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Jan. 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:58
March For Life | Ep. 698
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, we broadcast live from the March for Life and debunk the most common pro-choice arguments one by one.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty.
So today on the Ben Shapiro Show, we are live from the March for Life.
You can hear the thousands of amazing people who have come out hours earlier.
Standing out here in the freezing cold weather.
I'm told this is temperate, balmy weather for Washington, D.C.
this time of year, but I'm from California, so I don't know what these people are talking about.
It is amazing to be here.
It's really an honor to be here.
We're going to do something we've never done before on The Ben Shapiro Show.
We're doing a full-on themed hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
We're doing nothing but debunking pro-choice arguments all hour long.
And also we have a special guest who's going to be calling in a little bit later to say hello to everyone who is here.
So, let's just jump right in because there are a lot of pro-choice arguments to debunk.
So, let's begin with this.
We now live in a country that is still debating over whether abortion is a moral good or a moral evil.
President Obama, back on the 41st anniversary of the debacle, the evil decision known as Roe vs. Wade, He said, quote, Tonight, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision's guiding principle that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health.
This is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.
And Roe v. Wade is a grand and glorious thing because now women have the ability to fulfill their dreams by killing babies.
Which is an odd position.
I mean, the position that you actually are only able to engage fully in freedom if you have the ability to snuff out an unborn life is a weird position.
But this was not unusual for President Obama.
You recall that a few years back, President Obama spoke before the nasty, terrible organization known as Planned Parenthood.
And at the very end of his speech, as you'll recall, President Obama actually said that God should bless Planned Parenthood.
Here's what that sounded like.
As long as we've got to fight to make sure women have access to quality, affordable health care, and as long as we've got to fight to protect a woman's right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you've also got a president who's going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way.
Thank you, Planned Parenthood.
God bless you.
I know we've gotten a lot of flack.
I know the March for Life has gotten a lot of flack for allowing me to broadcast from the stage because I'm a political partisan, because I don't hide the fact that I'm conservative.
But the fact is that the pro-life issue does not have to be a partisan issue.
The only reason that there are so many folks who believe that it has to be a partisan issue is because, unfortunately, one party in this country has decided to embrace the full-on abortion till point of birth position.
Alright, so.
Now, back to the issue at hand.
There's a piece in the Washington Post suggesting that it was very bad that I was going to be here today because it makes the issue partisan.
It is not my fault, or your fault, or the fault of the unborn, that President Obama chose to take the position that he chose.
That is his fault, okay?
And it's not anybody else's fault when people in one party decide overwhelmingly to excise pro-life voices from their midst.
I know that there is a couple of Democrats, at least one Democrat, who's going to be speaking at the March Day, which is fantastic.
I wish all Democrats were here at the March today.
But there has been a shift inside the far left and increasingly the mainstream left version of what abortion should be about.
So if you go all the way back to the early 90s, the position of the Democratic Party, which is still quote-unquote pro-choice, which is of course a euphemism, the original position was safe, legal, and rare.
You recall, Hillary Clinton said this back when she was first lady of the United States.
The way she articulated abortion was safe, legal, and rare.
Here's what that sounded like.
We can support a woman's right to choose that makes abortion safe, legal, and rare, and reduces the number of abortions.
Okay, well that happens to not be the position of the Democratic Party today.
First of all, that was never logically tenable.
Right?
If you want something to be safe and legal, then your suggestion is that there really isn't anything morally wrong with the act that's taking place.
If abortion is not morally wrong, then why should it be rare?
So if you want it to be safe and legal, then why exactly should it be rare?
Obviously once you say it should be rare, you're acknowledging that there is a moral wrong that is being done at some level.
And therefore, the case for it being legal is actually a lot weaker, particularly when what you're talking about is not some sort of consensual behavior.
You're talking about the taking of an unborn life.
But the new position of the Democratic Party increasingly, and at least a lot of folks on the mainstream left, is not even safe, legal, and rare.
They've moved beyond that.
Now we are in the shout-your-abortion era.
You have folks like Lena Dunham who—I'll just leave it there—shh.
She says, she says, literally, she said this in the last couple of years, she said that she wished she'd had an abortion.
This is what it sounded like.
Now I can say that I still haven't had an abortion, but I wish I had.
I mean that's an amazing statement.
It has become a rite of passage for people.
A way of showing, of signaling to people that you are a good Women's rights advocate to suggest that you wish you had an abortion.
I mean, imagine the moral evil that it takes to be able to say that you wished that you had conceived a child just to kill that baby in your womb so that then you could brag to all of your friends about what a good feminist you were.
It's an amazing, incredible, disgusting thing.
Okay, so this position has changed radically.
Now, I don't want to take on the kind of strawman position that Democrats are all the most radical people on earth.
I want to take on the most mainstream arguments that are made against the pro-life position.
And we're going to go through these one by one.
There are basically ten of these pro-choice arguments.
And all of them are meritless.
All of them are meritless.
So we're going to go through them, and then I hope by the end of the show that folks are going to be equipped to speak more honestly and truthfully about how these issues work.
So argument number one is that this isn't a human being.
It's not a human life.
This is the argument that was put out by the editor of some publication called Romper, which I'd never heard of.
But earlier this week, this tweet was put up in which, when you show the tweet, in which this Romper editor suggested, Dear SCOTUS, Supreme Court, fetal tissue is not a person.
Fetal tissue is not a person.
Fetal tissue is not a person.
But I am, and I matter more than fetal tissue.
Signed, people who have miscarriages and abortions.
So there are many, many logical problems with this position.
Number one, to lump in people who have miscarriages with people who have abortions is in and of itself disgusting.
There are many, many women who want their babies who had miscarriages.
The idea that they didn't consider their own children children because they had a miscarriage because it was just fetal tissue is just absolute garbage.
It is absolute nonsense.
This also happens to be ascientific.
Now, if she had said that fetal stem cells are not the same as adult stem cells, of course, that's true.
That's not what she's saying.
She's saying fetal tissue, meaning the tissue of a fetus, is not a person.
Okay, well, by that standard, human flesh is not a person.
It's true.
A person, being a person, requires more than you just being A bag of flesh, right?
You have to be alive, right?
You have to be living.
But there is no distinction whatsoever between the flesh of a baby one minute before it enters the vaginal canal and one minute after it exits the vaginal canal.
The vaginal canal does not magically confer personhood.
It's just sheer nonsense.
And it's even more nonsensical when folks suggest that basically it's just a cluster of meaningless cells from the very beginning.
Now, today's theme of the March for Life is that it is a march for science, right?
Is that science is what matters.
And this is why it's amazing.
You see, the media will cover this march.
There's a bunch of religious bigots out there trying to end women's rights.
That's how they... if they cover it at all, right?
There'll be hundreds of thousands of people who show up today, and there'll be like 9,000 people who show up tomorrow at the women's march.
And they'll cover the women's march endlessly, and they will probably ignore, for the most part, the March for Life.
But if they do cover it, they will fail to acknowledge that the actual rationale for the pro-life position is not religious in nature, We'll talk about religion in a bit, but it's not really religious in nature.
The actual pro-life position is based on the sheer, unadulterated science of human life.
So let's go through that science for a second.
So, let's begin with week one.
Week one of pregnancy, or at least this is at conception.
We have some graphics that we can put up here.
If you take a look at what fertilization looks like, at the start of the week, ovulation happens, the egg is fertilized, and at that point, human life begins.
There's no question that a human life has now begun.
If you were to find this on another planet, it would be considered a life, right?
You would say life found on Mars.
If you found this organism on another planet, it would be a life.
This is a human life.
Now, the question is whether it is a baby is an irrelevant one, because the bottom line is that this will become a full-grown human being if left unimpeded in the natural course of things.
This has an independent DNA, okay, this is going to have an independent human existence.
So you don't have to say that this is a baby.
It's not a baby, obviously.
It doesn't have to be a baby.
It doesn't look like a baby, but it is a human life, and that's what matters.
Okay, and then, very quickly, there's implantation, that takes place, and then, by four weeks, by the time most women recognize that they are even pregnant, the ball of cells that is supposedly not human life is now an embryo.
By this point, it's now an embryo.
And by five weeks, the baby is already beginning to form its own circulatory system.
The tiny heart already begins to beat at about week five.
By week six, we are now talking one month of a woman knowing she's pregnant.
By week six, the nose, mouth, and ears are starting to take shape.
The intestines and brains are beginning to develop.
By week seven, the baby has doubled in size since the last week.
Little hands and feet are beginning to emerge.
By eight weeks, breathing tubes are extending from the throat to the developing lungs.
Nerve cells are branching out, forming those primitive neural pathways.
This is when people start to make the arguments about whether babies can feel pain or not.
At nine weeks, the baby's basic physiology is in place.
The baby continues to gain weight.
By week 10, the skin is translucent but tiny limbs can bend.
Details like fingernails are beginning to form.
You can tell the sex of the baby at this point.
This is when most women go into the doctor and the doctor does the ultrasound and then you can tell whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
All of this is happening within the first two and a half months of pregnancy.
All of this is happening within the first trimester.
And yet the Democratic Party platform position is that this is not a full-grown... It doesn't matter at all.
There's no moral component of aborting anything, anywhere in here.
And all the way up to birth, all the way up to birth, there is no moral component.
That's an incredible science-free argument.
And yet that is the argument that's made.
And we are called the science deniers if we dare to mention things like biology.
Basic fetal biology.
You know who actually acknowledged that abortion was taking human life?
It was actually the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Margaret Sanger said abortion was the wrong way, no matter how early it was performed, it was taking life.
It was only later that Planned Parenthood became not a contraceptive center, but an abortion center.
Second argument.
The second argument with regard to the pro-choice position is that this baby can't survive on its own, right?
We should be able to abort it because, after all, it's hooked up to another human.
And because it's hooked up to another human, viability is the real test.
Peter Singer, who's an ethicist at Princeton University, which tells you everything you really need to know about Princeton University, He acknowledges that this makes no sense.
Really, he acknowledges that it makes no sense because most babies are not viable in the sense that they can survive on their own for several years after they are born.
I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son right now.
He cannot survive on his own.
Legitimately.
Like, if I were, if both my wife and I were to abandon him in the house, he would stick a fork into an electric socket within minutes.
This is what small children do.
And this is particularly true of infants, right?
If you have an infant, the infant requires constant care.
The infant constantly requires that you are feeding it, and taking care of it, and changing it.
The viability argument makes no sense.
It doesn't even make sense when you're talking about many older Americans who require constant care in places like assisted living facilities.
So the viability argument, that if you are dependent on another human being to help you live, you are therefore not a human life, obviously doesn't hold.
Which is why Peter Singer, he actually acknowledges this.
He says, opponents will respond that abortion is, by its very nature, unsafe for the fetus.
They point out that abortion kills a unique living human individual.
That claim is difficult to deny because, again, this is a separate human being.
So what he says, what he says, Is that killing a newborn is not equivalent to killing a person because what you really need, the standard should be self-consciousness or autonomy or rationality, but none of those hold up to scrutiny.
None of those hold up to scrutiny.
Now the reason none of those hold up to scrutiny is a standard for viability, autonomy, self-consciousness, rationality, is that again, babies do not have any of these things.
Okay, so if that's the case, then you should be able to commit infanticide.
And in fact, that's actually what Peter Singer says.
He says you should be able to commit infanticide on kids after they're born.
At least if the pro-choice position were to be consistent, they would have to acknowledge how evil that position is, full scale.
Okay, argument number three is that it's responsible to abort.
Okay, this is the argument that women are making a responsible decision when they take the life of an unborn child.
Because the child will probably be miserable anyway, the kid will probably be upset day to day, might be depressed, might be obese.
For example, I don't know if you've seen this video, there's this woman who's been trying to go around training small children to be pro-choice.
She's this woman who works for Shout Your Abortion, and she explains to a kid that she had an abortion because she just wasn't ready for a child, as though this is some sort of moral stamp of approval.
Here's what she had to say.
Why did you have an abortion?
A few years ago I got pregnant, and I really didn't want to have a baby.
May I ask, what happened?
Did he not wear a condom?
Did the condom break?
Was it pre-ejaculation?
Such good questions, Vanessa.
Um, he wasn't wearing a condom.
Why wasn't he wearing a condom?
Have you ever had two options, and one of them, like, seems easier at the time?
Oh, yeah.
You could take a shortcut, or you could go the long way around.
It was the shortcut version.
Oh, so it's inconvenient.
And then it was inconvenient to raise the child.
See, it turns out that it's actually very difficult to raise a child.
It's time-consuming, it's difficult, because it's also the most important thing you do in life.
And I know that...
It has become unpopular to suggest that the most important thing that you are going to do in your life is raise your own children.
That you're going to bring a child into the world and then raise that child to be a good human being.
But that happens to be the truth.
There is nothing moral about the idea that you think you're going to be a bad parent so you get to kill the child.
It's an insane argument.
And by the way, again, an argument that holds true after birth.
What happens if you discover by age four that you're actually a terrible parent?
Do you now get to go and drown your kid in a river somewhere?
That's not the way this works.
Your failures as a parent do not allow you to kill another human being.
Argument number four is that it makes life better for women.
Abortion makes life better for women.
And this is the argument that you heard Barack Obama express a little bit earlier.
this argument that women's freedom necessitates the killing of the unborn.
There's an article over at The Guardian by a woman named Hadley Freeman, came out last June, in which she talked specifically about how...
The title of the piece is, "An Abortion at the Age of 23 Gave Me Freedom." And she talks about how, when she was 23, Her life forked.
She says, "Until then, it had felt like one of those LA freeways with half a dozen lanes.
I had options in terms of which path I took, but they were all going in the same general direction.
I was barely making a living in a job I enjoyed, living in a dump with friends I adored.
Life was wide open.
Then one day, I took a pregnancy test." And she says that she had an abortion.
She says, I absolutely could have had that baby.
I would have had to give up my job and move back in with my parents.
My relationship would eventually end, and it would have taken years for me to be able to support myself and my baby.
But sure, I could have done it.
But she's happy she didn't, because now she gets to work the job that she wants, and she doesn't have to live with her parents.
Yeah, you know who didn't get to live?
Someone else.
This is a dismissive view of the amazing gift of childbearing and childrearing to begin with.
I mean, the idea that human freedom, that female freedom is based not in raising the child, but in going working 2,200 hours at a law firm, it's ridiculous.
And I speak as a person whose mother was a working woman, my wife, as everyone knows, is a doctor.
I'm very much in favor of women in the workplace, but if you give my wife the choice between what's more important to her, raising our two kids, or working as a doctor, which is a pretty important job, she would make that choice in a heartbeat.
That's not a difficult decision.
What we have done as a society, by devaluing mothering in favor of work, is we have suggested that freedom itself is tied into work and not into mothering, and that is just not true.
It is just a lie.
And if your freedom comes at the expense of the life of another human being, then it's not really your freedom that is the top priority.
Okay, argument number five is the argument that because rape and incest are really bad, therefore abortion is okay, not only in those cases, but in all cases.
Now, this is a real red herring that you see thrown out by the pro-choice movement on a fairly routine basis.
You're going to be arguing abortion, you're going to be arguing the pro-life position, and they say, well, what about rape and incest, where we have lots of sympathy for the woman because she's just undergone something absolutely horrific?
First of all, the first thing that you should say in response to this argument is, okay, We can discuss those issues and I'm happy to talk about those, which I will in one second.
But first, are you willing to acknowledge that all the other abortions are wrong?
Because they're not, right?
This is what they're doing is they're using an exception in order to destroy the rule.
They're basically saying that because we have moral qualms, some people, about rape and incest, therefore a voluntary abortion for no reason having to do with rape and incest is totally okay.
All the folks who consistently mention rape and incest, this is not the good faith argument that happens between people who are pro-life on these issues.
Most of the people who mention rape and incest are instead much more interested in abortion across the board.
The truth is that only a tiny percentage of abortions spring from rape and incest.
As early as 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute asked women about their reasons for abortion.
Only 1% of the 1900 women surveyed suggested rape or abortion.
95% of those who mentioned rape or incest actually named other reasons as well for deciding to abort.
It wasn't just rape or incest, it was other reasons, economic reasons.
So it wasn't just pure rape and incest.
In other words, It is a minute fraction of abortions that we are talking about, and when people cite those abortions as an excuse for all the other abortions, that is intellectually dishonest in a massive way.
PolitiFact, right, which is a left-wing source, said that there may have been about 7,000 pregnancies from rape in 2010 in the United States total.
Total.
Out of the hundreds of thousands and millions of pregnancies that take place in the United States every year.
And this is supposed to be the rationale for ensuring that people can have abortions on demand?
Each year, there are about a million abortions in the United States.
Okay, a million.
And they're saying that 7,000 pregnancies resulting in rape, we don't know how many of those actually end in abortion.
Let's say it's half.
Okay, so you got 3,500 abortions.
What percentage of one million is that?
Not a high percentage.
And yet that is used as an excuse by the left for we can have no legislation on abortion whatsoever.
Now, as to the actual morality of abortion in the cases of rape and incest, as I have said one million times in my college speeches and when I speak about this issue, there is no one in the United States who is in favor of rape and incest.
Okay, if a man rapes a woman, he should be castrated or killed.
If a man commits incest, If a man commits incest with his daughter or his sister, he should be castrated or killed.
Okay, these are crimes against human beings.
These are evil crimes against human beings.
But one evil crime against a human being does not necessitate the morality of committing a crime against another human being.
If somebody were to rape a woman and the woman were to turn around and shoot an uninvolved third party, we would understand that she's not allowed to do that just because something terrible happened to her.
And yet, unfortunately, we've decided to conflate the two issues out of sympathy.
We can all be sympathetic and still recognize that it is an illogical argument that the baby should pay the price for the crime of the father.
Okay, in a second, I'm gonna get to the other arguments with regard to the pro-choice position, and then we have a special guest coming up.
Okay, so.
Argument number six that the pro-choice movement makes is that it is their body.
And so you see all of these marches where people are chanting things like, my body, my choice.
You see these big rallies, people chanting this.
There was a big rally in Los Angeles last year in which people were shouting, my body, my choice, and then women were shouting, my body, my choice, and men were shouting back at them, your body, your choice.
Here's what that sounded like. .
OK, so a couple of problems with this particular argument.
Okay, problem with this argument number one is that obviously it is not your body that we are talking about.
When women say, why are you so concerned about what goes on in my body?
My answer is I'm never concerned about what goes on in your esophagus.
I don't care about what goes on in your kidneys.
I'm not interested in your circulatory system.
I'm interested in protecting the living human being that is inside you right now.
That is the thing that I care about.
Then there is the kind of more complex argument that's made by sort of the libertarian contingent of the pro-choice crowd, the bodily autonomy argument.
So this is the argument that you've all heard, the famous violinist in a coma argument, right?
This is the argument where they say, you wake up in a room and there is somebody who is hooked up to you via an IV, right?
Just a random person.
And the person is a famous violinist.
And if you disconnect that IV, the person dies.
Do you have an obligation to keep that IV connected between you and the person who is in the coma?
Well, this is not a good argument for abortion for a variety of reasons, which I'm about to go into in a second.
First of all, if it turns out that the violinist in the coma we know will come out of the coma within nine months and go back to being a normal, full-fledged human being, It's kind of a dicey proposition to say that you should be able to just pull the plug on the guy, right?
Because you know that the person is going to be a full-fledged human being.
When you're talking about an unborn human baby, I mean, now a baby born at seven months is much more likely to live than to die.
So what you're talking about is a time delay in terms of when this person is going to no longer be connected to you.
So that is point number one.
Point number two, unless you were a victim of rape or incest, you're complicit in the creation of a child.
Right, the entire basis of the famous violinist example is that this person is unrelated to you.
You had no choice about whether this person was hooked into your veins.
Well, if you had consensual sex with someone and got pregnant, you are responsible for the act that led to that person being inside you.
Pregnancy is a pretty foreseeable risk of consensual sex and was for all of human history, regardless of whether you used birth control.
People who refuse to connect sex with the risk of pregnancy are either lying or they're stupid.
You wouldn't have an obligation to keep another human being tied into your body if you were knocked out, but if you tied the person into your body yourself, you probably would, right?
If you hooked the violinist into your veins and made him dependent on you, you'd probably now have an obligation not to remove the IV.
And then there's another problem, and this applies even in the cases of rape and incest, where voluntarism is not really the issue, where it was forced upon you.
that you didn't consent to the bodily connection.
Right.
And that is that abortion is not just pulling a plug.
And this is the part that nobody wants to talk about.
We speak about abortion in euphemisms all the time.
Abortion itself is a euphemism.
Abortion is a word that people think is antiseptic.
It doesn't do anything to the baby.
It's the same thing as pulling a plug.
It is not the same thing as pulling a plug.
If I change the violinist example, so the question is not, he's hooked into you with a line and you just have to pull the line.
But now, you have an axe in the room and the only way of disconnecting this guy from you is to chop him in the face with the axe.
That changes the math a little bit.
Abortion is a violent act.
It is not merely the disconnection of you from the baby, and then the baby dying on its own terms.
That is not what we are talking about here.
What we are talking about, the process of abortion, involves the dismemberment of an incipient human life.
That's what it is.
Okay.
Finally, your child, regardless of how it came into you, is your child.
The reason people like to use the famous violinist example is because the violinist is unrelated to you, they're a stranger.
Even if, God forbid, something happened to you that resulted in a pregnancy not of your choosing, that is still your child.
If I said to you that your child were forcibly hooked into you and you didn't have anything to do with it, right?
If I said that if you had a child you didn't know about and that child was forcibly hooked into you, wouldn't you have more of a moral obligation to that person than to a stranger?
You probably would.
Okay, argument number seven that the pro-choice movement uses is that it's all about safety for the mother.
That safety for the mother is the key thing.
This, of course, is utterly untrue and there is no science to back this whatsoever.
First, they argue that abortion is safer for mothers than pregnancy because the process of pregnancy is likely to lead to more complications and health problems than abortion would.
But that's true of a lot of things in life.
Right?
It's safer for women never to have to leave their homes, but we don't grant women the right to engage in identity theft in order so they can steal someone's credit cards.
They never have to leave their home.
Once we're in the business of allowing some people's right to health to overcome other people's right to life, we're in seriously dangerous territory.
It's always easy in life to say, you know what would be easier?
You know, there are dangerous neighborhoods in Washington, D.C.
Maybe we should just go kill everyone in these neighborhoods to make it safer for you to walk out your front door.
That's not the way that this works.
You do not get to change the rights of other people because it makes it safer for you.
The entire argument is that the baby has its own rights because unborn children do in fact have their own rights.
It's also true that the number of cases in which abortion is medically necessary, again, is extraordinarily low.
I mean, it's questionable as to whether these cases really exist.
Even in cases of, you know, preeclampsia and toxemia in late-stage pregnancy are extraordinarily rare.
And in those cases, usually c-sections are actually the best medical solution, not dismemberment of the child.
And virtually everyone who is pro-life agrees with the idea that if the life of the mother is in danger, then abortion can be considered.
But when people on the left say the health of the mother, now they're talking about just the comfort of the mother.
Because the truth is, we all undergo lots of health problems all the time.
Now, you'll see cases that the left will use, again, using the outlier to dispense with what should be a general rule.
When Ireland recently and tragically decided to reverse its position on abortion, they cited the case of a woman named Savita Halapanavar.
In 2012, she died supposedly for lack of abortion.
But, three official investigations actually found that this woman died of sepsis, which is a blood infection that is caused by virulent bacteria.
And if doctors had identified that earlier, abortion would not actually either have been necessary or it would have been performed to save the life of the mother.
So, when folks talk about how abortion laws prevent people from having healthy pregnancies or having healthy lives, it's just nonsense.
Okay, argument number eight is the slippery slope of control.
So we see advocates for Planned Parenthood marching around in their outfits based on the Handmaid's Tale, as though what all of the pro-lifers want is to restrict women to the bedroom so we can forcibly impregnate them and then call them things like Of Ben.
Like, this is what we're desperate to do.
I mean, no offense to the people marching in the Women's March, but don't flatter yourselves, ladies.
Okay, that is not high on the list of priorities for pretty much anyone.
So the basic argument is that if we don't allow women to kill their unborn children, soon we will use them as pregnancy surrogates by force.
The slippery slope is that if you don't get to kill a baby that you are complicit in creating, then I am going to come in your house, rape you, and force you to bear the child.
That's a hell of an argument.
I mean, really, if that's the way you feel about things, then you should forcibly imprison everybody who politically disagrees with you, because these are all incipient threats to your actual honor, right?
What's really bizarre about this argument is, of course, nobody is forcing women to get pregnant.
And we on the right are significantly more in favor of punishing rape stringently than folks on the left.
Folks on the left seem to be okay with letting people out of prison for rape after five years.
Folks on the right are a little less okay with that.
Whenever there's a case of a woman who's raped and the father who then goes and shoots the rapist, conservatives are secretly and openly cheering when that happens.
It is people on the left who are generally saying, oh, that's just terrible.
How could the father do something like that?
Also, the idea of forcing women into being surrogates.
Surrogacy can be useful and wonderful in some cases, but let's be real about this.
Surrogacy is a privilege of rich Hollywood leftists.
The people who are using surrogacy the most often are 40-year-old actresses in Hollywood who didn't want to get pregnancy because they wanted a flat tummy until they were 40, and then they decided to find a Guatemala lady and have a surrogacy.
So the idea that this is a widespread problem is just not true.
First of all, surrogacy is not all that prominent.
Second of all, surrogacy is itself not really an issue.
It's not a moral issue.
And third of all, no one is doing this.
Like, where are they getting this?
We're all going to invade their bedrooms.
It's just absurd.
Okay.
Argument number nine is the overpopulation problem.
We should kill lots of babies because there are too many people already.
First of all, this has always been untrue.
The Malthusian argument that there are too many people has been disproved over and over and over again.
As there are more people, there is also additional productivity.
There are more geniuses.
There are more people creating awesome new products and services.
There are lots of people who are creating great things.
There was a bet between Paul Ehrlich, back in the 1980s, between Paul Ehrlich, who's an environmental scientist, philosopher, at UC Berkeley, he also happens to be adult, and Julian Simon, who's a professor at the University of Maryland, and the bet went like this.
Paul Simon, so Julian Simon said to Paul Ehrlich, you pick any three commodities, any three, And I will make you a bet that within 10, you can pick any of them, that within 10 years, the price of these commodities will have gone down.
The reason he said this is because additional creativity will create additional productivity for these particular products.
Now, Paul Ehrlich's case was there are more people, more people means more demand, more demand means less supply available to more people, so prices will go up.
Julian Simon won that bet, because with additional people comes additional beauty in the world, comes additional creativity, comes additional brilliance.
Also, again, the argument doesn't hold on any logical level.
If there are too many people in the world right now, which million or billion would you kill off?
If you're really that worried about overpopulation to the point where you think that overpopulation is a threat to humanity as a whole, then we better start picking out who exactly we're going to take out back.
Folks on the left don't really like to talk about that sort of thing because they recognize how evil it is, but if they're casting aspersions at people who can't defend themselves, who don't have a voice to speak for themselves, then it's completely different.
Finally, argument number 10.
This one has become popular in recent years after the book Freakonomics came out.
That argument is that abortion lowers the crime rate.
What has lowered the crime rate traditionally has been killing all the would-be criminals.
First of all, I don't know who's comfortable with the pre-crime version of humanity, where we get to decide before you're born whether you're likely to be a criminal and then abort you based on future criminal activity in which you have not participated.
The argument, I guess here, is that would you kill baby Hitler?
And the truth is that no pro-life person on earth would kill baby Hitler.
Because baby Hitler wasn't Hitler.
Adult Hitler was Hitler.
Baby Hitler was a baby.
What you presumably want to do with baby Hitler was take baby Hitler out of baby Hitler's house and move baby Hitler into a better house where he would not grow up to be Hitler.
That's the idea.
But it is also true that the crime statistics do not even match up.
Criminologist Barry Latzert points out that abortions became available in 1973 under Roe v. Wade.
Those young people would go on to create a massive crime spike and the crack cocaine epidemic.
But if you move forward 15 to 20 years, right, that's when you would see the crime drop due to the abortion of babies.
But there is no crime drop.
You'd expect the absent babies, right, the babies that were killed starting in 1973, not to be around carjacking people.
But it turns out that people were still carjacking people 15 years after Roe v. Wade, 20 years after Roe v. Wade.
The crime spike only began to drop in 1994, a solid 21 years after Roe v. Wade was actually put in place.
That can't be due to abortion, right?
That's really due to additional policing.
So it doesn't even match up statistically.
Now, in all of this discussion, I've refrained from discussing the Bible and religion.
Now, one of the arguments that I've made is based on the Bible or religion.
Now, the media will pretend that I didn't make any of these arguments, that it's all about the Bible and religion, because the left prefers to believe that religion is stupid, and people who believe in religion are stupid, people who believe in God are idiots, and that's the reason why we prefer to protect the lives of the unborn.
But we do have to recognize one religious root to every argument that I'm making, and that is the innate value of human life.
That is a religiously based argument.
Anyway, the system that produces both science and the enlightenment is rooted in biblical values.
A Judeo-Christian system created a system based on science.
Science only rose in the West because it was based on the idea that you live in an understandable universe created by an all-knowing God, and that that all-knowing God wanted you to investigate that universe so that you could understand science, so that you could understand the worlds around you.
That same creator also gave us the most important verse in the history of humanity, that human beings are made in the image of God.
Without that fundamental assumption, Without that fundamental knowledge, none of this matters.
And no policy argument matters.
Forget about abortion.
No policy argument matters without the acknowledgement that every human being has value.
Once you accept that every human being has value, you can no longer be quote-unquote pro-choice, using their euphemism.
You must be pro-life.
Because if every human being has value, if every human being has value, then that means that every human being deserves to be protected, no matter how small, no matter how early.
All of them deserve to be protected because they are innately valuable.
Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson said about slavery, Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God, that they are not to be violated, but with His wrath.
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.
God's justice will not sleep forever, and we're not going to sleep until we see justice done.
We'll choose life so that we and our children may live.
Alright, well, I want to bring on the program right now a very special guest, Vice President Mike Pence.
Thanks for joining the Ben Shapiro Show.
Thank you, Ben.
It's great to be with you.
Thank you for being at the 46th annual March for Life, and thanks for being a leading voice for life in this pro-life generation.
As you can tell, I think the folks over here like you, Vice President Pence.
We're really excited to have you.
Can you talk for a couple of minutes about the importance of the March for Life, why the March for Life matters, and why this issue ought to matter to all Americans?
Well, it just, you know, it is an extraordinarily important event.
You think 46 years ago this month, a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States turned its back on the unalienable right to life.
And here, nearly a half century later, Generations of Americans have come together to say, no, we are going to put the sanctity of life back at the center of American law, and I believe in our lifetime we will accomplish that.
We will stand for life in America.
Well, Vice President Pence, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the Trump administration has done to protect human life.
This is one of the more glorious parts of the Trump administration's record.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you've done legislatively and in regulatory fashion to protect the unborn.
Well, as you know, you know our family and, you know, my kids are big fans of yours, like all the great young people listening this morning at the March for Life and around the country.
But, you know, since Karen and I entered public life, We've stood for life, and I couldn't be more proud to be vice president to the most pro-life president in American history, President Donald Trump.
You look at the record of this administration, you look at from literally the first days of this administration, the president reinstituted the Mexico City policy that had been overturned by President Obama.
Now no Federal tax dollars go to any foreign organization that supports or promotes abortion around the world.
It was also my great honor to cast the tie-breaking vote, Ben, in the United States Senate that allows states across this country to defund Planned Parenthood.
And President Trump has kept his promise to the American people, appointing in the last two years a record number of conservative men and women to our federal courts at every level who will uphold all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution, and that includes Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
So we've got a record of extraordinary progress on the right to life, and it's my great honor to serve in this administration.
But I must tell you, Ben, that your voice on the airwaves across the nation, your presence at this March for Life, the presence of this pro-life generation that will gather on the National Mall today gives us great, great confidence that this will be the generation That restores the right to life in America.
And I thank you.
Vice President Pence, I want to ask you a little bit about some of those threats because this obviously is a battle and it's an ongoing battle.
We've seen just in the last week, unfortunately, a House Democratic caucus has decided to try and raise the issue of the Hyde Amendment.
The more radical members of the Democratic caucus want federal funding directly for abortion.
They're trying to reverse President Trump's policy on the Mexico City policy.
What do you see as the chief threats to the right to life moving forward as unfortunately one of the parties becomes more radical on this issue?
Well, look.
The American people elected in 2016 a pro-life president and pro-life majorities in the House and Senate.
We made great progress.
We actually expanded the pro-life majority in the United States Senate in the 2018 elections.
But the Democratic Party, the party of abortion on demand, now has a majority.
But I can promise you that our pro-life colleagues on Capitol Hill and this pro-life president will stand In the gap, we will uphold the Hyde Amendment, and we will stand up for the right to life against all of their efforts.
Well, Vice President Pence, I know that you have a busy schedule today, but I do want to ask you, beyond the march today, what do you hope that everybody takes home from the march, and what would you like to see everybody do when they get back to the towns and cities where they live to help continue to push for pro-life positions and try to protect the lives of the unborn?
Well, my message to each one of them is first and foremost, Ben, and really to you, is to say thank you.
Thank you for standing for life.
It takes courage in this day and age to stand up for your values.
And my word to each and every one gathered there and all those listening around the country is continue to stand firm, to be prepared to give the reason For your devotion to life, for the hope that you have, and be prepared to defend life, but do it with gentleness and respect and love.
The progress that we have made in the last 46 years has been driven by the stand for the unalienable right to life that millions of Americans continue to take and have taken.
But it's also, I truly believe, been Demonstrated by the faith and the compassion that's been shown for women in crisis pregnancies.
I met yesterday with Students for Life, an incredible organization, and I met with young mothers who had babies on their knees.
They had gone to crisis pregnancy centers, and instead of facing judgment, they were met with an embrace.
They were met with love.
Their practical needs were met.
And they were able to choose life.
And so my word to all of those there is to continue to stand strong, continue to stand firm, continue to make the case for life, but always make it with love and gentleness and compassion.
And when we continue to do that, I truly do believe that we will once again restore the right to life to the center of American law.
Well, Mr. Vice President, thank you so much for taking the time.
I know everyone here is grateful for you taking the time, and we are grateful for everything the Trump administration has done to protect life.
We hope to see you here next year, as we've seen you here in the past.
Really appreciate the time.
Thank you, Ben.
Thank you for being here.
God bless you all.
Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence.
What an amazing thing.
The fact is that I do think that, in the end, our movement is going to win.
I think that it will win because I think that science is moving in the direction of our movement.
I think as more and more people see the facts, as more and more people see the science, they will be convinced.
And I think that as more and more people search for meaning in their own lives, and they look for a purpose to existence, and they look for a rationale for getting up in the morning, they're going to recognize that their own lives matter.
And if their lives matter, so do everyone else's lives.
And those lives include the lives of the unborn.
Okay, time for a couple of things I like and then a thing I hate.
So I'm going to do something that I have never done before.
So I do not put pictures of my children online.
I just don't do it because, you know, I'm unfortunately a target.
I get a lot of hate.
I get a lot of people who despise me.
But what I can do is my kids are now old enough that if I show infant pictures of them, they would not be recognizable because babies, when they are first born, do not look anything like they do now.
My kids are much cuter now than they were in these photos.
So I want to show you.
The things that I like are the things actually that I love.
the things that I care most about in my life, my nearly five-year-old daughter and my two-and-a-half-year-old son.
This is a picture of my daughter, if we have her picture.
But there's my daughter shortly after she was born.
This is a couple of weeks after she was born.
She's a beautiful child.
Yeah, she does look like me, right.
'Cause she's my kid, I mean, that's how it works, right?
And then here's a picture of my son.
And we can go back to the other one.
This is him.
He is just, again, an adorable, adorable kid.
Now, I was there for the birth of both my kids.
And when folks say that the greatest day of your life is the birth of your children, this is obviously true.
It is a miracle.
Every human life is a miracle.
And the birth of those human lives is clearly a miracle.
When I was in the room and you realize, first of all, the immense, incredible, unbelievable responsibility that falls on you as a human being to now take care of this newborn.
When you realize that the entire future of the species, the entire future of humanity, the entire future of meaning The entire future of the universe really does rest in the child that is in your hands.
Because without human beings, then, honestly, this is just a giant rock floating through space.
The innate value of human beings, you hold that innate value in your two hands.
And you realize that this innate value did not begin the moment that it entered your two hands.
This innate value did begin at conception.
It began at the very beginning.
It began long before you were ever able to see this child or hold this child.
But it did begin.
And once it began, we have to recognize that if you just had a rewind button on life, if you had a rewind button on your own life, and you just hit that rewind button, the movie begins.
The movie starts at conception.
It doesn't start later.
It doesn't start at birth.
It starts at conception.
At any point, at any point, God forbid, then or later, that movie could end.
That movie could end.
But if you end that movie, Five minutes into the movie.
You have still ended a movie, right?
The movie was ended, right?
You have now terminated it.
You've killed something.
You've ended something.
And you've not only destroyed that human being, you've destroyed everything that flows from that human being.
Because I hope one day that I'll walk my daughter down the aisle.
I hope one day that I'll stand there as my son performs the marriage ceremonies under the chuppah.
I hope that I'm there for all of those things.
Because they're going to carry that on to the next generation.
When we stand here, we are standing with generations that have not yet been born.
Those generations are going to be the ones who hopefully will never have to march for this cause, because it will just be taken as granted.
They are part of this great chain of history, this great chain of humanity.
They are carrying forward the legacy of life and meaning in the world.
So the things that I like are the things that I love, and I think they're the things that we all love.
And if we don't love those things enough, then we deserve every bad thing that happens to us, honestly.
Because in the end, life is the only issue that truly matters more than any other issue.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So I played a little bit of this clip earlier, this woman who sat down with a bunch of children to try and indoctrinate them in sort of pro-choice nonsense.
This is a woman named Amelia Bono, and she talked about her own abortion.
And her statement here is so counterintuitive, not only counterintuitive, but counter all reason, logic, fact, and decency, that it's worthy of pointing out.
She says that abortion is all part of God's plan.
This is her statement.
What do you think God thinks about abortion?
I think it's all part of God's plan.
That's smarter than what I said.
The idea that God's plan is for you to do something evil?
I'll tell you.
As a religious person.
Everything is part of God's plan, right?
I believe that when acts of evil happen in the world, even those acts of evil are part of God's plan.
What God has done is given us the choice as to whether we are going to be the instruments of that evil.
What God has done is given us the choice as to whether we are going to be agents for decency and light or for cruelty and darkness.
That's the choice that God placed before us.
So, The real question is not what God's plan is, because none of us are capable of understanding God's plan.
The real question is what our duty is, what God wants of us, and what reality demands of us.
And what reality demands of us is not for you to justify your own sin, to justify your own cruelty and malice and evil by appealing to a higher power.
What God demands of you is decency and justice.
What God demands of us is to choose life.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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