It's in the Code ep 150: “Abortion Is Healthcare, Pt. 2”
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Allie Beth Stuckey offers reasons for opposition abortion access that are typical of the anti-abortion movement. In particular, she argues that abortion is the murder of an innocent human person. She also tries to show that anti-abortion advocates affirm a full “culture of life,” and are not only concerned with the unborn. But are her arguments convincing? What does it mean to be a “human person,” and why does this matter? Can a theologically conservative Christian like Stuckey even affirm that humans are ever truly “innocent” in the first place? Does she really show that conservative Christians care about human life in a holistic way that encompasses more than the unborn? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan answers these questions.
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Hello and as always, I want to welcome you to It's In The Code podcast series that is part of Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
I am your host.
Glad to be with you.
As always, this is a series that is driven by you, your comments, your feedback, your insights, your ideas.
Please keep them coming.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, input, additional topics, problems, challenges, disagreements, whatever you've got.
I would love to hear them.
I respond to as many emails as I can.
I know it's not all of them.
But I do value listener input so much on this.
Also value all of you who support us in so many ways, and in particular those of you who are subscribers, helping us keep doing the things that we're doing.
Just a couple people, and we put out a lot of content, and we can't do it without you, so thank you for that.
I want to dive into this week's episode.
I was joking with a friend recently that episodes are all just getting longer.
Like, I don't know.
Soon I'm going to be doing like an hour episode every week or something.
I'm just kidding.
I have no intention of doing a full hour.
I hope not to do a full hour, but this series has been hard to keep on a leash because, as you probably know if you have been listening, we are taking a deep dive into Alibeth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy, part of the current right-wing diatribe against the evils of empathy.
I'm reading this book so you don't have to, and folks, it's bad.
It's bad.
There's a lot of stuff in here that's just...
And it just, it deserves some comment and some commentary and some decoding, and that's what we're going to do.
Last week, we started looking at her discussion of abortion.
Again, the book is organized into seven chapters, each focused on one of the so-called lies the progressives tell.
As I said last week, there's seven chapters, seven lies.
Folks, I believe all seven of the lies that she says that we need to reject.
And the first lie is abortion is healthcare.
So this is her chapter basically arguing against abortion.
It's her anti-abortion chapter.
And last week we looked at a couple of the overarching fallacies and contradictions that structure her argument.
I want to stay with that chapter.
I want to stay with that theme of abortion this week.
And here I want to focus on three issues which represent her responses to some of the most substantive issues that arise in debates about abortion.
Here are some overarching themes or patterns or contradictions in what she's doing.
This week gets more into the substance.
When we get to actual arguments and discussions about abortion, and if you have participated in these kinds of arguments and discussions, if you have friends or family or colleagues or what have you who are on different sides of this issue, you've engaged in those discussions, you will have encountered many of these kind of substantive concerns.
And that's what we're going to look at.
And I'm going to dive into three this week.
Again, the caveat, all of them could take more time than we have to give them.
Again, I invite you to give me your feedback or your thoughts on that.
I have been responding to some of those things in our bonus episodes, and so this could be a fair game for that.
A reminder that our next bonus episode will also have a component where subscribers can join us live and do a Q&A, so if you've got thoughts, I'd welcome them in that context as well.
Let's start with this.
Let's start with the big question that hovers around issues of abortion, the question of personhood, okay?
Opponents of abortion have argued forever that life begins at conception.
And as many people have noted, both proponents and opponents of abortion access, it's an almost undeniable position from a strictly biological point.
But it has turned out that it's also pretty vacuous.
And why?
Well, because there are all kinds of quote-unquote life that we don't preserve just because it's life.
And abortion opponents have increasingly come to realize this.
In other words, they've increasingly come to realize that the argument that life begins at conception maybe doesn't do the work that they want it to do.
So in recent years, and we've talked about this on Straight White American Jesus, in recent years a newer, more robust claim has been advanced, and that is that the unborn fetus is a human person.
Not just something that's alive, but a human person.
And the rationale behind this move is clear.
What is it?
Well, if we call the fetus a person, that will confer the rights and protections on the fetus to which other human persons are entitled.
That's why you define it as a person.
And then it's entitled to all the same rights and protections and so forth as any other person.
And this is the line that Stuckey takes.
And it will not surprise you.
To hear that I have all kinds of issues with her discussion.
She is not a person for nuanced or complex thought, and she pretty consistently conflates the notion that the human is person with the idea, excuse me, that the fetus is human or a human life, that the fetus is alive, conflating that notion with the idea that it is a human person.
And that's an important distinction.
Again, few people will deny that it's a kind of biological life.
It's a nascent biological organism.
But the claim that it's a human person, that's hugely debatable.
And so she often simply treats those things as if they're equivalent.
They're not.
That might be strategic on her part.
It might just be a lack of sort of recognizing the move that she's making.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
Because what the debate about personhood comes down to is the question of exactly when personhood begins.
That's the issue.
And we're not going to settle that debate here.
We're not going to try to settle that debate here.
This is not the space, and I'm frankly not prepared to fully settle that.
I'm not sure if I fully know what I think about exactly when personhood begins.
We're not going to settle that debate.
But what I want to look at, and this is the kind of thing we do in this series, is I want to highlight how Stuckey appeals to the idea and why.
And again, I want to keep this in front of us.
The reason we're talking about Allie Beth Stuckey is not Allie Beth Stuckey.
The reason we are talking about Allie Beth Stuckey is that Allie Beth Stuckey is typical of the kinds of arguments and all the things she talks about that you will hear if you encounter people on the religious and political conservative, if you encounter the Christian nationalists, if you grew up in high-control religion, you will have encountered many of these arguments.
Some of them are ones about trans individuals and so forth, or maybe newer.
Those weren't discussions that happened when I grew up within that context, but abortion certainly is one of those.
So one reason we're looking at Allie Beth Stuckey is, in many ways, she is typical of the kinds of arguments you will hear.
She's also hugely influential in those circles.
She has a large audience, and so oftentimes when you encounter people who say these things, she might be the one that they heard them from.
And so I want to take a look at what she says and why I think it doesn't work.
So the obvious and pretty well-worn response to this line of reasoning that says the human fetus is a person is to say that personhood doesn't correspond to something that occurs at conception, but it's something that develops later.
In other words, that if we acknowledge that the fetus is an unborn human, fine, that doesn't mean that it's a person.
And Stucky is aware of this, and she responds to this, and she responds to it to dismiss it.
And what she does is kind of interesting.
She cites the moral philosopher Peter Singer.
She doesn't actually cite his work.
She's got a number of endnotes in this chapter that take you to sources, some of which are dubious, some of which are not.
We're going to talk a little bit about that next episode.
But she cites and summarizes some of the positions of Peter Singer, who's a well-known ethicist, if one studies ethics.
But she doesn't actually cite his work.
She doesn't direct you to where you could actually go and look up his stuff.
But he famously argues that humans don't become persons until sometime, years, after birth.
So on his argument, abortion would not be the killing of a human person.
And people, you know, could take different lines on that.
But that line of reasoning that personhood is something that does not accrue at conception, that's a typical line.
And here's where it's important, though.
To see how she appeals to this philosopher.
She's not engaging him as a philosopher.
Her discussion is not philosophical.
But I think when we see how she makes use of this, why she's citing Singer, we get a window into her overall reasoning.
Because Singer recognizes and accepts.
I went back and reread his argument this week.
I figured out where the book is.
It's called, what is it called?
It's called Practical Ethics.
I went and got his book and had been rereading that section, hadn't read it in a long time, so I know what he says, okay?
He recognizes and accepts that on his account, newborns are also not full persons, which would mean that the death or killing of a newborn does not represent the death of a human person.
He recognizes that.
Now, I want to be clear, he does not advocate infanticide.
Stuckey suggests that he does, that he's an advocate of infanticide.
He isn't.
Stuckey, like many, many opponents of abortion, is fixated on the idea that people who believe that abortion should be legal, that people need access to abortion, that we all want to commit infanticide, that we all think it would be great and okay to murder babies.
Singer doesn't say that.
He doesn't suggest that.
We're going to talk, again, more of how this works in Stuckey's thinking next week.
But she suggests that he does.
But he does say...
Why?
Personhood for him requires that we have self-awareness, that we have a conception of ourself as distinct from other persons and so forth.
A newborn obviously doesn't have that.
Okay?
And she suggests that this would be an idea that would be abhorrent to many people, and so she takes that as grounds for dismissing the notion.
He says babies aren't persons.
People would think that's terrible, so his position doesn't hold.
That's what she says.
Here's where she makes what I think is the really important move, the thing that I want to decode that I think it's important to understand.
On a way of thinking like singers, what he's suggesting is that there is no simple or clear way to determine precisely when the mark of personhood is reached.
It's not clear exactly when.
A human becomes a human person.
And her move is to do this.
Her move is to say that because we can't define precisely when personhood begins, that is evidence that the argument should be dismissed.
Because anything else seems arbitrary.
Singer can't even tell us when babies are persons or humans become persons.
Dan Miller can't tell us exactly on what date and time.
The human embryo or the newborn baby or the toddler or whatever counts as a quote-unquote person.
That's nonsense.
The argument should be dismissed.
So what should we do?
Well, we should just accept that personhood starts at conception.
Essentially, it's conceptually easier.
So we should accept that, which would mean that fetuses at all stages of development are persons.
Okay?
Now, But you're having trouble figuring out why.
I'm going to try to explain why I think it's not right.
And I hear that from people a lot.
They're like, I don't think that works, but I'm not sure exactly why I think that doesn't work.
Here are the reasons why I think it doesn't work.
And I recognize I'm moving fast.
Again, email me, follow up.
Maybe we can talk more about this.
Her thinking is fallacious.
It's a fallacy on both philosophical and experiential grounds.
So here's the philosophical fallacy.
And I owe this insight to a friend and colleague named Andrew Dole.
He's a philosopher, not in the context of abortion, but it's an insight that I'm borrowing from him.
I want to credit him with that.
Here's the philosophical fallacy.
The fallacy is the idea that because a concept is inherently vague, a concept like person, That that means it is false or meaningless.
In other words, there can be concepts that are meaningful, legitimate, and useful, even though they are inherently vague.
And the classic example that philosophers talk about, and they actually do talk about this, is the example of baldness.
Which, if you know what I look like, is, you know, that's a topic that maybe would be of interest to me.
Okay?
What's the point?
Well, it's not clear exactly where the line between bald and not bald is.
You can't say exactly how much hair somebody has to have lost to count as bald and how much they have to have to count as not bald, right?
We can't draw that line at a clear point.
But if we imagine baldness as a continuum, not an either or, but a continuum, we can identify clear endpoints.
We can recognize some people say, yeah, that person is bald.
We can recognize somebody else and say, that person's clearly not bald.
Okay, let's make those the endpoints of our continuum.
And we can find that, yes, it's vague exactly where in that continuum we've entered baldness versus non-baldness, but the concept is still meaningful.
Or it would be silly to suggest that there's no such thing as baldness because we can't say exactly when somebody becomes bald.
Okay?
On reasoning like Singers or my own, because I've advanced the same position in the podcast on Straight White American Jesus, I've made the same argument about personhood.
Similar points hold.
On a continuum, It'll be clear to many of us that a few cells or a zygote that has just been fertilized is not a person in any meaningful sense of that term, while a 25-year-old with full and intact cognitive functioning clearly is a person.
The debate then and the ambiguity is, okay, so like where on that continuum do we want to say that personhood is achieved?
And I would suggest that personhood is like that category of baldness.
It is both meaningful, it names a real phenomenon in the world, and inherently vague.
So simply pointing out that we don't know exactly where to draw that line doesn't invalidate the term.
So that's the philosophical mistake that Stuckey makes.
Here's the experiential or factual fallacy, and if you're debating with somebody about this, this is probably the one where you'll get more traction.
We all, including Stuckey, We all, in fact, recognize degrees of personhood.
We usually tie personhood together with ideas like responsibility, a certain level of cognitive function, accountability for one's actions, and so forth.
A way to say that is that someone is a full person if we hold them fully accountable for their own actions and so on.
If we think about it this way, we don't hold young children to the same level of accountability or moral responsibility as we hold adults.
We recognize, in that sense, that they are not full, quote-unquote, persons.
We accept a legal definition of personhood as having some legitimacy, that there's an age after which one is considered a, quote-unquote, legal adult.
And most of us think that there may be problems with that, but that it has some connection to real differences among humans, that it's appropriate to make that kind of distinction.
We recognize that people with diminished mental capacity...
That's why, for example, we have the suggestion that somebody who's inebriated can't give sexual consent.
In that state, they don't have the mental capacity to act as a fully rational, moral, responsible human person.
That's the implication of that.
So in practice, even people like Stuckey implicitly acknowledge that quote-unquote personhood is a concept that operates on a continuum, a continuum of more or less or closer or further to full personhood, not the all or nothing status of an either or.
It's not an either or status, person not person.
It's better understood as existing somewhere on a continuum.
What does all that mean?
Does it solve the debates about abortion?
Nope.
Obviously not.
And I'm not trying to solve debates about abortion.
I'm not trying to say there aren't debates to be had about abortion.
What I am trying to show is that the issue is complex, which is why it's a persistent moral debate.
Moral debates are moral debates because they are complex, difficult topics.
And that is what Stuckey and everyone like her, whether it's Uncle Ron or your parents or your pastor or your pastor's seminary professor or whomever, that is what they can't acknowledge.
She and all the opponents of abortion access who reason like her, they have to reduce the question to an all-or-nothing, either-or option.
They have to take away that complexity.
To make their position and their argument that abortion should never be allowed to make that work.
So anyone who doesn't simply oppose abortion without exception can acknowledge complexity.
So let me say this, to be clear, all you have to do to undermine the abortion opponent's position is to demonstrate that the issue actually is complex and they've already lost.
Because as soon as somebody has to recognize that there's real complexity, real ambiguity, it's no longer an either-or question.
It's no longer a simple good versus bad question.
It's a question that becomes complex and difficult that doesn't admit to the kind of answers they give.
And that is how high-control religion, like the kind advocated by Stuckey, Consistently works.
And it's one of the big draws of it.
It gives simple answers to issues that are actually complex.
It's one of the things that draws people to high-control religion.
And this is what we see Stuckey doing.
Any degree of reflection on personhood alerts us to that, but that's what she's doing.
That's why she's making the arguments about personhood that she is.
Okay?
That's the first point.
Here's a second one.
And this has the issue of so-called innocent persons, if we stick to personhood.
She makes the assertion that what makes it wrong to kill a fetus is that in addition to being a person, we'll just let that go for now, they are innocent persons, that the fetus has not done anything wrong to be deserving of death.
The reason she's saying that is that somebody's going to say, well, there are other times when we kill persons.
Persons are killed in war.
Persons are killed in capital punishment.
Persons are killed in self-defense.
And we don't say people are morally culpable for that.
And the idea is that somebody has done something To be worthy of being killed, to deserve death, babies haven't.
So the logic here is simple enough, even if it remains implicit for her.
There may be justifications in killing some persons, but unborn persons are innocent in ways that these others aren't.
They haven't done anything to warrant being killed.
So it's inherently wrong to kill them.
What do I mean by that?
Here's what I mean.
That argument, which seems so simple and straightforward, actually contradicts what almost all conservative Christians teach and believe.
And let me tell you, I've had this conversation in real life more times than I know.
The conversation I'm about to relate, the reasoning I'm about to relate.
Okay?
Stuckey's vision of Christianity is what undermines this argument.
So let's imagine the conversation.
You say, you're talking to somebody, you say, hey, look, you say it's wrong to abort fetuses because they're innocent and haven't done anything to justify their killing.
Okay?
Okay.
But God kills millions of babies and others on a regular basis.
And somebody say, no, God lets certain children die.
Nope.
On your notion, if you believe God is all-powerful and causes everything to happen that happens, nothing happens that God doesn't will and so forth, then no, God can't just let things happen.
God is the author of everything that happens.
Everything happens for a reason and so forth.
It means God kills babies all the time.
So wouldn't that mean that God is morally culpable for killing the innocent and killing innocent persons?
If we're culpable for killing innocent persons with abortion, wouldn't God be culpable for killing innocent persons when he kills babies?
And there are a couple of responses you'll get at this point, but here's a really common one.
And again, folks, this is based on real conversations, especially among conservative Protestants, because it reflects a core commitment.
And here it is.
All human beings are sinful and fallen.
Tell me if you've heard this one before.
All human beings are sinful and fallen.
All human beings are deserving not just of death, but of eternal punishment.
So when God kills babies, he's justified in doing so because they are not, in fact, innocent.
There's no such thing as human innocence.
This is a conversation, again, I've had more times than I can count.
I'm not making up a response.
I'm telling you responses that I have heard.
The idea is essentially to say it's a category mistake to appeal to innocent humans because there are no innocent humans.
That's how you exonerate God of doing morally bad things.
And it's important to remember that for those conservative Christians, this has nothing to do with anything somebody does.
We are born Christians.
Before we actually undertake any actions, we are already guilty and not innocent.
From when?
From the moment of conception.
Okay?
Well, what's the point?
The point is that once we recognize that, it doesn't do any good for somebody like Stuckey to argue against abortion or really anything else on the grounds that the victims are innocent or don't deserve it.
When she has a theology that says there's no such thing as an innocent person.
Now, Conservative Christians appeal to human innocence all the time.
And I'm telling you now, it is one of the mistakes that I think is fundamental to that theology.
I think it's fundamentally contradictory.
I think once you have the notion that all human beings are sinful and fallen and worthy of eternal condemnation, there is no moral basis for protecting anybody for any reason.
I think it's a mistake.
It is written into the code of conservative Christian theology.
It is a core commitment of the tradition.
It cannot be changed without fundamentally rethinking the theology.
For my purposes here, I think it undermines Stuckey's argument that what's wrong is you are killing an innocent human person.
Why?
There are no innocent human persons.
If she wasn't a conservative Christian who believed something like that, maybe she could make that argument.
But she is.
Okay?
Third point I want to raise here.
I want to consider, actually, in this case, her response to an argument leveled against abortion opponents.
And this is an argument that we have made for a long time on Straight White American Jesus.
I have made it.
My co-host Brad has made it.
We're not the only ones who have made it.
And this is the accusation.
It is the accusation that abortion opponents—excuse me, abortion opponents—getting too worked up, getting all twisted up here— That abortion opponents claim to affirm a quote-unquote culture of life, but they really only care about the unborn right up until the moment of birth, and then they're on their own.
So in other words, their support for quote-unquote life, it really only consists of the unborn.
There are a whole range of things having to do with protecting human life and ensuring that it flourishes that abortion opponents don't care about, number one, but often oppose.
Programs to help the poor, programs to help the oppressed, tax policies that redistribute income from the wealthiest to people who don't have money, etc., etc., etc.
Stucky knows about this argument, and she seems to think she effectively responds to it.
But her responses, to me, just show how true this critique really is.
And I think that she's literally incapable of seeing it.
Stuckey's first move in addressing this is to relate an anecdote.
And she does this a lot.
She tells stories.
It's worth knowing that that is its own kind of strategic move.
When you're making a big programmatic statement and you tell a story about a singular instance, the question always comes up about whether it actually applies generally and so forth.
But we'll set that aside.
She tells the story of how a young refugee woman, Maria, was served by a pregnancy center, a Christian center seeking to give options other than abortion.
She talks about how they helped her enroll for Medicaid.
She talks about how they provided prenatal vitamins.
They enrolled her in parenting classes.
They provided her with a car seat so she could take the baby home with her from the hospital.
And she also recounts how they led Maria to Christ.
She converted to Christianity through the work of this Christian organization.
And she then recounts her participation in a baby dedication ceremony at her church.
And this is what she says.
I'm reading from page 22 of Stucky's book.
She says months later, That's the name of the church.
When the pastor introduced them, he shared a bit of their story.
How Maria had chosen life for her baby with the help of the volunteers at the pregnancy center.
When he'd finished the introduction, the entire congregation erupted into applause, which grew into a roaring, standing ovation.
Maria looked into the faces of thousands of her fellow church members and wept with joy.
It's a powerful statement.
And then she concludes with this.
I'm reading again from the same page of her book.
This story isn't an anomaly.
This is what pro-life Christians do.
They show up in big and small ways.
They meet needs.
She is explicitly offering this story as a rebuttal to the claim that abortion opponents only care about babies until they're born and so forth if they don't really support a culture of life.
And her story proves the point to me that all she cares about is life until the baby's born and then you're on your own.
All she and that church cared about was making sure Maria's baby was born.
Everything she talks about is up to that moment.
There is zero reference to any kind of care or support for her after that.
The things they did to help her get to having the baby, laudable.
But here are things that Stucky and others like her don't support, but which people seeking abortion access typically need.
She doesn't talk about universal health care.
It's good that she's talking about Medicaid.
Lots of conservative Christians want to cut Medicaid.
She doesn't talk about universal child care and pre-K.
Lots of those people seeking abortion are single parents who cannot, like, take off work.
They cannot raise a child.
They don't have the means to do so.
She doesn't talk about addressing that.
She doesn't talk about job and education training.
She doesn't talk about robust access to disability services.
Many people seek abortions because they're going to be debilitating congenital defects that those children are going to grow up with.
They would require massive care that is beyond the means of any but the wealthiest Americans.
She says nothing about any of this.
Everything she describes is about getting her to birth and then to the baby dedication, make sure the baby's part of the church, and that's it.
That's where the story stops, and that's her idea of showing up in a big way.
So if they affirm a culture of life that doesn't stop at birth, these are the kinds of things that they would need to affirm, in my view.
But not only do they typically not advocate for these things, they, and Stuckey is explicit in this, they oppose.
Government provision of those things.
Stuckey explicitly says this.
After she dismisses the idea, she dismisses the idea that, quote, Democrats, by providing more taxpayer-funded social services, make women less likely to choose abortion.
She rejects that.
She's having better access to resources.
Nope, it's not going to help stop abortion.
Doesn't give any evidence for it.
She just states it.
She goes on to say, and this is the key quote here, if we want to take care of the poor and the vulnerable, We don't need to outsource all our compassion to the state when we are called to take up the mantle of charity ourselves, end quote.
In other words, what she's saying is, and folks, again, this is a conversation I have had in real life with lots of conservative Christians.
She is saying this is supposed to be the work of the church, not the state.
And this is an old saw for Christian conservatives who oppose quote-unquote big government, the provision of welfare services, and so forth.
There are so many problems with this line of thinking.
I cannot even begin to address them all, but here are just a few.
The first one is this.
That sounds good.
Most conservative churches don't actually answer this call, this call for charity.
They're not providing health care or housing or education to those in need.
Not even their own members, let alone people in the community.
Just ask Uncle Ron to show you his church budget.
I've had this conversation where somebody says, oh, the church is supposed to do that.
I'm like, cool.
Show me your budget.
Somebody who was a pastor, one of a multi-staff pastor, multi-million dollar annual budget, I said, show me your budget.
Show me the line item where you're providing those things.
And of course, there wasn't one.
At best, they've got like a food pantry or maybe they donated some toys at Christmas, okay?
But even if churches did what they could in this regard, And even if they didn't limit it to their own members, if they were actually capable of saying, we're going to try to provide health care for the uninsured in our community or something like that, guess what, folks?
There are not enough Christian churches to meet the full societal need.
There just aren't enough of them.
We don't live in a Christian enough society to have that many churches.
The government simply has a reach that cannot be matched, which is why there are lots of Christians, typically not conservative Christians, but lots of Christians who support those programs.
But here's the final reason why I reject this reasoning by somebody like Stuckey.
For supporters of Christian nationalism, for anyone who accepts, you know, the whole the U.S. is a Christian nation and its governing laws should represent Christian principles and so forth, guess what, folks?
The distinction between the role of the state and the role of the church has collapsed.
You've broken it down.
A center point of Christian nationalism is the role of the state is to enforce Christian norms.
The state essentially is a church.
So opposition to these programs on the grounds that they usurp the role of this church makes no sense.
You can't be a Christian nationalist and say, like Stuckey does, that you're quote-unquote outsourcing your responsibility to the state.
Why?
Because you've broken down the distinction between church and state.
You say the state is an extension of the church.
We're in a Christian nation.
There you go.
There's no longer a rationale or a basis for saying that the state shouldn't be doing that.
So Stuckey, despite the story she tells, has no answers to the accusation that conservative Christian appeals to a culture of life are vacuous or self-serving or misleading.
And contrary to her intention, the story she tells actually illustrates the point.
And the worst part for me is that she might actually believe what she says is true.
I can't read her mind.
I don't know if she's selling books.
I don't know if she's just grinding a political axe.
I don't know if she really believes it.
But if she actually believes, I think that might be the worst part.
She might actually believe that what she describes actually constitutes Christians showing up in big ways.
You gave her a car seat?
Congratulations.
You bought some vitamins?
Cool for you.
Somebody volunteered to drive her to the hospital.
Great.
It's the best you can do.
Those of you who tell us you speak for the almighty God that controls everything in the universe and cares for everybody.
When it comes to carrying forth the this worldly needs of people, not just what happens when they die, but here and now for their entire life, her idea of big is pretty damn small.
And the reason I get so worked up about this is...
This is not unique to her.
This is a kind of argument and story and rationale that you will encounter over and over and over if you have these kinds of conversations.
Got to catch my breath.
There's more to say, but we're out of time today.
But we're going to stick with this in the next episode.
We're going to look at how Stucky actively weaves in disinformation to mislead her readers into supporting her positions.
We're going to look at some stuff that you're going to hear it and you're going to be like, wait, what?
She can't possibly argue that?
She does.
And again, she's typical in that.
We're going to look at how she does that, how that works in her chapter, how those who oppose abortion often make these moves to essentially demonize everybody who thinks that abortion access is something that should be preserved and that it's important.
For now, I've tried to show how Stuckey addresses some of those substantive issues that arise in the abortion debate, the notion that...
Thank you for listening.
I know I move fast in these.
I don't have a choice.
We could spend a really long time and we just don't have the time.
