.

As Christopher Kaczor points out, there’s a moral difference between a hit-and run involving a squirrel and one involving a newborn, even a mentally disabled one. And while some people are vegetarians out of respect for animals, “there’s still an important difference between eating a hamburger and a Harold burger, even if Harold, due to his mental handicap, was no more intelligent than a cow.” Indeed, our condemnation of cannibalism rests on the assumption that differences in species are morally relevant, as does our condemnation of sex between humans and animals.

At this point, a clever critic of the pro-life view might bring up human-animal hybrids. Imagine we have a monkey with 60 percent monkey DNA and 40 percent human DNA, and the brain of a human. Imagine further this chimp shows signs of having a rational nature, like his human counterparts. Doesn’t that defeat the claim that having a human nature is an all or nothing proposition?

As Kaczor points out, the animal-human hybrid objection is a non sequitur. Suppose creatures of mixed origin are indeed manufactured. If that happens, “then we shall have to debate about whether they should be included in the category of persons. But the debate about such creations need not undermine the moral conviction that all human beings—anyone who arises from human parents—should be accorded equal rights.”

Finally, writes Kaczor, a mentally disabled girl and her dog may be equally incapable of reasoning, but this condition in the girl is a tragedy but inconsequential for the dog. That’s why we take heroic measures to help her develop this skill while not giving it a second thought for Fido. In short, species matters.

Watch This [Scott]

2011-03-29T16:01:00.001-07:00

This short video by Tripp Almon clarifies the moral logic of the abortion debate.

No Regrets [Bob]

2011-03-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

If you've had any doubts about the role of "pro-life" Democrats in defending the unborn, read this and have all your doubts removed: Stupak: No Regrets

Sickening, but enlightening.

What's Good for the Goose...[Scott]

2011-03-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

My flight to SFO went quick in part because I chose to tune out the overcrowded coach section and focus exclusively on Christopher Kaczor’s The Ethics of Abortion.

Get the book. His chapter refuting the bodily rights arguments of Judith Jarvis Thomson and David Boonin is great. True, he covers many points we’ve addressed elsewhere on this site (see here and here), but he also adds some new takes on the issue.

Briefly, Thomson argues that even if the unborn is human, innocent, and has a right to life, he does not have the right to use the mother’s body to sustain his own life against her will. She may withhold support if she chooses. Abortion is the justified withholding of support. In addition to her famous violinist analogy where she likens unwanted pregnancy to being forcibly hooked up to a musician that needs your kidney to survive, she describes the fetus as an intruder, though an innocent one. The mother may justly remove the intruder if she wants to withhold supporting him.

Of course, for Thomson’s argument to work, the relationship between the mother and the intruder must parallel the mother’s relationship to her own child. Right away there are problems. First, there can be no intruder until two parents create him. Second, abortion is much more than withholding support—it’s actively killing another human through dismemberment or poisoning. Indeed, per Thomson, I not only have the right to remove an innocent intruder from my yard; I can cut him up and throw his body parts in the garbage! As abortion-choice advocate and philosopher Mary Anne Warren points out, “mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property.”

Nor is pregnancy parallel to being forcibly hooked up to a violinist. In Thomson’s analogy, the violinist has an underlying pathology and needs your kidney to survive. If you unplug him, he eventually dies from his illness, not because you actively killed him. You might even argue that although his death was foreseen, you did not intend it by withholding your support. Indeed, as Kaczor points out, a general in a just war may foresee that some of his troops will be killed in battle, but he does not intend their deaths. Conversely, with elective abortion, the death of the unborn human is not only foreseen; it’s intended. He dies not from an underlying pathology, but from an intentional act of dismemberment. Moreover, other than the case of rape, waking up and finding yourself forcibly hooked up to a violinist is not like pregnancy where both father and mother voluntarily engaged in an act biologically ordered to the creation of offspring.

Kaczor adds a point I hadn’t considered, namely, that Thomson is inconsistent. That is, while it’s true that you did not choose to be hooked up to the violinist, it’s equally true that he didn’t choose to be hooked up to you. If you may unplug yourself by directly killing him, then he should be free to unplug by directly killing you. True, the fetus lacks the power to detach, but the question here is not power but the moral right to detach at the cost of the mother’s life. Suppose the fetus had an agent to help him do this the same way a mother has an agent to perform the abortion. Is the fetus morally justified detaching even though it kills his mother? In short, if the violinist may not unplug himself causing your death, then you should not unplug and cause his.

I guess you could say the sword cuts both ways.

JivinJehoshaphat nails it on Jonathan Alter [Jay]

2011-03-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

Here is a great post from JivinJehoshaphat called Jonathan Alter Proves Himself a Fool. I am not going to cut and paste here because it is a work of art and ought to be appreciated in its whole.

Good Logic, Horrific Conclusion [Serge]

2011-03-10T07:12:00.000-08:00

The mainstream gradualist view on abortion seems to afford the human fetus some form of moral status as it develops in the mother's womb. This explains why early abortion is tolerated and late-term abortion is generally seen as wrong in our culture. Here is an excerpt by the director of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service Ann Furedi that takes that type of reasoning to task. Like Peter Singer, she gets the logic correct, but her conclusions are downright horrific. She uses this logic to defend the view that abortion should be legal at any time during the pregnancy, and we have no right to even ask why a woman would wish to obtain a late-term abortion. (All emphasis mine)

To me, the argument for a gradualist approach to the ethical rightness or wrongness of abortion that depends on the gestation of the fetus is weak, lacks intellectual consistency, and seems self-serving...

To the ‘ethical straddlers’ concerned about gestation we must ask: is there anything qualitatively different about a fetus at, say, 28 weeks that gives it a morally different status to a fetus at 18 weeks or even eight weeks? It certainly looks different because its physical development has advanced. At 28 weeks we can see it is human – at eight weeks a human embryo looks much like that of a hamster. But are we really so shallow, so fickle, as to let our view on moral worth be determined by appearance? Even if at five weeks we can only see an embryonic pole, we know that it is human. The heart that can be seen beating on an ultrasound scan at six weeks is as much a human heart as the one that beats five months later.

Claims that the fetus has ‘evolving potential’ make little sense. The potential of the fetus does not evolve; it just is. A fetus may draw closer to fulfilling this potential as it develops and as its birth approaches, but the potential does not change. Indeed, from the time of conception, as soon as embryonic cells begin to divide, an entity with the potential to become a person is created. It is the product of a man and a woman, but distinct from them. It has a unique DNA and, unless its development is interrupted or fails, it will be born as a child...

But it is difficult to see how it can be argued that a fetus should be accorded a moral status that differs at different stages of its development on the grounds of ‘evolving potential’, since a fetus at 28 weeks is no more or less potentially a person than one at eight weeks.

If it is ‘drawing closer’ to the fulfilment of the fetus’s potential that changes its moral status, then it seems that there is a difficult problem in finding a moral – as distinct from a pragmatic – justification as to when is close enough for the status to change. Since a fetus draws closer to fulfilling its potential from the day it is conceived, and is constantly evolving as it grows, which day - or which developmental change - matters morally? Is it when there is evidence of a beating heart, or fetal movement, or a particular neurological or brain development? Who makes this decision? And why?

It seems to me that the attempt to accord a ‘gradualist’ moral significance to the development of the fetus is little more than an attempt to disguise a personal reaction as an ethical argument. It exemplifies thinking that starts from an a priori assumption that something is ‘bad’, and then tries to construct an argument to justify the badness. In this case, the assumption is that later abortions are ‘bad’ and the arguments about the significance of the evolving potential of the fetus are an intellectually elevated way of justifying an assumption that is, in fact, no more than prejudice.

There is one major flaw with her line of reasoning. She posits birth as the one special event that bestows full worth and human rights on the developing entity that she was willing to kill in the womb. She does this by mere assertion. If there is something about a human being that gives it special moral worth, then doesn't it make far more sense to recognize that worth begins when the entity becomes a human being? She argues correctly that the gradualist approach is intellectually dishonest and self serving, but in its place she recommends a position even more intellectually dishonest and self serving.

Stuff to Look At [Scott]

2011-03-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

Townhall columnist Mike Adams, using The Case for Life, helps a student formulate questions for a pro-abortion professor.

Jivin J reports on a leading U.K. health official who suggests letting babies die to save money. Jivin replies, "Doesn't socialized medicine sound great?"

Ten reasons why Trevin Wax is an encouraged pro-lifer.

Nathan Schlueter on drawing pro-life lines: "We live in a regime that protects the right to abortion on demand. How can we best save lives under these circumstances?"

Matt Yonke of Pro-Life Action League sums up last week's discussion on incremental legislation (reposted from the comments section):

Hi everyone.
It seems to me the debate is not being framed correctly. Personhood advocates are often fond of saying they don't support laws that end with, "And then you can kill the baby." This is a rhetorical feint as no law ever written in American literally ends with such language.

What they mean is that they believe these laws give approval to abortion under certain circumstances. But nothing could be further from the truth.

What must be remembered is that the one-two punch of Roe and Doe said that you can ALWAYS and for ANY REASON kill the baby until it's out of the womb. Since the highest court in our land has ruled that, no lower law or legislature can give a woman more right to an abortion or approve it more.

Put another way, the abortion license is as big as it could possibly be. State laws can't make it any bigger. The only thing state and local laws can do is limit the abortion license, and they do that quite effectively, all the while making the public more and more conscious of the humanity of the child in the womb.

So, far from ending with, "And then you can kill the baby," incremental measures really end with "And then you CAN'T kill the baby." If you're a minor and your parents don't know about it, you can't kill the baby. If you don't wait three days, you can't kill the baby. If you won't look at the ultrasound, you can't kill the baby.

The default position under Roe is you can kill the baby. Incremental measure say, under certain circumstances you can't kill the baby even if Roe says you can. Hopefully, such laws will continue to close the abortion license little by little until such time as it can be done away with altogether.

With the debate framed that way, there's not only nothing wrong with incremental measures, there's also nothing incompatible between personhood and incrementalism. There's no reason supporters of incremental measures and supporters of personhood amendments can't work side by side. Heck, there's no reason the same person couldn't support both.

One final note, when personhood advocates throw incrementalists under the bus for being less-than-truly-pro-life, just remember who you're throwing under that bus. You're throwing my boss, Joe Scheidler, Fr. Frank, Troy Newman, Lila Rose, Monica Miller, Bryan Kemper and a host of others who have dedicated their lives to saving unborn babies from abortion under that bus too. Are you sure you want to do that?

Note: Comment threads for last week's discussion topic are now closed unless you add something really, really, novel to the discussion that causes us to go, "Wow, we never heard that one before." We wish you luck.

Unprincipled, Unprincipled, Everyone Unprincipled! [Jay]

2011-03-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

Last night, I fully intended to let the whole incrementalist thing go. After 24 hours straight of having my pro-life bona fides passive aggressively attacked I was a little sick of the game. Then it occurred to me, they are right.

It was the millionth time I saw questions about “unprincipled incrementalists” and the subtle hints about me and my fellow LTI ministry cohorts defining some human beings as less valuable than other human beings that finally cleared it up for me. It was a little hard for me to see at first because I was caught up in how many of us quit our jobs that previously supplied our families with that little useful thing called money and began a life of living on support to speak, teach, write articles, research materials for future books, and debate people on college campuses defending the position that all unborn human life is equally and intrinsically valuable. Eventually, through the helpful comments from others that it is not what I do or how I live my life but what they think of my position on political strategies that determines whether or not I am pro-life, I saw the light.

I was in a crisis. My entire DVD/Blu Ray collection had to be revisited before I went to bed. My bookshelves needed to be purged. My house was full of unprincipled incrementalist propaganda! I had been a fool all those times I had felt that emotional swell at the end of Amazing Grace with the eradication of the British slave trade. William Wilberforce was unprincipled! The slave trade was legally abolished in 1807, the scene at the end of the film, but it was not until 1833 that the slaves were actually freed. So he was really participating in perpetuating the idea that the slaves were worthless. Also, some British slave traders continued to defy the law for years so other than dramatically decreasing the number of new slaves being taken and shifting the political landscape of Britain forever he did not actually free any slave at all by this point. Why were these people cheering for this unprincipled compromiser?

I looked at my bookshelves and saw my Civil War section and was struck with how one of my heroes, Frederick Douglass, no longer deserves the mantle of abolitionist. Sure he was a former slave that dedicated his life to ending that evil institution as it was practiced in America, but he was unprincipled in doing so. He struck out from the real abolitionists and tried to form broader anti-slavery coalitions with the less principled Free Soilers and Republicans believing that a larger force working to limit slavery would faster facilitate the end of it. Who cares if he was right, didn't he realize that by allying himself with people that hated slavery for silly reasons (like it bred laziness in the southern states) or people who were willing to compromise to stop the spread of the slave state power that he was agreeing with them on those points? No matter what he said and in spite of the fact that his past experiences gave him greater reasons to hate that institution than any of the “real abolitionists”, his actions exposed him for what he was. Compromised and unprincipled. Nothing demonstrated that more than when he allowed a wealthy benefactor to help him buy his freedom. Didn't he realize that he was supporting the idea that people could be bought and sold? Who cares if he wanted to be free? That is nothing compared to being principled in the eyes of those who have arrogated the authority to bestow or divest that title from others.

My head was reeling. I couldn't find anyone on my history shelf that had ever been able avoid the trap of accepting less than all that they ultimately wanted in pursuit of a greater goal. Gandhi, unprincipled over and over again. Martin Luther King, Jr. was compromised! And don't get me started on that moral monster Lincoln. Everywhere there was nothing but unprincipled compromisers.

What has been accomplished by all of this? What had these men and women wrought by accepting a graduated move toward greater goals?

And what about the so called pro-lifers of the last 38 years? Oh how they have failed us! Sure the pro-abortion side is bemoaning the dearth of doctors and nurses willing to perform abortions out of fear it will compromise the ability to actually supply the current pace in the future when this generation of abortionists goes away, but that is small potatoes. It is absolutely true that for the first time since Roe v. Wade the majority of Americans identified themselves as pro-life, but that hardly matters because they don't get to make that call. I know that liberal journalists are writing articles lamenting how they have lost the argument on principles and need to change their tactics, a claim I have even seen repeated in pro-choice panel discussions, but they are blind to the truth of their success. They are trying to get the argument off of the unborn and back on the rights of women because the PBA debate and other legislative efforts undermined the public support of abortion in ways they see as dangerous, yet they cannot understand it was all a compromised and unprincipled waste of time on our part.

It was to no avail because we clearly should be further along than this by now. I mean I don't really know how long it takes to reverse the philosophical tides of history and reinstall a broader ethic that respects life rather than diminishing it to a functional machine whose worth is determined by utility. It is hard to tell how fast we should be able to arrest the worldwide liberalization of abortion laws and swing this ship back in the right direction. Nobody else seems to have a specific time table either, but it sure feels like we should have been able to do it by now. If it feels that way then it should be that way and so this has all been unprincipled failure to this point

I thought of all of these things and all of these men and women that I admire that are being cast as unprincipled and compromised and you know what I did? I went to bed and slept like a baby because if I am unprincipled like William Wilberforce, Frederick Douglass, Francis Beckwith, Hadley Arkes, and my good friend Scott Klusendorf then that is fine with me. I can learn to live with the disapproval of the rest.

To further demonstrate this point, comments will be closed on this post. It is a principle thing, so I am sure you all understand.

Francis Beckwith Replies to Rebecca Kiessling [Scott]

2011-03-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

Frank replies:

Rebecca writes (see comments section): "As a strategic means of ending abortion, unprincipled incrementalism has been a complete failure and got us the ruling in Roe v Wade."

At this point, I am going to have to pull rank on you. You really don't know what you're talking about.

First, Roe v. Wade is not the result of a strategy employed after Roe v. Wade. That is actually impossible, unless you believe in time travel and backwards causation.

Second, both the Human Life Amendment and the Human Life Bill of the early 1980s failed to pass. So, based on your reasoning, non-incrementalism is a complete failure, since each was a non-incremental approach.

The problem is how we judge success and failure. But none of us is ever in the position to make that judgment, since success may require literally centuries to undo the damage of the Enlightenment (which took about 300 years to unravel the moral foundations of Western Civilization). If anything, what we have seen over the past decade or so is a real shift in opinion from prochoice to prolife. And it happened after the partial-birth abortion debate and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA), both of which shifted the focus from "choice" to the nature of the unborn. The prolife movement was not going to have a chance unless it changed the question in the debate, which has been largely owned by the other side.

Think about the same-sex marriage advocates. They first began with decriminalizing homosexual acts, then moved to civil unions, and then once those were in place they raised the question, "So, what's the difference between these couples and different gendered ones?" That question could not have been asked in 1970 without snickers from even liberals. SSM is now a reality in at least five states.

Incrementalism is the only way to go, since it shifts the premises assumed by the wider culture making it nearly impossible to resist the next step. In the prolife case, that is precisely the strategy as well. If a child killed by PBA is protectable, why not the one killed by D&C two months earlier by a method no less brutal though its victim is smaller? Or the BAIPA. If the state must save the child who survives the abortion, why not a minute earlier, or a month earlier?

It's not always about what people explicitly believe. It's sometimes about what they implicitly believe and are eventually forced to concede given the trajectory of their worldview.

Incrementalism for its own sake is indeed counterproductive. But incrementalism for the sake of breaking new ground to push people in the prolife direction when they otherwise would not entertain it is ingenious.

Old Posts for the New Argument [Jay]

2011-03-02T08:23:00.000-08:00

I posted this morning expressing my feelings on the recent arguments in response to Scott's defense of Abby Johnson that has digressed into a rehashing of arguments on incrementalism that were covered pretty well back in 2007. The post was then removed by me because my boss is a good Christian man who encourages the nice side of me and discourages the dog in me that wants to scrap. I did not want to dishonor him. I will say that the people who question Scott Klusendorf's commitment to protecting the unborn and imply that he is in some sense compromised or guilty of the innocent blood of aborted human beings are... well I have nothing productive to say there so let us move on.

Here are two blog posts I wrote in 2007. They cover my position on incrementalism versus absolutism.

Jay on Incremental Legislation

Incrementalism vs... What?

That is my contribution to the discussion, and I am moving on. There are bigger fish to fry in this effort.

Save the Foreskin, Kill the Child [Serge]

2011-03-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

Only in San Francisco.

Self-described "civil rights advocates" say that a ballot proposition to ban circumcision is on track for gathering signatures, meaning that San Franciscans may vote on the measure this November.

This is the most humorous example of how intellectually disingenuous the pro-abortion choice crowd is when they claim that abortion is a private decision between a doctor and their patient.

According to this view, the government needs to protect young, innocent human beings from the horrors of having a small piece of skin removed from an admittedly sensitive part of their body. This protection supersedes the decision making process of the physician and patient's parents, and clearly shows that when it comes to foreskin, the government knows what is best more than the parent or doctor.

However, the decision to intentionally kill an innocent human being remains out of the purview of government and continues to be a protected right that can only be determined without government interference. Foreskin > children when it comes to value.

It is a strange world we live in.

Which Law Reduces the Most Evil? [Serge]

2011-02-28T19:28:00.000-08:00

I've been reading the comments that have offered about Scott's posts here and here, and I can't help but wonder about this question. Right now abortion is considered a legal right for essentially all 9 months of pregnancy. We can all agree that this is an abominable situation that demands social justice. I believe we can also all agree that what we seek in the future is that every single human being, regardless of the circumstances of their conception, should be valued and protected by law.

However, in the meantime, lets imagine a continuum of laws that lie somewhere between the present situation and the one that we all seek after. Let me offer an example:

1. The present situation: abortion a legal right for basically all 9 months of pregnancy.

2. Abortion legal in the first trimester, but illegal thereafter.

3. Abortion illegal in all three trimesters with the exception of rape and incest.

4. The ideal situation: every human being is protected by law without exception.

Once again, we agree that the present situation (#1) is abominable and the ideal situation (#4) is what we should seek. It seems that absolutist position would hold that until #4 could be accomplished (which we agree is a laudable goal), that we should not support any reduction of abortion that could be accomplished by laws 2 or 3.

Do I have this correct? Could anyone offer a logical argument to support that we should reject 2 & 3 until we can accomplish 4?

When Spiritual Platitudes Replace Good Arguments [Scott]

2011-02-28T04:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote yesterday that Abby Johnson's comments must be viewed within the context of discussing particular abortion-control legislation aimed at limiting evil insofar as possible given current legal restraints. Nowhere does she say she endorses permanent legislation permitting rape abortions but expressly says, "that no matter the circumstances, a child never deserves to be killed." However, as we work for that goal, "it's important for us to win some battles before we win the war."

In response to my post, a particular "pro-life" group known for self-righteously attacking other pro-lifers submitted two comments which I refused to post. The first was a long rambling quote from the group's website. The second was uncharitable to Mrs. Johnson, so I did not post it either.

However, a Facebook discussion about the morality of incremental legislation was instructive and I've posted the relevant portions here (names hidden). It illustrates the tendency of some purists (not all) to use religious pronouncements instead of rational arguments. My point in highlighting this tendency is not to claim I'm right (though I think I am) in the discussion that follows, but to show how some Christians think they can pull a spiritual trump card that frees them from addressing their opponent's arguments. From their alleged perch of Spiritual maturity they lecture the rest of us. Effective pro-life apologists do not operate that way.

So we can kill a little for awhile? Pro aborts get that if we are "choosing to kill a few" we are NOT legitimate pro lifers and they call us hypocrites and rightly so. Abby thinks she is doing what is right but so did Paul before God opened his eyes. To be politically correct is to Godly wrong.
We are not chosing to kill--the abortionist is. We are choosing to save as many as we can while we work to save all. You assume this is immoral thinking but you don't provide any evidence to back up that rather bold claim. You simply assert it.

Sadly, (I really hate admitting this!) I was once blindly following other "Christians" in the exceptions camp, then God, in all His love, grace and mercy showed me the error of my thinking.

Raw assertions that you are following God while the rest of us are ignorantly following a compromise do not an argument make. What's divisive is the intellectual dishonesty that takes Johnson's comments completely out of context and then falsely demonizes her.
It's all about "what does Jesus say," not what any of us think or say, we should always go back to the truth( the word of God) with people. Jesus said he came to bring a sword-- the truth rightly divides. The prolife movement is and always has been a big circus with so many different agendas. There is only a remnant that is truly working towards one goal together. Which should be The Gospel, sharing Christ so that people become born again. Then disciplining. We need to share Jesus, it's Jesus that changes lives, not us. The power to change is in Jesus, His Holy Spirit does the changing. Sometimes in loving one another, there is correction involved; but it should always be done God's way not our own way. Only we ourselves know the motives of our hearts, and our hearts do not lie and we know it. The Prolife movement is in serious need of the Truth being shared in all it's fullness...there is too much mixture.
There is no need to over spiritualize things here. The issue here is quite simple: Did Abby justify rape as a legitimate reason for abortion? That's the claim, and the evidence for it is nowhere to be found. Instead, the very video used to attack Abby shows that her attackers took her statements completely out of context, as noted in my comments above. The biblical thing to do in such a case is simply to admit the error, apologize, and move on.
Scott do you share the Gospel in your training, or do you just try to steer people away from committing abortion? Just curious....
And your point is? If your neighbor is beating her two year old to death, should you just preach the gospel to her or steer her away from killing her kid? When your own kids misbehave, do you simply preach the gospel to them or do you take action to correct the bad behavior? Moreover, you present a false choice. Pro-lifers can do both, depending on the circumstance. But, if you feel I must justify my pro-life work by preaching the gospel, take a look at this presentation and then tell me if I'm good enough to meet your standard. http://vimeo.com/19811217
Scott, Do you have children? Will you give one up to save someone else's? This makes no sense but the pro death people laugh at the hypocrisy. THEY get it that we will compromise and let some slip through the abortion mill without protection or voice. Jesus said to leave the 99 and go after the ONE. I am with Jesus.
Your solution is to protect no one until we can protect everyone. And that's the position of Jesus? How does it follow that because I can't save all children I shouldn't try to save some? I'm not the one compromising when I support incremental laws aimed at limiting the evil done. Rather, the abortionist is compromising because he's forced to give up the current status quo--namely, that any child can be killed at any point in pregnancy for any reason or no reason. Whenever I chip away at that status quo so that some lives are saved, I am not compromising. I'm improving the moral landscape. True, I don't intend to stop chipping away until all children are protected, but until that day comes, I will work to save as many as I can given current legal restraints--namely, the federal courts which disallow direct legislation protecting all unborn humans. Moreover, the premise of your statement is completely false. I am not the one who decides who lives and who dies. Rather, the federal courts have done that in Roe, Doe, and Casey, to name a few. I'm just trying to limit the evil done until those court decisions are overturned. What's wrong with that?

Abby Johnson is being Unfairly Savaged by Some Pro-Lifers [Scott]

2011-02-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

A small but vocal band of pro-lifers is attacking Abby Johnson for allegedly saying that we shouldn't get in a "tizzy" about rape abortions. These pro-lifers are intellectually dishonest. Indeed, the very video used to attack Johnson proves she is not guilty of the charge.

Put simply, Johnson's comments must be viewed within the context of discussing abortion-control legislation aimed at limiting evil insofar as possible given current political realities. Her specific remarks center on ultrasound and right to know bills. Nowhere does she say she endorses permanent legislation permitting rape abortions. Instead, she expressly says, "that no matter the circumstances, a child never deserves to be killed." However, as we work for that goal, "it's important for us to win some battles before we win the war." In short, she says that when it comes to this particular piece of legislation, we shouldn't get in a tizzy over rape but should work to promote the good insofar as possible. This is sound moral thinking: If you can't eliminate the evil, you work to limit its impact. To suggest that Johnson endorsed rape abortions in general is to ignore the context in which she made her remarks in the first place.

Update 2PM: A few Facebook replies to the content of my post above are instructive...

Reply #1: "Scot so we can kill a little for awhile? Pro aborts get that if we are "choosing to kill a few" we are NOT legitimate pro lifers and they call us hypocrites and rightly so. Abby thinks she is doing what is right but so did Paul before God opened his eyes. To be politically correct is to Godly wrong."

Me: We are not chosing to kill--the abortionist is. We are choosing to save as many as we can while we work to save all. You assume this is immoral thinking but you don't provide any evidence to back up that rather bold claim. You simply assert it.

Reply #2: "Sadly, I was once blindly following other 'Christians' in the exceptions camp, then God, in all His love, grace and mercy showed me the error of my thinking."

Me: Raw assertions that you are following God while the rest of us are ignorantly following a Satanic compromise do not an argument make. What's divisive is the intellectual dishonesty that takes Johnson's comments completely out of context and then falsely demonizes her. Pathetic.

Theseus, My Dog Bruno, & Identity Through Change [Jay]

2011-02-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

One of the keys to understanding the substance view of human value is the concept of maintaining identity through change or time. We say that humans are a substantial thing, a human being, and that our value is determined not by characteristics that we acquire or developmental stages that we reach but by our very nature. A human being is a substance that has value in and of itself. Moreover, we say that the unborn is fully human and therefore valuable in and of itself without need to develop into something more valuable or acquire traits to endow value. We are a substantial thing and that substance in question has intrinsic value.

Scott offers a basic contrast of substance and property things in Chapter 3 of The Case for Life. Substances are living organisms that maintain identity through time, while property things, such as cars and machinery do not. When I teach classes, this distinction is an important one to spend time on. If a student really grasps this idea then they are on the road to being a formidable defender to the value of human life.

The other night I was reading Volume 1 of Plutarch's Lives and was struck by a passage that I thought demonstrated this point very well. After Theseus returns to Athens triumphant in his many challenges including killing the minotaur, the people of Athens want to honor and remember these great deeds. It reads:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalerus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, the other contending that it was not the same.

Getting beyond how funny I think it is that even in ancient times philosophers were already turning artifacts into arguments, it is a great example of the difference between a substantial thing that maintains identity through change and a property thing that does not. You see, the philosophers that argued that this was no longer the same ship were absolutely right.

Ships are constructed things. They are put together piece by piece until they are in a form that can functionally fulfill the purpose of their design. The original ship in which Theseus sailed was constructed of particular planks of woods, particular sails (which were very important to the story), and particular oars. The ship is not alive and is not a thing that is developing under its own orientation toward an expression of its nature. It is a collection of parts fulfilling purpose.

So if an oar was damaged and had to be replaced by the Athenians wanting to preserve Theseus's ship then all is already lost. Though most of the parts of the ship were in fact the very parts that cut through the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and carried Theseus back from his victory over the minotaur, the whole is no longer identical to that ship. One oar is different and so it can no longer literally be called the ship that Theseus sailed. With every further change of parts the problem compounds itself. Fewer and fewer of the components of the ship ever sailed under Theseus and an increasing percentage of the ship is comprised of planks, oars, and sails that had nothing to do with the very exploits that drove the Athenians to want to preserve the boat in the fist place. In the end, what the Athenians have is a replica of something important to them but not the thing itself.

Contrast this with my dog, Bruno. Bruno was a Sharpei that we rescued. He had been abused almost to the point of death by vicious owners who were trying to make him a fighting dog. When he failed to impress them as a killer it appears that be became a bait dog, an object of violence of the other dogs being trained to fight. The day animal control rescued him, he had been denied food so long that he could not stand up and was a mess of injuries and sores. They initially decided there was nothing left to save and that it would be humane to put him down. Then one of the animal control agents that removed him from his owners decided he wanted to save Bruno's life. The vets nursed him back to health and a few weeks later we took him home as our family pet.

Bruno suffered for the rest of his life from what was done to him, but the worst of the damage was psychological. Long after the physical signs of abuse had faded and all of the parts that had been tortured were replaced with new healthy parts that had never known the life he lived prior to coming to our home, Bruno, the substance that endured through the change, remembered. He loved my wife Trayece immediately and she was his home for the first few months as he would not leave her side. Once he finally became comfortable with me and our home it is safe to say that he never wanted to leave. The front door could be wide open and he would never consider wandering out. The world he knew outside of the walls of our home held no allure for him.

We loved him and he responded with a fierce loyalty. He remained suspicious or at best indifferent to other adults with very few exceptions but was bizarrely gentle with children. Missionary friends of ours came to visit one time, and their youngest son had some special needs from surviving being born extremely prematurely. Our fear of how Bruno would respond to the young boy grew as their visit approached, and we considered putting him away for the night. To our delight, the two played together all evening and Bruno, who could be terrifying to an adult in an ordinary game of tug of war with a rope toy, seemed to understand the limits of the boy and played exactly at the level he could handle.

And yet, to his dying day a certain combination of things freaked him out. He never overcame his insane fear of thunderstorms or stairs, but far worse was his response to a man wearing a baseball cap holding a cup. I don't know what terrible memories that combination unleashed on him, but he immediately became aggressive and agitated. We warned friends not to hold cups when they weren't drinking just to be safe. He never attacked anyone or even bit anyone in all the years that we had him, but Bruno was scary when he was angry.

Something happened to Bruno. Though the parts that it happened to had long since been replaced by new biological cells, it happened to Bruno. And through the all the good years and all the love we enjoyed with him, that something impacted him all the days of his life. When he died of brain cancer much of what he had been had already been lost as his illness progressed, and yet it was still Bruno. Biological Bruno changed, but substantive Bruno maintained identity through that change. All that happened to him from the time that his life began to the time that it ended can be properly said to have happened to Bruno.

Ships don't remember battles and when you replace the damaged parts of a ship the physical structure is not impacted by the past. The effects of the battle simply are no more. This is true because the ship is no longer identical to the ship that was damaged or sailed under Theseus. The ship the Athenians preserved looked like Theseus's ship, but was not. At the time of his death Bruno did not look anything like the abused dog that we first welcomed into our home, but he most certainly was. Changing parts changes property things in a way that it does not substantive things. Though the parts change, the substance endures through that change and through time.

My Body, My Choice? [Scott]

2011-02-20T04:53:00.001-08:00

The latest 5-Minute Pro-Lifer is up.

Main points:

1. The alleged parallels between a woman being unnaturally hooked up to a total stranger and her natural connection to her own child fail to persuade.

2. If the right to bodily autonomy is absolute, no limits on abortion can be justified. This leads to horrific consequences.

Read the whole thing here.

Equip Yourself to Defend Life on Campus [Scott]

2011-02-15T16:24:00.000-08:00

Note: Due to a technical glitch that kept superimposing another video over this one, I had to repost this from yesterday.

Equipping was the subject of my 39 minute address to the Students for Life of America National Conference (Washington D.C., January 23, 2011). The outline is below.

http://vimeo.com/19811217

SFLA 2011 Scott Klusendorf from Alliance Defense Fund on Vimeo.

Title: "Equipped to Engage: Making the Case for Life on Hostile Turf."

Topic is significant, because many pro-life students feel they've been dropped into a campus environment where they are out gunned and in way over their heads, where they lack the weapons to engage the arguments arrayed against pro-life views both from foes and from those who claim to be on our side!

Thesis: We engage by making a clear and persuasive case for life. We do that 4 ways:

1) We engage by clarifying the nature of moral reasoning
2) We engage by clarifying the one question that really matters
3) We engage by clarifying the case for life
4) We engage by clarifying objections

What's Victory? [Scott]

2011-02-15T04:22:00.000-08:00

That’s one of the questions for an interview later today. I’m glad, because no social reform movement succeeds without a clear definition of what it means to win.

Here’s a preview of what I’ll say. Pro-life victory is defined narrowly. It happens when unborn humans are legally protected, which means outlawing elective abortion and destructive embryo research. That’s the standard. True, our tasks vary achieving that objective and necessarily include pregnancy center work, apologetics, political strategy, and educational campaigns, to name a few—but the objective itself is singular.

Pro-life victory does not mean the poor are fed and every unwed mother has all her needs met if in the end elective abortion remains legal. It does not mean reducing the need for abortion while lawmakers make sure it is nowhere restricted. It does not mean mass conversions to Christ, though as a Christian I have a mission to communicate the gospel wherever possible. It does not mean that we wait for hearts to change (though I hope they do) while another 40,000,000 humans are killed.

Pro-life victory means one thing: The state no longer permits 1,200,000 (read that number again, slowly) defenseless human beings to be butchered annually through elective abortion. It means the state no longer funds and permits destructive embryo research. In short, victory does not mean hearts are changed; it means the heartless are stopped. As Martin Luther King once said, “it may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.”

To that end, I’m encouraged by five current trends (there are others) that give me hope for eventual victory, though I’m prepared for a long fight:

First, the political party sworn to uphold elective abortion as a fundamental right suffered heavy losses in November and will likely face more losses in 2012. That party, as long as it retains a congressional majority, will kill pro-life bills and advance pro-abortion ones. Even its few “pro-life” members are problematic, and not just because the vast majority of them caved on opposing abortion-permitting health care legislation. The fundamental problem was that in 2006 and 2008, they voted to elect a pro-abortion Speaker of the House. In the 2010 mid-term elections, they paid dearly for that compromise.

Second, the pro-life student movement is exploding on campuses across the country and with it comes a renewed interest in pro-life apologetics, visual depictions of abortion, politics, debates, and training seminars. In 2004, a mere 60 students attended the annual Students for Life of America conference in Washington D.C. The 2011conference had over 1,800 attendees from 200 campuses. This student movement is, for the moment, overwhelmingly Catholic, but I’m hopeful evangelicals will step up. True, on one hand, you’ll look far and wide for a major evangelical conference that features pro-life apologetics in a workshop, let alone a keynote address. Nevertheless, leaders like Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Justin Taylor, Kevin DeYoung and Randy Alcorn are outspoken in their condemnations of abortion and perhaps under their influence a groundswell will follow. Here’s the bigger challenge: Evangelical student ministers must not only preach on abortion, they must also equip their people to engage the culture with a robust, but graciously communicated, case for life—a case that can compete in the marketplace of ideas. Thankfully, the pro-life student movement is beginning to do just that. Claremont political science professor Jon Sheilds writes that while pro-life students are making a persuasive case, their pro-abortion opponents are lazy and stagnant, preferring to silence their pro-life opponents rather than debate them. It isn’t working.

Third, a sizable number of Catholic scholars—including Pope Benedict—are drawing clear distinctions between contingent evils and intrinsic (absolute) ones. The former includes things like war and capital punishment that are not intrinsically wrong, but only contingently so—meaning they must be prudently considered and rationally justified. The latter, however, includes absolute wrongs like elective abortion that should never be tolerated. These scholars (see here and here) are clarifying for Catholic voters an important moral truth: We should never support a political party that promises to avoid contingent evils (like war) while it wholeheartedly promotes intrinsic ones (like abortion).

Fourth, some evangelical scholars are fighting back against those in their own ranks who discourage political involvement. Theologians like Wayne Grudem are connecting the dots: Christian belief is not just about John 3: 16, but transformed living which includes the transformation of government. True, political success can’t save souls eternally (only the gospel does that), but it can promote a more just society for the weak and oppressed. To that end, Christians should exert significant influence on government. Moreover, Grudem nails the core problem with those evangelicals discouraging political involvement: They wrongly take one of the ways that God restrains evil in the world (changing hearts through the gospel) and assert that it is the only way that God restrains evil (thus rejecting the role of civil government). Truth is, God gave both the church and the government a role to play. In short, pro-life evangelicals don’t have to choose between preaching the gospel and reforming culture. They can do both.

Finally, the nation’s leading abortion provider—Planned Parenthood—is on the ropes. While scholarly books affirming the anti-child agenda of PP were in print 25 years ago, almost no one but the most stalwart pro-life advocates read them. That, coupled with a pro-abortion media bias, meant that PP’s reputation escaped scrutiny. However, the Internet changed all that. Thanks to undercover groups like Live Action, Planned Parenthood’s cover up of child trafficking is now exposed with a simple mouse click. And the credit for that exposure goes to yet another student pro-life group, Live Action led by UCLA student Lila Rose.

To sum up, I’m hopeful. Can you imagine how many lives will be saved once the evangelical students are more engaged?

Update: Regarding my mention of Live Action, credible pro-life philosophers are debating whether lying is always wrong. I don't believe it's always wrong (If Nazis knock on your door and ask if you are hiding Jews, is it wrong to lie if telling the truth means innocent people are unjustly killed?), but you can read the debate here and here and here.

Update 2/18: Frank Beckwith argues that telling an intentional falsehood is not always wrong.

Update 2/19: Peter Kreeft argues for Live Acction.

And so does Hadley Arkes
SK

Worldview Class Takes on "Philosophy is Dead" Claim [Jay]

2011-02-14T14:08:00.000-08:00

After reading some of the most incredible and condescending dismissals of philosophy by professional physicists this week, I decided to put the claim that philosophy is dead to the test with a high school worldview class. They were not troubled and saw the flaw immediately. It may be basic, but it is dead on.

Here Dr. William Lane Craig says something similar but obviously with a great deal more sophistication in his Reasonable Faith Question of the Week article on Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's assertion in The Grand Design that "Philosophy is Dead."

Whatever verdict we make on their arguments, the point is that despite their claim to speak as scientific torchbearers of knowledge, what Hawking and Mlodinow are engaged in is philosophy. The most important conclusions drawn in their book are philosophical, not scientific. Why, then, do they pronounce philosophy dead and claim as scientists to be bearing the torch of discovery? Simply because that enables them to cloak their amateurish philosophizing with the mantle of scientific authority and so avoid the hard work of actually arguing for, rather than merely asserting, their philosophical viewpoints.

Why Christians Should Discuss Politics [Scott]

2011-02-10T08:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a good letter in the "Reader Mail" section of Biola Magazine Fall, 2010 (the official magazine of Biola University--sorry, no link to the actual letter). The author, Douglas Dunsmoor, explains why the Christian community should embrace political discussion rather than run from it:

In the spring 2010 Biola Magazine, a couple of opinion pieces called to keep politics out of the magazine. There are several problems with such an idea.

First, it’s self-defeating. It makes a statement about politics in the magazine in order to say that no political statements should be made in the magazine.

Second, it’s a part of pursuing truth (which we should do, especially as Christians) to discuss what ideas are true and best in any area, including politics. Regardless of what political party currently does or doesn’t hold to some idea, if it’s a good one, we should all want to understand and implement it.

Third, it’s also loving to strive to know what ideas are true and best, as certain policies can greatly help whereas others can greatly harm many people.

And, finally, we as Christians need to set a good example for our culture of how to discuss issues over which we have disagreements in a kind, respectful, reasonable way. If there are disagreements over something argued for in the magazine, let’s engage the ideas and arguments by presenting further reasons and evidence for and against certain ideas, fostering healthy dialogue and debate.

"The magnitude of the problem" [Megan]

2011-02-05T06:08:00.000-08:00

This post by R. Albert Mohler Jr. at The Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood is worth a read.

Re: Desires Determine Rights? [Scott]

2011-02-03T09:23:00.001-08:00

In a previous post, I challenged the claim that the right to life turns on having an immediately exercisable capacity for desires--namely, a desire to go on living. (Michael Tooley and Peter Singer more or less affirm the desire thesis.)

Christopher Kaczor adds a delightful example to support to my own position:

If Buddhists are right that the Buddha as well as other spiritual masters have reached a state of Nirvana--no longer desiring anything whatsoever and even extinguishing the capacity for desire--then either such mystics are no longer persons or having desires is no longer necessary for personhood.

Stem Cell Science You Can Love [Jay]

2011-02-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

One of the common misconceptions that I often hear is that pro-lifers are anti-stem cell research. That is simply untrue. I and others like me are against research that relies on the destruction of nascent human life to further research into possible cures for more developed human beings. That means that I am simply against the destroying of innocent human life in order to medically benefit another. But this shows stem cell science that I heartily applaud.

There Are No Words [Scott]

2011-02-01T09:04:00.001-08:00

Planned Parenthood--pure evil:

A Message to Pro-Life Advocates in Light of Gosnell's Shop of Horrors [Josh Brahm]

2011-01-26T04:40:00.000-08:00

This guest post is provided by Josh Brahm, a contributor to this blog. Josh is the Director of Education at Right to Life of Central California’s Fresno/Madera office, and host of the vodcast “Life Report: Pro-Life Talk | Real World Answers.” Get more of Josh’s unique perspectives on pro-life topics at www.ProLifePodcast.net.

This has been a really bad publicity week for abortion providers. First the national controversy over the horrors that went on behind the scenes at “Doctor” Gosnell’s abortion facility. Now an Associated Press story is implying that Live Action is getting ready to release videos exposing several Planned Parenthood employees of covering up sex trafficking with various PP health services. All of this while Abby Johnson’s tell-all book “Unplanned” has been on Amazon.com’s Top 100 Bestselling Books List for two weeks. Abby’s book is hardly the first book to be written that exposes what goes on at many abortion facilities (see here, here, and here), though it will probably forever be the most notable.

As atrocious as Gosnell’s barbaric acts were, and as bad as covering up sex trafficking is…those things are not what make abortion wrong.

Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

The shocking nature of these stories is precisely the reason that pro-life advocates must be especially careful in the next few months to consider what they will say if their friend asks, “so, why are you pro-life?”

The lazy way out would be to reply with something like, “have you heard about the freaky abortionists in those places? They keep fetal body parts in jars! How could I not be pro-life?”

This strategy is dangerous even though it may sometimes work.

It is not news to the regular readers of this blog that many people in the postmodern world are more quickly moved by emotional stories and pictures than by logic and good arguments. Thus, you may make some impact on the person you’re talking to with just the above statement about yucky abortionists. You say your piece, they react emotionally to Gosnell’s disgustingness, and you go your separate ways.

“But, why would that be bad, Josh? The whole point is to make the person rethink their pro-abortion-choice views, right?”

Yes, and this is where wisdom comes in. It’s not necessarily a choice between bad and good. It’s a choice between good, better and best.

While you may make a marginal impact on that person, if he later considers the issue more carefully, he will realize that Gosnell’s checkered past does not make or break the case for abortion rights. It just proves that some people do really sick things when they’re not kept accountable.

(Gee, I thought Christians already knew that…)

Instead, if you had made a stronger case for life, (I like to start with Steve Wagner’s 10-second soundbyte,) that person would have left, put the same amount of thought into the issue later, and would have been unable to dismiss your argument so easily.
An important clarification: this does not mean stories about Gosnell and the Live Action investigations have no significance. It takes stories like this to awaken the moral sensibilities of people in the mushy middle.

I believe there are minimally-committed pro-abortion-choice people that will read the Grand Jury Report on Gosnell, and learn that the reason he was left alone by the state authorities that already knew about the conditions of his clinic was because they didn’t want to put any “barriers up to women seeking abortions.” The pro-abortion-choice person may be shocked to see the effect legal abortion has on well-meaning people, and then (here’s the key) look closer at the abortion debate. Ideally they will compare the best arguments the pro-life side has to offer, and the best arguments the pro-abortion-choice side has to offer, and then change their thinking.

I make a similar argument when defending pro-lifers that utilize graphic pictures in their pro-life presentations. Abortion is not wrong because pictures of it are gross and bloody. But the pictures are true and they awaken our sensibilities, restoring meaning to the word “abortion.” This is important, because many people hear the word “abortion” and think of a benign medical procedure that makes a woman “unpregnant.”

However, we must remember the most effective way to use graphic pictures. It’s not just taping a huge graphic sign to the front side of your house and waiting for people to become pro-life. It’s using them in an environment where you can also offer a scientific and philosophic case for life. I do this regularly with pro-life presentations and while participating in a Justice For All or GAP exhibit. (Warning: links include graphic images.)

That’s my point. Stories about current events are some of the most effective ways for pro-life advocates to start conversations with their pro-abortion-choice friends in a way that is neither awkward nor forced. If using a story like Gosnell’s will get a non-weird conversation started on abortion that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, by all means use it!

But don’t stop there.

Make sure you get a chance to make a strong philosophical case for life before the conversation ends.

What I am recommending to my fellow pro-life advocates is to not get lazy and primarily use gruesome stories like Gosnell’s when making a case for life. Your argument will fall short every time.

Abortion is not wrong because many men and women regret their abortion later. Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

Abortion is not wrong because one of the babies killed may have eventually cured cancer or written the next great Broadway musical. Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

Abortion is not wrong because it may have a negative effect on our economy or may have helped cripple the Social Security program. Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

Abortion is not wrong because the nation’s leading abortion provider Planned Parenthood does many other icky things, including promoting promiscuity in teens, promoting violence against pro-lifers and selling fetal body parts. Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

Abortion is not wrong if some of the people working for Planned Parenthood help to cover up statutory rape or alleged sex trafficking, or if they lie about the facts of fetal development. Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

And abortion is not even wrong because some of the people who perform abortions commit horrific acts only paralleled by the scariest of horror movies.

Abortion is wrong because it unjustifiably takes the life of a human being.

NOTE: At the author's request, the post above was edited slightly @1:26 PM for clarity sake. The phrase "human person" was replaced with "human being."

The Pro-Life Statesman [Scott]

2011-01-25T07:08:00.000-08:00

A colleague of mine asked what adjustments pro-life advocates should make to better position themselves for 2011 and beyond.

That's a loaded question that's best left to brighter minds, but my general reply was as follows: Pro-life Christians should bring God glory. At the practical level, that means they must not only state their case persuasively, but transform themselves into winsome statesmen without sacrificing the intellectual content of their ideas.

I then sketched out a rough (and very incomplete) outline of what that transformation might look like, including those principles that I strive to live by as a pro-life apologist.

Thesis: The pro-life statesman completes five key tasks:

I) The pro-life statesman presents a persuasive case for life in forums where our message most needs a hearing:

A. in Catholic and Protestant high schools
B. in presentations to clergy
C. in debates at high schools and universities
D. in training seminars for lay people
E. in talks to elementary age children
F. in worldview courses for high school students

II) The pro-life statesman engages the debate in the academy:

A. in philosophy:
1. He defends the substance view of human persons
2. He challenges naturalism as a foundation for human rights and ethics
B. in Law: refutation of moral and legal neutrality
C. in Ethics: He helps Christians think biblically about medical technology related to the edges of life (beginning and end of life)

III) The pro-life statesman clarifies theological misconceptions

A. in Evangelical theology: He challenges the mistaken belief that we should only preach the gospel and never do politics--but he does so without sacrificing fidelity to the gospel or Scripture
B. in Catholic theology: He confronts the mistaken belief that social justice requires that all moral issues carry equal moral weight
C. in Pastoral theology: He engages clergy who mistakenly think the gospel of grace means ignoring sin
D. in personal theology: He challenges the mistaken view that individuals must get a personal assignment from God to do pro-life work
E. in youth ministry theology: He challenges the claim that today's twitter generation can't handle serious pro-life content

IV) The pro-life statesman connects the dots

A. in churches: He helps pastors win connecting biblical truth to abortion
B. in politics: He graciously explains why all political parties are not equal in their defense of human life
C. in pregnancy center ministry: He inspires staff and volunteers to minister to women AND impact culture

V. The pro-life statesman functions with intellectual integrity:

A. in his study: He masters the moral logic of the pro-life view
B. in his speaking: He cites sources for ideas and illustrations not his own
C. in his tactics: He graciously engages critics with questions designed to gather information and reverse the burden of proof
D. in his presentation: He avoids bad pro-life arguments

Admittedly, this is a very sparse outline, but stay tuned. I sense a talk may be developing.

It is All About Abortion [Jay]

2011-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

“People die.” Christine Dutton, Chief Legal Counsel of The Pennsylvania Department of Health

I apologize for the length of this post. My only defense is that I am enraged and have to get this off my chest. You see someone suggested to me that the recent events in Philadelphia were not about abortion and I just have to respond.

The incredible evil that Dr. Kermit Gosnell (that will be the last time in this post I put the title “Dr.” before his name) and his staff worked over the last several decades at The Women's Medical Society in West Philadelphia has now been exhaustively detailed in Grand Jury Report filed on the 14th of January. The report is full, and I do mean full at 261 pages plus appendices, of unconscionable acts described as every day occurrences.

Gosnell did not perform “late term abortions” (no veneer of clinical justification here today) He induced labor in heavily tranquilized women and then killed their children as they were born. He called this practice “ensuring fetal demise.” He did not anesthetize women properly, but gave them uncontrolled doses of drugs such as Demerol administered by non-medical staff in preset amounts determined by how out of it they wanted the woman to be. The more a woman complained, the more they dosed her until they accidentally killed a woman. Cats ran free and defecated where they liked. The exam table and the recovery room were stained with blood, the halls were too narrow to get emergency patients out on a gurney, the emergency exit was permanently locked with a chain and padlock, and by all accounts the facility reeked. Perhaps the most bizarre and ghoulish of all were the random body parts and collections of the products of his unspeakable acts that he kept and displayed under the pretense that the genetic material may one day be necessary for paternity tests (insane!). This included jars with pairs of feet that he severed from the babies he killed. Gosnell acts like a character from Criminal Minds keeping trophies of his victims and it is hard to imagine that he is not a clinically disturbed individual.

It might end with Gosnell's insanity except that he had a staff that worked with him and complied with all of this barbarity. These people did it all as well including dosing women with drugs they did not understand, helping to cover up the many life threatening and ultimately deadly mistakes Gosnell made, the horrifying practice of “snipping” the spinal cords of newborns, and the illegal trafficking of prescription drugs.

In fact, were it not for that last offense Gosnell might still be in business today. Why? Was he a mastermind that so cleverly covered up what was happening that state agencies could not make charges stick? Was he so brilliant as to build a web of deceit that took years for dedicated public servants to untangle? No, he was an evil and obvious mad man. The reason he got away with it, and perhaps the most horrifying fact of all, is because the people that should have stopped this all didn't care. Not even when several independent and respectable sources filed official complaints. Not even when an organization that supposedly operates to protect the rights of women to have safe abortions walked in the door, evaluated the practice, and determined it to be the worst abortion facility they had have ever seen. They all knew something bad was happening and all of them did nothing to stop it.

This is where it becomes inconceivable to hear anyone say that this is not about abortion. It is all about abortion. Gosnell is clearly insane and no hero to the abortion rights groups and is a criminal with no regard for the lives of the women he hurt or the children he murdered. People like him are why we have oversight from agencies empowered to shut medical facilities down in the first place. Gosnell does not represent every doctor that performs abortions in the sense that he is not normal, but this is inescapably about abortion and the nature of protecting brutality as a right.

Lets look at some of the text from the report to support this claim. Starting on page 8 under the title See No Evil:

Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. There were several oversight agencies that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of them did, not even after Karnamaya Mongar’s death.

What agencies? End of page 8 and top of 9:

The first line of defense was the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The department’s job is to audit hospitals and outpatient medical facilities, like Gosnell’s, to make sure that they follow the rules and provide safe care.

Per the report, they issued a license in 1979 to perform abortions, showed up for on-sight inspections in 1989 (10 YEARS LATER!!), 1992, and 1993. Every visit produced violations and in every instance he was allowed to continue as long as he promised to “fix it.” But in 1993 all sight inspections stopped so no follow up was done. Why? Page 9:

Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and
babies would pay.

Here is where the lie that it is not about abortion abruptly ends. Oversight was stopped and Gosnell continued his evil because the main agency in charge of monitoring people like him feared doing their job would produce barriers to abortion. That is sick and an outright betrayal of public trust motivated by dedication to abortion over law.

So they weren't looking actively but they would still respond to complaints, right? If someone had just told them there was a problem they would have stepped in. Page 9 & 10:

Except that there were complaints about Gosnell, repeatedly. Several different attorneys, representing women injured by Gosnell, contacted the department. A doctor from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia hand-delivered a complaint, advising the department that numerous patients he had referred for abortions came back from Gosnell with the same venereal disease. The medical examiner of Delaware County informed the department that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl carrying a 30-week-old baby. And the department received official notice that a woman named Karnamaya Mongar had died at Gosnell’s hands.

Yet not one of these alarm bells – not even Mrs. Mongar’s death – prompted the department to look at Gosnell or the Women’s Medical Society.

What finally prompted action?

Only after the raid occurred, and the story hit the press, did the department choose to act. Suddenly there were no administrative, legal, or policy barriers; within weeks an order was issued to close the clinic. And as this grand jury investigation widened, department officials “lawyered up,” hiring a high-priced law firm to represent them at taxpayer expense.

If only some other group could have known and stepped in to pick up the slack of the tragically disinterested Department of Health. Still page 10:

Another agency with authority in the health field, the Pennsylvania Department of State, could have stopped Gosnell single-handedly... Like their colleagues at Health, however, Department of State officials were repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell, and repeatedly chose to do nothing.

So they probably did not have as much to go on as the Department of Health, though. What kind of good information could they have that the others did not? Pages 10 & 11:

Indeed, in many ways State had more damning information than anyone else. Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street. The department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.

Well certainly once they found out a woman died they sprung into action! I mean they could not still do nothing when Gosnell's practice finally killed an adult woman could they? Page 11:

Shortly thereafter the department received an even more disturbing report – about a woman, years before Karnamaya Mongar, who died of sepsis after Gosnell perforated her uterus. The woman was 22 years old. A civil suit against Gosnell was settled for almost a million dollars, and the insurance company forwarded the information to the department. That report should have been all the confirmation needed for the complaint from the former employee that was already in the department’s possession. Instead, the department attorneys dismissed this complaint too. They concluded that death was just an “inherent” risk, not something that should jeopardize a doctor’s medical license.

Oh, it gets so much worse. The State Department dismissed further complaints as not part of a pattern after failing to check the litigation database to see that five other women had been paid for serious injuries while under the care of Gosnell. The State only mustered up the outrage to yank his license after the story went public. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health had employees that visited the facility frequently to pick up blood samples and later responded with a sight inspection when they were informed he was storing dead fetuses in the refrigerator, and did nothing. One public servant, ONE, tried to do something. Page 12:

By asking questions and poking around, she was able to file detailed reports identifying many of the most egregious elements of Gosnell’s practice. It should have been enough to stop him. But instead her reports went into a black hole, weeks before Karnamaya Mongar walked into the Woman’s Medical Society.

Karnamaya Mongar was the second woman Gosnell's practice killed. And the public institutions in place to protect our citizens had all of the information that they needed to stop this insanity before she died. Read the report. It is a mess of every possible group that could have done anything to stop the butchering of human lives and the mistreatment and medical torture of women turning their heads and acting like it was not happening. The National Abortion Federation had a representative evaluate the facility and failed to report the outrageous conditions to the authorities (not that they would have cared). The University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center apparently failed to report multiple incidences of trauma treatment as a result of a botched abortion including, according to the report, when a woman showed up almost dead. It is depressing.

Why? Certainly the socio-economic level of the patients in question is in play. Even Gosnell understood that reality and instructed his staff to treat white women from the suburbs differently than his normal clientele, explaining to his employees that this was just “the way of the world.” There is more to it than that, though. The report summary ends with the following on page 13:

Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

I apologize again for the length of this post, but it could have been so much longer if I wanted to labor you with the details of the incredible inactivity of those responsible for stopping madmen like Gosnell. We expect monsters to act like monsters. We expect those we pay with our taxes to stop them to actually stop them. Gosnell behaved as moral monsters do, and the people empowered to limit his evil failed to act in response. Why? Because it is about abortion, and only a simpleton or a committed pro-abortion zealot would claim anything else.

Clarity, not Gadgetry: Pro-Life Apologetics for the Next Generation [Scott]

2011-01-21T05:17:00.001-08:00

Are students today too distracted by twitter to care about serious pro-life content? And how should youth pastors respond? That's the topic of my short post at the Gospel Coalition site.

Infanticide, Pakistan, and the lack of Good Old Days [Jay]

2011-01-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

My friend and LTI Board member Chad Holland forwarded this story about unwanted children in Pakistan being abandoned and murdered. There are various societal and cultural pressures offered to explain why such a thing is happening, although I am very comfortable with merely accepting that man is fallen and prone to the most vile behavior as Paul reminds us in Romans Chapter 3. We do not murder infants because they are the products of immoral relationships or because they are girls (90% of the dead and abandoned children in relation to this article are girls) and will carry the burden of a future dowry. Such brute facts do not necessarily compel such brutal action.

Whether it is a matter of inconvenience to have a child or whether they fear they will be stoned to death by others for being pregnant but not married, they choose to do a great evil to make things better for themselves. We look to avoid consequences by performing an act that will leave us materially and physically intact at the small cost of our immortal souls, which we convince ourselves may not be real anyway. A trifle to consider when our present well being as we understand it and the current plans we have for our future are on the line. We become secret killers to avoid being publicly exposed and even sometimes so that we can merely continue to do the things we are currently doing uninterrupted. That is the sinful selfish behavior of the fallen and that is explanation enough for me.

It is natural to wish to see this as the barbarous acts of an evil people removed from our own way of life . I read comments of outrage, “How can we ever expect to get along with these beasts?” or “these people are monsters!” While I think that there are legitimate concerns that must be addressed in the radically different worldviews of Islam as it is practiced in much of the world and the Christian West, this situation does not demonstrate that so clearly. In fact, prior to the age of surgical abortion, infanticide was common enough in less foreign places.

In Joseph Dellapenna's Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, he confronts the idea that abortion has always been common in civilization. This is an argument from the defenders of abortion, and part of the task of demonstrating the error in this line of thinking was showing that abortion was considerably less attractive given its inherent risks (in many societies it was synonymous with suicide) than good old fashioned infanticide. To quote:

While western societies seem to suffer amnesia regarding the frequency of the practice of infanticide in their own pasts, in fact much of the evidence for infanticide or abandonment in England and throughout Europe shows these to have been common practices even during the Christian era... Throughout history until the emergence of abortion as a real alternative reduced the incidence of infanticide, making the latter a relatively minor legal problem, infanticide remained the most common crime in Europe and probably in the rest of the world.

Does this include sex selection killing, a practice we condemn as particular to the barbarous Chinese and Muslims? You bet.

While low rates of birth per women might have had a number of explanations, the skewed sex ratios, absent any prenatal means of sex-selection, can only indicate female infanticide (including abandonment and neglect)... Historical demographers have identified sex ratios as high as four-to-one in favor of male children in areas of medieval Europe.

Boys just are not naturally born 4 times more often than girls. He reports the natural sex ratio at birth is 106 boys/100 girls. So if medieval Europe, ancient Greece, and Rome all had unusual sex ratios then one can be certain they were arrived at about as naturally as China's is.

So infanticide is not a Muslim thing, and it appears to be prevalent in places where abortion is not an option (it is strictly forbidden in Pakistan). This proves abortion is a good thing, right? Why would anyone say that? Whether or not abortion or infanticide are morally wrong depends upon the identity of the unborn and the newborn. Are they full members of the human family? If the answer is yes for both, then it is truly bizarre celebrating the killing of unborn human beings to spare them being killed as newborn human beings as progress. The difference is not in the kind of action, but in the developmental stage of the human life. If that is a philosophically relevant difference then someone will have to explain why. That we are better able to conceal one over the other is not a great place to start, by the way.

I have been studying the history of abortion for about a year now, and one thing that I have confronted is that there are no “good old days” when people treated other human beings, unborn or born, with the dignity and respect those bearing the image of God deserve. Our history is filled with violence upon the young for the sake of the mature, it is just a different kind of violence to a slightly older human being. If anything, modern abortion is a sanitized version of an old evil. If the garbage bins of public streets were littered with the bodies of newborns rather than the “medical waste” of the unborn perhaps it would be unnecessary to explain to a self-professed “pro-life” gentleman why that identification impacts his daily life as I recently had to do. Perhaps the grim reality of the world we live in would be clearer to him. Seeing the daily killing of newborns is harder to live with than hearing about the statistics of the daily deaths of the unborn.

Though the past offers us no refuge to which we can point and say,“if only we could get back there”, we can at minimum remind our friends and adversaries that the laws once served to limit evil and inform our people of the nature of abortion. It would be easier to say that abortion has always been around so lets make it safe, but we would scoff at the person that made the same claim about infanticide, rape, or slavery. So we move forward calling the people around us to become something better than what we are even as we acknowledge that we do not fully know what that will look like. The alternative is to walk away and let the practice of abortion move forward without restraint or protest. If the unborn are fully human, that is just not an option no matter how much easier it would be.

Raw Statistics: Not a Substitute for Evidence [Serge]

2011-01-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

I couldn't agree with Scott more that we need to be extremely careful when evaluating statistics. As ones who should be primarily concerned with truth, abusing stats to make our points is short-sided and in the long run ineffective. We have to be better than those who use statistical data without warrant to make a point.

Like our opponents.

Here is a press release from the Guttmacher Institute discussing the leveling out of the long-twerm drop in the number of abortions:

The steady decline in the U.S. abortion rate since 1981 appears to have stalled, new Guttmacher Institute research finds. The 2008 rate stood at 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44, significantly below the 1981 peak (29.3 abortions for every 1,000 women). However, the 2008 abortion rate was virtually unchanged from the 2005 rate (19.4 abortions). Likewise, the total number of abortions in 2008 (1.21 million) was essentially unchanged from 2005.

I have no qualm with these numbers. However, check out the next paragraph:

“In this time of heightened politicization around abortion, our stalled progress should be an urgent message to policymakers that we need to do more to increase access to contraceptive services to prevent unintended pregnancy, while ensuring access to abortion services for the many women who still need them,” says Sharon Camp, president and CEO of Guttmacher.

Sharon decides with absolutely no evidence that the reason why the drop in abortion has declined is a lack of contraceptive services. Really? How did she come to that conclusion? Does she have evidence that most unplanned pregnancies are the result of a woman attempting to get contraception but being unable to do so? This surprises me, for I live in a medium sized city and can think of, oh about 30 places where one can get contraception within a 5 minute drive. Maybe there are other reasons? In fact, just recently pro-abortion choicers were claiming that the economy was going to be responsible for increased abortions. So what is it?

Statistics: Need for Caution, Part 2 [Scott]

2011-01-05T05:02:00.000-08:00

Not only must pro-lifers be careful with statistics; we must also be careful to define our terms. This is especially true if we want to convince reluctant pastors to take up our cause.

A Facebook message received yesterday is a case in point. "Speaking of statistics, do you know the number of women identifying as [born-again] evangelicals who are getting abortions?"

The question is a fair one. In response, pro-life advocates predictably hammer pastors with a Guttmacher study allegedly indicating that nearly one in five women who abort identify themselves as "born-again" protestants. If that doesn't do the trick, they pound the pastor with a Center for Reason study claiming that Christians have as many abortions per capita as non-Christians. (Go here for a summary of both studies.) The poor fellow is then told, "See, babies are dying in your church because born again Christians are getting abortions at alarming rates and they're getting them because you aren't preaching on the issue." To further close the deal, George Barna's research is often cited to show that born-again Christians in general live much like non-believers in terms of giving, the sexual practices of teens, and racial attitudes.

Really?

Well, that depends on what we mean by "evangelical" or, "Christian" or, more importantly, "born-again." A sharp pastor will eat a pro-life advocate alive who shows up quoting these alleged numbers and it has nothing to do with the numbers themselves. It has to do with how terms are used in the respective studies.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion the stats above are reasonably accurate. As John Piper points out, the Bible and Jesus run in the opposite direction of so-called carnal Christians who claim to be "born again", but who live just like the World. Indeed, Scripture is clear that those who are “born again” have an inner awakening from spiritual death to spiritual life and are radically transformed as a result. They are by no means perfect, but they don’t make peace with sin:

--John 3:20-21—whoever lives by truth comes to the light
--1 John 2:29—everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him
--1 John 3:9—No one born of God makes a practice of sinning
--1 John 4:7—whoever loves has been born of God
--1 John 5:4—everyone born of God overcomes the world
--1 John 5:18—everyone born of God does not keep on sinning
--Romans 6: 1-14--believers die to sin

In short, Barna’s carnal Christians aren’t worldly; they aren’t Christians!

So, how many "born-again Christians" have abortions? I don't know, but I doubt it's anywhere near the numbers presented above. It all comes down to what we mean by the term. If you aren't prepared precisely define what you mean, don't bother hammering your pastor. You'll only make pro-lifers look worse.

Statistics: Proceed with Caution [Scott]

2011-01-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

Jill Stanek's excellent blogsite has a discussion over an article in the journal Contraception. The article covers contraception policy in Spain and the abstract for the study concludes as follows:

STUDY DESIGN: Since 1997, representative samples of Spanish women of childbearing potential (15-49 years) have been surveyed by the Daphne Team every 2 years to gather data of contraceptive methods used.

RESULTS: During the study period, 1997 to 2007, the overall use of contraceptive methods increased from 49.1% to 79.9%. The most commonly used method was the condom (an increase from 21% to 38.8%), followed by the pill (an increase from 14.2% to 20.3%). Female sterilization and IUDs decreased slightly and were used by less than 5% of women in 2007. The elective abortion rate increased from 5.52 to 11.49 per 1000 women.

CONCLUSIONS: The factors responsible for the increased rate of elective abortion need further investigation.

The ensuing discussion about the study (in the comments section of Jill's blog) contains some fiesty exchanges about contraception in general, with some pro-lifers insisting this study proves increased contraceptive use results in more abortions. At least one post claims the pill itself is abortifacient.

What follows is what I said on Jill's blog:

Admittedly, I’m no statistican. However, I have two concerns: First, statistics are slippery things and it’s tempting to quote them when they seem to support our view and downplay them when they don’t. With any study involving the extensive use of stats, it’s best to withhold a declaration of victory until 1) the internal numbers are fully analyzed for strengths and weaknesses, and 2) the methodology of the study is subject to further peer-review. To cite one example, in 1994 (some) pro-lifers went crazy citing a statistic from the Daling study which allegedly indicated that women undergoing first trimester abortions were 800% more likely to develop breast cancer by age 35. Not long after, the alleged statistic was shown to be a fluke, a random statistical error that sometimes creeps up in large samples. Applied to the study in question, I’m not suggesting that pushing contraceptives on unmarried couples has no impact on abortion rates. I’m only appealing for caution while we await further commentary.

Second, regarding some comments above on BC pills functioning as abortifacients, my own organization takes a cautious view while we await further evidence. That is, while we don’t think there is sufficient evidence to say for certain that the pill functions as an abortifacient in the event of breakthrough ovulation, we do think there’s sufficient evidence to indicate it may function that way. Thus, given human life is at stake, we should err on the side of caution while we await further evidence, meaning we do not endorse its use. But we are careful not to overstate our case and claim certitude when the evidence is still open to debate. (We have dealt with that debate on our blog, so I won’t go into it here.)

In short, it’s important that pro-lifers function with intellectual integrity, meaning we go only so far as the evidence allows. Perhaps the Spain study is in the main accurate; if so, it’s useful for confronting the lies of PP. But while we await further review, I think we should hedge our conclusions just a bit.

Kevin DeYoung has helpful posts on being cautious with statistics here and here.

You may also want to read this.