Podcast: The Case for Abortion—and How to Refute It (Scott Klusendorf)

November 13, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Equipping Pro-Life Christians

In this episode, Scott Klusendorf offers pro-life training by actually making a compelling case for abortion so that he can teach us how to refute it through simple logic and reason.

The Case for Life

The Case for Life

Scott Klusendorf

The pro-life message can compete in the marketplace of ideas, provided Christians properly understand and articulate that message. Featuring additional content, this second edition helps pro-life Christians make a persuasive case for the lives of the unborn. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:07 - The Pro-Life Movement after the *Dobbs* Decision

Matt Tully
Scott, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Scott Klusendorf
Great to be with you, Matt.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to walk through a number of common rhetorically powerful pro-abortion arguments that we sometimes hear out in the world. And we’re going to do that, though, in maybe a somewhat unorthodox way: you’re actually going to make the pro-choice case as best as you can, giving all of the best arguments that you’ve heard in support of a pro-choice position. And then after you’ve done that, you’re going to help deconstruct those arguments and maybe help those who might even be feeling like, I don’t know how I would respond to that. You’re going to show where the holes in those arguments are and help the pro-life Christian who’s listening have a better grasp on how to respond to those things. But before we get to that, I wanted to briefly hear your thoughts on where the pro-life movement is today in light of being a year out from the Dobbs decision. Could you give us a little summary of how you see things?

Scott Klusendorf
Let me give you five points. I think that will help clarify. The first is this: we have learned that although Dobbs was a fantastic victory—and make no mistake, it was. Anybody who tells us it wasn’t doesn’t understand. But let’s be realist too. Since Dobbs, the pro-life position has lost every single time it’s been put directly to the voters for a vote. Think of red states like Kentucky, Kansas, and Montana. In Montana, we couldn’t even get a red state to ban harming children who survive abortion techniques. We couldn’t even get voters to vote to protect those children who survive abortions. That’s how bad it is. And the reason is, Matt, a lot of times what pro-lifers did prior to Dobbs is we assumed that if we could just change the court and get past a hostile press, the public was with us. Well, we have learned since Dobbs, the public is not with us. And not only are they not with us, they’re not with us in a big way. I don’t think there’s one state, even the most red state you could pick out right now like Tennessee, Louisiana, or Alabama, that if you put the abortion issue to the public for a straight up vote, they would vote against us. They absolutely would. That’s because the worldview challenges we face are enormous, and I’m not sure our movement has prepared for that for the long haul. We sort of thought, Well, once we can get Roe v. Wade out of the way, we’ve cured our problem. No, we haven’t. We’ve got a long uphill fight, and we’re going to need a lot of informed and equipped pro-life apologists, which is why I put a lot of effort into doing the second edition of The Case for Life for that very reason. What does pro-life advocacy look like in a post Roe world where the public is not with us? The second thing I would point out, Matt, is that we have a real issue with what I call poser pro-lifers, and let me define what I mean by that. Every election cycle, we get a bunch of people who flood into the pro-life universe who claim to be speaking for us, who claim to be concerned pro-life people, who basically advise us to not vote for pro-life candidates or for pro-life ballot measures but instead to actually support pro-abortion candidates because that actually will help us reduce the number of abortions because, allegedly, these pro-abortion candidates support social programs that will limit the number of abortions. This is nonsense. Think of a society that said, Hey, we’ll reduce the number of slaves, but we’re going to keep slavery legal. Anybody who said that, we’d right away realize they had a broken moral compass. And yet a lot of these so-called concerned and pro-life people come in. They’re posing as pro-lifers. They’re not. They’re from the other side. They’re plants from the other side that are not pro-life and do not help us, and yet a lot of pro-life Christians fall for it. We’re going to see more of that in a post Roe world coming up. The other thing is we have a real problem with disciplining our messaging. Just listen to pro-life political candidates. They say all kinds of things that are off topic that really get them into trouble, and we go, Oh boy! I can cringe listening to that! Yeah, you can because it’s really bad. They don’t know how to respond. I wish I could grab every pro-life politician, sit him in a room, and say, Here is your seven second pro-life soundbite. It would go like this: I oppose abortion because it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Period. Stop, rinse, repeat a billion times. Go no further. If you say just that, number one, you have a chance of getting it on the news because it’s short enough, but secondly, you won’t get into trouble going off topic and off script. And I think we’ve expected our politicians to be apologists when they’re not. We need to help them see what the moral logic of the pro-life argument is, but give them the sound bite they can use that will keep them on message. So that’s been a problem. The fourth area is we have not had systematic pro-life apologetics training in our churches and in institutions that are favorable to us. I know this because I teach at Summit Ministries, which is a Christian worldview camp, where every two weeks we get a new group of almost 200 kids. And these 200 students show up, and Matt, they’re coming from some of the finest churches in America. We’re not talking about heterodox churches. We’re talking about churches that are out there proclaiming the gospel, that are good churches with sound theology. And I ask these students every single session, How many of you, before coming to Summit and being exposed to pro-life apologetics for this entire day, heard a pro-life talk aimed at helping you engage non-christian friends on the pro-life issue at your churches? Well, what we find is that out of 200 students present, we get five to seven hands that go up in the room. That’s disastrous! When we aren’t even getting our pro-life training out to the people who are predisposed to us, that’s very bad in a post Roe world where people are now looking at this issue more closely. And then a final way we are in trouble is we do not have enough people working full time as pro-life professionals, getting our message out there and training our people. As a colleague of mine put it, there are more people working full time to kill babies than there is working full time to save them. And that’s very, very problematic. How many Christian colleges can you point to right now that even have a certificate program of maybe two to four classes aimed at putting full time pro-life people in the field professionally? None, except one. I can think of one school: Cedarville University. That’s it! And everywhere else, there’s no mention of pro-life advocacy as a career vocation where you can honor God by doing work by saving the unborn. That’s very problematic for our side. So our work is cut out for us. It’s good news that Roe is overturned, but we have some challenges.

Matt Tully
A couple of minutes ago, you said that many in the pro-life movement underestimated the worldview issues that were at play in the general population on this issue. Would you put yourself in that category? Do you think you, looking back, were not thinking enough about those issues?

Scott Klusendorf
No, I actually think I saw the problem coming, honestly. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I was warning my fellow pro-lifers for over twelve years now that we’ve got a worldview problem, not just a court problem and not just a hostile press problem. The culture doesn’t agree with us, and a lot of pro-life leaders refused to listen. They were just absolutely convinced that our problem was that the press was misrepresenting our view, or that the court was simply in the way of us getting anything done. And they steadfastly refused to believe that we did not have the public with us the way they fantasized we did. And so, no, I saw the problem actually.

Matt Tully
You mentioned the press, and I found it pretty fascinating to see the way the media coverage of this issue has played out over the last year or so since Dobbs. It’s amazing to see how many of the most high profile media organizations have really doubled down on framing this issue through the lens of women’s rights and access to health care. The opening line of one such article really stuck out to me. It read, “One year ago this week, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, which meant that millions of Americans no longer had guaranteed access to abortion care.” What do you make of that kind of framing that just dominates the media landscape that we’re all ingesting? How should Christians think about the way this issue is even talked about?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, they’re outright lies. And my colleagues who did not understand the need for worldview training in apologetics were correct that the press was lying, and they are. It’s blatant lies. We were told that women who had ectopic pregnancies no longer would be able to get life-saving treatment now that Roe had been overturned. We were told that women who had miscarriages would be drug off to prison and maybe executed in the gas chambers. And if they managed not to get executed, they would have to prove that they didn’t have an abortion because they had a miscarriage. This is all complete and utter lies. Nonsense. But the public believes it, Matt, and that’s our challenge. We’re going to have to puncture these misconceptions at the same time that we’re making a persuasive case for our view. And if we’re not equipping our people to understand these lies and refute them persuasively, it’s no surprise that we’re going to face an uphill struggle moving forward.

11:02 - Pro-Choice Arguments with Zeke Diversity

Matt Tully
Let’s turn to some of the most compelling and powerful pro-choice arguments that we often hear today. And these arguments that we’re going to discuss, they actually come from a talk that you often give when you speak to young people about these issues. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Dr. Zeke Diversity.

Scott Klusendorf
Zeke is my alter ego. I fear that at times people like him better than me just because he puts on quite a show. But I show up at worldview forums and Christian schools where I do assemblies and other talks, and I will take on the persona of Dr. Zeke Diversity from UCLA, a philosopher in the department of epistemology. And I show up and I pretend that I’m a pro-abortion philosopher, and I don’t give them street level arguments; I give them the toughest academic arguments that are out there—the stuff that we’re hearing that is a bit more challenging. And quite frankly, Matt, I can destroy their pro-life beliefs in about ten minutes.

Matt Tully
Do you get feedback from students? Can you even see it on their faces? Do you see fear starting to well up in their hearts?

Scott Klusendorf
Fear, anger, frustration. They don’t know what to do. In fact, one of the funniest stories was I did this at a homeschool conference in Cincinnati a few years ago, and a group of students and parents came in late after I had started and they didn’t know I was role playing. I was just seeing their faces melt with rage as they were listening to me. But I put on a good show and I sound very persuasive to these students, and they have not been hit with this kind of stuff. But I know if I don’t hit them with it, they’re going to leave for college and they won’t be inoculated against the challenges they’re going to face. So I take it on me to give the toughest arguments they’re going to hear, not the weakest.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful clarification because I think sometimes, especially as parents, we can think we want to protect our kids from some of these “bad influences,” but you seem to be advocating the opposite approach.

Scott Klusendorf
You can’t protect them. The only thing you can do is inoculate them—to make sure that they have been exposed to this stuff and know why it’s garbage before they leave our homes and leave our churches.

Matt Tully
Another part of this, as I’ve thought about this talk that you give and how you approach this issue, is sometimes it seems like we Christians are very good at knocking down straw men. We can hear some of the worst arguments from the abortion side, and we feel comfortable with those. But some of the arguments that you’re about to share with us are really powerful, and it would be hard for most of us to know how to respond to those. Do you think that’s a common danger for Christians, straw manning the opposition?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, one of the things that makes me cringe is when I hear pro-lifers say, We have the truth on our side, so we’re going to win. Well, I do agree that we have the truth on our side, but that doesn’t mean the public is buying the truth. We’ve got to make good arguments, not bad ones, and we shouldn’t dismiss our opponents. We should engage them and refute them intelligently, not dismiss them with labels like they tend to do with us.

14:06 - The Intuition Argument

Matt Tully
Let’s turn to five lines of argumentation that you walk through. I’ll ask you to make the case from Zeke’s perspective, and then we’ll unpack it together. The first argument that Zeke would make is that the pro-life cause fails the intuition test. And these arguments struck me maybe as particularly powerful and perhaps seemingly hard to know how to respond to. So I wonder if you could walk us through this side.

Scott Klusendorf
What I do is I tell the students that the pro-life view fails the intuitions test, and by that I mean there is a wide discrepancy between what they say they believe about the unborn and what they actually believe when push comes to shove. So Zeke will stand up there and say, How many of you think abortion is murder? Every hand goes up. I then say, How many of you are willing to pick up a gun to stop it the way you would if a toddler were being killed in your neighborhood? You won’t? Oh, there. See, you don’t really believe what you say. And are you willing to prosecute women for murder who have abortions? One or two hands go up. See, there’s a discrepancy between what you say you believe and what you actually believe. And then I’ll give them the toughest one. I’ll say, Pretend you’re in a burning research lab. In one corner over there to your right is a vial full of 1,000 frozen embryos on ice. In the corner to your left is a six-year-old girl. You only have time to save the embryos or the girl. Which one are you going to save? Every hand saves the six-year-old. I say, See, even you don’t believe the embryos have the same moral worth, and even you don’t believe it’s wrong to kill them because you saved the six-year-old but not the embryos. Those are examples of intuitional things, and what I do is I press the point and say, Hey, I’m not trying to critique you as pro-life students, but here’s the deal: recognize there’s a discrepancy between what you say you believe and what you actually believe in the real world. And you need to be honest about that. So he’s playing a real game with them.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the things that was most compelling about the way you present this is even just the way that you frame the arguments, the way that you engage. It comes across as so reasonable, respectful, thoughtful, and intelligent. And again, that doesn’t fit with the narrative that we often give ourselves of the protester on the street just yelling profanities. That’s not the real opponent that we’re facing.

Scott Klusendorf
No. And that’s one of the things that makes Zeke very dangerous because he’s nice, he’s winsome, and he makes a lot of sense at first glance, or at first hear, I should say.

Matt Tully
So then what is wrong with the intuition arguments you just laid out? Because I think we all would resonate with some of the things that you were saying right there.

Scott Klusendorf
Well, first let’s start with rules. In order to refute the pro-life position, you ought to first summarize it accurately and state what it is. And Zeke never does that. He just launches into his five reasons why he thinks pro-lifers are nuts, and he launches right into the intuitions without ever engaging the actual formal pro-life argument. So what is that formal pro-life argument? Premise one: it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Premise two: abortion does that. Conclusion: therefore abortion is wrong. That’s the argument Zeke needs to formally refute. He doesn’t. He just launches into his own speech without even summarizing our position. So in one sense, there’s not a lot for us to have to refute up front. We could point out that, Wait a minute, you’re not even engaging our formal argument. Suppose we do save the six-year-old over the embryos. Okay, how does it follow that because we save one human over others that the ones left behind are not fully human? And by the way, Zeke’s whole analogy here is flawed from the beginning. The burning research lab is about who we ought to save; abortion is about who we get to intentionally kill. You cannot jump from we save the six-year-old to we get to intentionally kill the embryos, which is what abortion does. For example, not to be rude to you or Maggie, but if I was in a burning room with you and Maggie and I had a choice to save you two or my daughter, Emily Rose, who is going to toast? Well, you two! Now, I’m not going to shoot you on the way out, but I’m going to save my daughter first. Does it follow that you're less human and valuable than she is? The answer is, of course, no. And that’s what Zeke is trying to do. He’s trying to jump from Oh, you’d save the six-year-old first to it’s now okay to intentionally kill the embryos left behind. And that's a non sequitur. Another way to look at this is to say the Secret Service will take a bullet for the president, but it won’t take one for you and me. Does it follow that we are less human than the President? No, it just means the results of losing the President for the national security of our nation are far greater, so they protect him rather than you. But it doesn’t mean that you’re less human. I mean, for this matter, the Secret Service will save the President over a city of six million people. Does it follow all six million or less human than the President? No.

Matt Tully
So why do you think that some of these intuition arguments, though, can be so powerful? As I read through these, they’re not the typical kind of argument, like a scientific (we’re going to get to that) or legal arguments. Maybe that’s part of the power is that everyone sort of just sort of agrees with this. We all feel the same pull towards one side or another, and we can’t always articulate the difference between what they’re advocating for and what would be right or wrong.

Scott Klusendorf
Well, intuitional arguments have power because you don’t need a formal, logical argument to recognize them. For example, if I say murder is wrong, rape is wrong; if you were to demand of me that I give you a syllogism to prove that, I would be within my rights to say, Matt, you’re just nuts if you don’t recognize that!. You don’t need an argument. You need a shrink. There’s something wrong with you. And intuitions, though, and here’s the key thing, they’re trustworthy on the face of it. In other words, we should give them consideration, but they’re not infallible. They can be corrected by evidence and logic. And in this case, Zeke’s intuitions are correctable because there are factual and logical problems that he doesn’t bring to the front of his argument. We need to recognize those things like we just did a moment ago.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that some of our struggle here is that we, as Christians, often we don’t have any training in argumentation and in logic. We struggle to notice and identify a non-sequitur, and so we just kind of get carried along with these arguments.

Scott Klusendorf
Really, the rules of the game are crucial. In fact, in the second edition of The Case for Life, I spend a whole chapter laying out what the rules of arguments are and what you have to do to successfully refute a formal argument. And the reason for that is too many pro-lifers start making a case the way Zeke did. They just start making statements without actually establishing arguments. And then they get stymied when someone else replies with a statement that isn’t in agreement with their own. And I tell students all the time here are the three most important words in pro life apologetics: syllogism, syllogism, syllogism. You need to know what your formal pro-life argument is. And that way, if people try to change the subject on you, you can bring it back to the argument you’re making and ask the question, How does that refute my argument I just made?

Matt Tully
Because I think that could be the response is that you say a word like “syllogism” that maybe half of us haven’t even heard before. Does the public have an appetite for formal logic and arguments, or is that kind of missing the boat in terms of what people are actually caring about? But it sounds like you’re kind of saying that by having that in our mind and keeping that central, it allows us to effectively, winsomely push back against changing the subject.

Scott Klusendorf
Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s human nature to change the subject when you’re in an argument and you’re not winning. Ask any married person, When you’re in a conversation with your spouse and you’re losing, and they know you’re losing and every rational mind in the universe knows you’re losing—the Lord knows you’re losing—do you slap yourself on the thigh and say, ’You know, I’m so glad Jesus put you in my life to straighten out my twisted thinking. Thank you, dear.’ No, we don’t do that. We resist. We dig in. We fight. We look for ways to change the topic, to maneuver and to attack rather than refute. And this is what happens on abortion. And so by keeping focused on the essential pro-life argument—that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings; abortion does that; therefore it’s wrong—we keep the main thing the main thing. And in terms of the public not being schooled in logic, there’s truth to that. That means we need to help them understand logic. That’s part of why we’re not winning the way we should. We have to do some background logic instead of just launching into our own assertions.

Matt Tully
Take us next to some of the scientific arguments that Zeke would make in support of a pro-abortion position.

Scott Klusendorf
If you don’t mind, let me just quickly knock out two other intuitional things Zeke threw at you. He said that if you really think abortion is murder, are you willing to prosecute women for murder? Now, there’s reasons why pro-life politicians have not wanted to do that, namely that if they put the woman up on the stand and they’re going to prosecute her the same way they are going to prosecute the doctor, they won’t get her testimony to prosecute him. And secondly, to prosecute the woman as a co-conspirator here, you have to prove a meeting of the minds, meaning her knowledge of the act is identical to the doctor’s knowledge. You’re never going to prove that in a court of law, and no DA is going to enforce that. So pro-life legislators have prudently said let’s prosecute doctors, not women. But set that aside for a moment. Suppose pro-lifers are inconsistent, that we say abortion is unjust killing but we won’t prosecute women for murder. Does that disprove our syllogism that abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being and therefore is wrong? And the answer is no, it doesn’t. Our argument can stand even if we inconsistently apply it. At best, all Zeke does is prove your inconsistency. He doesn’t prove your argument is bad. This is why we’ve got to start with argument, argument, argument, because if you don’t, then Zeke comes along and makes the issue your behavior rather than whether or not your syllogism stands the validity and soundness test.

24:50 - The Scientific Argument

Matt Tully
Let’s move on then to the scientific case that Zeke might want to make in support of the pro-abortion position. What would that look like?

Scott Klusendorf
Zeke is going to make a big deal out of twinning. He’s going to say, Okay, if you’re going to argue that every time we put sperm and egg together you get a living human being, what do you do, number one, with twinning, where up to twenty-one days after fertilization you could get a split in that early embryo and you end up with two? And secondly, what are you going to do with molar pregnancies, where the early embryo morphs into a tumor instead of an embryo? Now what? How can you say life begins at conception when those two things could happen? And then he would also argue that women don’t grieve miscarriages the way they grieve the death of an embryo or an older child, and if they don’t grieve those deaths profoundly, clearly we understand there’s a difference between the two.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that issue of twins. How would you respond to that? Because that is one of those issues that maybe many haven’t thought about, but once you pose it like that, it’s like are we saying there were two lives here from the very beginning, or another life came into existence at some point? How would you think about that?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, the good news is we don’t have to answer that question to successfully refute Zeke. And here’s the question he didn’t answer and can’t answer: How does it follow that because a living entity may split that it wasn’t a whole living entity prior to the split? Matt, if you were to cut a flatworm in half, you’d get two flatworms. Does it follow there was no flatworm prior to the split? So the fact that an entity may split does not mean it wasn’t a whole living entity prior to the split. So the twinning argument is not persuasive to me at all. By the way, if the unborn are not human because a twin can be formed from them, we have a difficult question to ask, and that is this: With cloning technology that we now have in place, a twin can be formed from any one of us. We can take a somatic cell from you, strip its DNA, slap donor DNA in there, and voila! We could end up getting a twin of you. Does it follow, therefore, that you do not exist because a twin can be formed from you? This is not a good argument.

Matt Tully
So the response to that would probably be something like, Well, but we’re talking about a natural process inside the human body as part of the normal process of human development. And so in that case, having the potential for a twin would imply something about the status of that initial clump of cells.

Scott Klusendorf
I don’t think they can reply that way because I think the analogy holds in ways it needs to hold. And that is their essential argument is that because a living entity can split, it’s not a whole living entity because that can be a possibility. Well, I think then the flatworm example works very well. You can’t say that just because an entity splits it wasn’t a whole living human being. With analogies, you always want to keep focused on the part that’s essential. No analogy is perfect, but it can be relevant in the ways it needs to be relevant. And in this case, I think our flatworm example is relevant.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing, too, how assumptions can be smuggled in, though, with analogies that you maybe didn’t see there, but they’re playing a big part in why the analogy works or doesn’t work.

Scott Klusendorf
Correct.

Matt Tully
So let’s talk about the other argument that you made, the one about women grieving in different ways for a miscarriage versus losing a born child. How would you respond to something like that?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, I want to be very careful here and sensitive. There are listeners hearing us right now who have suffered the pain of miscarriage, and I don’t want to downplay that at all. For some women you and I know, and maybe even some fathers too, the pain of miscarriage has been every bit as great as the loss of a born child. But let’s set that aside for the moment. Here’s the question for Zeke: How do my feelings about something change what it is ontologically? If I were to get a text message saying one of my own kids has died today, I would feel worse about that than hearing that 10,000 children died in India today from malnutrition. Does it follow those Indian children are less human than my own kid? No. It just means I have a stronger tie to my own child. It says nothing about the humanity of those others. So my feelings about something don’t determine what it is.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that a lot of these arguments that Zeke is making do seem to be attacking the consistency of the pro-life person rather than anything to do with the argument of the pro-life position.

Scott Klusendorf
Precisely. And a lot of evangelicals fall for this. They think, Oh my! We’re not being consistent. There goes our whole case. No. Your case can be good, even if you don’t apply it consistently.

Matt Tully
And what I find helpful, though, is that you’re even demonstrating that for some of these arguments, the pro-life person isn’t necessarily being inconsistent. There are good reasons for our intuitions being a certain way or our grief looking a certain way. There are reasonable reasons for those things to be the case.

Scott Klusendorf
That’s correct.

30:04 - The Philosophical Argument

Matt Tully
Let’s turn to the philosophical test that Zeke would put forth. And these arguments seem to be some of the most often employed, or even just assumed, in public discussion about abortion to me. And so in light of that, they seem really important for us to understand how to refute. So maybe make that case for us.

Scott Klusendorf
Zeke is going to argue two philosophical arguments. The first is the unborn are human but they’re not persons, and it’s personhood that matters, not species membership. And until you have desires, cognitive awareness, you’re not a person. You may be a human biologically, but you’re not the same being then as you are now. That personhood begins with what we call mental continuity—having a sense of yourself existing over time, as Peter Singer would argue, or having desires to go on living, the way Michael Tooley might argue. Until you have those things, you are a human but you’re not a person. Your identity doesn’t begin until personhood, not at bodily existence. The second thing Zeke’s going to argue is even if we grant that you’re a human being and a person with a right to life, you still do not have a right to use the body of another person to sustain your own life. You may withhold that support if you want. And he’s going to use Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist argument where she argues: Imagine you wake up one morning and find yourself surgically connected to a world famous violinist who’s been put there by the society of music lovers. And this violinist has a deadly kidney ailment. He will die if he’s not hooked up to you and use your blood type to save his life. And as you’re waking up, trying to break free, the hospital staff says, Listen, you got to stay hooked up. We’re sorry, but he’s a human being with a right to life. And if you disconnect, he dies. So we realize this is inconvenient for you, but too bad. He’s a person with a right to life. You’re going to have to endure this for nine months until he gets better. And then Thomson asks a great question that Zeke puts out there very dramatically. He says, It would certainly be nice if you let your body be used this way, but must you? And that throws the audience into all kinds of convulsions.

Matt Tully
That’s a powerful idea there because we value so much this personal autonomy and freedom in our country as individual humans. The thought of imposing the care of another human being—if it even is a person, going back to that first argument—does seem potentially unjust. So how would you respond to something like that?

Scott Klusendorf
I’ll take Thomson’s argument first—the bodily autonomy one—and then I’ll jump to the personhood argument after that. The problem with this whole idea is abortion is much more than merely withholding support. Let’s say that Maggie has a terrible disease. Let’s say she has cancer, God forbid, but just for the sake of argument. She needs your blood type to be cured. Let’s say you may withhold giving her a blood transfusion. Abortion is much more than merely withholding support. It’s intentionally killing another human being. And Zeke just focuses on the withholding of support part of this, not the actual intentional killing, as outlined in our syllogism. I think my colleague Frank Beckwith puts it real well. He says calling abortion merely the withholding of support is kind of like suffocating someone with a pillow and calling it the withdrawing of oxygen. There’s a whole lot more going on here than merely withholding support. We’re intentionally killing an innocent human being. But secondly, why should we believe that a mother being hooked up to her own child is morally equivalent to you being hooked up to a total stranger? You may not have responsibility for a total ] stranger violinist, but parents do have responsibilities to their own offspring. And this is a major flaw, I think, in the whole line of Zeke’s argument here. By the way, if we have no duty to our unborn offspring because merely being biologically related confers no special responsibilities on you as a parent, we can also then say if biology confers no special duties on me, I can abandon my aging parents. And by the way, wouldn’t this be a good argument for child abandonment as well? The mother doesn’t consent to provide any more support for the child; therefore, she just abandons him. We would think that to be awful.

Matt Tully
You start to apply that line of argumentation in other contexts, and it immediately becomes as distasteful as it actually is. You can kind of see the problem with it. Let’s go to the issue of personhood versus humanity. I think that one can be especially powerful. And people will often point to, Think of all the human skin cells that you lose every day. You don’t think anything of that. It doesn’t strike you as a travesty—so just being human doesn’t necessarily confer the value that we think of with personhood.

Scott Klusendorf
Right. Now, keep in mind that’s actually a scientific argument. I’m glad you brought it up because your critic at that point is confusing parts with wholes. These skin cells on the back of my hand that I shed daily are merely part of a whole, distinct, living human being—me. There’s a difference in kind between each of our bodily cells and the whole, living embryos we once were from the moment of fertilization. And that’s the thing the critic is missing. Embryos are not mere parts of human beings; they are themselves distinct, living organisms. Zeke argued that you have to have cognitive ability, self-awareness, and desire to see yourself living over time to count as a person. Pro-lifers need to get in the habit of asking our critics, Why should I believe there can be such a thing as a human that’s not a person? I mean, make the critic defend his own claim. If I claim that there’s a pink elephant swinging above your head right now, Matt, I bear the burden of proof, not you. Why do we so easily take the burden of proof when it’s not ours to make? For example, I’ll hear pro-lifers say, Oh, well, fetuses in the womb are dreaming by week eleven, and they can feel pain by week thirteen, and they have cognitive memories as early as eighteen weeks. These are wrong answers. As soon as you answer that way, you’ve bought the premise that cognitive development is what gives you value and a right to life. Challenge the premise. I would ask Peter Singer, How self-aware do I have to be not to be killed? And why that level of self-awareness and not something else? Make him defend his claim. I don’t need to do it.

Matt Tully
Does that apply to heartbeat laws where, again, we sort of view the heartbeat as this demonstration of humanity? Is that kind of falling into the same kind of trap?

Scott Klusendorf
Philosophically, it does, but legislatively, I can understand why a heartbeat law might be a good thing to do. If you’ve got enough votes in the chamber to ban abortion at heartbeat, but you don’t have enough votes to ban it at conception, by all means, protect children from heartbeat forward. But our position is not that life begins at heartbeat; it’s that it begins at fertilization and that that’s a distinct, living, whole human being with the same identity at conception that it will have at age eighty-seven when it dies, let’s say. You’re the same being now as you were then. And if you are intrinsically valuable now, you were intrinsically valuable then. That’s the essence of our philosophical case. Let’s say Michael Tooley, or somebody like him, says, Well, until you have immediately exercisable desires, you’re not a person—a slave can be indoctrinated not to desire his freedom. Does that mean he’s not entitled to it? How does having immediately exercisable desires confer personhood? Why is that trait decisive and not having a belly button that points out rather than in? Our critics need to argue for that, not merely assert it. And these personhood objections are largely just assertions that are completely arbitrary. And by the way, they’re also based on an underlying worldview that I talk about in the second edition of The Case for Life called “body-self dualism.” And this worldview is one, Matt, that Christians really need to take seriously because it impacts not only abortion but the transgender issue, the gay marriage issue. Body-self dualism says that the real you has nothing to do with your body. The real you is your thoughts, your desires, your aims, your cognitive processes. Until you have those things, there’s no you there, when it comes to the abortion issue on this view, and there’s also no you there any longer if you were to develop Alzheimer’s disease or otherwise suffer from memory loss. So this view that the real you is your thoughts, your aims, and your mental life, your desires and not your body—on body-self dualism, your body has no intrinsic purposes. That is not a biblical worldview of the human body where we do see that the body has intrinsic purposes. But on body-self dualism, I could say something like, I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body, or I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body is more often what you hear. That claim makes no sense at all unless you assume there’s a clear dichotomy between a person and his body. The biblical view is that we’re a dynamic union of body and soul. From the beginning, we are not pure body and we are not pure soul; we’re a dynamic union of body and soul.

Matt Tully
What have been some of the best arguments that you’ve heard, or what’s the response that you might hear from, again, the pro-abortion position when you confront them with these theological assumptions that they might be making? What’s the response to that kind of criticism?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, one of the new thinkers on the block is a gal named Kate Greasley from Oxford, and she makes an interesting argument. I don’t agree with it, but I can at least find it interesting. She argues that, yes, it’s true development does not end at birth, and the problem with development arguments is that if you say that it’s development that gives us value, those with more of it are going to have a greater right to life than those with less. And development doesn’t end at birth, so that would mean that a twenty-year-old has a greater right to life than a ten-year-old or a five-year-old. And the way Greasley tries to get around this is she says, Look, let’s stipulate that once you cross a certain threshold you are in a range of personhood where you don’t become more of a person once you’re in the range. And she gives this example: If you look at Hoboken, New Jersey, it’s barely in the state of New Jersey. In fact, it’s right on the border of the Hudson River with New York. If you look at Princeton, New Jersey, it’s smack dab in the middle of the state. No question it’s in New Jersey, but we don’t think that Hoboken is less valuable and less of a city in New Jersey than we think Princeton is. And likewise, once you are born, she argues, you are in the range of personhood, even though you will continue to develop after that. My question is, Who are you to stipulate it’s birth that is the decisive place? Why is it that threshold and not something else? I could argue that fertilization is actually a more dramatic departure, a more dramatic threshold. And I think that a lot of people have bought the notion that we can just arbitrarily decide it’s this point (birth), or it’s self awareness, and they just establish a line, but they don’t really argue for why that’s the line and why we should draw it there.

41:48 - The Sociological Argument

Matt Tully
Maybe the last category of arguments that Zeke would make is that the pro-life position fails the sociological test, or in other words, the common good test. How so?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, he would argue that we’ve had fifty years of legal abortion. And Zeke, by the way, tells his audience that he’s glad Roe v. Wade was overturned because he thinks it was a poorly decided legal decision. But sociologically, he argues that you can’t just pull the rug out from women who for fifty years have been told you have a right to an abortion and then tell them you can’t have it anymore. He says there’s going to be some deleterious results from this. One of which is going to be women are going to seek illegal abortions that could harm them, and it’s not very pro-life to want to subject women to harmful abortion procedures that could kill them. Secondly, he would argue that you have precedent here, that we need to respect stare decisis, meaning we’ve had a precedent of abortion and maybe we need to have that law continue and just give it a better legal foundation than Roe gave it. We shouldn’t just throw out laws that are established and grounded in our foundation as a Republic.

Matt Tully
And we see a lot of that argumentation happening today. There’s a lot of talk about the importance of access to health care and the strain that the striking down of Roe v. Wade has put on many women and families who are seeking abortions and have to travel great distances to find them. This seems to be a pretty powerful category of argumentation that is being made in the public right now.

Scott Klusendorf
It is because people have been fed the lie that abortion is health care. Health care does not intentionally kill people. I know there are people who want to redefine it to include that so that it includes assisted suicide, involuntary euthanasia, and a host of other things. But health care is about making the patient better, not worse off. So we shouldn’t accept the definition of abortion as health care. That’s a euphemism. We should challenge it. Secondly, the fact that something’s been on the books for fifty years does not mean we shouldn’t overturn it. Laws against slavery had been on the books permitting slavery for decades prior to their being ended. It didn’t mean we shouldn’t have overturned slavery. Laws against racial segregation were on the books for decades. That didn’t mean it was wrong to challenge them and overturn those. When Brown v. the Board of Education was passed by the Supreme Court, the precedent that they were arguing against, Plessy v. Ferguson, had been the precedent for almost fifty years, but that didn’t mean racial segregation was a good thing and we ought to continue it. So just because something’s been there for a while does not mean it’s somehow good to keep it going.

Matt Tully
It’s another good example where that argument does nothing to touch the core syllogism related to the pro-life cause. It really is just saying, It’s been this way for a long time and we’re used to it, so why would we change it?—which is not the issue.

Scott Klusendorf
And I think if you read the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and others, they give you a very good insight as to why appealing to tradition is not always good and beneficial.

Matt Tully
Some of the greatest evils of world history were things that, at the time, were accepted by the broader society. They were cheered on and supported in many ways. And it almost makes the evil worse because of that fact.

Scott Klusendorf
Communism was a definite precedent in Eastern Europe and in much of Asia, and communist dictators killed over a hundred million of their own people. Merely appealing to tradition or precedent is not necessarily a good and moral thing.

45:41 - The Urgent Call for Pro-Life Apologists

Matt Tully
Scott, as you take a step back and think about the impact that this session with Zeke Diversity has on students, young people who are hearing it for the first time, as you walk through and deconstruct his arguments, and we’ve heard a really abbreviated form of that today, do people say that they feel more confident coming out of that? Do you feel like they have more tools and they’re ready to go and actually start to respond to some of these arguments they hear their friends or family members or coworkers making?

Scott Klusendorf
Well, if the question is, Do they feel like they’re professional pro-life apologists at that point?—no. But here’s what they do have: they’re now inoculated against those arguments. When they hear them in the classroom, they’ll go, Wait a minute. I heard somebody talk about that, and I know there’s answers to that. I just need to do a little digging to find those answers—instead of being surprised and saying, Hey, my Christian worldview is inadequate. They didn’t prepare me for this. And haven’t we all heard the stories of people who send their kids off to a secular university, and the kid comes home for Thanksgiving break and semester one, and he’s totally leftward in his thinking and he’s deconstructing his faith? And when you ask why, he says, Because people hid the truth from me. They didn’t tell me there were other ways to think about these things. Well, we better expose our students to those other ways before they leave.

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love most about your book, The Case for Life, and as you said, coming out with a second edition that is very robust and with lots of new material. But I think sometimes we can think about this issue as something for the experts, for people like you who’ve got years of experience making these arguments in the public sphere. You could get on a podcast and have a debate with somebody and do okay. And we just think, That’s not me. I can’t do that. But I think one of the things I love about your book is that it does train the individual Christian, maybe first and foremost, for his or her own sake—for our own confidence in these things so that we can be alert to the smuggled assumptions and poor arguments that often are thrown at us from the other side. And then maybe there’s even the ability to then recommend this to another Christian friend or a child who’s struggling with these things and who’s wondering. But it doesn’t necessarily mean we all have to go out and become public apologists for the pro-life position.

Scott Klusendorf
Well, nobody thinks it’s wrong for all of us to be considered evangelists. In the same way, I would argue that it’s not wrong to assume that we all ought to be speaking out on the single greatest moral tragedy of our time. There is no moral issue that comes anywhere close to the number of unborn children killed under Roe v. Wade’s tyrannical rulership in our country. We’re talking about well over 60 million lives lost. That’s Yankee stadium filled 1,300+ times over. That is just incomprehensible, the number of lives lost, and that demands a response from us as Christians. And it needs to be a biblical response and an intelligent one.

Matt Tully
Scott, thank you so much for helping us to think about what that response can look like, and helping us think through the case for abortion as we then turn in and contemplate the case for life. Scott, we really appreciate that.

Scott Klusendorf
Thank you, Matt.

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