Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Sept. 3, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:33:00

Choosing Life: The Long Term Perspective - Chuck Donovan

Chuck Donovan has been a leader in the fight for life since the 1970s. In this conversation he shares a history of the Pro-Life movement and gives his perspective on its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	People concerned that the issue is politically polarized.
	It's an interesting thing.
	The Republican Party, which I'm a member, is overwhelmingly pro-life.
	The Democrats now are overwhelmingly on the other side.
	I think to make a case, that's not a good thing for society, that we don't all see our stake.
	Of course, it's a bad thing that we don't all have a shared understanding of what the value of life is and how it drives every issue.
	At the same time, what I find fascinating is that it is now the defining, the defining issue between these two vast camps in American society.
	That's how important the abortion issue is.
	The political alignment of the entire country is not built around war and peace.
	It's not built around the size of the welfare state or tax policy.
	Everybody has opinions, but on life, it's like the Red Sea.
	I think that tells us something.
	We need a better answer than all we've got now.
	Conservatives are fond of saying that politics is downstream of culture.
	But politics can affect culture, too, as Chuck Donovan learned throughout his career crafting public policy to discourage abortion and foster a culture of life.
	He worked as legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, helped to lead the Family Research Council for nearly 20 years, and served in government as a writer for President Reagan.
	He has been in the fight for life for decades and offers a perspective that few today can rival.
	I'll come around to this.
	Right now, I would strongly recommend you go to hallow.com slash choose life because today's world is a scary one.
	Too many people don't seem to care about the truth.
	And I would suggest that that's all rooted in people becoming less or really just anti-religious.
	That's why it's more important than ever to keep our relationship with God strong.
	Hello is the number one Christian prayer app in the United States.
	It's like Calm or Headspace, but rooted in Catholic faith.
	It is the perfect resource to deepen your relationship with God and find peace through audio guided prayer and meditation.
	Several of Hello's meditations encourage you to choose life and to pray for others to choose life, such as their Litany for Life with Lila Rose.
	Hello is free to download.
	It will help you find peace and calm throughout your day.
	So do it.
	Do it right now.
	Download the app for free at hallo.com slash choose life.
	That is hallo.com slash choose life.
	Here's Chuck Donovan.
	My name is Chuck Donovan.
	I've been involved in the pro-life movement since 1971 at the University of Notre Dame.
	And I've been involved with it more or less continuously since as a writer, speaker.
	I've worked in government and been the lobbyist for National Right to Life Committee, Executive Director of Family Research Council, President and Founder of Charlotte Lozier Institute, and have written a book or two and some public policy papers along the way.
	And what was it that first caught your attention about the pro-life, pro-choice debate, and what made you decide to become involved?
	That's an interesting question.
	I think of the dynamics as coming out of my family history.
	I'm the third of ten children, which is a significant responsibility when you've got a bunch of youngers around.
	But you get used to the idea that somebody smaller than you is worth an extra measure of care and defense.
	And I think it almost grew organically out of that.
	I certainly didn't know that much about the biology of the unborn child when I was In high school in the late 60s.
	But when I got to the University of Notre Dame, I ran into a prominent pro-life family, the Wilkie family, and they had some incredible information about what abortion really entailed.
	And to me, once you see it, once you understand the direct violence of abortion, I was sold on it as a priority worth my attention.
	So is there any debate, you know, there used to be a big debate about when does life begin, and it seemed like at a certain point that was all anybody talked about.
	Is there any debate any longer about whether it's a human life from the moment of conception?
	I don't think there was ever much of a debate about it, to be frank with you.
	If you go back and read the medical dictionaries, My father was a pharmaceutical salesman, so our house was flooded with medical material.
	And it was a given that a pregnancy represented a developing child.
	It was given in those textbooks that at the moment of fusion of sperm and egg, a new human life was created.
	I think what has changed is that every bit of science that's come forward and every bit of medical care, which is something we've emphasized, has reinforced the reality that the unborn child is not only a human being, but can be a patient, is treated as a patient, can be helped via surgery, via transfusions, can be observed via fetoscopy and ultrasound.
	It's all been reinforcing of what we knew all along that this is where human life begins.
	And do you think average people on both sides of the debate, not the people who are, you know, at the forefront of the pro-choice movement or the people at the forefront of the pro-life movement, but just the average American, do you think that most people, you know, at their core kind of want the same thing in terms of do you think that most people, you know, at their core kind of want the same So for the pro-life movement, it's protecting the life of the baby.
	For the average pro-choice American, they say, we want to protect the well-being or the life of the mother.
	Before we get to the disagreements, is there a shared agreement about some sort of value that everybody's trying to achieve?
	I wouldn't go that far.
	And the reason is I think there are political purposes behind some who have chosen to support a regime of legal abortion and certainly the history of the population control movement.
	They knew pretty much what they were about.
	They felt that the fate of current generations depended on how we treat or in this case, I believe, mistreat future generations in terms of the abortion issue.
	So I think they don't have precisely the same values.
	Having said that, I think what's encouraging is that the American people have a durable sense that abortion is something that even at the political low point, according to President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, Clinton, abortion should be rare.
	Well, you don't say that about something about which there is no political or moral concern.
	So I think there's an understanding that it's wrong, that it's a bad course, but there are some serious actors who want to promote it.
	And so would you say that...
	Most Americans do agree that abortion is something that ideally shouldn't exist.
	I think they think that.
	I think there's certainly a segment of Americans who think earlier in pregnancy it's less concerning or, put in the positive, they need for us to show in the pro-life movement that That we can protect the unborn without undermining the well-being of women.
	In fact, and I think this is our unique task now that the abortion laws may change, is to show that we are very serious about supporting women and children.
	That's been one effect that's happened for the pro-life movement because of its own convictions, but also driven by the other side's insistence that you cannot protect Protect a child until its birth and then turn your back because life's a complicated thing.
	Right.
	So I guess, you know, based on what you just said, are the true kind of like advocates of the pro-choice movement or the pro-choice lobby, are they really kind of the friends of Americans in the way that they make it out to be?
	And are they really trying to protect women through pro-choice policies?
	I think there are some empathetic women on the pro-choice side of the debate in the sense that they see a society in which male responsibility is basically dropped through the floor.
	What I think they don't often see is that abortion has helped that collapse of male responsibility by making it possible for both parties to walk away regardless of the cost to another human being's life.
	At the cost of relationships.
	By every data point that I look at in terms of relations between the sexes, durable relationships, marriage, children being born out of wedlock, Even that phrase sounds quaint these days.
	We have not made progress.
	Choice has not brought us that lovely era of the perfect privilege and plan where all children are wanted.
	What we're finding is that a lot of children are not wanted by the very parents who have them.
	And I think it's because we have dissolved the initial bonds of responsibilities between the sexes.
	And I think some in the pro-choice movement exploit that.
	But I do think there are some in the pro-choice movement who see women essentially struggling on their own, and they see this as the better of two alternatives.
	And that's where the disagreement is.
	But keep in mind that even with the worst view of the data, four out of five American women do not have abortions in their lifetimes.
	It remains a minority event.
	Here at Charlotte Luzier Institute, we're looking at Medicaid data that shows that having an initial abortion does not predict success in life.
	It predicts future abortions.
	It sets women on a path of multiple encounters with abortion.
	So we need to pay attention to what women are actually experiencing, and we need to do a little bit better job of reaching consensus on things that allow both sexes to achieve their goals in life without discarding their kids.
	Is it possible to solve this conflict or this debate between these two, you know, pretty polar opposite viewpoints without agreeing on the scientific and historic facts that have kind of preceded where we currently are in the abortion debate?
	And by that, I mean, you know, it seems like both sides accuse the other side of being anti-science or being anti-woman or, you know, and you even see, you know, organizations like Planned Parenthood saying, oh, well, abortion is always going to be.
	It's always been accepted, you know, as early as the 1600s, you know, people aborted their kids.
	So can you weave, for me, the importance of having a proper understanding of the science and the history and what's preceded the current debate in order to even adjudicate which side is correct?
	Well, I think if you are on the pro-life side of the debate, you're very encouraged by history.
	You're also very encouraged by the science.
	Take the history first.
	When you get to more recent centuries, And laws were based, at least in the English American tradition, were based on quickening.
	This is what I would call a threshold scientific evidentiary marker.
	The law would have protected the unborn child in all likelihood if there were a way to detect the child existed.
	But quickening was movement, something the woman could perceive or other family members could perceive.
	So the presumption could be that there was unknown and living pregnancy.
	I think people need to know that history.
	It was the Protestant-led American Medical Association of the mid-1800s in the United States that first got us a wave of pro-life statutes that dominated the U.S. landscape.
	It was not a church body springing forth with new ideas about ensoulment or any other spiritual matter.
	It was physical recognition that this child isn't being in the womb.
	So really, it's not an issue of religious zealots saying, oh, we want to spread our religious or moral beliefs across the rest of the population.
	It was an issue of science realizing, oh, life is happening earlier than what we previously thought.
	Is that correct?
	Well, I think the interaction is a little more complicated than that, in the sense that certainly the pro-life viewpoint does not depend on a religious insight.
	Religious insights have to do with sacraments, the nature of the soul, salvation, and in other religious traditions, whether it would be It's a different set of propositions from one that says a human being exists here and now, and all human beings are worthy of protection.
	I think it helps to have religious insight about the importance of human life, and I would never say it doesn't.
	But is it absolutely essential?
	Is it something a civilly-minded person couldn't recognize?
	I think it's exactly the opposite.
	If you recognize that you can't privatize the decision about whether you or I are human beings, that can't be a matter of individual judgment, then that's not a religious insight.
	It is as transactional as it can be.
	And the pro-life movement generates momentum around the fact that we want to treat all human beings as full possessors of the right to life.
	Beautiful.
	What should the average well-meaning pro-choice American, what should they know about the debate and what don't they know that would kind of surprise them or shock them?
	Well, one of the things, and it's been true, and it's been a development since the period prior to Roe v.
	Wade.
	You know, you reflect a lot about this.
	What happened in the case of women pregnant without benefit of marriage, or some phrase they would have used a century ago, and it wasn't that there was no support in the United States.
	There were maternity homes, and Professor Marvin Olasky has written very compellingly But since 1972, and more likely since the early 1980s, when legislative attempts to protect the unborn faltered, there was a massive movement.
	To create pregnancy centers.
	You asked the question, Ian, about the American people and their sensibility about abortion.
	The American people support pregnancy help centers.
	It's overwhelming.
	Pro-choice women support them.
	But if you read the popular press about pregnancy centers or watch a few legislatures in blue states, for lack of a better term, They scorn pregnancy centers.
	They talk about them as deceiving women and providing no real services.
	Well, the list of services pregnancy centers provide, compared to what a Planned Parenthood provides, is immense.
	It's simply factually the case.
	You can get prenatal care.
	You can get STD treatment.
	You can get referrals for job training, childcare.
	These things have all developed since the early 1970s, so what the pro-choice America needs to understand to the extent it exists is that pro-lifers really mean it and have proven they mean it about protecting women's interest in pursuing education and career as well as protecting their kids.
	And, you know, same question but kind of going the other way.
	What should pro-choice Americans or people who think, oh yeah, I support, you know, I support a woman's right to choose.
	What should that person know about the pro-abortion lobby?
	Yeah, I think that the...
	Everyday American who is pro-choice or indifferent as to whether the law changes or not, I think they need to understand that the abortion industry really is an industry.
	It's driven by different types of ideology.
	And I don't think everybody on that side of the fence on the life issues thinks exactly the same.
	There are those who are in it for monetary gain.
	There are those who are in it because they believe that women will advance or be abandoned if they don't have the option of abortion.
	But the real powers in the movement, if you look at the big foundations, originally Rockefeller Foundation, now the Gates Foundation and others, they're in it for very ideological purposes.
	They believe there are too many people or they hold to eugenic views of human life and they think we can improve the human race.
	I wish more of the American people would And it's tough to pay attention to what's going on in genetic engineering and the like.
	We're very concerned about it because that's the flip side of this.
	Old-time eugenics was simply about getting rid of the feeble human weeds, as Margaret Sanger called them.
	A newfangled eugenics is trying to create better human beings.
	And I'm a little scared when I think about some of the people who think they know what a better human being looks like.
	But there's huge science behind that.
	It's something we all need to pay attention to because, as C.S. Lewis put it, we're looking at the abolition of man.
	Because of that, would you say that there's really an honest debate happening between the two sides or would you say that the pro-choice movement is trying to obscure details and avoid a truly honest debate of what's at play with abortion?
	I think it's one of the most exciting aspects with regard to an honest debate that a Supreme Court ruling that returns this, not to the states.
	What the court will be doing if it reverses Roe versus Wade would be, number one, it'd be getting the Constitution right.
	Number two, it'd be saying to the American people, We don't sit in some high place determining these ultimate questions.
	You as Americans need to debate how things like abortion figure in your understanding of the human community.
	So we're going to get debates.
	And they're going to be different in New York State and New Jersey where other states where they're now legalizing abortion until even after birth than we get in other states, whether you...
	Use Texas, Florida, Ohio, whatever it may be as an example.
	There'll be robust conversations about why are we seeking abortion?
	What are the alternatives?
	How do we deliver them without having negative results for women?
	So I think we're going to have a real ground to compare.
	Where do you want to live at the end of the day?
	I think Americans will gravitate toward communities to protect life, protect family, and also elevate women in their roles in society.
	So let's have it.
	Does the pro-choice movement want that sort of open, honest debate?
	I think it's for their political purposes.
	They are using what I would call a cliché that was wrong from the start.
	We've alluded, or you've alluded as well, to the idea that religious zealots drive this debate.
	Well, I've known millions of pro-lifers over the years, including most of the leaders, and they had a zeal for life, but they were not religious zealots, aiming on producing a theocracy to rule the United States.
	They were also largely women leaders.
	In all my years in the fight in Washington, D.C., I've spent 65% of my time Reporting to a woman leader of the pro-life cause.
	It's been false from the start.
	I think correcting the record will be important for us going forward.
	Great.
	What can intellectually honest individuals on both sides of the debate agree on?
	Are there any common ground agreements?
	I think there might be some agreement in terms of And how best to put this, the American people seem to be less troubled by abortion earlier in pregnancy.
	Right now, we're debating a 15-week limit.
	On the pro-life side, I think we would make the argument there's nothing radical that happens at 15 weeks.
	That takes a non-human entity and converts it into a human being.
	And everything we're learning from the science about fetal pain, about such commonplace things as left-handedness or right-handedness, motion, how the baby reacts to the presence of another baby in the case of twins.
	The babies become gentler toward each other.
	I think we should be able to agree on these facts.
	Where we're going to disagree is what's significant.
	I think it's incumbent on the pro-life side.
	Not only to locate those things of significance, like the heartbeat, but also to expound how do we deliver help and support to women?
	How do we encourage men to step up and be men about the children they help create?
	Those are things that everybody will benefit from.
	So let's hope we can make ground on that rather than have the sexes pointing fingers at each other, which is kind of a cycle we're stuck in now.
	Hmm.
	We kind of touched on this already, but has it ever been the case as Planned Parenthood is, you know, arguing pretty vocally right now that the majority of society through history has thought that the life of the child should be subjugated to the whims of the mother?
	That goes back to their argument that as early as the 1600s, we have records of people, you know, societally being fine with the idea of taking certain, you know, herbs or medicines or things that caused the pregnancy to end before quickening.
	Can you talk about that?
	You know, is Planned Parenthood, because, you know, they don't say it in those words, but they're basically saying that throughout history, society has been fine with, you know, the woman making a decision for herself before a certain point.
	Can you address that?
	I think this is the last thing you can say is that history endorses abortion, either in terms of practice or in the understanding of medical ethics.
	And the conclusive proof of that is the Hippocratic Oath.
	It's much disregarded these days by our medical schools, which take a very utilitarian view of what ethics requires.
	But the Hippocratic Oath dates to two millennia ago.
	And it covers every ground of current controversy.
	Privacy of medical records, abortion.
	The language in the oath says, I will not give a woman a pessary, which would be one of the devices or drugs or potions that might be used to induce abortion.
	The Hippocratic Oath pledges the physician not to engage in assisting a suicide, which is now obviously a worldwide phenomenon, a matter of debate.
	This oath was not the creation of a traditional Western religion.
	It was also something that permeated medical practice throughout the entire Western world.
	I think the evidence for the East and Asian countries is that embracing abortion is a modern phenomenon there, too.
	It was always frowned upon.
	There was always a question of whether you could punish it justly, particularly when ascertaining whether there was an actual pregnancy was an issue.
	But collectively, history has seen the role of the physician as healer and helper, not destroyer.
	So is the foundation of a lot of modern abortion advocacy based in essentially what are lies fabricated for maximum kind of social change or impact?
	I would call them lies.
	I think that's a fair statement.
	Yeah.
	Certainly, if you look at one of the prime organizational advocates of abortion, the largest producer of abortions in the United States is the Planned Parenthood Federation.
	When you read their founding documents, they do not talk about medical ethics.
	They don't talk about protecting the vulnerable.
	They don't talk about protecting women.
	They essentially have cast their lot with the idea of population control, and based on Margaret Sanger's earlier writings and teachings, they thought that the government could sterilize and abort its way out of high welfare costs.
	She proposed the notion of a baby plan in 1932, published in the New York Times, The lower class of citizens as she viewed it, obviously she got nowhere near accomplishing that, although many of the ideas of people around her contributed to a lax attitude toward these things in World War II. So some of the very same figures.
	So I think we have been subjected to a great deal of deception about what the aims of the abortion industry really are.
	What would you say were the main philosophical and, you know, maybe even legal justifications societally for Roe v.
	Wade?
	You know, without getting into kind of the specific arguments given by the justices of the court at that time, you know, what were kind of societally the main philosophical and legal justifications for the Roe v.
	Wade decision?
	And how have those justifications shifted or changed over time?
	That's an interesting question, how have justifications for abortion changed over time?
	One of the most interesting things, and I was just beginning college back in the late 1960s and 70s, the momentum toward legal abortion had begun to run into real trouble.
	During the 1960s, you may recall, the Sherry Finkbein case garnered international attention, and that was spurred by a drug called thalidomide, which resulted in very serious deformities in developing children,
	and a woman named Sherry Finkbein was unable to obtain an abortion in the United States, her home state of Colorado, and much of the media rallied behind her In her desire to obtain an abortion, I think she ended up going to Europe to get one.
	But it also facilitated a number of states liberalizing their law.
	But most of those states had what would now be considered, even after liberalization, a very conservative law.
	The American Law Institute statute allowed abortion for rape and incest.
	Life of the Mother, where it was arguably already legal.
	And also some understanding of the women's health.
	Most states, 33 states, didn't even pass that.
	They had life of the mother statutes.
	So what was the justification then at that point in time?
	Probably you would call them the hard cases.
	And as that went forward, though, states began to vote on their statutes.
	New York had liberalized its law pretty radically, and the state legislature in 1972 voted to repeal that liberal law.
	So pro-lifers were already rallying and winning substantial public support.
	Where we are now, I think we get a whole new class of arguments that Revolve around what the lawyers call stare decisis.
	In other words, we now rely on abortion on demand.
	It's so much a part of how our society works and functions that it would be too disruptive to change it.
	And I think some of the most compelling things happening on the pro-life side is that we're really digging into, well, what has happened?
	Is abortion associated with women's success?
	Is it associated with better marriages?
	Is it associated with stronger children?
	Is it associated with pro-child and pro-family policies?
	And you find the more you dig into these things is that abortion has become a substitute for good policy.
	The woman can always do away with the child.
	The welfare system can always be drained of another 500,000 children who will depend on Medicaid.
	And these arguments become the arguments.
	It's a reliance interest, but it's being relied on, that is, abortion, by people who don't have the best interests of our society at heart.
	We have more from Chuck coming up.
	But first, be sure to text PRO-LIFE to 47581.
	Because as the country grapples with the aftermath of overturning Roe v.
	Wade, the pro-life movement has come under fire from far-left pro-abortion extremists.
	Not only have leftists firebombed and vandalized pro-life clinics in multiple states, but online pro-life groups have experienced mass censorship by Google, Facebook, TikTok, you name it.
	That's why Live Action has been working tirelessly to find ways to spread the truth about abortion and share resources with those who need it most without relying on biased big tech.
	If you want to join Live Action's Fight for Life, text PRO-LIFE to 47581 and opt in to receive updates from Live Action about their ongoing work to end abortion.
	Texting pro-life to 47581 means you won't be at the mercy of the big tech sensors in the ongoing fight for life.
	What does eradicating such a sizable percentage of our population, what does that do to the future stability what does that do to the future stability of our society?
	Well, I think we're going to live that experience.
	I gave a speech recently in which I talked about Japan, which has had the longest-running lowest total fertility rate among advanced nations.
	Japan is widely understood as an aging nation.
	You read story after story about how robots tend to older Japanese couples because they are not younger workers, healthcare workers, to support them.
	There's something called the Ikea, which in Japan is an empty house that cannot be sold because there's no market for it.
	And these dot the entire country.
	One in seven homes in Japan is now an empty house.
	I think what we're seeing in the United States could be the beginning of a sharper decline.
	We have had a total fertility rate under replacement since the mid-1970s, and we're now at the lowest birth rate in American history in terms of recorded birth rate.
	So women are not having the family size they would like.
	It's somewhere between two and three kids.
	Instead, we're about one child.
	Per couple below that, it's going to happen in subtle ways when, in my opinion, when you find supply chain disruptions, a lot of that has to do with the fact there are not people to do these jobs.
	I recently drove across the eastern seaboard to visit family, and you see now hiring signs everywhere.
	There's a lot of bad policy from government, but there also is a lack of people to do What societies have come to expect.
	And we'll see that even more in the days ahead.
	Does the my body, my choice argument, does that truly benefit women or does it let men off the hook?
	Well, the my body, my choice argument does let men off the hook because its corollary is your body, your responsibility.
	You can take care of this, not I. I've helped create this child.
	I'm the father of this child, but I have no instant duty to take care of this.
	To address that child's well-being or even address what the mother might prefer.
	I think both sides, you asked about how both sides can agree.
	One of the things that both sides agree on is that the response of the father to an unexpected pregnancy is probably the prime factor in a woman deciding to proceed with an abortion.
	My boyfriend doesn't want it.
	My husband doesn't want to work two jobs, which may or may not be necessary.
	It would be pressure from the boyfriend.
	If the boyfriend turns around and says, hey, well, not what we expected, but we'll cut through this, the woman very often makes the decisions for life.
	Pregnancy centers often try to fill in for that male role, which is a steep challenge for them to do it.
	But I've also had, I would say, a prime difficulty with the whole idea of my body, my choice, in the sense that we all recognize individual sovereignty over a wide range of things that affect your mind, body, and spirit.
	I think if it's applied to a tattoo in which a third party is not affected, the life of an unborn child is not Affected by whether someone chooses to wear earrings or whatever they may have, my body, my choice makes perfect sense.
	Pro-lifers believe in a vast, particularly conservatives, believe in a vast array of my body, my choice arguments.
	But look at this situation.
	The unborn child is a separate human being.
	If we don't debate and settle that, we've got nothing.
	And pro-lifers have nothing to offer if we don't insist on what we think is the scientific reality.
	On the other hand, though, if you believe sovereignty over the body is everything, then you have a right, a constitutional right to approach a physician and say, you know, I would rather be disabled.
	Would you please remove my hand?
	And there's actually, there have been some cases where people have sought disability because of a psychological need to be in a protected classification.
	But what if every physician, as they should, said, we're not going to remove a healthy hand?
	Well, are they denying constitutional right on the grounds that they have a different view of my body, my choice?
	No.
	They have a different view of what ethics require with respect to promoting health and well-being.
	The same thing is undoubtedly true with the unborn child.
	An unborn child is largely, obviously, a healthy entity.
	And in addition to that, a separate human being.
	The my body, my choice argument brings you nothing as to an answer whether a physician should agree to remove that child.
	So what's the logical end to my body, my choice?
	Well, the logical end of my body, my choice is that any other human being that places a significant demand on others, whether it be a parent or on society, can be dismissed.
	The right to life can be ignored.
	When you look at it in terms of how much in the way of demands a child Two weeks after birth, places on a couple as opposed to the baby simply needing nutrients and relatively healthy practices four weeks earlier in the womb, I would say the demands are much greater later in that child's life.
	They depend on adults for their sustenance, for their clothing, for their sleep, for their medical care.
	What we get when we privatize this idea that Someone can be classified as non-human and non-worthy of respect.
	We establish that principle.
	And I think when we talk about spreading disrespect for life, of course the aged and firm come into view as perhaps an assisted suicide is the way out of this.
	And we see the dynamics of that spreading to people who are mentally ill but physically well.
	We see it with disabled children being selected for euthanasia in the Netherlands and other countries that have had these laws for the longest period of time.
	So it does spread.
	It's an attitude that we don't have a fundamental right to life that can't be violated.
	We have a fungible right to life that can be bargained away.
	Should the weight of decisions about Keeping or ending a life rests solely on the woman who's pregnant?
	Or should men be required to share some of that responsibility?
	And if men were required to share responsibility for that, what would that look like as a society to put more responsibility on men?
	Well, I think the fundamental question about men's responsibility for new human life starts with education from the youngest age.
	It's deeply unsatisfying to talk about child support as the answer.
	On the other hand, we need to recognize that the child support from the father of the child is something that should commence immediately.
	Any wherewithal he has, not something should be chased down two or three years later.
	The mother in the situation of an unexpected pregnancy should be able, with the support of the law, To call upon that man's help and support.
	On the other hand, we need to be educating children, young men, boys, from the earliest stages of life that you're responsible for your deeds.
	And it transcends, obviously, the issue of pregnancy.
	I will not say we'd have an undisciplined society altogether, but the abortion industry and that whole notion of the sexual irresponsibility has tied in with the idea that we are not really responsible for what we do.
	And I think we're seeing that in the way we're handling our prison system, for example, right now.
	We have something of a revolving door in many of our cities, and what's the outcome?
	Is that people feel free to commit the same crimes over and over.
	How often do we read of someone who has 29 prior convictions and he's assaulting an elderly woman in a subway?
	Shouldn't happen.
	And that's not a pregnancy issue, but it's a male responsibility issue.
	And we have a lot of fundamental work to redo in rebuilding that responsibility from the smallest age up.
	To what extent is a solution to abortion dependent on how we train our young men?
	I think a good 75%.
	And it's one of the biggest challenges in the pregnancy center movement, which I've been involved with for decades.
	We know that the need that's presented in an unexpected pregnancy is immediate for the mother.
	She has to deal with prospective rapid and potentially radical changes in her life.
	What changes for the male?
	Well, with abortion, if he supports abortion, nothing really changes.
	And it may not be a shock that six months or a year later, the same situation recurs.
	So I believe if men were stepping up to the plate and saying, hey, we didn't expect this pregnancy to occur, But we're responsible for it.
	This is a new human being.
	I'm expected to take care of the child, whether I can personally raise the child or not.
	I think we'd be a long way towards ending the abortion fight.
	It really is not about women's decision-making.
	I think it's a lot about a couple's decision-making backed by society that expects better.
	A lot of times, especially in the pro-choice movement, People in that movement kind of hold up men who are pro-choice.
	It's like, oh, look at this caring guy who supports women's rights and isn't that noble that he agrees that it's the woman's choice.
	Is that really noble?
	Can you juxtapose how the pro-choice movement talks about pro-choice men versus the kind of abdication of responsibility that's really going on?
	Well, obviously, men who advocated to defend abortion are idolized by the pro-choice movement.
	I guess you get the basic question, was it a surprise that Hugh Hefner, who was a central figure in the sexual revolution at the grassroots level, was it a surprise that he came out and donated to the National Abortion Rights Action League?
	Did he embrace abortion?
	That you could pick up a Playboy magazine and get your photos and next to that you could get advocacy for ending the lives of the unborn?
	To me, that's exactly where you'd expect Hugh Hefner to be.
	And I would say the vast majority of men are not disciples of Hugh Hefner, but they're all beneficiaries in a way of a culture of sexual irresponsibility.
	And sadly, while feminism is split on the life issue, the most radical feminists act like Hefnerite men.
	Which is to say, look, if I'm going to make my way in industry or corporate life or political life, I need to be able to walk away from the children I create.
	And that's the kind of cultural thing where women should not aspire to be more like that type of man.
	And as men, we need to recognize that some of our fellow men are just exploiting the moment.
	Now that 95% of biologists, I think is the current statistic, agree that this is a human life from conception, what are the moral implications of that sort of scientific consensus?
	Well, one of the ways the scientific consensus affects my thinking is that we are at a point in human history where you cannot say, I don't know.
	Centuries ago, quickening left authorities with a sense that perhaps an abortion didn't take place here.
	Perhaps nothing intentional or something we can identify took place.
	But now, you know, it's practically ubiquitous.
	How many ads did you see during the Super Bowl in past years or currently on TV where, for a second, the image of that unborn child on the ultrasound screen is absolutely clear?
	You know, I had four children.
	The first one, we had a bare outline of my daughter's forehead, and I thought, Wow, this is fantastic.
	But now you look at ultrasounds and you get details of the curl of a smile or an eyebrow and parents put these on their refrigerators and children see them and every child should see them.
	Museums, the Los Angeles Museum of Science now has an incredible exhibit on pregnancy where you can experience the environment, the sounds The rush of blood, the heartbeat in the womb, and the lighting as if you were experiencing that as an individual, which of course is something we all experience but don't particularly remember.
	But there's just so much in front of us now that's unavoidable truth.
	There are 20-some children's hospitals across the country that have separate fetal Surgery units.
	And there will be more.
	It would be common to do surgery on the unborn child, whether invasively or through transfusions and the like.
	And eventually we'll all know someone who was operated on when they were 12 or 15 or 20 weeks.
	These are human beings.
	They're our brothers and sisters.
	And the science, frankly, is overwhelming now.
	Can you give us that juxtaposition of ultrasound technology that you mentioned?
	When your first daughter was born, you could barely make her out on the ultrasound.
	Give us a general timeline, year or decade, and then compare that to what we can see now on ultrasounds.
	Well, certainly.
	In the 1970s, ultrasound technology was developing.
	It was not in common use or wide use, but as the decade proceeded, it became standard.
	The initial ultrasound machines were fairly large units, and they produced something like a Polaroid picture, at least the one I received.
	It was black and white.
	It was glossy.
	I could make out the outline of my daughter's forehead, but not really that many details.
	Certainly couldn't identify her face or which way she was oriented.
	Well, now we have 3D and 4D ultrasound being administered practically in every pregnancy.
	It's standard of care.
	It should be administered even by abortion clinics, which now are refusing to do this, so that they can verify a pregnancy exists.
	Rather than proceed with a surgery or giving away pills that cause an abortion.
	But now you've got outlines of the baby's face.
	Basically real-time images rather than sonically created images.
	And there's a world of difference.
	And once you've seen those, I don't think you can unsee them.
	And I don't think you can go back and say, this may look like a human being, but it's not.
	It's unquestionably, as they say, one of us.
	Can you weave a little bit of a narrative of Bernard Nathanson, who he was, and his transformation from an abortionist to a pro-life advocate?
	Sure.
	Bernard Nathanson was one of the most fascinating figures, I think, of the 20th century.
	An absolutely brilliant human being, accomplished physician, very interested in science.
	I'm more of a literature reader, but early on I found that he was devoted to Irish literature, loved Finnegan's Wake and claimed to have read it multiple times.
	Not something that very many physicians would claim, but absolutely brilliant.
	He got involved in the abortion movement after, I think, his own experiences.
	He actually, early in his career, and it's depicted in a film about him, aborted his own child.
	Which I think was probably one of the most profoundly changing events as he evolved.
	But back in the 1960s, he was part of the National Abortion Rights Action League, combined with Lawrence Lader, who was the leader of that group's fight to make it one about religious zealotry, particularly by Catholics.
	And they work with others like Betty Friedan in the feminist movement.
	It was New York-based.
	They really made the most progress legislative lately in New York.
	And they were beginning to make some progress with the American people.
	Where the country broke was over Roe v.
	Wade, which I think took a quantum leap.
	Beyond what the American people wanted or were debating.
	And over time, because he was so focused on the science and what it could show him, he had said earlier in one of his writings that, well, we might all change our views about abortion if we had a window into the womb.
	Because up to that time, 1973, as we've talked, that window was fairly opaque.
	And as that changed, I think his conversion, as I understood it, came about by science.
	And that was followed later by a religious conversion, ironically, to the very Catholic faith that he had exploited to create legal abortion.
	And he created a film called The Silent Screen.
	That film depicted the unborn child reacting to an abortion.
	And the child's reaction is one of an open-mouthed, Startle reflex, moving away from the abortionist tool.
	It's still riveting to this day, if you view it.
	He circulated it to the country, educated the country.
	And back in the day when I was working at the White House, he brought in a showing of the film for President Reagan to see.
	It helped affect the president's thinking about the urgency of the issue.
	Bernard Nathanson was key to everything.
	The fact that he was a physician, a man who admitted to performing or presiding over 70,000 abortions in his career, a man ultimately of science and literature, and he changed his mind.
	It showed that anyone can change.
	At the height of Dr.
	Nathanson's advocacy for abortion, can you walk audiences through a bullet point list of the four steps or the four lies that they took to convince America or tried to use to convince America to accept abortion?
	Well, we've talked about...
	The four major ways in which abortion was advanced in the United States.
	The first was to suggest that illegal abortion was claiming the lives of some 10,000 women a year.
	Now, that's an argument calculated to reach people who obviously passionately care about the lives of mothers and could be persuaded that legal abortion was the way to end the taking of those lives.
	As Bernard Nathanson noted, though, they knew the statistics were false when they promoted them in the 1960s.
	Centers for Disease Control, acknowledged later on by the Guttmacher Institute, concluded there were some 200 or so deaths per year from illegal abortion.
	A number like that, any number, is not negligible.
	But it was nothing on the scale that the abortion industry suggested.
	And there were reasons for that.
	For one, the high rate of death from illegal abortion earlier in the 20th century preceded the development of penicillin and other antibiotics.
	It wasn't a result of the abortion itself, but infection.
	Secondly, Mary Calderon, who was then medical director of Planned Parenthood, said two things about abortions.
	She said people need to realize, she didn't see the legal implications, but that 90% of the illegal abortions being done prior to Roe v.
	Wade were still being done by physicians.
	They were being done by the same physicians who, after Roe v.
	Wade, put their shingles on the front of the building rather than by word of mouth.
	So illegal abortion didn't mean non-medical abortion or with not a physician.
	The other thing is she asserted that abortion for reasons of the life of the mother were practically obsolete even in 1970s.
	Because obstetrical practice advanced to the point with life support and neonatal care that it was seldom a choice between the mother and the baby.
	So the abortion industry posited that there was a choice between the mother and the baby when medical science was moving in the other direction.
	And Nathanson acknowledged that.
	A second point they pushed was this one of women needing to have abortion to assume their equal place in society.
	And that did split the feminist movement to a certain degree because feminists knew that there were a great number of Americans who wouldn't go along with the program, like, for example, the Equal Rights Amendment, if...
	If abortion were found to be part of it.
	And for that very reason, the movement for the ERA finally collapsed, and it remains a dispute with respect to passing an amendment like that, and that it would lead to abortion on demand.
	So that was the second point in dispute.
	Third major point was this idea of religious zealotry, and Catholics were the particular object of that.
	I've always found that interesting.
	The Catholic Church is widely credited, and justly so, with having held the line with respect to the abortion issue in the 1960s.
	There was a fair amount of Catholic leadership at the National Right to Life Committee, where I worked.
	In the U.S. Catholic Conference, Monsignor McHugh and others in that era represented new voices, and of course there was the Vatican, which in the 1960s had stood by its traditional position on contraception in Humanae Vitae.
	So there was a split brewing there between evangelical and Protestant denominations and Catholics, so I think that became a A fissure that was exploited by the abortion industry.
	But they made it a very brutal and bitter one by attacking celibate Catholic priests as being the only reason why we had laws against abortion.
	The truth being that Catholic Church had nothing to do, nothing significant to do with the 19th century statutes that swept the country.
	Texas' Roe v.
	Wade law at issue in Roe v.
	Wade was not a Catholic creation.
	But be that as it may, a popular prejudice against Catholics or seeing them as very, very conservative on these issues was exploited to advance the abortion cause.
	So, why would Dr.
	Nathanson and the pro-abortion lobby have...
	Felt it necessary to take these sort of explicit steps or tell these lies in order to try to make the acceptance of abortion more widespread?
	Well, the explicit lies about abortion, if we understand all four of them, were designed to appeal to something in the better nature of people.
	The better nature of people, particularly Americans, is we don't But that was coming from the Hippocratic tradition where there was regard for that being a substantive thing.
	The second thing is that Americans don't want women to die from illegal abortion.
	In terms of an agreement, we're seeking that.
	We should be able to agree that abortion, illegal or legal, is a horrible thing and is worth our attention.
	Thirdly, we don't want to be ruled by a theocracy.
	If the only basis for a law is that God said it, the American people will question, well, we're free people.
	We have different views of God.
	How do we reconcile those differences?
	So Americans do want to avoid that.
	They want to have, I think, morally principled secular government.
	Fourthly, I think...
	This might be the basis of the appeals made by the abortion industry, but it has a result of being a choice among various evils.
	And where does abortion stand among those evils?
	For the pro-lifer, those other things poverty population stresses, those are genuine concerns.
	But abortion is unquestionably not the answer to it.
	But for many Americans, once you start to do a balancing test, they can find some good in it, even if they object to the specific way it's done.
	At the time that Nathanson and the pro-abortion lobby were ramping up the use of these lies, Were Americans at the time reticent to accept abortion and agree about living in a society where abortion is just commonly accepted?
	And is that the reason why the pro-abortion lobby started rolling out these types of arguments?
	The abortion lobby needed distracting arguments because by the early 1970s, The legalization activity that had happened in the United States in 17 states was grinding to a halt.
	In Michigan and South Dakota, there were referenda on eliminating their pro-life statutes.
	Both of those came out with very pro-life results.
	South Dakota was almost 80%.
	Michigan, I think, was in the high 50s.
	At the same time, Washington State voted to protect legal abortion.
	But New York State, which was the hotbed of pro-choice activism, repealed their law legalizing abortion to 24 weeks.
	Then Governor Nelson Rockefeller vetoed that repeal.
	So when you came to the Supreme Court decision in 1973, The states were already pulling back from legal abortion.
	Once, I think, the states and the people had seen there were a lot of false arguments proceeding here.
	But then the Supreme Court stepped in and put its stamp of approval on most of those false arguments.
	And so the states are kind of all over the place.
	Laws are being implemented.
	They're being repealed.
	Governors are vetoing it.
	What's going on with the American people right now?
	How does America generally feel about abortion at this time?
	Well, there are two ways in which classically popular opinion about abortion has been measured.
	One of them is at what stage of pregnancy does the interest of the child or the reality of the child outweigh The second one is, what are the reasons that justify having an abortion?
	And interestingly, you see, even now, the media focuses on the first question.
	Americans are more troubled by abortion as you proceed through pregnancy.
	The baby is more visible.
	The attributes of the baby are They continue incredibly fast in how they develop it, but it's continually accumulating.
	When you look, however, at the reasons that justify an abortion, Americans accept very few of the reasons abortions occur.
	Elective abortions are rejected on moral grounds by the American people.
	That was true in 1972.
	It's true now.
	Americans are tolerant of abortion if they believe the life of the mother is at stake.
	They're tolerant of in cases of rape and incest.
	And although I think the baby who is disabled is increasingly protected, that one has drawn near-majority support among the American people.
	But those are like 2 or 3% of all pregnancies.
	So, so much depends on how you ask the question.
	And I believe the American people would embrace very pro-life laws in the majority of the states if the Dobbs decision gives them a chance to do so.
	And we have to help Americans enact their views, but also make sure that women are helped.
	And can you weave us a little bit of kind of a national history, looking at our society, what's going on in our society, kind of starting in the mid-50s and leading up to 73 with the Roe decision?
	Yeah.
	Well, I think it's very difficult for us now to understand how tumultuous The 1950s and 60s were from a social standpoint.
	The secular revolution, I think, was lit by one or two other issues, including the war in Vietnam, the advance in society of widespread drug use, things that represented a youth rebellion of sorts against what the established government at the time was asking of them.
	We also had the development of the contraceptive pill in, I believe, the late 1950s.
	It really got spread on the U.S. market in the 1960s.
	So it became a much easier question whether you could engage in sexual activity while avoiding pregnancy.
	um So those things were combining together.
	But you also had...
	The 60s were the decade of assassination.
	And I don't think today's Americans fully appreciate how anxious and angry a society we became.
	Martin Luther King was assassinated.
	John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.
	Robert F. Kennedy...
	And these were figures that were advancing, for the most part, policies the American people agreed with.
	Their deaths also sowed great mistrust across society.
	So by the end of the 1960s, you have Woodstock, The Summer of Love.
	The music I listened to rarely agreed with the ethics of the music I listened to, but I sure played the stuff because that's what college students in that era listened to.
	So at the end of the day, the sexual revolution was definitely a major push toward legalizing abortion.
	I think smartly the abortion movement played itself as a wave of the future, an advocate for the young.
	Now, 50 years on, we're seeing that the aftermath of those things was not all that good.
	It might be worth – so Dr.
	Daniel Sulmacy, who's a professor – so he's a professor at bioethics at Georgetown.
	And he, in an article about abortion, mentioned that in his view, we as a country have moved – So far into the realm of discussing everything from a data and science perspective that we're societally incapable of discussing things from a philosophical or moral stance.
	Do you think that's true?
	And if so, could you touch on that idea?
	Is that true first and foremost?
	And secondly, if so, maybe expound on that.
	The idea that we can only debate things from a scientific point of view is not quite compelling to me.
	I think what we're facing is people, a people, the American people, who would like a moral basis for decision-making.
	However, they have lost the foundations of where moral decision-making legitimately comes from.
	I think for a person who is religious, for example, there's a substrate, an underlying system of beliefs that covers most of secular responsibility.
	And it can be as simple as what some would call a leftish gospel of the Good Samaritan.
	The priest passes by, the man lying beaten and robbed and near death on the side of the road.
	Samaritan crosses over, aids him, and makes sure that he's comforted.
	Well, did he do a religious thing?
	No, but he did something that was embedded within a moral substrate about caring for your neighbor.
	So I don't think Americans are beyond them.
	What they have trouble with is they might not pick up their Bible in the first place to know the story or another source of religious teaching.
	I found it fascinating that over the course of the pro-life movement, I met a number of atheists, one of my first interns at National Rights of the Life Committee, I was Jewish and an atheist and a rabid pro-lifer.
	I welcomed him and we formed a friendship that's lasted for decades.
	Bernard Nathanson began an atheist and I think he became more pro-life before he became a religious person.
	Same was true of Nat Hentoff, the writer for The Village Voice.
	People like that remind me that there is a civil way in which we can arrive at very moral conclusions that religious people and non-religious people alike will embrace.
	Are we beyond that?
	No.
	On the same time, does science help us?
	Yes, it does.
	The Atlantic Magazine ran an article two years ago in which it said that science is helping the pro-life side.
	I passionately believe that.
	We're going to be able to do things to protect children in the womb ever earlier and less invasively.
	And let's get about that.
	But the reason we do it has to be a moral question.
	Is that our brother or sister?
	Is that patient?
	Is that patienthood hand in hand with personhood?
	And I think it is.
	And I think if patienthood helps you see personhood, so be it.
	If it's a religious insight, I'll accept that too.
	One of the things that I've been thinking through is how do you, in the course of...
	We're covering such a broad range of history and topics and issues within this debate in a relatively short period of time with this film.
	One of the things that I've been wrestling with is just linking the various things together.
	I'm curious, if you look at that first step of decoupling the debate from a moral debate and just making it a science or medical debate, does decoupling the whole issue from morality somehow tie into or make sense that the very next step that they used...
	Was then to just kind of throw morality out the window and just blatantly lie about the number of women who are going to die if abortion wasn't legalized.
	So I guess the point is how do those things tie together and how do you kind of get from one to the next?
	Interesting question how these various arguments tie into one another.
	I think Assuming a stance of practical necessity or utilitarian ethics probably covers you on both of those fronts or inspires you.
	If you're trying to save the planet from climate change, in which you've envisioned that a million people will die a day because of the weather, that justifies in some thinking an awful lot of radical activity.
	Whether it be massive expansion of government, elimination of fuel that people use to heat their homes and drive their cars and run their businesses, it becomes a practical question.
	So I think the abortion industry became pretty amoral earlier on.
	What we have now, though, is if we're going to premise what we're saying and doing totally on the science, then the powers in the medical community right now wield much more authority on the pro-choice side than on our side.
	I think we're catching up But I think we can have an awful lot of pro-life policymaking before we ever convince the American College of OBGYN to be pro-life.
	So let's win for life even if we haven't quite captured the scientific heights.
	So why is the medical establishment optically predominantly pro-choice?
	I'm not sure it is, in a sense.
	I think the institutional side is.
	When I first came to Washington, the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, which still has a building next to the Supreme Court, was uniformly pro-choice.
	But in the years since, the leadership of some of those bodies has relented on that position and embraced a more pro-life stance.
	When it comes to the medical community, I would say, as in most of this debate, most people sit on the sidelines.
	In fact, there was a poll of ACOG membership some decades ago which found that the majority of the physicians in ACOG are not pro-abortion per se, at least to the extent of embracing abortion on a request.
	92% of OB-GYNs don't do abortions and won't do them.
	Those are very impressive numbers, but are they sidelined, fearful of speaking out?
	In a cancel culture and in an abortion, the cancel culture began decades ago.
	It takes courage to speak out.
	C.S. Lewis was definitely right about the place of courage in moral reality.
	Yeah.
	You know, thinking about that second lie of, you know, the number of women who are going to die if abortion wasn't made legal.
	Yeah.
	When you have a huge claim like that, in my mind, it makes it easy to then immediately start demonizing people who don't agree with your claim.
	You can immediately start demonizing people as uncaring religious zealots or uncaring people who want to control women's bodies.
	How does starting off with a lie give you ammunition to then start making ad hominem attacks against people who don't share your pro-choice views?
	Well, I think that in social debate today, we have an awful lot of ultimate stakes debate going on.
	In other words, are storms and destructive weather a bad thing in most cases?
	Yeah, nobody's fond of hurricanes, cold snaps, heat waves.
	People do get hurt.
	When you frame something in terms of the apocalypse, It's about to happen because of something that you think human beings can absolutely control.
	Then it's very easy to demonize someone who is an opponent of some or most of your judgments on that topic.
	Population control operated that way in the abortion issue.
	If you read accounts of what societies practiced in India and China, I think you can come to the conclusion that as bad as the United States has been, the worst harms of abortion and abortion-favorable policy have happened in other nations.
	And those were definitely the result of very apocalyptic thinking, and that leads to moral recriminations.
	From which it's pretty hard to recover if you're in public debate.
	So I would hope that one of the effects of reversing Roe versus Wade is that we not only have debate, but we have a turn of dedication to making reasonable, non-apocalyptic arguments and then looking at the results.
	Another way in which pro-choice and pro-lifers should be able to agree is that our data in the United States for an advanced society is really terrible.
	States don't collect data on complications of abortion in a systematic way.
	The CDC doesn't collect it.
	We don't have national data or data usable nationally out of California, Maryland, and other states that do an awful lot of the U.S. abortions.
	We should agree that science and data matter enough that we would collect it systematically.
	And we've been pressing that point.
	We'd hope the other side would agree.
	So is it a surprise considering the apocalyptic claims of the pro-choice movement about the number of women who would die from illegal abortions?
	Is it a surprise that they then immediately go from that into saying the other side is just religious zealots who want to destroy women's lives?
	Sure.
	The idea that one side of the debate is indifferent to women does flow from this unfounded assertion that women are going to die in large numbers from making abortion against the law.
	It ignores the fact that for decades...
	Basically, religious groups have been at the forefront of providing free health care, for example, or maternity homes or places where women obtain support.
	It's happening in society now.
	So it won't deter.
	It won't end pro-lifers from expanding pregnancy care work.
	What it will do is...
	Reduce public support for that work and deter honest assessment of what the effect of that work is.
	I think pro-lifers have to be conscientious about data.
	It means we dismiss nothing.
	We don't make assertions we can't back.
	I've said repeatedly, do all women have mental health consequences from having an abortion?
	Probably not.
	Do many do and is it not acknowledged how many do?
	Yes.
	And getting those numbers right is part of the puzzle of arguing how we should approach these things.
	Right.
	When did, you know, semantics I think really do matter.
	And I think it's a question that I haven't gotten a clear answer on and I'm curious if you can kind of clarify this.
	When did the pro-abortion movement really start claiming the term pro-choice?
	Because I think saying, oh, we're pro-women's choice sounds very compelling.
	You know, saying, oh, we're pro-death or we're pro-abortion.
	No one's going to want that, right?
	So when did this pro-abortion movement become the pro-choice movement?
	The powerful thing about moving from...
	Previous language to the pro-choice position was that it appealed to what I would call the broadly libertarian streak in the American people.
	We like to decide what to do with our own money, with our own investments, with our own votes.
	So this fit very nicely into it.
	My recollection is that there was a transition period where the slogan was, Who Decides?
	And I had long philosophical conversations with people on our side about this question.
	Who decides in a morally contested area?
	Well, it makes sense that if there's difference of opinion, the individual.
	And that was a bit of a precursor to the pro-choice slogan.
	What it finessed, obviously, is who decides what.
	You know, if you're taking a human life, you don't ask the question of a parent of a one-year-old who decides whether this child eats dinner tonight or not.
	The obligation is to provide the meal.
	The obligation is to protect life.
	So by putting something up for decision, putting it up for choice, you're basically saying it's decidable.
	It's choosable.
	Very, very clever.
	A difficult finesse to deal with.
	And pro-lifers have had to be nimble in responding to it.
	The language of the pro-choice movement has changed depending on the degree of militancy going on in the movement.
	Back in Bernard Nathanson's day, it was called National Abortion Rights Action League.
	And that acronym was kept, but it was supplemented with references to choice a few decades later when there was an attempt to appeal to a country that obviously wasn't embracing abortion.
	But now you will see sporadic attempts to shout your abortion or de-stigmatize abortion.
	The dilemma for the pro-choice movement is that they can soften it, but they can't transfer it into a good And I think we'll see further attempts to try both methods, if you will, to see if the American people will buy into the viewpoint that abortion is something we just have to learn to live with.
	Is abortion, when you actually look at what is happening, Is it a barbaric thing?
	And if so, is that the reason why you see people like Abby Johnson and people who were former abortionists, former people who worked at Planned Parenthood, is that the reason why there have been relatively frequent exoduses from the abortion movement to the side of life?
	I think so.
	When you read Abby Johnson's account, Of recognizing what she was doing on the day where she was in the operating room, observing the ultrasound screen.
	I think she saw, because she could no longer not be in the room as it were, she saw the brutality of the act.
	And that's something that cannot be eliminated.
	Here's a human being clinging to life, not misplaced, but where it belongs by virtue of its state of development.
	And it's being ripped from that place and reduced to the contents of a suction tube.
	I mean, imagine that.
	And later, with an abortion, as we've seen recently in the District of Columbia, what it takes to take the life of a baby.
	It's a horrible thing.
	Early on, Magda Dines wrote a book called In Necessity and Sorrow, where she made the argument that abortion was terrible, but we needed it.
	But the descriptions in the book are reminded that if this is what we need, then we are little better than the most ravenous animals that roam the planet.
	So I think it's something you can't get away from.
	It is the core of the debate.
	So what can you tell us about chemical abortion?
	Chemical abortion has been with us for a while, but in the last, I would say, five to ten years, it has become the majority method by which abortions are done.
	The abortion industry will tell you it's because of a response to pro-life statutes.
	I don't think so.
	I think it's a response to a number of things, including the decline in the number of physicians willing to do abortion, the fact that abortion clinics are not welcome in many communities.
	They don't exist in 95% or more of American counties.
	This is the abortion industry's response to move abortion not only out of the clinic context, but out of the medical context.
	They're taking a vast gamble with women's lives.
	They're experimenting with allowing these chemicals to be used later in pregnancy.
	They're ignoring the risky evaluation and mitigation strategy, which suggests that women need medical attention before pregnancy.
	They even consider taking such pills.
	We are going to have women badly injured by these drugs, and right now we're barely able to track those injuries.
	So it's a reckless move.
	It's not a response to the pro-life side.
	It's a response to really the decline of abortion from the medical community.
	It's a way to make it a non-medical event, and it's tragic.
	How much more dangerous is chemical abortion for the woman than traditional abortion procedures with the suction tube or-- And I guess specifically, I think it was in a CLI article that emergency room visits went up something like 500%.
	Is that true?
	Yes, that is an increase in the number of women making visits to emergency rooms on a set of Medicaid clients in 17 states, and the number has increased 508%.
	In terms of the relative risk between chemical and surgical abortion, it's about a factor of four times more dangerous to have a chemical abortion, at least in terms of whether a woman will visit an emergency room for care within 30 days of obtaining the chemical abortion.
	The biggest danger is from an unrecognized ectopic pregnancy because the woman hasn't had pregnancy confirmation that the pregnancy is indeed in the womb.
	And not in the fallopian tube or somewhere else where an ectopic situation could occur.
	So chemical abortion is designed to happen away from a clinic, often away from an emergency room situation.
	And they're being distributed to children as young as 10.
	It is a horrific situation.
	To me, it's a case of massive medical neglect.
	And yet the FDA says it's safe and has approved use of the pill.
	Can you talk about that?
	Well, there are lots of Americans who have their issues with the FDA these days.
	It's the most independent of federal agencies.
	It does not disclose very often its processes.
	It is...
	Part and parcel of the problem that's developed with opioid prescriptions in the United States.
	It is financed in part by the industry.
	It is basically regulating a situation we don't readily tolerate when other industries are involved.
	And it has long been a citadel for people who promote the pro-choice point of view.
	The original risk evaluation strategy was barely adequate to provide women with support if they take these chemicals.
	Now we're without that completely.
	I view that as an ideological judgment by a pro-choice institution.
	So can you kind of give us just some sort of lead-in that links us from the risks to the just shocking fact that the FDA has kind of put a blanket approval on them?
	Sure.
	Well, the risks of chemical abortion have been identified for a long time, particularly in overseas studies, where the dramatic increase in emergency room care for women who have chemical abortions was first identified in a finished study.
	So the FDA had that information.
	It's one of the reasons why it initially installed the risk evaluation management structure.
	When it moved away from it, it was not because of medical news.
	Medical complication tracking in the United States is poor.
	Our new studies showed how dramatically more dangerous abortion pills are.
	The FDA, rather than wait for that information, though we told them it was coming, acted politically.
	And they did so because of the ideology of abortion that's governed abortion promotion for the last 60 years.
	Regardless of what happens with future Supreme Court rulings on the issue of abortion, why is it important for Americans to be aware of the history of abortion, the dangers, what the science and medicine – advances in medicine show about abortion?
	Why is it important for us as a society to be informed and knowledgeable on this topic regardless of what happens in the future legally?
	Well, medicine is probably the most commonly shared major concern of every human being on this planet.
	We can do so much more to protect human life than any previous generation.
	But for millennia, thanks to the Hippocratic Oath and standards of the medical profession, what we had first and foremost was trust between the patient and the doctor.
	The essence of the Hippocratic Oath is, first, do no harm.
	And if you knew your physician never meant you harm, maybe lots of things go away, including the medical malpractice challenge in the United States.
	But now we're in a situation where who is the healer?
	Who's the physician?
	What is driving his decisions or her recommendations?
	If it's something social, if it's something political, if it's some idea that the sexes no longer exist, if it's some idea that the baby in the womb is no longer human, the baby born alive no longer has a right to life, then what you have is no trust.
	And if you have a society where there is no trust, then the entire edifice of the practice of medicine, in my view, collapses.
	And we are left with so many other similar situations where the social contract, weak as it may be sometimes, is frayed.
	It's signed by one party but not another.
	And at some point, neither party signs it.
	And then how do we get along?
	How do we get along if we don't know the physician means well for us, if he's not an agent of some political movement?
	We saw that with psychology in the old Soviet Union.
	We see it in the West with the sanctity of life.
	I think everything is affected.
	Mothers, babies, men, the aged, the infirm.
	It becomes a battleground.
	That's not what we want in our hospitals.
	It's not what we want in our laws.
	And it's where the abortion industry and its allies have taken us.
	Is there anything else that you'd like to share or say or any final thoughts that you have before we cut?
	Well, I want to thank you for doing this.
	Wish you great luck with it.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I mean, one of the things I would say is that people are concerned that the issue is politically polarized.
	It's an interesting thing.
	The Republican Party, which I'm a member, is overwhelmingly pro-life.
	The Democrats now are overwhelmingly on the other side.
	I think you make a case that's not a good thing for society that we don't all see our stake.
	Of course, it's a bad thing that we don't all have a shared understanding of what the value of life is and how it drives every issue.
	At the same time, what I find fascinating is that it is now the defining, the defining issue between these two vast camps in American society.
	That's how important the abortion issue is.
	Who would have guessed 50 years ago when people were promising the courts resolved this question?
	Or people now saying, oh, settled law.
	But actually, the political alignment of the entire country is not built around war and peace.
	It's not built around the size of the welfare state.
	Or tax policy.
	Everybody has opinions.
	But on life, it's like the Red Sea.
	I think that tells us something.
	and we need a better answer than the loan we've got now.
	The abortion industry uses women for their own profit.
	These lies are pervasive They're not difficult to refute, but it can be difficult to penetrate that culture of lies, to get the truth out there.
	We have to do it.
	We have to do it because it's right.
	We have to do it for the victims of abortion.
	We have to do it for the women who are taken in by this industry, who are used for dollars, even to their own detriment.
	If you enjoyed this conversation with Chuck Donovan, you'll want to check out our Daily Wire original documentary, Choosing Death, The Legacy of Roe.
	In it, we take a wrecking ball to the four fallacies keeping the abortion industry alive.
	To watch it right now, go to dailywireplus.com.
	Today, if you join, you will see not only this full movie, Choosing Death, The Legacy of Roe, but you will have access to The Daily Wire's entire catalog of content, which we can only produce and distribute because of you, with your support.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is the Choosing Life Podcast.
	We'll see you next time.
	The Choosing Life Podcast is a Daily Wire production produced in association with Outer Limits.
	Our technical and support team includes Ian Reed, Jesse Eastman, Ryan Moore, Mariah Cormier, and Jim Wirt.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2022.

▲