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Sept. 17, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:59
Choosing Life: A journalistic survey of the debate - Alexandra Desanctis

Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Alexandra Desanctis, gives a concise and factual survey of the history and key arguments surrounding Roe v. Wade and the debate over abortion rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I think that women would be much better off in a society that totally rejected abortion.
It creates an anti-woman culture.
When you say that a solution to women's problems is an act that pits her against her own child, that creates a societal understanding that women are expected to At the very least, be open to the possibility of killing their child in order to sort of advance themselves.
Whether that's, you know, women can only make it to the corner office if they have access to abortion, or women can only, you know, achieve the educational goals they have if they have access to this act of violence.
That does not create a pro-woman society.
A pro-woman society would say, Everything about women is good and ought to be embraced and accepted, including their ability to become pregnant.
And we should support that by requiring men to support women when they're pregnant, by encouraging marriage and family formation, by helping women who are unexpectedly pregnant carry their pregnancies to term, retain job opportunities if that's what they want while being a mother, as opposed to rejecting pregnancy and motherhood and pretending we can get rid of them by killing unborn children.
Abortion is an essential aspect of women's health care, without which thousands of women would be killed each year by the inhuman clumps of cells in their wombs.
Right?
That's the story we've heard from the pro-abortion movement and its mouthpieces in the establishment media for 50 years.
The only problem is that none of those things are true, as Alexandra De Sanctis has been showing in her prolific and influential writings on the foundational lies of the pro-abortion movement.
In this episode, she gives a thorough summary of the history of the pro-abortion movement and dissects the most common arguments in favor of abortion.
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Here's Alexandra.
My name is Alexandra DeSanctis.
I'm a staff writer at National Review and a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
And in both of those roles, I write a lot about abortion policy, the pro-life movement.
I've been writing for National Review since 2016 when I graduated from college.
And shortly after coming on board, I just got really interested in covering abortion.
I've always been pro-life.
But this issue is a big issue in politics, always has been, at least since I've been alive and before that.
And so I just kind of decided to become as much of an expert as I could.
I've covered it in the elections context, in the culture context, politics.
And now I'm writing a book that'll be out this summer on the topic with Ryan Anderson.
And why do you care about this topic?
I think it's the human rights abuse of our time, the human rights issue of our time, that we're killing hundreds of thousands of human beings every year in abortion.
And not only that, but this harms all of us.
The fundamental harm of abortion is that it kills an innocent human being.
How could our society be better off for allowing that to happen?
I think we're all worse off because of it.
Can you kind of give us a little bit of an intro?
Who was Bernard Nathanson?
What was he known for?
What kind of change did he undergo over the course of his career?
And kind of give us that background.
He's a fascinating character and a sad person, but a redemptive storyline for sure.
He performed, I think, by his own accounting, something like 60,000 abortions.
When he was an abortionist, shortly after becoming a doctor, he kind of turned to abortion and I think?
And he was one of the major kind of pro-abortion activists behind pushing the Supreme Court to legalize abortion in Roe v.
Wade.
So definitely a very prominent abortion rights activist around the time of Roe.
So after Nathanson stopped performing abortions, one of the major things he talked about became a pro-life activist, was a major leader in the pro-life movement.
And he spent a lot of his time in that activism talking about the lies that he and his colleagues had used back when he was pro-abortion to try and convince the court to legalize abortion.
And what were those lies?
Among them were the idea that thousands of women were dying as a result of abortion not being legal.
You know, the claim that if we legalize this, it would make it more safe for women or women could get abortions in a way where their kind of life and health would be better off and that it was going to happen anyway.
You know, that abortion was going to happen by the thousands.
Whether or not it was legal, it was just a matter of whether women were going to die in the process, essentially.
And he later admitted those facts were totally made up.
We just came up with those statistics out of nowhere, essentially, to try and prove a point that we wanted to make and get a result that we wanted.
So after Dr. Nathanson became a pro-life advocate and started talking about their tactics, what were some of the things that he revealed?
So some of the main lies that they told as pro-abortion advocates were the idea that abortion is a medical issue, not a moral one.
The idea that women would die by the thousands if abortion were not made legal.
The idea that the pro-life movement was made up of essentially religious zealots who wanted to push their views on other people.
And the idea that abortion was some kind of solution to poverty or social problems.
You know, is that accusation that pro-lifers are just religious zealots who want to control women's bodies, is that a fair critique?
No, this is a total falsehood.
And this is something we hear all the time.
And I think the first thing we need to remember is that There are a huge number of people who describe themselves as pro-life or anti-abortion who are not religious at all.
Some of the most pro-life people I know are actually avowed atheists.
So you can absolutely be opposed to abortion without being religious.
The second thing we want to remember is that our laws impose every law we have imposes some kind of moral value.
And sometimes it accords with one religion or another.
And the fact that religious people might agree with it or religious beliefs might line up with a particular law does not mean that we shouldn't impose it on people.
All laws impose some version of morality.
Pro-choicers often call the pro-life movement anti-woman.
Can you respond to that?
Yeah, this is a very common claim.
I think this is probably the most common argument you hear from people who support abortion.
They don't want to talk about whether it's a human life at all.
They just want to talk about how pro-lifers hate women.
And this kind of goes back to one of the major lies that Nathanson and his pro-abortion colleagues told, which was that legal abortion is good for women.
Abortion is a solution to women's problems.
Women will be safer.
Their health will be better if they can access abortion.
This is simply not true.
There are serious risks of abortion to women.
And even in cases where there aren't kind of health side effects, psychological side effects, long-term consequences, women are actually not better off if their best solution is to kill their child, right?
It pits women against their own children.
It turns that most vulnerable human relationship into an antagonistic relationship between enemies.
And women are not better off as a result of that.
What are some of the biggest claims that the pro-choice lobby uses to attack pro-lifers?
So the pro-choice movement, the pro-abortion movement, often claims that the pro-life movement is only made up of white Christian conservatives who are trying to impose their religious values on others.
They claim that the pro-life movement is anti-science.
Our claims or our beliefs are not based in scientific fact.
They claim that the pro-life movement is just kind of old white men trying to control women's bodies.
Calling the pro-life movement anti-woman is probably the most common accusation from pro-abortion activists towards the pro-life movement.
And is that fair?
I think that's completely unfair.
And how do you respond to the accusation that pro-lifers are anti-science?
Typically, when the pro-abortion movement claims that pro-lifers are anti-science, they don't actually have anything to back up that claim.
They don't point to any evidence.
They don't really take the argument further, especially if you respond and say, well, actually, science shows us that the unborn child is a human being.
This is a distinct person in their mother's womb, his or her mother's womb.
They just don't want to talk about it anymore.
So as soon as the scientific discussion goes on to terms where it's clear that the pro-life case is true, they just kind of drop that line of attack because it's not really based in reality at all.
And, you know, playing devil's advocate, what is the pro-choice movement's strongest argument?
And, I mean, so like, you know, because we don't want to do the same thing to the pro-choice movement that they often do to the pro-life movement.
So, giving them the benefit of the doubt, what is their strongest argument and how do you respond to that?
I think the strongest argument of the pro-abortion movement is that life is difficult and women in particular face a lot of very difficult situations that make pregnancy, childbearing, becoming a mother hard.
Chief among them the fact that men abandon women.
Men often try to engage in sex without consequences.
They walk away and they leave women if they become pregnant with their child.
And they often get away with that.
And so I think the argument for abortion that women need this is it can be compelling because women Are in hard situations.
But the response is simply, if you tell a woman that if she's in a difficult situation, it will be improved by an act of violence, right?
She's participating in an act of violence, not just against another human being, but against her own child.
You're not actually helping her at all.
Women in hard situations need real solutions, not an act of violence.
If science and if scientists and doctors all agree at this point that it's really a human life, and I think the science has changed quite a bit since Roe v.
Wade was passed, and at the time it was like, oh, well, when does life begin and all that debate?
You almost never hear that debate anymore.
So if doctors and scientists all agree, and I think it's like 85 or 90% of doctors, regardless of their view on abortion, agree that life begins at conception, that human life begins at conception, then what is the debate about now?
I think that's why the pro-abortion movement typically shifts to the language of pro-lifers or anti-woman or Pro
-lifers are trying to impose their moral beliefs or their religious values because they want to avoid the central question, which is what happens in an abortion procedure and is that acceptable?
And what does happen in an abortion procedure?
A human being's life is intentionally ended.
Do you think most Americans really think about or are really cognizant of what abortion actually and literally means?
I don't think that most Americans think about what abortion is.
Obviously, on both sides, kind of the far ends of the spectrum of this debate, you have really committed pro-lifers, really committed abortion supporters who are really invested in the debate.
But I think in the middle, you have a lot of people who would prefer not to think about it.
And I think that's understandable, right?
Because abortion, we kind of all know on a gut level that this is not a good thing.
At the very least, if people support it, they kind of know maybe they think it's a necessary evil or something we kind of have to live with because life is hard or something like that.
But nobody really wants to celebrate this.
Nobody thinks it's a good thing.
And so I think most people try to avoid the question.
They try to avoid thinking about what it is.
And they're helped in doing that by, in my opinion, a kind of set of major media outlets who avoid the question of what abortion is, like the plague.
They hate talking about it.
You never see politicians who support abortion get asked, "What is an abortion and why do I don't think I've ever seen anyone ask that question.
And that is the central question in the debate.
If people were presented an accurate picture of abortion, what do you think would happen societally?
I think that if most people were confronted with the simple fact of what happens in an abortion procedure, it would revolutionize the abortion debate because it would expose the fact that every abortion is an act of violence against a human being.
And not only is that unacceptable, not only is a society deeply unhealthy if we promote this as any kind of solution that ought to be legal, but it's not actually good for anybody else.
If you look objectively at abortion, its impacts, and then the two sides debating it, is there one side that lines up more with the idea of women's rights and the core ideas of feminism and increasing women's opportunity and success in society?
Yeah.
I think the abortion rights movement thinks that it has a monopoly on women's rights language.
They often even use the euphemism reproductive rights or women's rights when they're actually talking about abortion.
Their whole narrative is it's good for women if they have access to legal abortion.
But the fact is that women have achieved a huge amount of advancement since Roe v.
Wade, independent of an increase in the abortion rate.
So since 1990, we've seen an almost steady decrease every single year in the abortion rate.
And over those same decades, women's educational advancement, professional advancement has skyrocketed even relative to men.
So the idea that, you know, abortion is the reason why women are able to succeed is ludicrous.
Women don't actually need violence in order to be successful.
And, you know, if you look at the impacts that abortion has on women, is there, you know, even more than kind of, you know, maybe it being a wash, you know, is there any argument that could be made that the pro-life movement is actually more pro-woman than the pro-choice movement?
The pro-life movement is absolutely more pro-woman than the abortion rights movement because, first and foremost, on kind of a fundamental level, the pro-life movement says to women who perhaps become pregnant unexpectedly or, you know, are not being supported by their husband or their partner or their family in their pregnancy, They come alongside those women.
They support them.
They say, you know, there are solutions.
We can help you.
There's a community around you who can help you carry this life.
And whether you choose to give it up for adoption, you choose to, you know, become a mother, I suppose you already are a mother, whether you choose to carry this life to term, we'll be there with you.
That is a fundamentally pro-woman argument.
But even aside from that, abortion actually is actively harmful to women.
In some number of cases, it's physically harmful.
It's often psychologically harmful.
There are long-term consequences or there can be in future pregnancies.
And the pro-abortion movement does not want to acknowledge those things.
And when we try to talk about them and bring them up, it's almost always the abortion rights movement that tries to silence that data, dismiss that data, you know, claim that abortion is almost always safe, even though that's simply not true.
In addition to the negative, you know, kind of anti-women impacts that the pro-choice movement has today, in what way did the pro-abortion lobby back at the time of Roe use, you know, a woman, specifically you know, a woman, specifically Norma McCorvey, almost as this kind of prop, you know, to push through their agenda?
When, in fact, she ended up never even having an abortion.
She ended up having, I think, three children, correct?
So maybe, can you, like, weave for us a little bit of that story, you know?
In what ways does the rhetoric of being pro-woman not match kind of the historic actions of pro-abortion advocates who are...
Happy to just use women who don't even want an abortion to be kind of the face of their movements.
I think what's so interesting about the backstory of Roe v.
Wade and the decision itself is how rather than focusing on women or women's health or what they needed, it was actually very much focused on doctors and the kind of right or freedom of doctors to perform abortions.
And so at the time, the kind of language around promoting abortion was that women were dying, women needed this in order to be safe, in order to be healthy.
They would die in illegal abortions otherwise and were dying by the thousands, which is simply not true.
But the people most aggressively pushing legal abortion were actually doctors who at the time were the ones being punished, right?
If a state had laws against abortion, the person punished was the doctor who performed the abortion, not the woman.
And so these doctors wanted to have the freedom essentially to, if they thought it was the right thing or they wanted to make money off it, whatever the reason might be, they wanted to be able to perform abortion without legal consequences.
And you can see that kind of lobbying from that angle show up in the decision.
If you read the Roe v.
Wade opinion, it's not about women's rights or equality or liberty or freedom.
It's about doctors and trusting the medical judgment of doctors to be the ones deciding whether or not women need an abortion.
Can you tell audiences a little bit of the backstory of Norma McCorvey and what's her story?
Yeah.
So Norma McCorvey is the Jane Roe of the Roe v.
Wade decision.
She was a woman in Texas who was seeking an abortion and pro-abortion lawyers and activists essentially got to her, found her, and realized that her story and her case could be the way to legalize abortion if not, it was in Texas.
So And what ended up happening to Norma McCorvey?
She had kind of a long and difficult life.
She converted to Roman Catholicism much later in life.
She had a kind of Several decades, I believe, stint as a pro-life activist.
There have been some reports later in life that she may have said she wasn't actually pro-life or was kind of used by the movement.
So it's not totally clear what was true.
It's quite complicated.
But at the very least, she was not this kind of lifelong abortion cheerleader.
Is there a sense to which the pro-abortion lobby used a woman who was confused and in pain and made her this kind of centerpiece to push their agenda?
I think it's very clear that pro-abortion activists used Norma McCorvey and her difficult life situation and story to make their kind of political ends and their legal ends more sympathetic and palatable.
And is that happening today?
It happens all the time.
And you can see this when abortion advocates or clinics go to court and they sue states that have pro-life laws.
They go to court and they say, we're doing this on behalf of women.
But very rarely do you see An actual woman sue a state and say, I couldn't get an abortion because of this particular health and safety law that you put in place.
It's always abortion clinics showing up in court and saying, we're here representing women when there's very obviously a conflict of interest between the abortion provider and women.
That wasn't just happening back in 1973 with Norma McCorvey.
It happens all the time now.
The pro-abortion movement has been using this strategy for decades, using women who are in difficult situations as a means of getting what they want.
And what do you think it is that the pro-choice movement ultimately wants?
I think there are a lot of people who consider themselves pro-choice, who sincerely believe that this is a good thing for women, that women at least need to have this option in their back pocket if they're in a difficult situation.
But I think the loudest abortion rights voices, most of them are financially entangled.
Planned Parenthood makes just buckets and boatloads of money off of abortion.
They make federal money off of abortion.
These abortion lobbying groups, this is their business model.
And so they have a financial stake in preserving legal abortion.
To what extent does the sexual revolution in the 60s play into kind of the history of the abortion movement?
I think the sexual revolution was kind of the necessary first step in legalizing abortion because the aim of feminists at the time, second wave feminists, was at least the most radical among them, was to break down the nuclear family, right?
And that kind of started with the legalization of contraception.
But it culminated in abortion, which says basically even if you do conceive a child you don't want, you have to be able to even kill that child to get rid of it because kind of free sex or kind of the abolition of the family is the ultimate goal.
And maybe give audiences like a 30,000-foot view.
What was a sexual revolution?
You know, kind of define it for us.
What are kind of the general years, you know, that this is happening?
and kind of just describe the tenor of the country and the movement itself.
So the sexual revolution was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when mostly kind of radical feminists were the main drivers behind it.
But there's this whole free love movement was the idea where you should be able to have consequence-free sex with whomever, whenever you want to.
And consequence-free is the key.
The goal of the movement was to achieve kind of policy and legal changes that would enable So whether that was contraception so you could have sex without getting pregnant or abortion ultimately so that you could get rid of what the consequences were.
You know, a child, they wanted these to kind of bolster the ideological idea that sex ought to be outside the context of marriage, outside the context of family, just kind of for fun.
And, you know, what's going on, you know, while the sexual revolution is happening, what's going on in terms of, you know, medical advancements in terms of, you know, FDA approval of the pill, Planned Parenthood's kind of growth, you know, what are, you know, abortion advocates arguing?
How does that tie into kind of like the lies that kind of frame this whole story?
Yeah.
So at the time, as a sexual revolution was unfolding as sort of an ideological matter, you had Planned Parenthood and other groups that today we know as pro-abortion, who initially started out as actually pro-birth control groups.
Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood to distribute birth control.
And so they kind of started with that policy goal of let's at least have contraception legalized so that we can And was it at this time that those kind of big lies start to really be perpetrated?
It was around this time that doctors mainly, but pro-abortion activists began to come up with their political strategy, their messaging strategy for promoting abortion, which included trying to pitch abortion as a medical issue.
So you had kind of medical organizations start to pivot from only sanctioning abortions when it was strictly medically necessary to saying, well, we should trust doctors' judgment.
They should be able to do this at any point, essentially, if they think it's medically necessary.
Which was expanded to cover a whole number of abortions that were not at all medically necessary and pushing the lie that women somehow needed legal abortion.
And, you know, let's dig into that argument that, you know, without legal abortion, thousands of women will die a year because that's an argument that Planned Parenthood is still making.
They made it back during Roe.
They are still making it today.
Is there any validity to that statement?
Where did that, you know, statement come from?
And what kind of pushback have they received even from, you know, mainstream media?
Yeah.
Yeah, so abortion rights activists have been pushing the claim that thousands of women will die every year in illegal, in unsafe abortions if abortion is illegal.
They did it at the time of Roe.
This was one of the key claims that they made to try and convince the court to legalize abortion.
And this is something they still say today.
Planned Parenthood has claimed as recently as 2018 or 2019 that thousands of women were dying prior to Roe v.
Wade, you know, implying that if abortion were illegal again, this is what would happen.
But the fact of the matter is thousands of women were not dying in abortions.
The best data we have suggests that in the five or so years before abortion, fewer than 150 women were dying every year as a result of abortion.
And the Washington Post even specifically did a fact check on that where they had multiple fact checkers look into this, right?
Yeah, so a couple of years ago, the then president of Planned Parenthood, Dr.
Lina Nguyen, kind of parroted this claim that thousands of women were dying in illegal abortions before Roe.
And this claim was so egregiously false that even the Washington Post had to admit it was untrue and fact-checked the claim and not only gave Planned Parenthood four Pinocchios for it, but listed it as one of the top lies of the year in its annual ranking.
What did Planned Parenthood have to gain from kind of the free sex movement, the increased usage of the pill?
Because the pill, I think, approved by the FDA in May 1960, sexual revolution really is kicking off full steam ahead.
So all these things are happening, and what did Planned Parenthood have to gain from all of these changes occurring?
Planned Parenthood was actually founded by Margaret Sanger in the early 20th century because she wanted to promote legalized birth control.
And the reason for this was not that she thought free sex was great, but she actually was part of the eugenics movement.
And so she and her kind of fellow eugenicists wanted to promote birth control as a means of limiting what they viewed as undesirable populations.
So this would be people like We're good to go.
Time went on and this argument began to fall more out of favor, though it still exists.
Planned Parenthood pivoted to pushing birth control as the linchpin of the sexual revolution because you can't have a free sex or free love movement without contraception or birth control.
You can't have free sex if there's a possible consequence of pregnancy.
And so around the time that abortion was then legalized, it was preceded by the legalization of contraception and the growing widespread acceptance of its use.
When did abortion really become a contentious topic in the United States?
Honestly, the abortion debate was just beginning to kind of were into motion at the time that the Supreme Court legalized abortion.
And that's one of the things that's so bad about the ruling.
There are many things that are bad about it.
But one of the chief ones is that America never actually really got to have an abortion debate.
At the time that Roe legalized abortion across the entire country, about 30 states had laws protecting unborn children on the books.
Maybe five or so, a handful of states had legalized abortion, at least at some points.
But Americans were just kind of starting to develop their opinions.
It was starting to become clear that this was a human life.
You were starting to hear arguments that women might need abortion in order to be free and equal.
But that whole argument was short-circuited by the fact that the Supreme Court stepped in and said, actually, this is going to be the law of the land for everybody.
And when did the kind of majority of Americans or America in general kind of decide, oh, well, whatever, abortion is here now.
I guess we accept it.
When did America kind of accept abortion or has it accepted abortion?
I don't think America has actually accepted abortion.
And I think that's why we see abortion laws go back to court every single year.
That's why we see, you know, 50 years after Roe v. Wade, 30 years after Planned Parenthood v. Casey, there's another abortion case pending at the Supreme Court where they once again have to explain why we have the abortion laws that we have handed down by the Supreme Court because Americans did not accept it.
And the justices in Roe v. Wade decided the way they did because they thought they were going to settle the question.
They thought they were going to end the abortion debate, just kind of get rid of the controversy by legalizing it at the federal level through the court.
And instead, they created a 50-year battle that I think is more contentious today than it was back in 1973.
Why is it becoming more contentious?
I think abortion is more contentious today than it was in 1973 because more Americans realize that this is a human life in the womb.
We have 4D ultrasounds, for example.
You can very clearly see a baby's face early on.
We know facts about when the heartbeat develops, we can hear it.
We know about fingernails, the baby's fingernails.
We know all sorts of things we didn't know as well or we couldn't see as clearly back when Roe was decided.
But I think another big part of it is more Americans are frustrated that they don't have a voice in the abortion debate, right?
No matter what they think, no matter what their state lawmakers try to put in place, if they're pro-life, that law is going to get struck down.
They can't have their voice kind of put into action in their laws because of what the Supreme Court has done.
And so I think pro-lifers in particular are not going to go away until this issue is settled.
Will, do you think this debate will ever be settled?
My hope is that someday we will look back at abortion and our history of allowing it the way we look back at slavery.
I think we will wonder, maybe it won't be in my lifetime, but future Americans will wonder how we ever let this happen.
Now that Roe v.
Wade has been overturned, big tech is working overtime to stop the truth about abortion from getting out.
Far-left abortion extremists are not content with dehumanizing the pre-born.
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Why is a discussion about the history of abortion and the reality of abortion something that people should engage in, regardless of whether they're watching this in pre-Dobbs ruling world or a post-Dobbs ruling world?
The history of the abortion debate and the just basic reality of what abortion is, is always going to be important.
Even if someday we reach a world or a society where we know that abortion is deeply unjust, we always have to remember, I think, kind of the horror of what we let happen.
And especially because even if the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey in Dobbs, that's most likely going to just return the fight to the state level.
And so every American has to be prepared to know what they think about abortion, why they think it, the truth of what it is, the history behind how it came to be legal.
These are essential pieces of information and kind of fighting for the pro-life future that we want.
In what sense is it important to remember the history of abortion similarly to remembering the history of wars or human rights abuses in our country or others?
I hope that someday we will look back on abortion as a horrific thing and wonder how we ever let this happen.
But I think even if we do reach that time when all of us are willing to recognize that this was deeply unjust and that it should never have happened, We'll have to remember the history of it.
We can't forget why this happened and we shouldn't let it happen again.
It's a horrible atrocity against vulnerable members of our community.
And who knows who could be next?
I think those who, what's the famous quote?
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
And I don't know if abortion becomes illegal.
We all know it's unjust someday.
Who knows if we'd go back to being a pro-abortion society.
But kind of the pro-abortion mindset of exterminating the vulnerable or Turning on some human beings because they're inconvenient, that could very well lead to other kinds of atrocities in the future if we aren't careful.
I'm sure you've seen this, but I've seen Planned Parenthood on their website say, oh, well, abortion has been just a common part of American life as far back as the 1600s.
It's only somewhere in the middle of the 20th century that Americans really became these prudes who want to deny women rights to their own bodies.
Have you seen that argument kind of picking up steam over the last few years?
Yeah, I think the pro-abortion movement has turned to this argument that abortion was just always totally normal throughout history and only suddenly became something that pro-lifers were fixated on in the middle of the 20th century.
That's simply not true, actually.
The common law tradition has always been anti-abortion.
And there was, you know, kind of before the science was clear, there were differing opinions on when human life actually begins.
But there was always a fundamental sense, both in Great Britain and then in the United States, where we kind of carried on that legal tradition, That once there is a human life, abortion is wrong.
And that was always the practice in our law, even, you know, up until Rome.
And I think Planned Parenthood would respond, and I've read articles that they've said, oh, well, back in the 1800s or in the 1700s, before quickening, everyone was like, oh, yeah, it's fine to have an abortion or get rid of the child because the child isn't a human being until quickening.
Do you think that that's a valid argument?
And if not, what's it missing?
So it is true that there have been points in history where people thought abortion was acceptable before what they called quickening, which is when you could first feel the child move.
But that was not because they thought it was okay to kill human beings.
It was because based on their kind of limited scientific and medical knowledge, they thought that there wasn't actually a human being there until you could feel it moving.
So they were still at that time, you know, kind of operating out of the best scientific medical information that they had.
They were still kind of operating from the belief that all human life deserves to be protected from the moment that it exists.
So there's just kind of a difference in information they had access to and whether or not this was a human life.
But there was no consensus that there is a human being until quickening and you can kill it up to that point.
The idea was just that they didn't know there was a human life.
Their belief was human life didn't start until quickening and after that point they knew that killing it was immoral.
But Is Planned Parenthood and is the abortion movement ignorant or are they doing something else?
It seems to me that Planned Parenthood and abortion supporters who use this argument about abortion being okay up to quickening are intentionally misconstruing the facts.
They're pretending like we always had the science that we had about human life way back into the 1600s, and people back then just thought abortion was moral up until you could feel the baby move.
But the fact is, they didn't know that.
And I think Planned Parenthood is well aware that that's the reality.
What would you say to a person who's like, oh, well, I read on Planned Parenthood that abortion's always been accepted.
What would you tell a person who's confused and kind of looking for the truth?
How would you help someone kind of navigate those waters?
Yeah, the historical record on kind of abortion throughout history can be kind of shoddy.
But the best information we have suggests that factually speaking, in previous kind of generations, we didn't know when human life began.
And there was a very common consensus that when you could feel the baby move, this was when human life began.
And after that point, Most people believed, the kind of legal consensus especially, was that abortion was immoral after that point because it's always wrong to take innocent human life.
And the common law tradition reflects that understanding.
And if you kind of look back to their scientific and medical understanding, too, you know they didn't realize how conception takes place.
They didn't realize how implantation takes place.
They didn't realize there was a human being there until you could feel it.
You know, now that everyone knows when life does begin, are abortion advocates today just saying, look, we know that it's a human being and we think that a woman should have the right to kill another human being?
Abortion advocates typically avoid addressing the question of when human life begins or whether a human life is at stake in abortion.
They usually kind of gloss over that question or don't talk about it at all and they skip right to, well, it's necessary for women or, you know, this is women will be better off or more equal or more free if they can have abortions.
But they kind of imply that there's no human life at stake.
I think they try to pretend that there's not because it's a very ugly thing to say, Actually, it's okay to kill human beings sometimes.
They don't want to make that argument.
So they often say things like, you know, abortion is healthcare, or this is a basic medical decision between a woman and her doctor.
This is something we've been hearing since back before Roe v.
Wade, the idea that this is healthcare.
And I think they use that as a way of kind of avoiding the question of what's actually going on in an abortion, which is it kills a human being.
And is there any corollary besides abortion where people in our society think it's acceptable to say, oh, well, whether to kill that other human being is just a decision between that person and their doctor or that person and their best friend or what have you?
Abortion is the only context in which anybody would argue that sometimes it could be a medical or healthcare decision whether or not you're going to kill another human being.
And they make this argument because they're trying to avoid admitting that abortion kills a human being.
But if you tried to pretend that it was healthcare to kill your mom because she was annoying you, obviously everybody would think that was insane.
But they use this language about the unborn because they can get away with it and they don't want to talk about what abortion is.
What are some of the claims of the pro-abortion lobby in relation to poverty and fighting poverty and helping women out of bad circumstances?
Abortion supporters often argue that abortion is especially necessary for women in difficult situations, whether that's women in abusive relationships or women who are maybe in a low-income situation and need a better job or whatever it might be.
They argue that abortion is a solution for these women.
First of all, I think that's a very ugly claim, right?
If you're saying that these women are badly off in some way, and so the best thing we have to offer them, our best solution is an act of violence against their own child.
You're telling these women that their solution is to treat their child like their enemy, and somehow that's going to help them out of a difficult situation.
That's crazy.
But as a society, we don't do this with anything else, right?
If we went into kind of a struggling nation where people were starving and we killed a bunch of impoverished people, would we have made the country better off?
They have more food to go around.
They have more resources.
We don't actually solve problems by killing other human beings to make our resources more available.
What about the claim, you know, oh, well, you're giving a woman autonomy over her own body.
We're the pro-feminist, pro-woman faction.
Is that true?
Or does abortion really just put another undue burden on the woman and just let men off the hook?
Pro-abortion...
Abortion rights supporters often argue that abortion is necessary for women's autonomy over their own bodies.
The most important point to remember in this regard is that there's actually two bodies involved in an abortion.
There's the woman's body and the body of her child.
So it's not as simple as deciding what to do with her own body.
But there's a second question at stake here, which is, are women actually more free and more equal because of abortion?
Even just kind of tabling for a moment the question of the violence against the child...
Women are actually not better off as a result of abortion.
Oftentimes, abortion enables men to abandon women when they don't want her to be the mother of their child.
If a man gets a woman pregnant and says, you know, go get an abortion or you're on your own, is she actually better off?
What if she wants to keep the baby?
What if she wants to be with the father of her child?
She doesn't have that option because abortion says, well, you can go take care of it.
And a woman's way of kind of walking away from sex when she's pregnant is an act of violence.
And what should our society be advocating for if we truly believed in kind of the tenets of feminism, the tenets of women's rights?
What should our society be advocating for and what should our society be expecting of both men and women?
I think that women would be much better off in a society that totally rejected abortion.
It's a fundamental lie that creates an anti-woman culture.
When you say that a solution to women's problems is an act that pits her against her own child, that creates a societal understanding that women are kind of expected to At the very least, be open to the possibility of killing their child in order to sort of advance themselves.
Whether that's, you know, women can only make it to the corner office if they have access to abortion, or women can only, you know, achieve the educational goals they have if they have access to this act of violence.
That does not create a pro-woman society.
A pro-woman society would say, Everything about women is good and ought to be embraced and accepted, including their ability to become pregnant.
And we should support that by requiring men to support women when they're pregnant, by encouraging marriage and family formation, by helping women who are unexpectedly pregnant carry their pregnancies to term, Retain their educational opportunities while being a mother, retain job opportunities if that's what they want while being a mother, as opposed to kind of rejecting pregnancy and motherhood and pretending we can get rid of them by killing unborn children.
And what about the argument that, oh, well, millions of babies would flood orphanages or if adoption is the only way for a woman to not keep her child, millions of kids will enter the foster care system.
What do you respond to that?
I think we would find in kind of a more pro-life society that many more women than we would expect would actually want to be mothers, especially if they were supported by the father of their child or by their families or communities.
I think we'd find a lot of women who actually want to be mothers.
And many women say they have fewer children than they want.
I think there's kind of a We've created this societal structure in which women feel like they don't actually have the freedom or the option to be mothers and to be supported in that choice.
And so I think if we had a truly pro-life society, you wouldn't actually have very many children flooding foster care or orphanages because either they'd be adopted by loving families, many of which are waiting and have no options for adoption, and many women would actually choose to parent.
And even if there are some unexpected consequences of, you know, a pro-life society, would any of them outweigh the saving of human life?
It's certainly possible that there would be downstream effects.
Of course, there will be downstream effects of making abortion illegal.
But the question is, is that a good enough reason to keep abortion?
And the answer is no.
Even if we have more children who need loving homes, even if we have more parents who need more societal support to raise their children, or other kind of societal decisions or changes we have to make in order to support life, It's going to be worth it every time because we're getting rid of a procedure that, again, kills innocent human beings.
How many children have been killed since Roe v.
Wade?
Somewhere in the realm of 65 million unborn children have been killed since abortion was legalized.
And with the change of technology, change of medical knowledge since Roe v.
Wade, do most doctors acknowledge that from conception it's a human being?
Somewhere in the realm of 95% of biologists affirm that life begins at conception.
And is abortion antithetical to the values of inclusion and equality defending the underprivileged in society?
Abortion is antithetical to the kinds of values we hear a lot about from progressives, whether that's inclusion, protection of the vulnerable, lifting up the underprivileged.
But it's also antithetical to America's founding values, you know, equal rights, human dignity, the protection of the right to life.
This is what our government was founded to do, and we're just blatantly contradicting that when we allow abortion.
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 Alexandra DeSantis, 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.
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I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Choosing Life Podcast.
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