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June 18, 2025 - Straight White American Jesus
33:06
It's in the Code ep 151: “Abortion Is Healthcare, Pt. 3”

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 800-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Allie Beth Stuckey warns her readers to be on the lookout for people passing off lies as facts and appealing to emotion to mask bad arguments. But, as Dan discusses in this week’s episode, her anti-abortion positions are grounded in lies that pass as factual arguments, and are intended to bring others to her position by playing on their emotions. What are the lies she tells? How do we know they’re lies at all? And how does she want to move us through emotional appeals? Check out this week’s episode to find out. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Axis Mundi.
Hello and as always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and pleased, as always, to be with you.
And as always, just a reminder that this is a series that comes from you.
This is a series that depends on you and your ideas and your feedback and your comments and your questions and all of those things, so please keep those coming.
You can send them to me, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
You can also drop things in the Discord if you have access to that, and I do hover around there and try to check that.
Always looking for new ideas as well as responses to the series that I'm in.
I've got things kind of planned out for a while, trying to get ahead of the curve there, but always looking for new ideas.
I bring these up sometimes in our supplemental bonus episodes.
Sometimes they lead to additional episodes in the series we're on.
Sometimes I get whole new series ideas.
So please, keep those coming.
And thank you so much to everybody who reaches out.
I apologize, as always, that I just don't have the time or the bandwidth to respond to everybody.
I want to dive into this week.
We are continuing our exploration of basically the right-wing critique of empathy run amok.
The idea that empathy is bad, that empathy is sinful, as some will say.
Or looking at Allie Beth Stuckey's book, which is where we've been spending our time, the idea that there is something called toxic empathy, that empathy can become toxic and lead us astray.
And that's what we have been doing is exploring Stuckey's book.
And again, I'm reading this so you don't have to, so if you haven't seen it, it's organized into five chapters, and each chapter is organized around what she sees as a lie.
So there's like lie number one, lie number two, lie number three, and so forth.
These are the lies that she says progressives tell, all of which are evidence of toxic levels of empathy.
And again, to be clear, I accept all five of what she labels as lies.
So I guess for Ali Beth Stuckey, I'm a big fat liar.
And all of you who listen, if you agree with me, I guess, you're big fat liars too.
But we're looking at her responses to these so-called lies and really trying to decode what's really going on and what she's doing.
And we've been exploring the first of these lies, chapter one in her book, which is entitled As a Lie, as she sees that abortion is health care.
We spent a couple episodes looking at various dimensions of her anti-abortion position.
And again, the rationale here is not about Allie Beth Stuckey.
It's because what she says and the way that she argues and the reasoning that she puts forward is, And I think, again, I'm reading this book as we go through this.
I haven't read the whole book yet.
I'm kind of reading it as we go.
But I'm anticipating that's a statement that's going to remain the same throughout the book.
I think throughout the book, we're going to see that she's not really saying anything new or all that terribly clever.
But she is kind of a clearinghouse for ideas and arguments that you'll hear among high control religionists, among conservative Christians, among Christian nationalists, among conservatives.
And in that regard, she's a good sort of clearinghouse for seeing these, and that's why we're looking at her, okay?
And this is going to be our final episode, looking at how she responds to the issue of abortion.
We'll turn our attention to the second lie that she takes on in the next episode.
But the theme this episode might be what we would call Stucky's lies, and specifically her lies about abortion.
What we're looking at are the ways in which she tries to argue against abortion through rhetorical sleights of hand, guilt by association arguments, and just kind of fabricating lies that she tells, and she probably believes them, about specifically people who argue in favor of abortion access.
And it's also worth noting here, and you can recall here that in her introduction, and we talked about this in one of the episodes, She specifically warns her readers to beware of people playing to their emotions, making emotionally laden arguments to try to sway them instead of using facts and data and so forth.
It's worth noting that in this chapter, this is precisely the aim of the kinds of arguments and the rhetorical moves that we'll be looking at.
So she is aiming throughout this chapter at playing to people's emotions, bringing them to her view through emotional appeals and so forth.
And that's what we're going to see, okay?
So it's ironic, as I say, to be discussing this and kind of framing it this way in a chapter that ostensibly takes on the lie that progressives tell.
Because, again, the chapter is structured around lies and falsehoods that Stucky relies upon to bring people to her view, to tap into those emotions.
And, again, these are lies and, I think, emotional appeals that are typical on the right.
And what we're going to do then, we're going to look at three of these.
We're going to look at three lies that Stuckey wants us to believe.
And if you've engaged people in your life on these topics, if you have people in your life who are staunch opponents of abortion access, and you have tried talking with them, you've engaged them at any depth of analysis, you will have encountered at least some of these, I think, some elements of these lies.
You might have encountered all three.
I think it's rare if you've actually engaged that you won't have encountered any of them.
And that these will be completely foreign to you.
Okay?
So I want to look at three.
Again, there's more in the chapter we could look at, but I want to look at these three.
And the first one I want to look at is this.
This is the first lie we'll consider, and I'm just going to state it this way.
Basically, what she wants you to believe is, if you support abortion or contraceptive use, you support eugenics.
So again, if you support abortion access or the use of contraception, you're a eugenicist.
And if you're listening, you're like, how in the world do you get to that claim?
The answer for Stuckey lies in the origins of Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood, obviously a medical provider, but very well known, among other things, and probably maybe most notoriously known when it comes to the issue of abortion, as an abortion provider.
So Planned Parenthood is always the primary target of those who are seeking to ban abortions and so forth.
The answer for Stuckey to prove that if you support abortion or use contraception, you are eugenicist, lies in the origins of Planned Parenthood in the modern contraceptive movement.
And this is like one of the gotcha sections of Stuckey's chapter.
She outlines it as the chapter subheading is the dark history of abortion.
And this is really the place where she is supposed to.
And again, she's typical of others.
This is the person you touch as well.
I'll bet you didn't know, and then they unveil the devastating evidence, the gotcha moment where you are caught flat-footed, and you are forced to acknowledge the evils of abortion and contraception because you didn't know that you were a eugenicist and you didn't want to be one, and so now you have to change your views on abortion.
That's the aim, okay?
We're going to take a look at this.
So what she does here primarily is she tells the story of Margaret Sanger.
Who was the founder of Planned Parenthood.
And she tells us, and these things are true, she tells us that Sanger wanted to prevent undesired and undesirable pregnancies.
And she also tells us that for her, those pregnancies that were undesirable were tied in with the eugenics movement.
She tells us about Sanger's eugenicist and racist ideology, linking her ideas to ideas that have been popularized within German Nazism and Marxism.
Bell, which held that mass sterilization was constitutional, and this was something that people like Sanger advocated.
And so the long and short of it was that Sanger, who did, was a tireless advocate for the legalization and popularization and access to contraception in a time when those things were not realities.
But that advocacy...
Okay?
And so she was a eugenicist.
She held these views.
And in 1942, an organization she had started, it was the American Birth Control League, was renamed Planned Parenthood.
And Stuckey also notes that the president of Planned Parenthood, she talks not just about Singer, but she briefly mentions, rather, that the president of Planned Parenthood in 1973, which is when Roe v.
Wade was decided, was Alan Guttmacher, who had previously served as the vice president of the American Eugenics Society.
So, what she's trying to say there is, Planned Parenthood was founded and run by eugenicists.
Okay.
Okay?
Eugenics is a deplorable movement.
It's a deplorable ideology.
Even though there were times in the 20th century and earlier in the 20th century when it was actually kind of in vogue, we can recognize and agree it's a deplorable movement.
And so what Stuckey is trying to do is, again, this is her gotcha moment by highlighting the connections of Planned Parenthood.
With these eugenicist movements.
And you can imagine now, I'll bet you didn't know that Planned Parenthood was founded by somebody who was a eugenicist and so forth.
Like, it's her gotcha moment.
But here's the question.
Is it?
I mean, let's say that you wanted to learn more about Sanger's eugenicist connections and read A Condemnation of Radiology.
Let's say that you went to Google, and I did this, and you just Googled Margaret Sanger.
Planned Parenthood eugenics or something like that.
You know where you can find information about Margaret Sanger, her eugenicist connections, and a condemnation of her ideology?
Just guess.
I'll give you a second.
The answer is the Planned Parenthood website.
Planned Parenthood, the organization she founded, talks about this.
Folks, it isn't a secret.
People may not know it.
It's not a secret.
Planned Parenthood acknowledges this and denounces her ideology.
If you go to the Planned Parenthood website, following a lengthy summary of Sanger's work to legalize and popularize the use of birth control, here are some other things that the website says about her.
And this is a quote.
The website, the Planned Parenthood website says, quote, Sanger believed in eugenics, an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children.
End quote.
The website goes on to say this, And then finally,
just one more example, again, from the Planned Parenthood website, So not only is this not
a secret, It's on the Planned Parenthood website.
The big gotcha moment?
It's there.
It's in the Planned Parenthood website, and it's clear that they do not support eugenics.
They don't support the racist ideology that Margaret Singer did and so forth.
Okay?
So what Stuckey actually trades on here is a kind of guilt by association logic, as well as the idea that the founding of an organization or group determines its existence and aims for all time.
And those are just simplistic concepts.
And to see why this is a fallacy, all you have to remember is that the same GOP, the same Republican Party, that routinely denies the racism exists and now opposes all efforts to combat it is the so-called Party of Lincoln.
It's the Party of the Civil Rights Act, etc.
The Civil Rights, excuse me, the Republican Party of 100 years ago is not the Republican Party at present.
Organizations change, institutions change, and this is what Stucky wants us not to know and to recognize.
So it isn't a gotcha moment at all because the history is acknowledged and owned by Planned Parenthood.
And they are also clear how their present positions and aims differ from those of the organization's founder.
It's not a gotcha moment at all.
But Stucky isn't done.
And her fallacy and her fallacious reasoning continues.
Okay?
She goes on to say, she says that Planned Parenthood in its contemporary instantiation, and this is a quote, has followed the eugenics program to its inevitable conclusion, end quote.
What's her evidence?
Her evidence is that the number of abortions performed or provided to black women is disproportionately high.
In other words, So a disproportionate number of abortions are granted to women who are African American.
So Sanger says, see, see, they're still targeting black people.
Eugenics.
Guess what, folks?
Again, this isn't news and everybody knows this.
Everybody knows those data points.
This is a classic example of agreeing on a fact.
But radically misrepresenting the meaning of that fact.
Why?
Because virtually anyone who studies economics and healthcare in the U.S. also recognizes that there are numerous social and economic and political factors that lead to this disproportionate representation of women of color among those receiving abortions.
Everybody knows this.
But these are all realities that the American right denies, and addressing them is exactly the kind of policy the Republican Party explicitly rejects.
So the explanation for those numbers that most analysts and experts accept are explicitly rationales and explanations that the Republican Party and people like Stuckey reject.
So Stuckey makes the absolutely Orwellian move.
Of attributing a situation that stems from policies and a social order that she supports.
The kind of social order and policy that she advances, that she is a fan of, is what brings about these realities.
And instead, she blames the existence of realities that people like her have brought about on the very people who recognize them and oppose them.
It's an absolutely breathtakingly illogical move.
That she makes.
But that's how her arguments work.
So that has to do with abortion.
What about contraception?
Where does the contraception come in here?
Because she doesn't anywhere argue really against contraception.
She just kind of smuggles in contraceptive opposition.
Okay?
Well, here's how she gets there.
She connects eugenics with the thought of a guy named Thomas Malthus.
And Thomas Malthus, he lived in the 18th into the 19th century.
He was born in 1766.
He was an English economist who famously warned of the catastrophic implications of human overpopulation and argued that human birth rates should be reduced.
Now, eugenicists did use his arguments about human overpopulation to legitimize their ideas, but this does not mean, and this is what Stuckey assumes in the association that she makes without articulating it clearly, it doesn't mean that everyone who thinks human overpopulation is a problem is a eugenicist.
Does that make sense?
Eugenicists And she makes this connection to paint anyone who's concerned about global overpopulation as a eugenicist.
And she specifically cites Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, right?
some dog whistle names for the conspiracists out there.
Basically, she says anybody who thinks that human overpopulation is an issue That's just eugenics.
And if that wasn't enough, she makes more bizarre claims of her own.
She says, this is on page 14. She says, quote, Again, it's breathtaking, folks.
This is a statement that I think could only be made by an affluent white woman in the most affluent society on Earth.
Marked by a declining birth rate who can say that increasing population is actually good for the planet.
It's an example of staggering white privilege from somebody who conveniently denies that there's any such thing as white privilege.
Okay?
So, bringing together all these pieces, what is she trying to do?
What is her aim?
Why does this matter?
That's what we're interested in?
What she's trying to do is to say that anyone who supports not only abortion access, but the use of contraception, Or even anybody who's concerned about global overpopulation is a eugenicist.
If you believe any of those things, that abortion access is important, that contraception use is, I don't know, okay, that there are more humans on the planet than maybe there should be, and that it would be better if fewer humans were born, if we reduced the overall human birth rate, it's all eugenicism.
So that's her lie.
Her lie is abortion access and birth control access advocates are eugenicists.
If you support abortion access or the use of birth control, you support eugenics.
That's the lie.
But her argument is built on spurious connections, guilt by association fallacies, manufactured facts, that whole thing about how the environment is better with more people in it.
And it's intended to play To the emotions of readers to sway them to her radically anti-abortion position.
I mean, she's not just anti-abortion.
She's anti-birth control, anti-population control.
She's anti-fact.
It's a radical position.
She tries to draw people into that by playing to their emotions and telling lies.
Okay?
But she's not done.
She's not done telling her own lies in this chapter.
I want to look at a couple more.
So here's the next really nasty one.
And this is one you will encounter routinely if you engage with anti-abortion advocates.
I'm confident of this.
And that is the argument that if you support abortion, you support infanticide.
That is, you support the murder of babies.
Babies who are born, who live outside of the body, and so forth.
You support imanticide.
Or, more provocatively, she would say something like, those who support the murder of unborn babies...
And this is a common argument among anti-abortion activists for a number of reasons.
I can't tell you how many times I've encountered this argument.
We came across one reason in our last episode, and that has to do with the argument about personhood.
Not going to rehash all of that except to say that if we recognize that the fetus is not a human person, this often implies that the newborn infant isn't either.
And that is why she'll argue, as she did, about Peter Singer, this philosopher.
That if you believe that, you support infanticide, which doesn't follow at all, okay?
That's one argument.
Probably the more common argument on a popular level, the Uncle Ron level of argument, involves anecdotal stories and urban legends about murdered babies.
And usually when you talk to somebody and they say, oh, they just kill babies after they're born, you're like, oh my gosh, that sounds terrible.
Like, how do you know that?
Like, point me in the direction and say, well, everybody knows that or they hide it or, you know, whatever.
It's often it's an everybody knows kind of argument with no real data that's given.
But Stuckey claims to have proof that affirming abortion access is equivalent to supporting infanticide.
I think this is another gotcha moment in her chapter.
So what's her evidence?
Okay.
She does recount true incidents, though the facts about some of these are disputed.
And she does choose incidents that are pretty old.
I think the most recent one that she cites is like 12 years ago.
Another is 19 years ago.
Another one was 20 years ago.
So these are not exactly recent events.
Here are the two most horrific that she describes.
She cites abortion provider Kermit Gosnell, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who admitted in court to delivering live babies and then snipping their spinal cords to kill them.
That's awful.
She also recounts the story of a baby that was delivered alive, a planned abortion, but the baby was delivered alive.
And then placed in a biohazard bag and disposed of in a dumpster.
Okay?
Terrible stories.
So, I mean, boom.
She's got us.
Boom.
Gotcha moment.
Abortion providers commit infanticide.
And if you support abortion, you support infanticide.
Or, more importantly for her, if you think infanticide is bad, you should oppose abortion.
There it is.
A knockdown argument.
No!
The evidence she gives, and these are true factual accounts, okay?
The evidence that she gives actually undermines her own arguments.
For example, she describes Kermit Gosnell as the now-imprisoned abortion provider.
Yeah, he is in prison.
The doctor that snipped the spinal cords of babies that were born alive was sentenced to three life terms for first-degree murder because of what he did.
So, not only is this not abortion care, he was appropriately prosecuted and imprisoned for what he did.
This is in no way an indictment of abortion care.
This is somebody who wasn't doing abortion care, who was murdering babies, and was indicted and imprisoned for it.
The case with the baby who was allegedly put in the bag, well, not allegedly, was put in the bag, but allegedly suffocated is also complex, but Stuckey strategically leaves that out.
The cause of death of that infant, which was born alive, was listed by the medical examiner as extreme prematurity, not homicide.
So technically, the baby was ruled not to have been killed.
Suggests that the baby was not actually viable, and enough ambiguity in the circumstances.
In that case existed, the criminal charges weren't fired, but the doctor running the clinic was stripped of his license.
His license was taken away because that incident happened.
Here's the point, folks.
These examples are not evidence that support for abortion is tantamount to support for infanticide, which I should point out.
I always have to point out to people, infanticide is illegal.
Okay?
Even if abortion providers, I don't know, believed in it and wanted to kill living babies or something like that, it's illegal.
Okay?
The fact that these accounts are rare and that when they do, that's why she has to reach back 19 and 20 years, for example.
They're not common.
The fact that they're rare and that they result in investigation and prosecution and loss of credentials and so forth, it proves exactly the opposite of what Stuckey thinks it does.
These are exceptions that prove the rule.
In other words, these are the exceptions that prove that this is not what abortion providers do.
And when this happens, it is investigated, prosecuted, and punished.
These examples are actually counter-evidence to Stuckey's second lie, which is the support for abortion is support for infanticide.
If you dive in at all, we recognize that it proves the opposite of what she says it does.
Okay?
That's her second lie.
Here's the third lie in this chapter that I want to take a look at.
This will bring us to the end.
The third lie she wants us to believe is that if you support abortion access, you're a violent person.
And her effort to make this point, it's even weaker than the other two that we've been looking at.
And here's how it is.
And if you read her books, pages 23 and 24, you can see how this progresses.
So she first starts...
For those who don't know what crisis pregnancy centers are, they're pregnancy centers that usually seek to advise women against abortion.
They're usually religiously affiliated.
The story of Maria that we talked about in the prior episode, that was a crisis pregnancy center.
It was a Christian organization and so forth.
So she cites legislative efforts that have been taken against the crisis pregnancy centers.
So she cites, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who introduced a bill, she was a co-sponsor on this, to, quote, stop anti-abortion disinformation by crisis pregnancy centers, end quote, and proposed penalties to crisis pregnancy centers that provided disinformation.
She also cites a 2015 California law that required crisis pregnancy centers to advise clients on the existence of state-provided abortion access.
That law was struck down by SCOTUS in 2018.
But she sides these two legislative efforts, okay?
Then, in the next paragraph, no transition, no discussion, she just shifts.
And here, she shares an anecdotal account of a machete-wielding man threatening people in a crisis pregnancy center.
She highlights a crisis pregnancy center that was burned in Oregon.
She highlights vandalism against centers undertaken by the abortion access activists with an organization called Jane's Revenge.
Following the leaking of SCOTUS' Dobbs decision, if you may remember, that was the decision that struck down Roe v.
Wade.
The decision was leaked before it was formally released.
A man was arrested for plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
She highlights all of these.
So she runs through a litany of violent actions undertaken by proponents of abortion access.
And then she says this.
Kind of summing it all up, she says, it shouldn't surprise us that those who advocate for the legal dismemberment of innocent children, who's appealing to emotions now with that language, but she says it shouldn't surprise us that those who advocate for the legal dismemberment of innocent children are also violent in general, end quote.
What is she doing there?
This is the key.
She implicitly equates legislative debate and action on one hand, To acts of violence undertaken by activists on the other.
Equates those two, even though those lawmakers condemn such acts.
And then she uses these isolated acts of violence.
A majority of Americans, folks, believe that some form of abortion access should be legal.
If everybody who thinks that was violent, you would see these things happening all the time.
It would not be hard to find examples.
She takes very isolated acts of violence and then makes the claim that all supporters of abortion are quote-unquote violent in general.
If you support abortion, you are violent.
Senators, other legislators, violent.
Everybody who supports abortion access is violent.
There's not even an effort on her part to prove.
The supporting abortion access is actually equivalent to undertaking violent action.
She simply, in one paragraph, she's talking about Elizabeth Warren and lawmakers in California.
The next paragraph, she's talking about private individuals acting violently, just assuming that they're equivalent.
And then she goes on to say that it's a general truth about everybody who supports abortion access.
Again, the fact that this is factually false is obvious.
The vast majority of those who support abortion access are not undertaking violent action.
If they were, you'd be talking about a majority of Americans undertaking violence.
That simply doesn't happen.
There's no evidence that those who support abortion access are quote-unquote violent in general, and there's lots of evidence that people, like me, who support abortion access oppose violence undertaken.
Against those who themselves oppose abortion access.
I'm opposed to political violence.
I don't think we should do that.
So this is just another lie that Stuckey tells.
And again, it's typical of anti-abortion rhetoric generally.
I've heard people say, well, you know, if you're willing to kill an unborn baby, you'll kill anybody.
Everybody who thinks that, they're a murderer, even if they've never actually committed murder.
That kind of rhetoric.
I've heard it.
And it's a basic guilt by association argument.
Where anyone who supports abortion access is taken as equivalent to or is guilty by association with the most radical and violent opponents of abortion bans and so forth.
Okay?
What is all of this?
We've been working through this.
Here's the big picture.
Step out for a minute.
In combating what she sees as the lie that abortion is healthcare, right?
In combating that lie, it turns out that Stucky's a liar.
She doesn't have real reasons to give.
She just has lies to tell.
And it turns out that her lies depend on the same appeal to emotions she warns us about in her introduction.
Nobody wants to be labeled an infanticidist.
Somebody who commits infanticide.
Nobody wants to advance.
Nobody wants to advance eugenics.
Most people don't want to be violent.
They don't want to be thought of as violent.
So she plays to all of those emotions to basically say, if you support abortion access, you're really a terrible person.
You actually believe and support some of the most awful things.
She's playing to the emotions to try to bring people around to her view.
She said in her introduction that lies and emotion-tugging arguments are red flags to look out for, and she's right.
They are.
We should be aware of those.
You should keep your eyes out for those.
But it turns out, that's the best she can do, is to tell lies and play to emotions.
And when you dig down just a little, even looking at her own descriptions, it unravels.
Stucky's not done with misinformation and lies.
She's not done passing off lies and misinformation as insightful social commentary and morality.
It's what she does for a living.
She's not done doing it in the book.
We'll turn to the second lie in her next chapter, where she warns us against, this time, the dangers of empathizing with the transgender community.
So that's where we're headed next.
Dark territory.
Again, I'm reading the book so that you don't have to.
Before I go, I want to say again, thank you for listening.
I say this all the time.
Any of you received emails from me saying this?
There are other things you could be doing right now besides listening to what I have to say about this.
And so the fact that you're listening, we appreciate it more than we can say.
Particularly our subscribers, thank you.
We put out a lot of content.
We work really hard, and you help us to do that.
If you're not a subscriber and you want more content and the bonus episodes and ad-free listening and all of those things, please consider subscribing.
But whoever you are listening, supporting in all the ways that you do, thank you for doing that.
Again, I always value your insights, feedback, comments, suggestions.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Would love to hear from you.
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