It's in the Code ep 149: “Abortion Is Healthcare, Pt. 1”
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In this episode we address the first of what Stuckey identifies as progressive “lies”: “Abortion Is Healthcare.” In looking at her discussion, Dan offers an overview of the contradictions, fallacies, and revisionist history she uses to defend her views. He explores how she uses the precise rhetorical tricks she accuses others of using, and how her discussion of abortion contradicts her entire thesis about the dangers of empathy. Listen in to hear more!
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Hello and as always, welcome to It's in the Code.
The series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, your host, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
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Sort of social commentator, podcaster, etc.
And she's written this book.
Spent the last few episodes working to get to the substance of her book.
We've been sort of stuck in the introduction, looking at how she's setting up her discussion and so forth.
And now we're into the book itself, and it is organized into seven chapters, each looking to debunk what she takes as a lie told by progressives.
I should be clear.
I guess I believe all the lies that she lists.
They're all positions that I hold.
But each of these lies, as she understands it, is an expression of the toxic empathy she's working to combat.
They are lies that people come to hold because they fall prey to toxic empathy.
In this episode, we're going to look at the first of these so-called lies.
Quote, abortion is healthcare.
It's the title of the first chapter.
The book is just organized.
Lie one, lie two, lie three, etc.
Lie one, abortion is healthcare.
And as it's going to be true of every chapter in her book, as I said, I'm sort of reading this so you don't have to, but folks, I have to fight the temptation to go line by line by line and address everything, everything that could happen or be brought up in these chapters.
I can't do that.
I'm not going to try to do that.
We're not here for that.
We're going to hit what we can, and we'll just dive in, and we'll see where it goes, okay?
So, we will spend at least a couple episodes on this chapter, because there's a lot to say, but there's no way we'll get to everything.
So, back to the comments.
Please feel free to email, to reach out.
If you happen to be reading the book, or you're familiar with it, or you've got other questions about it that we don't get to, let me know, and maybe we'll have a chance to do that in a different context.
So, I want to start by noting some of the rhetorical moves and the contradictions and fallacies that Stuckey uses in her discussion.
And I think it's important because these are sort of overarching patterns in her style and her approach that really set up the more substantive claims that she makes.
And in fact, I think the cogency of her arguments depends on these kinds of moves that she makes.
And so they're important to see because if they're problematic, it renders all of her discussion problematic.
And again, I'm reading this as we go.
I have not read Chapter 2 yet.
I haven't read Chapter 3 yet, and so forth.
But I'd put money down that these are patterns that we are going to see repeated throughout the book.
So if we're alert to her rhetoric, it'll be easy to see just how spurious her thinking is.
And again, I'm looking at Stucky because she is indicative of broader discussions.
If you talk with proponents of high-control religion or most abortion advocates and so forth, you're going to hear arguments like the ones that Stucky makes.
So if you can be alert to what she is saying and how she's saying it, I think it's going to alert us to other people in our world who might be doing the same thing.
Okay.
And if you recall, if you've listened to last episode, She warns us to look out for these red flags, these rhetorical moves, because they're the signal that toxic empathy is coming.
She wants her readers to be on the lookout for them.
And it's telling because in her chapter on abortion, and again, I think this is going to be true through the book, she herself uses the same rhetorical devices she warns her readers of.
In other words, if we come to this armed situation.
We're on the lookout for them.
We'll find them in her writing.
Her discussion is so rife with fallacious reasoning and contradiction, there's no way we could even list every example, let alone discuss it.
And what she tries to do throughout is she tries to sway her readers to her position by using literally the same mechanisms that she accuses others of using.
And I want to highlight just a couple examples of this, okay?
So here's a really central one that sort of pervades the chapter.
She accuses, again, you'll remember this if you've listened to the last episode.
If you didn't listen to the last episode, it's sort of a brief summary.
She accuses progressives of using euphemisms to mislead people into supporting their positions.
There we go.
That was a hard sentence.
It's early in the morning.
And she also accuses them of using, quote-unquote, emotional language to manipulate others into agreeing with them.
And I talked about how these two things overlap.
Like, often when somebody uses a euphemism, there's an emotional import to it.
There's a reason that she's doing this.
Okay?
But folks, throughout her discussion, she routinely refers to abortion as murder, as the killing of innocent persons, etc.
Okay?
And that's before doing the work that you would need to do to try to show that those are terms that fit and so forth.
And why do I bring that up?
I bring it up.
Again, this is not unique to her to use that language.
I bring it up because those who don't accept that abortion is murder or the killing of innocent persons would, of course, accuse her of speaking euphemistically here.
They would say, hey, you're using a euphemism.
And the reason you're using a euphemism is that this language is obviously intended to evoke emotional opposition to abortion.
Of course we're opposed to murder.
Nobody's going to walk around saying, I'm in favor of murder.
So if we can get you to acknowledge that abortion is murder or use that language, you are going to be emotively moved to oppose it.
So if we're looking for her red flags, euphemism and emotional language, here it is.
Structuring her chapter right from the outset.
Now, it's worth noting, in my view, when we're talking about complex, inherently emotionally laden, moral topics, ethical issues, I think this is unavoidable.
Because one person's emotional language will be another person's factual statement.
If I were talking with somebody about abortion and I described it as the termination of a pregnancy, And they're really committed to the view.
They believe strongly that it is the murder of an unborn person.
They're going to accuse me of using a euphemism.
And likewise, I'm going to accuse them of using a euphemism.
And both of us are going to feel an emotional charge from the words that are used.
And folks, I think that when you're talking about things that are inherently contested and complex, that's unavoidable.
There is no quote-unquote neutral perspective from which to view these issues.
That's why they present themselves to us as morally loaded.
We don't feel that they are an issue of neutrality.
So that's a real thing.
So my criticism of Stucky is not so much that she uses the language that she does and that there's the emotional work being done as it is that she won't acknowledge that and that she has already positioned herself by writing the introduction as if what she's doing isn't emotionally loaded language, as if she is using neutral, simply factual language while her opponents are the ones that are using euphemisms.
Or emotional language.
There's a complexity to this that she cannot allow or acknowledge because her entire position is built on the notion that she is simply speaking the truth, that it is clear, that everybody else is wrong, that everybody else is misleading, that everybody else is lying, and so forth.
So that's why she's using this kind of language.
It's why she has set it up that way so that she can smuggle in her own Emotional language and quote-unquote euphemisms and have them pass a simple factual description.
So that's one example, one really egregious example of how she structures her chapter.
Her chapter is also rife with fallacies and contradictions, and I want to dissect one of the most egregious here, because it's the one that structures the entire chapter.
In discussing her move away from a position that allowed that abortion could be justified in some circumstances, she does this a lot.
She's trying to position herself.
As sort of sympathetic with an audience that's reading this that is probably a Christian audience, probably maybe not as extreme as hers.
She's trying to bring them to her view.
And she'll be like, you know, I used to think that.
When I was younger and naive and less biblical and less brave, I used to believe things like that.
So she'll talk about how when she was younger, she thought that even as a Christian, she thought that maybe abortion could be okay sometimes.
You know, that's the person that she's trying to talk to is somebody like that.
So she'll position herself that way.
And so she talks about what it is that moved her from that position.
And she writes that what changed her mind was this.
She says she, quote, wasn't considering abortion from the perspective of the child the procedure kills.
End quote.
It's on page five.
So here's the first issue.
If you're listening carefully, you already caught this.
She argues against empathy with a pregnant person.
We should not take the perspective of a pregnant woman.
We should not take the perspective of a pregnant person.
We should not view it from their perspective.
Why?
Because we should take it from the perspective of the child the procedure kills.
In other words, she doesn't reject empathy.
She just switches it.
She doesn't oppose empathy at all.
She just privileges an empathetic perspective-taking of the unborn child.
To a perspective of the woman or the person carrying that child.
So this whole book, about the evils of empathy, the dangers of empathy, her whole thing in the introduction about how you can't trust empathy to lead you astray, her entire chapter is built on an appeal to empathy for the unborn child.
On her own grounds, it's maybe the biggest contradiction you could have in the book.
Her entire chapter rests on empathy.
Okay?
But here's the second issue related to this.
That's a contradiction.
She's doing something contradictory, but there's a fallacy in here as well.
And here's where it comes in.
And we're not even getting to the question of when life begins, when personhood begins, etc.
We're not even getting into that.
Here's the fallacious part of this.
It is a fact that the fetus has not developed to a point and won't until years after birth.
The fetus has not developed to a point of having anything we could meaningfully describe as a perspective, quote unquote, at all.
In the most literal, technical sense of cognitive development, the fetus cannot have a perspective.
It simply does not have the equipment to have a perspective.
It doesn't have the cognitive capacity.
It has not developed to that point.
So when she claims to orient herself to the perspective of the fetus, That's not really what's happening because the fetus can't have a perspective.
Literally cannot have a perspective.
Literally is incapable of doing that.
And again, she's not unique in this.
I've encountered this argument many times.
You have to consider it from the perspective of the unborn.
They can't have a perspective.
So what's actually going on when somebody claims to speak from the perspective of the unborn is this.
They're actually projecting their perspective onto the fetus.
They're not speaking for the fetus.
They are not giving the perspective of the fetus.
They are projecting their perspective onto the fetus.
So, of course, surprise, surprise, when they project their own perspective, the fetus, quote, unquote, wants what she would want or what she would want it to want and so forth.
It's a complete fallacy, this appeal to the perspective of the fetus, because it's an organism that cannot have a perspective.
So not only does she evoke empathy to combat empathy in a contradiction of her position, she privileges empathy with a fetus that cannot have a perspective on anything.
This is a fallacy wrapped up in a contradiction.
She brings a fundamental contradiction to her own approach and then uses it, weaponizes it, as it were, in her argument by using fallacious reasoning of perspective taking of something that's impossible to do because...
And that's important because this fallacious appeal to empathy is the primary basis of her entire chapter.
And we can say more about that.
I want to move on.
I want to hit to one more thing because I say it's the primary basis of her entire chapter.
That's going to bring me to another overarching set of assumptions and presumptions that she has that I think it's important for us to see.
Okay?
We have seen...
And given her background, her conservative Christian identity, and so forth, given her biblicist claims, I think we could expect that that's going to figure really prominently, that that's going to be the basis of her chapter, and it really isn't.
Despite her claim to speak from a biblical lens and despite that background, she doesn't actually get to the Bible until 24 pages into a 33-page chapter.
And then she devotes two pages to the topic.
She spends twice as much time talking about just defending legal prohibitions of abortion.
She talks about the Bible hardly any, and that's significant given what she says is going to be her biblical perspective.
Now, I think that we can speculate about reasons for that.
Maybe her opposition to abortion isn't really about what the Bible has to say.
I think...
Both of those can be true.
She clearly presupposes in her discussion a Christian audience, so I think maybe she's just assuming and presuming certain things about the Bible.
She's not trying to persuade those who disagree with her.
She didn't write this book for me.
If you're listening to this series, she probably didn't write it for you.
She's trying to give conservative Christians a resource to defend their views.
She's trying to keep, I think, impressionable Christians from giving in to the idea that abortion could be defensible, that support for some level of abortion access could be necessary.
That's what she wants to do.
And as such, and virtually by definition, I think this is part of why she doesn't actually spend time talking about the Bible.
She is presupposing that her audience generally opposes abortion and that her audience knows that the Bible is clear in its opposition to abortion.
I think that's what she's presupposing.
She doesn't have to spend much time talking about what the Bible says because I think she believes and she knows that her audience already believes that the Bible is clear in its opposition to abortion.
And this isn't surprising.
It is a truism, a simple taken-for-granted fact within conservative It is a truism within those circles that the Bible condemns abortion.
It's not something that needs to be demonstrated.
It is simply known and to be true.
It is typical to hear this preached in churches.
It is taught in seminaries.
It is published in books, just like this one.
Opposition to abortion is then presented as the historic teaching of the church because it is presented as the timeless truth in the Bible.
The Bible condemns abortion.
Good conservative Christians believe the Bible and recognize it's fully authoritative, so good conservative Christians oppose abortion.
So within that frame, it is also a truism that this has been a consistent, defining feature of conservative Christianity.
And it's not just a truism, folks, within those circles.
The idea that opposition to abortion is a defining feature of historical conservative Christianity is such a truism inside and outside of conservative Christianity that it is typically not questioned at all.
Lots of people who are not part of conservative Christianity simply know that conservative Christians oppose abortion.
This is a defining feature of their identity, and this is what conservative Christianity is.
And I think that these are reasons why Stuckey spends hardly any time discussing the issue.
And why the discussion that she does give is really weak.
We're not going to spend a lot of time on her biblical discussion, but it could be stronger than it is.
Okay?
But given that taken-for-grantedness, that taken-for-granted perspective about opposition, it's worth remembering, and we have highlighted this a lot on Straight White American Jesus, it is worth remembering that biblicist conservative Christians have not always opposed abortion.
And I don't want to rehash all of that here.
But it's worth reminding ourselves of a few points because I want to circle back around to why this is significant for Stuckey's argument and evaluating it, okay?
And there's maybe no one better on this than a friend of the show, Randall Balmer, who's written about this a lot.
If you're curious about this, he wrote a really accessible Politico piece on the religious right and the abortion myth.
If you just Google Politico...
It'll come up if you want to take a look.
It's a quick read.
But here's the long and short of it.
Conservative Protestants, okay, the ones who insist on the inerrancy of Scripture, that the Bible is clearly and unequivocally condemns abortion, that it teaches that life begins at conception, etc.
Those people who take that as eternal, unchanging, divine truth, the way that the world was created and has always been, those same conservative Protestants did not widely oppose abortion until the late 70s.
and the early 80s, until well after the Roe v.
Wade decision.
Not only did they not oppose So just a few quick hits on this in case you've not heard those other episodes, in case this is new to you.
In 1968, there was a conference of evangelical theologians and ethicists and others organized by Christianity Today, the kind of flagship publication of the evangelical world.
And they came to the conclusion that there were, quote-unquote, disagreements about whether abortion was sinful, but the participants were in, quote, accord that abortion was necessary and permissible in some situations.
That was the general consensus.
Two successive editors of that publication, Carl F.H. Henry, in a bygone generation, was a huge theological name within evangelicalism, and Harold Linzel, they defended access to the practice.
The Southern Baptist Convention affirmed the need for abortion access in 1971, in 1974, which was after the road decision, and again in 1976.
Well-known and influential Christian ethicist Norman Geisler, you can still find his Christian ethics book.
I don't know what edition it's on now, but it's still out there.
He defended the practice on the grounds, and it's the first edition of his ethics book, and I have gone back and read this.
He defended the practice on the grounds that the unborn fetus was not a person.
Figures such as W.A. Criswell and Billy Graham and James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, a who's who of a generation of evangelical thinkers, did not oppose the practice.
Now, they all changed their positions later, but they did not initially oppose the practice.
Okay?
Here's the takeaway, and it's huge.
Here's why it matters that Stucky just takes this for granted.
Stucky has a take that...
There's a lie, and the lie is abortion is healthcare.
That's the title of the chapter, Lie 1, Abortion is Healthcare.
But to be clear, this lie, quote-unquote, was a typical conservative Protestant position until half a century ago.
Until half a century ago, most conservative Protestants, or at least the ones that wrote and published and taught, believed the lie.
So the truism that, first, conservative Protestants have always opposed abortion, and second, that they do so because of the teachings of the Bible, it's a myth.
And it's a myth that has held for less than half a century to date.
I don't want to delve anymore into that and the politics of it and how the myth came to be and so forth.
But what interests me here, what I want us to think about for just a few minutes, is how firmly this myth has taken hold as fact and the significance of that.
None of those well-known evangelical thinkers and speakers acknowledge that they used to support abortion.
If you go back and you read Norman Geisler's second edition of his ethics book, where he now opposes abortion, you won't find a note there where he says that in the first edition he didn't.
Jerry Falwell starts preaching against it.
You're not going to hear him offering a lot of public reflections about how he didn't before.
James Dobson became an ardent opponent of abortion.
He's going to be silent on the fact that he used to not be an opponent to it.
Most pastors are not taught in seminary that this is a relatively new dimension of conservative Christian theological understanding.
Virtually no one in churches has taught this.
In less than half a century, the history of conservative Protestantism has essentially been erased on this issue.
Why?
That's the question.
And it's so important for understanding what Stuckey is doing.
Why?
The simple component, I can imagine this if I talked to students, I said, why would that be?
And they'll say, well, people don't like to admit they're wrong.
Okay, those college seminary, those seminary professors, those big-name pastors, those ethicists and theologians, they don't want to admit that they're wrong.
Okay, but why?
Here's why I think it is.
If they admit their change in perspective, it threatens their claims to be quote-unquote biblical.
Because claims that the Bible is inerrant and authoritative, they also typically come with the claim that its teachings are clear.
That anybody can and should read the Bible, and if we come to it with sort of clear eyes, and we come to it with an open mind, and we come to it ready to receive truth, we can understand the clear teachings of God.
Why?
Because there's no point in appealing to the inerrant Bible if it's difficult to understand or difficult to interpret.
And the clarity of the teachings are also what, for most conservative Protestants, this is what makes people morally responsible to follow them.
They recognize that if you can't understand it, if it's so opaque that you can't make sense of it, it doesn't make much sense to say that you're obligated to follow, which you can't know.
So it has to be clear.
So if conservative Biblicists acknowledge that their views have changed, it means, number one, that they weren't good Christians before.
They were in the wrong.
And they're not going to do that because they're busy being authorities for everybody else.
It also means that their interpretation of the Bible has changed, which is exactly what happened.
Their interpretation of the Bible changed.
But here's what I think is going on.
If they were to acknowledge that, because people say this, why can't they just say, I changed my mind?
Or I read the Bible wrong before, or my interpretation changed.
Here's why I think they can't.
To acknowledge that opens up the anxiety about why.
My reading of the Bible changed.
It opens up anxiety about whether it will change again.
If we recognize that we were wrong, it opens up the anxiety like, what are we wrong about now?
Maybe the things we say about the LGBTQ plus community will change.
Maybe we're wrong about that.
It challenges that whole structure of authority.
And if they acknowledge that the Bible can, in fact, be hard to understand, leading to competing interpretations, again, it undermines the claims to biblical inerrancy.
It undermines their claims to speak for the Bible, to interpret it, that it's clear.
So that's the abortion myth.
That's what I think is going on.
I don't know if Stuckey knows that or not, but she certainly won't acknowledge it.
There's no acknowledgement anywhere that it's only in the last half century, out of hundreds of years of existence, that conservative Protestantism has come to this perspective.
Her discussion of abortion requires this mythic forgetfulness.
Forgetting The truth and the history of conservative Protestantism is required for her discussion.
Why?
Because she claims to view the world through a quote-unquote biblical lens.
This is a lens for her in fitting all the logic of Biblicist high-control Christianity.
This is a lens that can allow no ambiguity, no complexity, no change over time.
It is the lens that confers her supposed authority.
The entire reason, on her own reasoning, her own basis of rationale, the entire reason we should listen to her is that she is presenting biblical truth.
It's what allows her to view the world in stark either-or terms.
So we can see how all the pieces of this chapter that I'm highlighting here reinforce each other.
Everything is about reducing complexity, making things simple, Making things into an either-or choice and opposing us, the opponents of abortion, as the ones who are rational and biblical and moral and so forth, and everybody else is sinful or fallen or demonic.
She'll use that language in the chapter.
Casting things in stark either-or terms.
She needs this myth.
She can't make the simplistic claim she does without that presuppositions.
Which means, and here's the takeaway sort of all of this.
This is why it's important to understand all of this.
It's important to understand this when you engage somebody like her, when you're talking to Uncle Ron, whoever it is.
If we engage her thought, we have to recognize that we're not entering onto a level playing field.
She has already smuggled in completely false and simplistic understandings of the Bible.
She has smuggled in an understanding of cognitive development that doesn't exist.
She has used the same rhetorical devices that she has ruled as out of bounds in the introduction.
She has brought all of that in before a conversation ever even begins.
All of this, folks, is before we even get to the claims she actually makes, the things that she says about life and personhood and so forth.
Next episode, we'll take a look at just some of those.
Again, we won't be able to get to all of them, but we'll take a look at some.
Need to wrap this up.
As I said, it's a little bit longer episode.
We could dive more deeply into everything that we're talking about here, and we just don't have the time.
I've just been able to scratch the surface, but I've tried in this episode to highlight what I think are some of the most sort of evident and egregious and also important rhetorical devices that she uses, contradictions, fallacies.
There are others, but these are the ones that I think if we recognize them, we recognize how shaky a structure the entire chapter is.
Next episode, we're going to stick with Stucky's abortion discussion.
We're going to look at some of the more substantive claims that she makes.
We'll see where that takes us.
In the meantime, thank you again for listening.
Thank you again for the support.
Keep the ideas, thoughts, feedback coming.
DanielMillerSwadge, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
