March 27, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:13
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| Joining me today is the founder and president of Live Action, a pro-life organization which advocates for the dignity of all human beings, Lila Rose. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| I'm glad to be here. | ||
| Well, I'm glad to be here, too. | ||
| You had reached out to me like a year ago about having a civil conversation about abortion. | ||
| Is that even remotely possible? | ||
| We're about to do it. | ||
| We're gonna do it? | ||
| We're gonna do it. | ||
| All right, we're gonna see, because we do. | ||
| I think most people watching this from the beginning, just from the way I intro'd you, know that we have a different position on this, and that's okay. | ||
| I've had this debate and this conversation. | ||
| I don't even wanna call it a debate. | ||
| I've had this conversation with Ben Shapiro and a series of other people, but this is the one. | ||
| I mean, to me, abortion is the one that is the most polarizing and sort of, That just makes everyone absolutely crazy. | ||
| So let's put that there and here we go. | ||
| So just tell me a little bit about yourself first before we get into the specifics. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I head up this not-for-profit, but that's most of my time in life. | ||
| But I'm also big into my family. | ||
| That's really important to me. | ||
| I got married last fall. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| I actually have seven siblings. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, really pro-life. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Or my parents were anyway. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I live in Berkeley right now, Berkeley, California. | ||
| So, I'm born and raised in San Jose. | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| What are you doing up in Berkeley? | ||
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I'm having a good time. | |
| Yeah? | ||
| Are they okay with your alternative lifestyle up in Berkeley? | ||
| Yeah, it is very alternative. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| More people are open-minded on this than I think we give each other credit for because people just assume they have an opinion on it. | ||
| But once you start to engage and have a conversation, people can be very open-minded. | ||
| So there definitely are people that are just kind of your stereotypical, set in their ways, this is my ideology. | ||
| But I've had some really good conversations in Berkeley. | ||
| So I think people find it really interesting to see how people have either evolved or not evolved or changed or not changed when it comes to abortion. | ||
| Did you come from a family that was, well, I guess you just said your family was pro-life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Conservatives? | ||
| Republicans? | ||
| Yeah, I definitely think they identify as conservative. | ||
| They weren't necessarily activists. | ||
| So when I started live action, I actually started as a teenager, it was kind of an oddball thing because they were not out there doing pro-life activism or, you know, doing Wow. | ||
| activism of any really political kind. | ||
| But they were very, people that really cared, my family really cared about other people, | ||
| they cared about education, we were homeschooled. | ||
| So we had that alternative lifestyle. | ||
| They were kind of like hippies in a different way because they were all, you know, big family, homeschool. | ||
| We had like chickens. | ||
| We've got some chickens back here. | ||
| You can play with the chickens later. | ||
| I look forward to it. | ||
| So okay, so you got into this topic. | ||
| I mean you started doing activism related to abortion when you were in high school? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How did that possibly come to be? | ||
| Yeah, so we, again, it was kind of alternative. | ||
| I was actually taking like college classes when I was 12. | ||
| We had a really kind of mismatch or patchwork education. | ||
| We did all kinds of, you know, I was going to some high school classes, some college classes, so there was a lot of free time and flexibility in my schedule and I had a lot of A passion and ability to pursue things I loved. | ||
| And when I found out about abortion, I was just very, very concerned. | ||
| I was really interested in all kinds of human rights issues. | ||
| I was involved in volunteering with children with disabilities, volunteering with homeless ministry, house building in Mexico and Tijuana, famine relief in Niger. | ||
| So I was really into just wanting my life to be, you know, served, give back. | ||
| And when I found out about abortion, I started to really consider what was happening. | ||
| So there's 3,000 abortions every day in America. | ||
| So that's a million a year. | ||
| And I started to look at the fetal development and see just how amazing this little life is, even in the first trimester, that this is a life. | ||
| And just the violence abortion does to that life. | ||
| And I was learning all this as like, you know, in my early teens, I was just deeply struck because I thought, if this is really life, if these are really humans, like you and I are humans. | ||
| And you and I started, you know, Embryo Dave, you know, back in the day. | ||
| Embryo Lila. | ||
| And he's wearing the same jacket. | ||
| Very fashionable, I'm sure, in utero. | ||
| But we all started that way. | ||
| And I was just thinking, I thought, I realized, this is the greatest human rights issue. | ||
| I can get involved in a lot of other causes. | ||
| There's a lot of things to care about. | ||
| But this is life and death for 3,000 people a day. | ||
| And they're people that are not protected by the law. | ||
| They're seen as society as less than, not human. | ||
| And women, girls, I mean, as a woman and as a young woman, very young woman at the time, I just thought, I'm being told that taking this life is a good thing, can be a really good thing for me. | ||
| And I just thought, how can this be? | ||
| This is a violent act. | ||
| So that really inspired me just to begin live action. | ||
| And the idea was, I just need to get a group of friends together. | ||
| To do community education, basically community organizing to educate other young people in high school and junior high about what abortion actually is, about embryonic and fetal development, about the risks to women. | ||
| No one talks about the risks to women. | ||
| About the way it's harmed society and how this is not peace and justice, this is actually violence and injustice. | ||
| And if we want to be better together and be more loving and be more compassionate, we need to eradicate this altogether from our society. | ||
| Okay, so I want to touch on a lot of those issues that you just brought up. | ||
| So you start live action as a young teenager. | ||
| How did it go? | ||
| Were you immediately attacked? | ||
| Did your friends all want to join on board? | ||
| I mean, what was that like? | ||
| To just put yourself as a young person out there, because I get so much email now from kids that are in high school that whatever their issue is, they're starting a young libertarian club or something, and just the amount of hate that they deal with and all that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean we definitely got a lot of rejection because very few people, like when we were pursuing schools to give presentations at schools or even churches, we even got rejection from churches because we wanted to go and we developed this very professional presentation on like the facts, right? | ||
| And we got training and we really did our research and we developed this whole program and literally it took a whole year to convince the first church to let us come in and give a presentation to the youth group there. | ||
| And it took, you know, several months and into years to really start getting | ||
| schools to allow us to come and give presentations. | ||
| But we did and it made-- | ||
| Why would you be getting pushback from churches that I assumed were completely ideologically aligned? | ||
| Well, just because you're ideologically aligned in theory doesn't always mean you're aligned in practice. | ||
| So unfortunately, even in the church and a lot of Christian communities, | ||
| abortion isn't talked about. | ||
| Women are having abortions. | ||
| Even some people are encouraging women to have abortions, like even pastors in some situations, | ||
| like privately behind the scenes, if their daughter gets pregnant. | ||
| So there's some really awful things that happen like that. | ||
| And there's this fear of offense. | ||
| It's a fear of offending their congregation. | ||
| or it's just this wanting to be Mr. Nice Guy all the time, or Mrs. Nice Guy, or nice girl, whatever. | ||
| And so people are afraid to talk about the tough things, even when, according to the research that has been done, | ||
| the people who are having abortions, as many people identify as Protestant or Catholic | ||
| as secular and not know religion who have abortions. | ||
| So you have people who are maybe not going to church every Sunday, but who have some sort of faith background, who are not really educated and not really empowered, so they're also having abortions. | ||
| So that's part of the battle, is getting this message, forget what your religious label is, getting it to people so it really touches their hearts, and then you make inroads in the church community to provide the support for women who face unexpected pregnancy. | ||
| Were you shocked at just how hard it was just getting the conversation going? | ||
| Because the way I always frame this is, if you listen to, you know, broadly speaking, if you listen to how the media deals with this, is if you're on the right, that means you hate women. | ||
| You want to somehow control women. | ||
| And if you're on the left, and you're pro-choice, that means that you hate babies. | ||
| I mean, that's basically how it's framed, and not just through the media. | ||
| That's basically how our politicians are framing it. | ||
| How did you find you could sort of get past just the box that people look at this in? | ||
| You just talk to people. | ||
| I mean, listen, most of our impression of what the left really says and the right really says, or what abortion advocates supposedly are saying, meaning just a normal person who identifies as pro-choice, like their representatives in media, versus what we see or what we think are the representatives for pro-life often displayed in media, are not the actual fullness of the position. | ||
| And they're not actually dialoguing. | ||
| So the benefit of being a teenager at the time and talking to, like, sitting down with the youth pastor or going to the school administrators and trying to get inroads was that I was able to just talk to them as a human to a human and discuss what we could bring to the table, discuss, you know, our program. | ||
| And it wasn't, you know, two people debating in five-minute segments on a TV show, you know? | ||
| So I think when people actually talk to each other in their communities, Things change, you know, when they actually have a respectful dialogue. | ||
| It doesn't seem that way, though, if you were to watch TV or look at news headlines, because it looks like the world is so crazy polarized. | ||
| Yeah, so, okay, so if we were just sort of starting from the beginning here, if you were sitting across from somebody, and let's say they were neither here nor there on the issue, they didn't feel strongly either way, or they just wanted more information, what are some of the things that you would be telling them? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I would start by, first of all, finding the common ground with them. | ||
| I would say, you know, do you think, and I'd ask you Dave, you know, do you think that it's always wrong to intentionally take a human life, an innocent human life? | ||
| Like, is it always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life? | ||
| And pretty much like 99.9% of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to wait on answers so that when we get to our differences, I think it'll, it'll have a little more weight. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's intentionally wrong to indirectly, to directly take an innocent human life. | ||
| And I was like, okay, great, we all agree. | ||
| So number two, abortion is the intentional and direct taking of an innocent human life. | ||
| And that's usually where people are like, really, tell me more about that. | ||
| And then obviously the last conclusion would be, therefore abortion is always wrong. | ||
| But then we have to unpack, well, why is abortion always the intentional and direct taking | ||
| Well, first of all, we know, because science shows us, that a unique individual human life begins as a single-cell embryo at the moment of fertilization. | ||
| Like, you and I both began our life that way, and from that moment, our sex was determined, our eye color, our hair color. | ||
| Within three weeks, our heart started to beat. | ||
| Within six weeks, our nervous, our brain waves are starting to, you know, can be detected. | ||
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Within seven weeks, So you believe that life begins at conception? | |
| I wouldn't call it a belief, I'd call it an acknowledgment. | ||
| An acknowledgment that life begins at conception. | ||
| And then we know, like you actually look at abortion procedures, there's no debate. | ||
| I mean, they intentionally, directly dismember, disembowel, destroy that child, that life, that human life, in the first, second, and third trimester. | ||
| So because of those two facts, abortion, the intentional taking of an innocent human life, is wrong. | ||
| So, okay, so there's a lot of ways we could go here. | ||
| So, all right, we'll do some of the more science-y stuff first. | ||
| In cases where there's a threat to the mother, we'll just rifle off a few of these, what position do you think is right or just or fair? | ||
| Yeah, that's a very good and important question. | ||
| And there are certainly cases where pregnancy can have complications or severe complications. | ||
| If those were to be the case, The intentional direct taking of that innocent human life and abortion is not a medical treatment. | ||
| This is a big confusion that often happens in kind of pro-life, pro-choice, soundbite debating. | ||
| Like, we're not actually talking to each other because they're like, well, women need abortion for health. | ||
| And when you actually unpack it, early delivery, so in some severe cases, for example, if there are ruptured membranes or infected membranes inside the uterus, so that, you know, those are attached to the baby. | ||
| In some cases you might have to, for severe infections that's starting to form, you might have to deliver the baby early. | ||
| That's not an abortion. | ||
| That's not targeting the baby's body for destruction using forceps or using drugs. | ||
| That's delivering the child because she or he is attached to a part of the woman's body that's causing infection. | ||
| So that would not be an abortion. | ||
| And pro-life and pro-choice agree that in some cases that may be necessary. | ||
| And, but for any other case, like for example, if I get chemo, or if I get cancer and I need chemo, you don't have an abortion. | ||
| You might choose to undergo chemo, and that's in targeting the cancer cells, might harm the baby, and the baby, there might be miscarriage, but that's not an abortion. | ||
| So you can do any number of treatments as a woman who's pregnant who might have complications or might have other conditions, but the direct taking of that life, going in there and targeting that baby for destruction is not a medical treatment. | ||
| Right, so are there no cases where it's a direct threat to the woman's life that then... There are cases where things related to pregnancy might be a threat, like for example, ruptured or infected membranes. | ||
| But in that situation, delivering the child early, that's not going in there to tear the child apart with... I mean, the way abortions are done, abortions aren't done through... Right, but in effect, if the child wasn't ready to be given birth to, Right, and that would be a really tragic case. | ||
| But in that situation, there should be careful management of the pregnancy to try to allow that baby to live for as long as possible in the womb so that there would be a chance for the baby to be delivered alive. | ||
| But the point is, not using just a forceps and a lethal injection to kill that child before delivery, but trying to give that child a chance. | ||
| And if that child were to die after delivery because he or she is too preemie, too much of a preemie, and you know, preemie keeps getting pushed back and back, as you know, like 21, it's 21 weeks now that some babies and a half that can survive after birth. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| They're so teeny. | ||
| But we should at least give them a chance. | ||
| And it's a total mentality shift. | ||
| The mentality shift is, are we going to attempt to save this life? | ||
| This life of the child as well as we treat the mother? | ||
| Or are we going to just say, this life is not a life, right? | ||
| And we can target his or her body for destruction before birth. | ||
| Okay, so that's dealing with health of the mother. | ||
| So what about cases of where it's health of the fetus or of the child? | ||
| So I know somebody within the last year or so that had an abortion a little bit after 20 weeks, I think, because the child had severely, severely underdeveloped brain. | ||
| And the doctor said this was not gonna be anything remotely close to a functional life if it survived in the first place. | ||
| So where do you stand in a case like that? | ||
| I mean, I would first say, if there was a toddler with a severely underdeveloped brain, is it okay to take the life of that toddler? | ||
| Because you have a severely underdeveloped brain, or you have even a life-threatening condition, like you have a terminal illness, does that mean you should be killed? | ||
| You know? | ||
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What? | |
| Like, why don't we treat you with love and try to eliminate the suffering and not the sufferer? | ||
| Or try to serve the patient and not see them as somebody that we could just kill? | ||
| So I think we just need a total mentality shift. | ||
| And if we acknowledge that these are humans, like a toddler or an infant is a human, if an infant is a human, then before birth that same child, whether it's weeks or months earlier in their development, is a human. | ||
| Humans beget humans. | ||
| It's not like a different species. | ||
| This is a human. | ||
| Individual, unique life. | ||
| They deserve the same care and protection that an infant does. | ||
| So we shouldn't, we don't leave infants to die. | ||
| We shouldn't leave infants to die because they have a life-threatening condition or because they have a severe disability. | ||
| So does the state then owe the mother or the parents, let's say, anything? | ||
| If the state, let's say there's someone, like this case I just laid out to you, where this | ||
| person, they just disagree with your premise there. | ||
| They just feel that they should be allowed to do what they want. | ||
| But then the state says, "No, you cannot have that abortion. | ||
| You have to bring this child into the world." | ||
| And now, let's assume that the child survives. | ||
| It has all sorts of problems that they don't want to deal with. | ||
| And the state forced them to bring it to term. | ||
| Do you think there's any responsibility of the state there? | ||
| Because this is where I find a little bit of the conservative argument to be tough because it's like, well, okay, I get it. | ||
| You're trying to protect life. | ||
| I can go with you on that. | ||
| But then at the same time, if you're using the state to force that, well, you also don't want the state to be supporting people and now you have a little bit of a chasm there in the logic. | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I'd say, first of all, you have to be consistent. | ||
| If it is, he or she is a life before birth, then, and she's a life after birth, if she's a life after birth, she's a life, he or she is a life before birth. | ||
| So, you know, if you're looking at it from the pro-choice perspective of it's not a life, then you can do whatever you want. | ||
| Like, I don't, you know, if you can prove to me this is not a human life, I'm fine, you do whatever you want. | ||
| Right, so I think that would be, in my view, that would be a pretty extreme position. | ||
| I don't find that many people saying it's not a life after a certain amount of weeks. | ||
| But I think that we need to be consistent. | ||
| If you're a human life, do you have human rights? | ||
| You know, I think it's just about consistency. | ||
| So this is the logic side, and then I'll address what you're describing as the compassion side. | ||
| But I think we have to be logically consistent, because we kind of like-- it's like our brains start | ||
| turning off, I think, sometimes on this. | ||
| If he or she is a human life before birth-- | ||
| and science could conclusive about that. | ||
| The United Nations Declaration, Universal Declaration on Human Rights, says that all members of the human family | ||
| have these rights. | ||
| And then in Article 6, it says that these are anybody who's a member of the human family | ||
| has a right to be seen as a person under the law. | ||
| These are members of the human family. | ||
| They're smaller. | ||
| They're more dependent. | ||
| They're very fragile. | ||
| They need time and nourishment to grow, but they're members of the human family. | ||
| So they deserve to be treated that way. | ||
| But in the case you mentioned, I think it's obviously very complex because if you have socioeconomic struggles, you're not able to care for a child with serious disabilities or a life-threatening condition, a terminal illness, then yes, I think that there needs to be appreciation for | ||
| that. | ||
| And our society, our community should be supporting those families. | ||
| And if the family's really not able to care, the parent's really not able to care, there | ||
| should be a way that they can place that child for adoption or find other caretakers for | ||
| that child. | ||
| And those-- | ||
| Do you think that's on the state, though? | ||
| Or do you think that can just be done with churches and synagogues and other-- | ||
| I think it's best-- | ||
| I think it's best done by people closest and most intimate in the community. | ||
| So I'm a big believer in subsidiarity, so this idea that the best solutions for a community will be as localized as possible. | ||
| That being said, there will be situations where the community isn't available, or somebody fails somebody, and so I do think that there should be backups. | ||
| I think that, you know, I think a lot of the systems we have in place, they're very imperfect. | ||
| Like, you know, for born children, for infants, for children who suffer serious disability, for infants or children from families that are not taking care of them, you know, with addictions or abuse. | ||
| You know, I think the foster care system needs a ton of work. | ||
| I think that, but I'm grateful that it exists. | ||
| You know, I'm grateful that we have some programs, some state programs. | ||
| I think the more localized and the more we can empower local communities, the better. | ||
| So I'm not against those things. | ||
| I think they need to be improved. | ||
| But I think those same things should apply to the child before birth. | ||
| It's not, again, we have to be consistent. | ||
| If this is a human life, they deserve protection just like a born life, whether you're before birth or after. | ||
| Yeah, so when we talk about the science part of this, if something in science, I mean, a lot of this has to do with the way people just view, I think, the nature of reality and really, you know, science versus belief. | ||
| I mean, it's all here, which is why this topic is so difficult to talk about. | ||
| If science could somehow prove to you, let's say, that life, in essence, doesn't begin until three weeks in, Could that shift your position on this? | ||
| That the egg meets the sperm, okay, conception, but then for three weeks, whatever that is at that point, it actually doesn't qualify as life by a sort of technical scientific term. | ||
| I feel like even the question's a little bit of a contradiction just because you said three weeks from something is when life begins. | ||
| Well, three weeks from what? | ||
| Well, that's why I brought up the question, because this is where everybody's definition of everything, I think, is, you know, you can look at a three-week fetus, is obviously very different than what it's gonna look like at six months and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, but you looked really different as a baby. | ||
| Like, you know, baby Dave had a massive head, as did I, right? | ||
| So, humans are supposed to look different at different stages of development. | ||
| But I think, look, what is the IVF specialist trying to get in a lab? | ||
| What are they obsessed with getting when they're trying to create life in a test tube? | ||
| They're obsessed with getting the meeting of a sperm and an egg, the fusion, that moment of fertilization. | ||
| Then they have a single-cell embryo, and they know that, and they'll tell their client, the family, we have, you know, ten embryos. | ||
| You can implant three or whatever, right? | ||
| I mean, they're obsessed with getting that moment, that special moment in a test tube because that moment means something. | ||
| And the science on this is conclusive. | ||
| What that moment means is you have a unique individual life that needs nourishment to grow. | ||
| So it cannot survive outside the womb. | ||
| It cannot survive outside the test tube. | ||
| It needs a ton of support to grow. | ||
| But if you give it that support and if you don't interrupt his or her life, kill it, Then he or she will become one day an adult. | ||
| One day we'll grow into the person and then eventually pass away as we all know we die. | ||
| So that is human lifespan and that's conclusive. | ||
| There is that meme that I always find it's hard to get my way out of which it's like they'll show like a month old fetus and they'll say that everyone agrees that this is life and then they'll show or that everyone on Everyone on the right basically will agree that this is | ||
| life. | ||
| People on the left will say this isn't life. | ||
| And then they show a speck of something on Mars and they'll say, "All these scientists | ||
| say this is life." | ||
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And it's like, "Ah, that's a big..." | |
| But it's human life. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of life out there. | ||
| But we're talking about something very special, which is human life. | ||
| And that's why even the United Nations, and I don't know if there are United Nations fans | ||
| here, but even they have said that this is life. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the United Nations, generally speaking. | ||
| Well, me neither, actually, for a lot of reasons, but they actually, you know, are contradicting their policies, but their principles say, you know, all members of the human family. | ||
| All members of the human family. | ||
| So, you know, and I think, look, it's not just right versus left, I think, on this. | ||
| You know, I'm from California, I live in Berkeley right now, I went to school at UCLA, like, I've met people on left and right who are pro-life and in the pro-life movement there are atheists, | ||
| there are secularists, there are people who are more left-wing who are also pro-life. | ||
| So this is unfortunately it's seen in the media and it's because the Democratic Party | ||
| has like abandoned pro-life ideas, which is really sad because I think you, there are | ||
| pro-life Democrats out there. | ||
| I think a lot of Democrats are pro-life. | ||
| Actually, the majority of them want abortion restrictions, but they're not getting their day. | ||
| They're not getting representation. | ||
| They're getting these crazy senators, like all the Democratic senators who are running for office, like Kamala, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Warren, Bernie Sanders. | ||
| I mean, I guess he's not Democratic, but he basically is. | ||
| All of them are the most pro-abortion people ever. | ||
| They're for abortion through all nine months. | ||
| Right, so okay, so let's bring that to sort of where I'm at, because they are making my life difficult for this, because I often describe myself as begrudgingly pro-choice. | ||
| I view this as, I think I view this probably as horrifically a choice as you do. | ||
| You don't think it's a choice per se, but I view the idea here as probably as horrific as you do. | ||
| I don't think that something at 18 weeks is not a life. | ||
| So when I discussed this with Ben Shapiro, my position, this was I think a little over a year ago. | ||
| And the clip really took off. | ||
| My position at the time was that at 20 weeks, there is more than ample evidence that the fetus can start feeling pain. | ||
| And I would view that up until that point, that I would leave the choice with the mother. | ||
| That it's not a good choice. | ||
| I'm not defending the choice. | ||
| I'm not moralizing about the choice. | ||
| But that's just the position that I would want the power to be with the person that is here and now. | ||
| Now, Ben said to me something that you already alluded to, which is, well, if you're saying it's a life at 20 weeks, you're obviously acknowledging it's a life at 18 weeks. | ||
| And to be logically consistent, I had to concede that point because, yes, I am acknowledging that. | ||
| I'm just allowing the life that's here and now to sort of supersede in the decision-making. | ||
| But why do we have this mindset? | ||
| Like, let's imagine, I mean, there are women that kill their infants. | ||
| They're born alive infants. | ||
| I mean, there's just a horrible case in Texas, this poor girl who, you know, gave birth and stabbed the baby to death, and now she's being tried for murder, you know, the very severe penalties, which is a whole other debate, right? | ||
| But it's like, why aren't we consistent on this? | ||
| Is it because the infant or the 20-week-old can feel pain? | ||
| Is pain the kind of ticket to legal protection, like my ability to feel pain? | ||
| Because what if I was paralyzed and I couldn't feel pain? | ||
| Right, so again, I don't think it's a perfectly airtight, logical argument. | ||
| My deference, though, is to the mother. | ||
| Now, I would say this, and this is why I prefaced it by what you just did with the Democrats right now, is that they have now gone seemingly so far Extreme on abortion where it's now we're talking late trimester and then there was that really awful video of the the governor of Virginia, right? | ||
| Yeah Talking about decisions that could be made after birth. | ||
| Yeah, they've gone so extreme that I'm finding I'm finding I'm finding holding What I think is a somewhat moderate position here. | ||
| I'm finding to be just very difficult Yeah, I mean I hear you and I think it's because they're actually being consistent. | ||
| That's the thing, on abortion, I don't think that you can have a, when it comes to looking at when life begins, when life should be protected, I don't think you can have a moderate position. | ||
| It's either it is a life and it should be protected, he or she should be protected, or she or she is not a life And we as adults, the strong people in the room, the mom or the doctor, we get to decide when that life deserves protection or when that life can be killed. | ||
| So I think that actually, in a way, as repulsive as the Democrats' crazy abortion through all nine months, Leave the infant to die after birth. | ||
| As crazy as it sounds to most people, they're actually being consistent because they're saying, well, it's a helpless dependent infant slash fetus slash embryo. | ||
| I decide as the adult when I can confer on, you know, the value on this. | ||
| I get to make the final medical decision, right, as they see it, a medical decision. | ||
| So leave me alone. | ||
| Like, leave me alone, state. | ||
| Let me do what I want to do. | ||
| And yeah, I think that they're actually being Consistent if they really think that we have the right to take some lives So how much of this discussion is just that you think people don't really think through their positions? | ||
| Because like I I've thought about this a lot and I get you I really I hear you and I find this you know who knows what I'll what I'll think in in 20 years and we're right and who knows what you'll think in 20 years or Whatever, but that's what really thinking through an issue is about. | ||
| And, you know, there's also an irony here because, you know, for someone like myself, if you take a classical liberal or libertarian position on this, you believe in the individual above anything. | ||
| So my position has been, well, in the individual, I'm looking at it through the woman's choice. | ||
| Now, I get the counter argument. | ||
| I've heard this from a lot of libertarians. | ||
| Well, if you really believe in the individual, there's an individual right there. | ||
| The fetus is the individual. | ||
| But how much of this is just that people don't People don't want to do this. | ||
| Yeah, I think it is a lot of that. | ||
| I think that most people would actually come to the pro-life position. | ||
| And when I say pro-life position, that's so, I think, weighted down with these, like, political, you know, edge to it, like, well, that means you're, like, a Republican and you love Trump if you're pro-life. | ||
| It's like, no, that's actually not true. | ||
| You know, pro-life, it says all humans are, all human lives are precious and have the same human rights. | ||
| I mean, I think that's the pro-life platform, you could say. | ||
| Um, and that starts in the womb, obviously, and it ends at natural death. | ||
| But, yeah, I think a lot more people would be more open-minded and more willing to, like, acknowledge human life in the womb and see the violence of abortion if they had the conversation. | ||
| But we just assume that the other side is wrong. | ||
| You know, we assume, and people, I think, when it comes to pro-life, if they're pro-choice, they assume that's just what the crazy Republicans believe. | ||
| Or that's what Trump thinks, or that's what Trump is doing. | ||
| And then they're afraid. | ||
| I think that's the other thing, is fear. | ||
| People are afraid. | ||
| And even what you were saying, Dave, about being moderate on this, I think there's this fear of women are gonna be set back. | ||
| Mothers are gonna be set back if abortion is illegal, if abortion is rejected societally. | ||
| Right, well, it's always framed as a woman's right issue, or a woman's health issue, I should say. | ||
| Right, which is extremely misleading. | ||
| Because, I mean, the first, a key part of the Hippocratic Oath on healthcare is do no harm. | ||
| And actually, the original Hippocratic Oath, which is that all doctors and medical personnel had to take this oath saying that they would actually not administer abortion. | ||
| Because abortion is doing harm to the second patient, to the child. | ||
| It's killing that child. | ||
| So we have to have a paradigm shift on this. | ||
| And we also have to see that there is responsibility that is involved. | ||
| I mean, I'm not saying that any woman who gets pregnant, she has to parent that child and be involved in that child's life for life because that may be something that's really difficult for her or something that she's not able to do. | ||
| But I think we need to take more responsibility for each other. | ||
| I think that's part of the message too. | ||
| So then going back to the question that I asked earlier, do you think that a sensible thing for the pro-life movement to do, let's say, and this is a strange hint that I might be giving you, would be focusing more on what's done after. | ||
| So we framed that before within whether it's done through the church or some other private organization, but if the focus was there so that you could take the pressure off all of the men and women who You know, they're sort of somewhere in the middle, but they're really concerned that if you're going to force people to do this, you're going to bring all these unwanted pregnancies and all of these things out there, and then you're going to have, or you're going to have more women, you know, going to back alleys and all that stuff, so that if your focus maybe was there a little bit more, maybe that would do something. | ||
| I'm really just spitballing this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is the pro-life movement's focus. | ||
| I mean, again, this is totally the misrepresentation, I think, of our Mm-hmm. | ||
| of our work and of the movement's work to people who disagree. | ||
| I mean, again, people who disagree are likely not gonna be getting their news | ||
| from people who are pro-life. | ||
| People who disagree are gonna be getting their news from organizations, like the New York Times is pro-abortion. | ||
| I mean, the Washington Post, the editorial boards are pro-abortion. | ||
| They explicitly are in support of abortion. | ||
| You know you're not gonna get me to defend mainstream media here, right? | ||
| Now you're just giving me red meat. | ||
| My point is that you don't know what's going on in the pro-life movement because people haven't taken the time to look. | ||
| The pro-life movement has thousands, more than abortion clinics, thousands of pro bono, confidential pregnancy and early childhood care support facilities, places where they provide prenatal support, | ||
| they provide ultrasound, they provide parenting classes, baby clothes, diapers, and then when the | ||
| child is still an infant, they'll try to help place for jobs, they'll try to do | ||
| resume work, they'll do all kinds of amazing things. | ||
| And there's thousands of pregnancy centers across the country that are designed for this. | ||
| And the social safety nets that we do have in this country are designed for young mothers | ||
| and for young families as well. | ||
| Those exist. | ||
| Churches that are doing support, you know, connected to pregnancy care centers. | ||
| So there's a ton of stuff out there. | ||
| Like here in L.A., there's several of them. | ||
| And I volunteered at them, you know, when I was a student. | ||
| So they're out there. | ||
| They're just not getting any press. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| People just don't know about them. | ||
| So what about the... So we do care. | ||
| We care about... You have to be consistent, I agree. | ||
| If you're pro-life, you can't just be like, I just love the baby before he or she was born. | ||
| We love the baby, period. | ||
| We love the life, period. | ||
| And there's work being done for children both before and after birth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what about the sort of like nitty-gritty legal parts of this? | ||
| Because the discussion about abortion often is just framed through Roe v. Wade. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I don't have to ask you where you fall on Roe v. Wade, but it is one of those positions where, again, and I say this is begrudgingly pro-choice, And I hear you, and I really do hear you on these arguments, I really do. | ||
| But as a states' rights guy, because a lot of people think that Roe v. Wade was about making abortion legal, which isn't the case. | ||
| This was that it was federally mandated. | ||
| It stripped away states' protection. | ||
| So Roe v. Wade basically said, You can't ban abortion in your state. | ||
| You're not allowed to. | ||
| Abortion is a right. | ||
| You need to allow abortions, and that's actually part of a women's right in your state. | ||
| And look, I mean, you could do this, you could kind of walk back to another human rights abuse our country both profited from and perpetuated, which is slavery. | ||
| And you know, you had this situation where you had some states who saw the person, the slave, as three-fifths of a human, | ||
| literally three-fifths of a person, and then you saw some states who said, "No, these are | ||
| persons." | ||
| I don't think states should get to decide that some humans are persons and other humans | ||
| aren't persons. | ||
| I'm with everybody's a person. | ||
| If you're a human life, you're a person. | ||
| Now, how we care for you and protect you is going to be complex. | ||
| That's a whole other question. | ||
| But I'm also for states' rights. | ||
| I think we're a very big, diverse country. | ||
| I think localization is important for laws and for both laws, safety nets, how communities are governed. | ||
| But I don't think that we should get to decide whether some people live or die. | ||
| It's interesting because this is where, because we don't have these conversations enough, you don't hear people explain that properly because you hear a lot of people on the right will say that they think it's an overstep by the courts of what the Constitution should be laying out in terms of states' rights and the individual and all that. | ||
| You're saying that, even though you're for states' rights, that you don't even think this is a states' rights issue. | ||
| It's not, yeah. | ||
| I mean, again, it all comes back to, is he or she a human life? | ||
| And do all human lives deserve protection? | ||
| I mean, again, I know it's hard to be consistent in that way because we have these competing concerns, especially ones that have been heavily branded and promoted, like this idea of women's rights, this idea of choice. | ||
| I'm for women's rights, by the way. | ||
| I'm for choice. | ||
| I'm for bodily autonomy to the degree that I'm not interfering with somebody else's right to live. | ||
| But again, I can't interfere with somebody else's right to live, and if I have a child within me, that is a responsibility I do have, to a degree at least, and other people should be helping me with it, but that doesn't mean I have the right to end the life of that child. | ||
| Okay, so let's go to just some of the seriously unpleasant parts of this when we see videos of what an abortion is like and all of these things and undercover Planned Parenthood things where they talk about, you know, throwing body parts into a garbage, I mean, horrible, horrible stuff. | ||
| I guess I want to give you an opportunity to just address some of that. | ||
| Obviously, it's not that shocking to you of what's going on here. | ||
| Well, I've been inside abortion clinics. | ||
| I mean, I've done investigative reporting and I know people, you know, obviously David has done the investigative reporting exposing the body parts trafficking that happens at abortion facilities. | ||
| He and I work together, so I'm very familiar with that really ugly side of it. | ||
| So what does that actually mean? | ||
| That they're actually aborting fetuses and then selling the body parts? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, now they would say, we don't make that much money off of them, so it's not really selling. | ||
| But they're making like $70, $80, $90 a body part. | ||
| And if you've got five body parts, if you've got a heart, a liver, a brain, you know, you could be making $400, $500 off of each fetus, off of each baby. | ||
| $500 off of each fetus, off of each baby, and on top of the $500 or $400 or $600 abortion, | ||
| you're talking about a thousand bucks plus an abortion then, all in profit or all in | ||
| net money coming in. | ||
| So it is an industry. | ||
| The government's funding it. | ||
| People don't realize this, but the National Institute for Health has a budget, $100 million | ||
| in the last reported year goes to research on aborted baby body parts. | ||
| So, think about that. | ||
| The government literally has this hundred million bucks, millions of dollars, which is for these researchers, and so they're going to go buy, they need their stuff. | ||
| They need their body parts. | ||
| So, where do they go? | ||
| Abortion facilities. | ||
| And they're going to be like, you know, it's profitable for the abortion facility to do business with the middleman who then hands it off to the experiment, you know, the person experimenting on these children's bodies. | ||
| Where does Planned Parenthood fit into the equation? | ||
| So they sell, they've sold body parts and they continue to sell body parts. | ||
| In fact, the district attorney here in Orange County shut down a middleman that was doing business with Planned Parenthood to buy body parts from them to then sell them off to medical experimenters, you know, who are doing experimentation on them. | ||
| So Planned Parenthood is one of, I mean, they're the biggest abortion chain. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people don't know this about Planned Parenthood because they're like, Planned Parenthood, you know, Well, you always hear people say it's less than 1% of their activities or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, even the Washington Post has given that three Pinocchios, you know? | ||
| Slate has called it very misleading that they do 1 or 3%. | ||
| The fact is Planned Parenthood is the biggest abortion provider, so they commit over 300,000 abortions annually. | ||
| That's almost a third of the national abortion rate. | ||
| They're the biggest kind of single chain that is doing abortions. | ||
| That's 900 abortions a day, 900 lives taken a day, up to 24 weeks. | ||
| So even past the point you say you're okay with, these are children that are viable. | ||
| But all of the abortions are wrong, are taking innocent human lives. | ||
| And that's a lot of dead bodies that they could do business with middlemen to get them off to labs where they're experimented on. | ||
| Is there any country in the West that's doing the laws in a better way? | ||
| In a better way within your estimation? | ||
| So Malta. | ||
| Malta has really better material. | ||
|
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I don't know that Malta has ever been referenced on this show before. | |
| Well, go Malta, you know? | ||
| Malta's really pro-life and no abortion is permitted in the country. | ||
| Ireland was very pro-life until abortion activists, a lot of them imported from the UK and from other countries, went there and said, no, this is going to be, we've got to legalize it. | ||
| So wait, let's just back up though. | ||
| So in a country like Malta, are there numbers on how many women are now actually going to back alleys? | ||
| And what is actually the state doing after? | ||
| And that's a great question, Dave, because I think that is a fear that motivates pro-choice people sometimes, like, well, women are going to go to back alleys. | ||
| That's actually a myth. | ||
| That's actually a myth that all these women are going to do back alley abortions if abortion is illegal. | ||
| Before abortion was legal in this country, the supposed deaths from back alley abortions were in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands that were claimed. | ||
| And the reason we know this is, first of all, the CDC was reporting in the hundreds, but the tens of thousands that were claimed, that they said, well, tens of thousands of women are dying right now, We're fabricated numbers, and the people that made up those numbers later on admitted it. | ||
| So Dr. Bernard Nathanson was an abortionist. | ||
| He helped found the National Abortion Rights Association, so NARAL, and he later became a pro-life activist, this guy, and he said, we made up the numbers. | ||
| We were just trying to, like, get our agenda through. | ||
| So we literally made statistics up out of thin air. | ||
| What was it that changed him? | ||
| I'm sure there's an interesting story there. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of things that changed him, but eventually, because he's doing all these abortions, and eventually he just saw, and you know, as he was looking at the ultrasound of what he was doing, and the child basically running for his or her life, I mean, from the suction, he just was like, I can't, this is, all of a sudden it clicked for him. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of a mysterious thing, why didn't it click before? | ||
| But it clicked for him, and he just thought, I can't do this anymore. | ||
| And at the same time he was having his own faith journey, like believing that human life is made by a God, a creator who loves us, and that also was beginning to move his heart on it. | ||
| So it took him years to kind of have a full 180 on it, but eventually he became a pro-life activist and said, I was a mass murderer. | ||
| He wrote books about his experience and said, I took 70,000 lives and shared that. | ||
| So we discussed a little bit about the belief part, and you mentioned that there are non-believers that are pro-life. | ||
| You really never hear about that. | ||
| Do you find that they have different issues that they're thinking about or struggling with? | ||
| Meaning if you're not of a religious background? | ||
| Yeah, because the general picture of someone that's pro-life is usually just like a Christian conservative. | ||
| I mean, that's generally what it is. | ||
| You don't find that many Or you just don't see publicly that many atheists or just more secular pro-life people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, first of all, I didn't always identify as a Christian. | ||
| You know, when I was in high school and as a teenager, I actually ended up becoming a Catholic in college, but it was after my own journey of discovering what I believed. | ||
| And whether I knew for sure what religion I identified with, if at all, I knew that it was wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life. | ||
| I think, again, if it goes back to the facts of this, and it goes back to being consistent, it doesn't matter your worldview. | ||
| It doesn't matter your religious background. | ||
| It doesn't even matter your political affiliation. | ||
| Nothing matters except, do you believe human life should not be intentionally killed, innocent human life? | ||
| And is the child in the womb an innocent human life? | ||
| But that being said, I think there is a growing amount of people, even in the public movement, who don't identify with the religion. | ||
| who are atheists, I know some of them personally, atheists, or part of very left-leaning causes, other causes, | ||
| who are pro-life and see it from a scientific and logical perspective, | ||
| and from a human rights perspective. | ||
| But there are a lot of, obviously, people of faith who are pro-life, | ||
| I wish there were more, just because, there are people of faith who are out there being Christian | ||
| and they're not doing anything about abortion. | ||
| This is the greatest human rights issue. | ||
| There are thousands of children being killed every day, and women facing an unexpected pregnancy at churches. | ||
| And it's not talked about enough in churches. | ||
| So just because you're a Christian or conservative doesn't mean you've got it all figured out. | ||
| Have you found counterparts on the pro-choice side of this that are willing to have this discussion? | ||
| Because originally when I think you reached out to us, or maybe it was on Twitter, at first about coming on the show, I thought, alright, well I should do this one as a debate. | ||
| And then I thought about it a little bit longer and I thought, you know what, no, let's do one Just with you, so we can hear your ideas without it, you know, without entering the fray, and then I'll find somebody. | ||
| It will be a lot easier to find someone on that side, right? | ||
| And do that, and then maybe we'll do this as a debate then, or a conversation, or something. | ||
| Yeah, I'd love to do a debate. | ||
| Yeah, and I'd be happy to do it, but I wanted to do it separately first, just so that all the ideas can be out there. | ||
| Do you find that you can find people on the pro-choice side of this that will debate you in an honest and even way? | ||
| Because I don't have to tell you, I'm finding it harder and harder. | ||
| It's really hard, Dave, to find people willing to debate about this. | ||
| that will do these types of debates without attacking you personally and your motives and-- | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| And things of that nature. | ||
| Yeah, it's really hard, Dave, to find people willing to debate about this. | ||
| I have been on shows like radio shows, TV shows, and Planned Parenthood has been invited, | ||
| and every time they've declined, like Planned Parenthood spokespeople or representatives. | ||
| And I was actually on a live radio show. | ||
| It was somewhere in the Midwest. | ||
| And the Planned Parenthood director of that Midwest affiliate was on the other line. | ||
| She had been invited. | ||
| And when she heard my voice and she heard who I was as a pro-life activist and she heard me talking, she literally hung up. | ||
| She ditched out of the show. | ||
| ditch the show. | ||
| So I have seen in the pro-abortion world, I call it pro-abortion because I don't think, again, | ||
| there is middle ground on this, but in that pro-choice world, | ||
| it's very hard to find people willing to have the debate, especially on live TV or in a longer, | ||
| or a format where it's filmed or people can watch it later. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting because that, I just find so consistent with everything that's happening | ||
| on the left these days, on every issue. | ||
| If you want to talk about climate change, they won't talk about it because you have to accept their position first, or whatever. | ||
| And again, I say that as someone that's not fully where you are, obviously, but I'm finding it more difficult and more difficult that they're in an odd way, they're staking out religious positions. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting, it's like, it's the new Pharisees, you know, it's like, I'm so holy, I'm so right, I'm not even gonna deal with your dirty, you know, people that just don't agree with me, and like, you know, I'm the one who's pure, I'm the one who's compassionate, I'm the one who's correct. | ||
| And yeah, it's really vicious and it's really bad for everybody, you know? | ||
| What do you think the pro-life community generally thinks of Trump at this point? | ||
| I mean, he's probably, in a weird way, been the biggest supporter for you guys in modern times at some level, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he has been very supportive in many ways. | ||
| I was very skeptical when he ran for office. | ||
| I did not vote for him in the primary, and I was really concerned. | ||
| I thought he was potentially just kind of tricking all of us or trying to trick people, you know? | ||
| Even when he had Mike Pence come on as the VP, because Pence is super pro-life, and he has been consistently politically for years. | ||
| I was encouraged by that, but I was also like, is this like your token pro-life Pence? | ||
| you know, on the ticket. | ||
| But he has, the administration has done some very pro-life things, which I'm really grateful for. | ||
| I find it really sad though, that, you know, the one that's most pro-life, | ||
| as far as the policy is concerned, you know, he reversed the Mexico City policy, | ||
| which is international funding for abortion. | ||
| He defunded Planned Parenthood. | ||
| Wait, let's talk about that one for a second, 'cause that was actually, I think, | ||
| one of the first things that he did, and it sort of went under the radar. | ||
| And then I saw these people arguing about it, and it's like, so we were actually funding abortions | ||
| overseas, not overseas, but in Mexico. | ||
| Beyond our borders, for some reason, we were using American tax dollars to do that. | ||
| Do we even know why? | ||
| Why was that policy even in place in the first place? | ||
| That has nothing to do with whether you're pro-choice or pro-life. | ||
| That's just like, why are we funding abortions anywhere? | ||
| Why are we funding these type of things outside of our borders? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, population control is a lot of it, and that is rooted in eugenics. | ||
| So the early eugenicists in this country were also Margaret Sanger and her friends. | ||
| She founded Planned Parenthood, and they used forced sterilization. | ||
| She promoted forced sterilization. | ||
| Margaret Sanger, who is the founder of Planned Parenthood, she actually designed the one-child policy. | ||
| She wrote out a proposal for a one-child policy. | ||
| If you were a parent, you were not allowed to have more than one child, the state would force you to only have one offspring. | ||
| And that's what China's doing right now. | ||
| I mean, they've kind of expanded it to maybe the two-child policy. | ||
| But it's really horrific. | ||
| I mean, it's this idea that the government gets to decide what happens in reproduction. | ||
| So the whole thing about pro-choice is actually the opposite of it. | ||
| It's like, so not choice that you are forced abortion, forced sterilization. | ||
| And in some of these developing nations, I know stories, and these are anecdotal, so | ||
| we don't, it's hard to even know the full body of research on this or know what is actually | ||
| going on, but I have anecdotal stories of women who went to family planning clinics | ||
| in Mexico or family planning clinics in some African nations that are UN-operated, funded | ||
| by, have been in the past funded by US tax dollars, and they were, without their consent | ||
| or knowledge, were given IUDs placed in them that they then didn't know how to deal with. | ||
| I mean, they would, you know, years later, this one woman had migraines, she had all | ||
| these health conditions, she didn't know what was wrong with her, finally they discovered | ||
| this old IUD in her that had been in her for like 15 years and was potentially, could be | ||
| life-threatening. | ||
| So there's all kinds of weird stuff happening where the rich... | ||
| Right, I suppose that depends how far you want to go down the rabbit hole of what the rich elite maybe in the UN are doing. | ||
| They're looking at impoverished countries and they're thinking, hmm, what are we going to do with impoverished countries or countries that are struggling? | ||
| Let's make sure they have less children. | ||
| Why not better education, access to clean water, better infrastructure, better democracies? | ||
| Why are we just going to try to kill off or limit their ability to have children? | ||
| I mean, it's a really terrible approach. | ||
| I think in many ways it's racist and it's discriminatory just because people are poor against them. | ||
| Because you're poor, you shouldn't have children. | ||
| Right, it's one of those things, I mean, to be funding these things beyond our borders, the United States, remove the U.N. | ||
| for a second, but for the United States to be doing it, such a strange thing. | ||
| Well, we're funding it within our borders. | ||
| Well, whether you're for it or not, doing something within your borders is one thing, doing something outside of your borders is something else. | ||
| It's our, I think, you know, we're gonna go save the world, America's gonna save the world. | ||
| Yeah, America can do good in the world, for sure, but you're not saving the world by going off and helping other people kill their offspring. | ||
| I mean, that's just not... | ||
| Good. | ||
| So what is the funding situation? | ||
| Yeah, so I you hear a lot about this about how much we either give tax dollars for abortions and Planned Parenthood or they'll say no, it's 99% private or Extremely confusing information that that again, it's one of these things. | ||
| It depends who you follow on Twitter to Basically decide what you think on this. | ||
| So what do we need to know about funding? | ||
| Yeah, so here are the basic numbers and again, I'll explain what the opposing side may say so we for you know To maybe show where the disconnect is, but there's over half of a billion dollars going to Planned Parenthood from U.S. | ||
| taxpayer sources. | ||
| So that's federal money, and it's going down through the states, being distributed through Title 10, historically. | ||
| That's what President Trump just cut, actually, his administration, and through Medicaid, largely. | ||
| There's all these other teeny little pocket streams of money as well. | ||
| So Planned Parenthood says, well, we're not, they're not funding our abortion because we're using this to reimburse for ultrasound or reimburse for condoms or reimburse for, you know, a pregnancy test or whatever. | ||
| The problem with that is those reimbursements are helping fund the infrastructure at Planned Parenthood where they're committing abortions. | ||
| And some of those other services like ultrasound or pregnancy tests are done around the abortion service. | ||
| Right, so it's like the precursor, basically? | ||
| Yeah, and it's just the money's fungible. | ||
| Like, you know, it's kind of like saying, like, we're not going to fund the, you know, fund steak, you know, people eating steak because it's wrong, eating cows is wrong, or, you know, or turning the environment, whatever, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so we're not, but we're still going to fund steak houses half of a billion dollars a year. | ||
| It's like, well, it's only paying for the ketchup and the french fries and like, you know, it's just like, come on guys, like, it is funding a corporation that has increased abortion numbers over the last 10 years. | ||
| And a lot of their other services have actually declined. | ||
| Is there any other funding that the US provides that's outside of Planned Parenthood? | ||
| You mean to abortion providers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not typically, unless they find ways to reimburse for similar things that Planned Parenthood is doing. | ||
| So there is a Hyde Amendment where, I actually take that back, because in some states like California, you can reimburse directly for abortion. | ||
| So that's the state money. | ||
| So we're just talking federal money. | ||
| That's half of a billion dollars. | ||
| So Planned Parenthood, if you went to a Planned Parenthood in California, if you qualify, you could reimburse for an abortion, even a late-term abortion. | ||
| in our state and other states. | ||
| So that's a big chunk of money and it's hard to even track that money | ||
| because every state tracks it differently. | ||
| But yeah, I think the fact that they're funding the infrastructure for Planned Parenthood, | ||
| they're funding the ability for it to market itself, build relationships and communities, | ||
| turn the lights on, hire the staff, it all helps them increase their abortion business. | ||
| Do you know the numbers or the specifics on states that, so I get your position on Roe v. Wade, | ||
| I would assume a state like Mississippi still probably has the tightest laws around when you can have an abortion versus a state that I suppose like California that probably has the most lenient? | ||
| I'm just picking those two, but I'm guessing I'm not that far off. | ||
| Yeah, there are some states, like for example, Ohio recently passed the heartbeat bill, which would try to ban abortions once the heartbeat can be detected. | ||
| The problem is... Usually when is that? | ||
| That's at just three weeks, basically, 21 days. | ||
| Amazing how quickly. | ||
| Most women don't know they're pregnant at that point. | ||
| They haven't even necessarily missed their period yet, or they might just start to be missing it. | ||
| So anyways, yeah, I think there are states that are trying to ban abortions, like, past the first trimester, or in the first trimester, but they're being hit with challenges, because that's where Roe kicks in. | ||
| You know, Roe says, Roe and Doe, which are two different cases, and then KCV Planned Parenthood, these different legal precedents after Roe that basically say, if you're a state, it's really hard for you to ban, or nearly impossible for you to ban abortion, you know, before viability. | ||
| Or if you create too much... So then the discrepancy is when is viability, right? | ||
| Right, and that, you know, medical advancements have pushed it further and further back. | ||
| You know, now a child can survive at 21 and a half weeks, it's incredible, who was born completely preemie. | ||
| And that may continue to push back, but again, it's so arbitrary. | ||
| It's like, why does that define whether or not you should live or die? | ||
| You know, how advanced medical technology is, whether or not you can be killed or not. | ||
| So you would argue that then this law in Ohio, the Harpey Law, is basically, you would say that's a good first step or something. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| We celebrate any laws like that. | ||
| And there are some states which are also trying to limit abortion by making abortion facilities have to have standards like hospitals. | ||
| So that's another thing that has made some progress. | ||
| What standards are they held to now? | ||
| So for example, ambulatory hallways. | ||
| So you're able to fit your, you know, a stretcher through the hallway so that if there's a woman | ||
| who starts hemorrhaging, which has happened, you know, happens sometimes with | ||
| abortion, she can be carried out on a stretcher. Or the doctor has to have visiting privileges at | ||
| a nearby hospital. So if she goes to the emergency room afterwards, I mean, I just knew a | ||
| friend who recently had to go to the emergency room who had an abortion, and you need to have | ||
| the doctor be able to accompany you or know who your doctor is, have admitting privileges. | ||
| But again, abortion advocates are against all of these things. | ||
| They think abortion facilities basically should have as few regulations as like a dental clinic, or even less actually, like a tanning salon, you know? | ||
| Because again, it's this idea, this ideology, they say women's right, don't interfere whatsoever. | ||
| So what state's the most lenient? | ||
| If Ohio is sort of doing it right, in your estimation, what state would you say is sort of the most out there? | ||
| Well, New Mexico's really out there. | ||
| It's abortion through all nine months for any reason. | ||
| So that really is real? | ||
| So that means that you can have a perfectly healthy eight-month fetus? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| And you don't have to have a medical excuse, you don't have to have a... No. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is where I just, I can't, I got nothing left, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's happening. | ||
| People don't even realize. | ||
| When New York happened... Are there numbers on how often that happens, say, after... It's really hard to track. | ||
| After that 20 weeks or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, it's really hard to track. | ||
| We know it's in the tens of thousands. | ||
| But it's hard to know exactly, you know, because some of the state reporting, like California doesn't report to the CDC how many abortions it does, or how late term they are. | ||
| So the national numbers, I mean, we know tens of thousands, but we don't know beyond that. | ||
| We don't know what else is happening in some of these states. | ||
| What New York did is already being done in seven other states. | ||
| Abortion through nine months. | ||
| But we just, again, people just don't know. | ||
| Media is not reporting on it. | ||
| Wait, so the New York thing, which just happened, and there's a very, I thought it was a very chilling video, I mean, I tweeted it, even though I wasn't thrilled to do it, of all of the state legislature cheering this bill. | ||
| So that bill allowed it under any circumstances through nine months? | ||
| In New York, they said, well, if there's a health, or it could be emotional health, or mental health reason, economic reason, that the mother and the doctor decides. | ||
| So that's really saying it for any reason. | ||
| Because if I go and say, you know, I'm not feeling like doing this because I just think it's not convenient for my life right now, it's not good for my life right now, and you got the abortionist to sign off on it, which, you know, they're making up to $20,000 for a late-term abortion, then you're good to go. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And then they had the statue, not Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building was in pink or something. | ||
| Yeah, the World Trade Building lit up in pink to celebrate the late-term abortion passage. | ||
| I mean, this is where I say it's like they're making my... | ||
| What I would again say is a pretty moderate decision and you know you're saying that 21 weeks now because science has advanced that a fetus could be you know livable and it's like all right well I'm talking about the 20-week pain thing and if I that had I could probably if we did this long enough you could get me to move forward on that Well, let's say it's 16 weeks. | ||
| And again, I'm conceding that because that was the exact conversation I had with Ben, where he said, well, if it's at 18 weeks, and I can't deny that, but then when they take such an extreme position, and I think this is what's happening all over the political landscape right now, we have sides taking just extreme positions all over the place, so we get pulled in ways that maybe aren't the default places for us. | ||
| I think that's true about policy decisions. | ||
| Like, how do we deal with environmental concerns? | ||
| How do we deal with healthcare? | ||
| How do we deal with tax policy? | ||
| What do we do about the poor? | ||
| What do we do about homelessness? | ||
| Like, there's so many... What do we do about education? | ||
| You can have extreme policy positions, but with pro-life, it's not about policy, it's about fundamentals. | ||
| It's about, do human beings have the right to live? | ||
| And does the state, is it the state's duty to do their best to protect them, even if it's a complex situation? | ||
| Because in a situation where, you know, there's, for example, child abuse, right? | ||
| If a family is abusing their children, the state isn't inspecting every home to see if, you know, child abuse is happening, right? | ||
| So similarly, if we made abortion illegal, it's not like the state's going to be inspecting every pregnancy. | ||
| They will have to, we'll have to deal with it. | ||
| We'll have to deal with that complex situation. | ||
| But it comes back to, Are we about protecting human rights, the right to life, or not? | ||
| And that's why with pro-life, I don't really see it as one extreme versus another. | ||
| I actually see the Democrats' position right now of abortion through all nine months as the logical, consistent argument coming from this idea that human life in the womb does not have value, does not have legal rights. So you're really giving the devil his due | ||
| there. You're saying, all right, if this is what you guys want, then this actually all makes sense in a weird way. | ||
| Yeah, because if it doesn't have legal protection at 19 weeks, why should it have legal protection at 20? | ||
| All right, so one more for you. | ||
| And then I promise you, we will do this. | ||
| If I can get someone that will have this conversation in good faith, we will absolutely do it. | ||
| And I welcome people to give us some recommendations in the comments below. | ||
| What kind of cost has this had for you to just do this? | ||
| This is not the type of thing that you're going to get invited to the parties at Berkeley and the cool parties in LA and everything else. | ||
| Just putting yourself out there on something. | ||
| I know about getting hate online. | ||
| What does this cost you? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've gotten my share of hate online over the years and, you know, death threats and weird attacks and stalkers and just very, you know, fake porn websites set up about me and just very weird things over the last 10 years doing this activism and doing reporting on this. | ||
| But I put it all in perspective because I think, look, we live in one of the freest and most prosperous nations, | ||
| despite these horrible blights that we are struggling with. | ||
| In the past, it was slavery. | ||
| In the past, it was women not even having equal rights under the law as men. | ||
| And now we have abortion. | ||
| So we are dealing with our crap. | ||
| We have this stuff to deal with. | ||
| But I feel very privileged. | ||
| And so when I do experience attacks, it helps me to put it in perspective. | ||
| And then also just the incredible reward of seeing lives being saved. | ||
| I mean, I've been privileged to see lives being saved because of the work that we do. | ||
| Like, women who learn the facts and they say, I could never do this. | ||
| I'm just not going to have an abortion now. | ||
| I'm canceling my appointment. | ||
| And we get pictures of, like, the newborn. | ||
| And we just start crying, like, thank goodness that this happened. | ||
| Thank God that this happened. | ||
| So it's incredibly rewarding because we're dealing with life and death, so it's extremely painful because we're dealing with really horrific violence, but we're also seeing lives be born and live and thrive, and that's what it's all about. | ||
| Well, this is what it's all about for me. | ||
| I mean, this is exactly why I do the show, and I'm thrilled that you came in here, and we'll continue this conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
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Awesome. |
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