Episode 23 - Pro-life, Pro-choice

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welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody i'm michael gunger on the show as always we've got mr science mike what's up dawg and one of our favorite guests and regular contributor to liturgists rachel hell evans welcome rachel thanks for having me again so today we're discussing an issue that has had a lot of press lately and is one of the most polarized divisive uh emotional scary topics to discuss for me anyway it goes to the heart of what people believe it means to be a human being and to be a sovereign individual in the united states that has freedoms it's talking about abortion and goodness gracious not an easy topic to talk about so mike and i uh have had some discussion about it we've seen rachel you've been discussing it some on your social media world with all the you know the planned parenthood videos that have come out and everything and you know at the liturgist we always try to have conversation that's honest and real and we're always looking through lenses of faith art and science we want to try to find ways of having discussions that are above the the noise and the polarized positions of just screaming at each other and actually try to hear one another so i can't think of hardly any that are more difficult than this one so uh what do you guys what do you guys want to talk about how do you want to do this well i think it's interesting you mentioned like a dichotomy first of all i you know went on a minor why pro-life and pro-choice are meaningless terms rant on my facebook page a couple of weeks back and i was shocked that basically well frankly like all the best people in the world hang out on my facebook page but i was shocked that even among that group what i got back was yeah totally those really are almost meaningless terms and here's why i say that if you look at polling data if you give people the choice between pro-choice and pro-life in a poll the nation is relatively static the the numbers on that hasn't moved in a long time pro-choice has a slight uh lead over pro-life in this country but it's not you know it's like five percentage points but if you give people the ability to choose one or both of those labels most people call themselves pro-choice and pro-life i don't know for sure but i'm guessing there's three people on this call for whom neither of those terms cleanly apply to the way they understand life and understand right to life and all the issues surrounding that and so i'm hoping what we can do today is provide a voice for all those people who look at the ping pong match and kind of roll their eyes yeah i had the very same experience on my facebook page and i was just kind of you know just writing what popped into my head on facebook which usually ends up going badly but i i said something about feeling you know really torn between having kind of a general pro life ethic but feeling like the policies of uh more progressive politics suit my pro-life position better in a lot of ways so you know support for access to contraception and affordable health care and child care and government assistance for single moms that sort of things how like progressive politics and sometimes even you know democrat or liberal politics seem to work better practically for somebody who wants to see the abortion rate decrease anyway uh so it's just kind of me just saying whatever popped into my head and it was like i don't think i've ever written a single facebook post that got that much traffic and attention and conversation and it was kind of a relief to know i'm not the only one who looks at the field and feels really torn like one minute i'm agreeing with one side and the next minute i'm agreeing with the other side and it can be really disheartening because you feel like you have to choose uh and that if you appreciate or understand some pro-choice policies and appreciate and understand some pro-life policies then you're you know an evil person in somebody's eyes so yeah i hope that this will be a conversation that's nuanced and that will bring people in who feel also feel torn and also feel like the labels don't quite fit them right it seems likely that abortions will never be illegal in the united states again but i'm actually really glad that in 1933 abortions were illegal because it's likely that my grandfather would have never been born i never got to meet my great-grandmother i never got to see a picture of her and sometimes i wonder if i resemble her or if my own daughter looks like her there's a lot of turmoil inside me sometimes i wish i could just talk to her hear her story and i know it's an extremely complicated issue but i'm really glad my grandfather was born and i'm really glad my daughter was born i really don't know if anything drives me battier than the the like dualistic binary camps of positions that exists in america like when you go on the message boards and stuff a lot of times what the conversation devolves into is you're saying you know you're pro-life you believe that human life begins at conception you also are for gun violence it turns into like a party attack and it's just these like positions and these camps and it's so gross i really feel like if we could talk together without all the assumptions about the other side or the other people being evil and inconsistent and hypocrites there's actually so much common ground to find so much not all but most pro-choice people i know especially people of faith want to see the abortion rate go down they want it to be legal but very rare you know that whole thing um and so that we share the goal of wanting to see the abortion rate plummet and i think that we could if we we could get past demonizing one another and vilifying one another because of what we check off on that box when we're polled i really think we could actually have some productive conversations like uh folks on the more conservative side i think have brought a lot about adoption to the table and and can make a great case for caring for kids who might be left behind because of physical challenges or race or whatever but i really feel like the more progressive folks have a lot to bring to the table when it comes to talking about access to contraception comprehensive sex ed government assistance for single moms access to affordable health care and child care generous maternity and paternity leave like all of those things if we could talk to each other i think we could build this really cool coalition of people who want to see the abortion rate plummet but who maybe come from different sides of the political spectrum and i do i i mean for all the discouragement of the last few weeks i have seen some of that happening like i do see some folks from the more conservative side taking into account the reality that when we're talking about unborn children we're also talking about mothers and that we should care about what you know is going through the mother's minds and why they decide to have abortions and i see people on the more progressive side acknowledging real concerns from pro-lifers and conservative folks about hey there's no denying that this is a life the question is i think more about personhood than life and that that's significant and that matters and that we should be wanting to protect the vulnerable so i see this opportunity for really great conversation and great cooperation but it just seems like we can't get past the labels and people won't pro-life people won't work with coach pro-choice people and pro-choice people won't work with pro-life people even though there's so much overlap when it comes to a shared goal of reducing abortions now i think there's some pro-choices who are like you know abortion on demand treating abortion like birth control uh which of course i i am very uncomfortable with but most of my pro-choice friends like the people i've actually spent a lot of time talking with they think it's that abortion should be legal because they know that it'll continue to happen even if it's illegal and like me they voted for republicans in the past and nothing changed and that sort of thing but they they seem to genuinely want to see the abortion rate go down well what i'm saying interestingly enough in the data is that you've had this tremendous progress and by progress i mean change not necessarily it's getting better don't take your hands off the keyboard if you're about to email me but there's this tremendous progress on social issues in the united states for example acceptance rates on premarital sex or same-sex marriage have been skyrocketing over the last 25 years the views on abortion are static they're not moving significantly this is one issue where millennials poll basically identically to generation x who polls almost identically to um boomers in terms of percentages this is an issue that is not moving in our country and it seems like especially among millennials there is some societal openness that abortion may be necessary or should be legal in some cases but still a personal antimatter against it so abortion should be allowed but i would never get one and there seems to be some of that at play in these numbers and in this this 20-year trend in a declining rate of abortions in this country of course america is still much higher than say secularized western europe in terms of abortion rates but we're also seeing that abortion rates are falling as teen pregnancies have fallen dramatically in the last few years and the data is telling that's because teenagers are not only using contraception now but multiple forms of contraception it used to be that many abortions occurred in people who were you know relatively low income but using a single method of birth control typically a pill and practically birth control pills fail six to eight percent of the times in other words there's a decent chance of pregnancy if you're only using the pill and so women were getting pregnant and then reporting primarily that they weren't able to afford it 75 of women 3 and 4 when asked why they were getting abortion one of the reasons is because they couldn't afford the child and also three and four would say that because having the baby would interfere with work so there's this economic argument being made that it's it's it's you know we might talk about a woman's right to choose but with these low-income women there was no right to choose a baby was a luxury that they could never afford and so you have these like multiple societal trends all of which at least in recent history have have meant less actual abortions occur i have a friend uh micah oder who said that he sees a trend in how technology has affected this rate in two ways obviously contraception contraception for me is essential to my pro-life ethic like i just want to give everybody in the world a condom like i feel like this that is really crucial to curbing the abortion rate and giving women more control over their lives especially women living in poverty so i think access to contraception is huge but the other side of it he said too is ultrasounds and ultrasound technology um certainly uh for a woman who's going in for her first ob gyn appointment it's hard to deny that that's a little person in there especially when you can see the pictures and so i think technology has probably had a big effect on seeing those numbers go down so you just got to the like heart of where i'm torn on this issue so i think on this very pragmatic level there's this incredible common ground that most people would agree less abortions is better because in most cases when an abortion occurs it's not like some lifestyle election it's usually someone who's facing potential starvation or poverty issues and so there's this very valid case to be made that an abortion represents kind of a societal failure in those circumstances so there's the pragmatic thing where addressing poverty helps dramatically even if it's what we call perceived poverty if it's not actually starving to death addressing chronic hunger which changes the way that human beings make decisions by the way will dramatically dramatically more than anything else we could do reduce the abortion rate in this country three out of four women self-report again that you know concerns about money are what's driving this decision where i don't find a common ground and where frankly i don't even know where i land is like fundamentally i find some merit to the the core idea behind the pro-life movement and the core idea behind the pro-choice movement and that if we assume human beings have something called a soul which i don't know what a soul is but many people believe they exist when does that denote personhood in a collection of tissue is it immediately conceptual at some point later if it's immediately if that's the assumption you've made and you believe deeply then it makes sense to fight viciously for the total number of abortions in this country to be zero not at some point in the future but today but on the other hand if you believe that somehow personhood derives from consciousness clearly early term fetal tissue is not conscious in any meaningful way and what you're talking about is using religious beliefs to take away a person's autonomy and the problem i have with the abortion discussion is the deeper i dive into the science and the data the more confused i get usually when i figure out the science behind something i come up with enough information to make a moral decision and in this case i have no idea when personhood is imparted to a human being depending on what scientist you ask anywhere from 30 to 45 percent of pregnancies spontaneously end most of them in the first few weeks because of neural tube defects probably four million pregnancies end completely naturally every year and so when i think about personhood if a human being gets a soul at the moment of conception four million souls leave this planet without intervention in america alone every year it just racks my brain trying to to get around that try to figure out what that means and what that what that says about creation which is why i have to spend all my time here at the pragmatic layer and i can't really play in the underlying philosophic issue because i can't figure out where i stand [Music] i am 100 pro-choice the idea that anyone would be forced to carry a pregnancy that they do not want or need to terminate for any reason is abhorrent to me the thought that the decision of what is best for me should i become pregnant that that decision could be taken away from me is very frightening yes we can lower the abortion rate with comprehensive sex education free birth control maternity leave etc but abortion should always be a part of comprehensive reproductive rights whether or not a person decides to have an abortion should be no one's business but their own it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists i don't know that anybody should and can say they know for sure the moment a a life has a soul or should be given personhood or should be thought of as a person if it's that conception then like you said like we should be in a perpetual state of grief all of us women everywhere for all of the babies that we have lost you know and and that doesn't quite seem right um and i especially hate it when that's used to discourage people from using contraception um you know on the off chance that a fertilized egg can't implant in the uterus like that seems to me to be it would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year if women had access to birth control and even birth control that might in some rare cases keep a fertilized egg from implanting so that's kind of a rabbit trail and yet it's not because i find myself in lengthy arguments with people about that tiny stage between like fertilized egg and implantation and it it's sometimes it just feels like splitting hairs who really knows this for sure i don't know but that also leads me to think that we should i mean i know this is maybe kind of a cop out played on the safe side and assume that you know life even as it's developing is valuable and precious and uh should be protected um but knowing for sure when uh you know a fetus is a person i i don't know i don't know and i used to think i knew that for sure but like much of my faith and much of my life i don't know anymore i actually stood on the side of a road with a poster once that said abortion kills children i've actually done that i mean talk about movement on the issue i read a a personal testimony sort of account the other day from a woman who you know planned parenthood was the only place where she could get access to health care that she could afford and so she went into planned parenthood to um take care of a miscarriage that she had you know spontaneously she was very much a wanted child and she had to walk past all of these protesters with all of these signs of babies cut up into pieces and screaming at her telling her that she was a killer and that she was a murderer and as somebody who herself has had a miscarriage i cannot think of a more awful thing but i think that just goes speaks right into the tone deafness of some of the pro-life rhetoric and also a misunderstanding of what some of what planned parenthood does which that's a whole other issue and also a misunderstanding of just how complicated all of this is like you know having had a miscarriage early on in a pregnancy very early on i don't feel the same way about that loss as i might other losses as i might feel about if we lost the baby at this point and why is that it's because we do ascribe levels of i guess personhood or levels of um i don't know connection based on how far along these pregnancies are and i don't think that that necessarily i don't know if that should change things i really don't but i know that it does make it more complicated in my mind it would be irresponsible though to say that life that it's not a life in there i mean or that there's not life in there right i mean the question is more about personhood oh yeah like like a sperm cell is living an egg cell is living as soon as they combine the the cytoblast is living that's living tissue but you know so is a polyp that you cut out of your intestines that's living you just destroyed life absolutely when you wash your hands you commit a an untold genocide of bacterial life you kill more bacteria than people have lived every time you wash your hands so you know pro-life can be uh that's why it's such a weird term i mean the only reason anything's alive because it killed something else even plants try to steal sunlight from each other and throw shades so other plants can't survive we're in a very competitive biosphere here once i heard somebody say like a pro-choice person say well life begins at birth and that i could not at any level really get behind because it i mean at some point i don't know that life that we all agree is a life and anybody should agree is a life or is living i suppose is a better way to say it and at some point and it's go and i feel like it has to be before birth it becomes a person i don't know but it's it's not as cut and dry as i once thought that's for sure well i mean so if if we're talking about personnel from consciousness that stuff's troubling because like human infants aren't that aren't that conscious like there's all kinds of things we kill and eat that denote a higher level of neurological sophistication and a more elaborate model of reality than a human infant we've just decided as a species human infants are a special form of life which by the way i'm pretty cool with but it's kind of an arbitrary thing like i'm pretty empathetic to even though i'm not one but i'm kind of the soul of a vegan because there's so many things that we kill and eat that have very real awareness and so what we're talking about is we've kind of decided that humans represent some exceptional form of life and that the potential of an infant to develop into this very special thing we call an adult human puts on it this special legal status of personhood but i think scientifically speaking all that stuff is just kind of uh psychosocial constructs i i agree but they're they're necessary when a baby comes out and is in the world so what has actually changed from an hour before that or a week before that or a month before that no i mean some things not that much there's no actual hard line you just now it still can't survive without the mother a year in you can't survive if i leave lucy just to herself she's gonna die she's a year and a half old almost if you remove like grocery stores most of america would die like most adult humans aren't capable of independent survival anymore that's why i've got dan [Laughter] we'll be fine in the zombie apocalypse but i think there's still something to be said about protecting life even when it doesn't contribute you know what i mean like this notion that sort of like well when they become you know able to take care of themselves well then they're fully a person or you know like there's so many people who are adults who can't take care of themselves for because they have various challenges if we start sort of reducing the value of a life to what it can contribute and how um sort of autonomous it is then we get into real sketchy territory because we're sort of saying that something has value because of what it can contribute as opposed to just having inherent value so this is where i'm going to go right off the rails i agree with you i totally agree with you but what i'm saying is why then do not those same rights to life exist for dolphins chimpanzees elephants other forms of life that build elaborate social structures and have emotional interior landscapes and many of the things that we value in humans well because we've evolved as a species to to need to put human life before other sorts of life otherwise we probably wouldn't have survived and it's been a while since i've been on the more conservative side of a conversation but i think i'm even more of a conservative side uh than you guys are i'm i'm actually not totally convinced i hate saying this because i recognize that i'm at least half of a white man i'm half white so i have plenty of privilege and a man i have no idea what it's like to carry a baby but i don't necessarily believe in an immaterial soul but i do believe that life is sacred and i do believe that the more complex that life gets that we should be very mindful of that and when i've heard both of my daughter's heartbeat in the womb there's something sacred about that heartbeat to me like it's not a hangnail it's not a polyp that's the heartbeat of my daughter when i look at the camps and who's saying these things i want to take the side of the liberals because i i'm always that's where i stand on almost everything most other things let's care about the the woman in poverty yes always i want to care about the woman in poverty who is being oppressed by society and but i'm not totally convinced that 200 years from now people aren't going to look at us and what our society did to the unborn and not see it as genocide you know i want to be understanding of circumstances a woman's just pregnant i know there's a difference of complexity of life at that point then three months or six months or nine months or two years old i don't see much of a line between the six month old out of the womb and a six month in the womb like they're both totally dependent on the mother they both are very pre what you would consider adult human consciousness they're just a beating heart and a brain and lungs but they are human the whole time and that's why honestly like we did we we turned down the screening for lucy we had this last last week lisa was at a club 21 meeting here in los angeles as a club for mothers with kids with down syndrome and this lady walked up and saw everybody and she's like what is this and they said it's a club for women with kids with down syndrome and she said oh i thought they'd take care of that now oh gosh oh man it was the lady that started the club that she set it to and the lady just that started the club was just she had her breath taken when she was like you mean you mean terminate and she's like yeah and she's like well these women decided not to and that was like when we were we had the option to screen for it and we actually took the option with homily and actually ironically that pheromonally they had said there looks like there might be some risk of down syndrome there was a little something little in her heart or something that ended up getting fixed but it just created anxiety for us with emily if she has down syndrome we're not gonna we're not gonna terminate why bother getting nervous either way you know like so we just decided to opt out of even knowing for lucy uh which i'm actually sort of glad i think that we did i think that's a huge part of this conversation too because like this attitude of like well if they have challenges if they have down syndrome if they have you know whatever it is then oh that life is less valuable than any other life therefore should be terminated and that says a lot about us as people i think and as a society that's very concerning to me very concerning on this personal level uh i just agree so much we had two planned pregnancies in our house like to the month we wanted to conceive we did like they could not my children could not be more like meticulously spreadsheet planned if we would have had a surprise child i would have been overjoyed and i don't care what uh screening said about my child i would want it to come into the world so that much like many americans i would never personally consider an abortion and i know based on our discussions my wife feels the same way although i also have to be honest i would probably defer to her ultimately in those conversations well you know not you said most americans decide to interrupt you but apparently nine out of ten people that find out that their kid has down syndrome will terminate oh wow i think something like down syndrome uh when that goes from being hypothetical to what's going to go down i bet that shifts the the equation a lot for people again i don't know i have two i'm so blessed just two really really healthy girls no complications either time it's tough for me this is why i'm for abortion being legal because of my confusion over when personhood is denoted to humans it's difficult for me to say i would support legislation that made it illegal or prohibition not only because i doubt the effectiveness of prohibition but i also think on another level if someone disagrees with me they should have the legal option it's weird to me to use the law to force a human to carry another human in their body and i know people say the inevitable consequence of having sex is pregnancy i get that argument well and here's where i wouldn't necessarily be pro-life is with government stuff i think the government is corrupt i know we probably we need some sort of government i'm not just an anarchist but i am pretty cynical and disenfranchised about government and criminal justice in our country period like it's racist and corrupt and i'm sick of the government in so many ways so should the government decide philosophically what is a human being for everybody no i actually don't think the government should be the theological and philosophical arbiter of truth for everybody in the united states what i'm more concerned about is how should we feel how should i feel about abortion but if somebody was offering like an infant drowning service you like most people would support police action against an infant drowning service you know what i mean so but then if it's a if it's a if it's a partial birth abortion service a lot of people don't see any distinction between drowning an infant and a partial birth abortion that's where i get so confused it's all so arbitrary people just like well this is the point that i care i mean i kind of feel like my impulse and i realize this is completely arbitrary is to think that uh late term abortion elective late term abortion should be illegal and that you know before that though maybe not but where am i drawing that line why you know what it seems like so much of this is intuitive but yeah when it comes to like how would the government enforce all of this um it does get a little sticky i mean you would think that people who are very um anti sort of big government would be concerned about government making decisions super uh important decisions about um you know women's health and i'm not trying to like oh code abortion as women's health but there are sometimes legitimate health concerns that i really do believe are best made between a woman her family and her doctor and you know the idea of the tennessee state legislature getting involved in that decision does make me a little uncomfortable as a woman not that this necessarily changes anything but it should be considered that making it illegal certainly won't stop it it'll just kind of drive it underground and we'll have a lot more clinics like the gosnell clinic that made headlines a few years ago um you know it and so even when people say well this is you know we're gonna look back and see this time as you know a genocide which i understand that impulse but like if we look back on all of human history abortion has been around for a really long time because women have for a very long time felt so desperate in their circumstances that they feel like they can't bring a child into this world and that to me is the tragedy is that any woman in this country the richest country in the world should feel like she is too poor uh or too desperate or too abused or too afraid or too unsupported or too busy at her job to uh to bring a child into the world because like all three of us the way we feel about abortion let's face it is indeed affected by our privilege like if we have a surprise pregnancy yeah maybe we'll be like whoa this is going to be a lot to handle but we have such great support systems and we're so privileged socioeconomically not rich but we're more privileged than others that we can say with a lot of flexibility oh well you know we can handle this or and even if a child has special challenges we can say well we can handle this we'll find a support system you know that's a luxury that a lot of people don't enjoy especially single moms especially single moms of multiple kids and so i mean i don't know i you know with all the abstract when does life begin when does personhood begin to me it's like i don't know if we'll ever figure that out but we can figure out how to better care for these moms i really think that's totally doable and that we can get people from both sides on that i really believe it but because we get so hung up on the abstract i think it keeps us in a lot of ways from actually working towards curbing the abortion rate which is it just it seems very doable to me what frustrates me is when you have somebody who's adamantly pro-life but then also adamantly against contraception adamantly against sex education adamantly against you know government support for single moms and paying for diapers and like you that's a huge disconnect and very frustrating one for me to me where people fall on the windows life begin question is like less important than where people fall on how do we actually curb the abortion rate the thing is we will not stop abortion by making it legal all human history is riddled with abortion we stop it by you know putting it out of business the old-fashioned way like driving down demand and i don't know if that will ever eliminate it i don't know if there's any way to ever completely eliminate abortions and even people making that decision for all the wrong reasons i don't know if that's something we can ever solve but i really think we could do better especially here in the us at curbing it it's not rocket science i'm coming to this conversation with the perspective of an adult adoptee who is now in reunion with my biological father my bio parents were young teens with no family supports when i was relinquished for adoption i am pro-life but i believe the church has done a great disservice to the pro-life voice by insisting on being anti-abortion and championing adoption instead of family preservation we raise the take care of orphans banner when really what we're doing is using money to buy infants rather than using that same money to support and empower young people in financial distress to raise their own children we should be coming alongside and loving these young moms and dads through the first years especially instead of spending time picketing abortion clinics why don't you go buy groceries for a struggling single mom and babysit her baby for her while she's going to school to further her career options i admire the tenacity for life that some of the extreme pro-lifer people holding up the signs and and calling it genocide calling it murder there is a deep reverence for life at the heart of that which is good and i don't know how any liberal should like take away from that rather than like saying you know they they go well you're not pro-life because you're for the death penalty you're just changing the subject a person that truly believes that at conception that's a human being what else would you expect a decent human being to do but to go out and shout like what else would a decent human being during the holocaust do if if you had full mindfulness of what was going on but to try to say something and to try to stop it so you gotta admire that but it is fruitless at this point i think in society it doesn't do much because the people that are doing the abortions they don't believe the same as you that the fetus is a human being they don't believe that the same way as you so you're just preaching to the choir and dividing the aisle deeper but if you can find if we can find ways of finding some common ground to actually do some work that does move us towards actually valuing life all across the board there are probably some smarter more helpful ways to do that the problem i see sometimes is that the pro-life advocates focus so much on the fetus and so much on the baby or the life whatever you want to call it that they almost forget there's a mother and then on the other side the pro-choice people focus so much on the mother they almost forget that this life inside of her is is that's that's significant and significant even to her i mean i know many women who uh say that they had an abortion even though they thought it was wrong they sort of made peace with god and felt like it was the only way they could protect the rest of their children i mean you know nobody makes these decisions easily but the thing is at the end of the day you can't separate the two when it comes to abortion into unborn children there is a mother and there is a child and if we're not thinking about both i feel like we're missing the actual reality behind the situation which is you cannot have one without the other and if we're not meeting both of those needs and thinking about both of those people then we're going to miss the boat you know all the way and so shouting down women walking into a planned parenthood clinic not the way to go because that's like not showing any care concern for the mother as much as i understand the passion behind it i think that it can be really counterproductive isn't it interesting and even how the language and it's not just this issue i feel like all these camps of issues even what you what people choose in their marketing for the pro-choice pro-life you're arguing about two different things the the pro-choice people saying a woman has a right to choose what she does with her body and the pro-life people are not even talking about her body at all yeah i think so this has been by far one of the most uh productive or at least uh not crazy conversations i've had about abortion so thanks for that i was mainly just listening because i literally am trying to figure out what i think [Laughter] well it's so weird because because we like to think in absolutes the process of conception and the development of a human being is is develop it is a process like nobody's nobody's crying genocide over every guy that masturbates every day i bet john mcarthur is but besides him oh wow that was perfect you know so it takes a while for the sperm to get to the egg and is that depressed and then when it finally meets at what point if you go down take our like human skeletal what if you go down to nanoseconds and now every nanosecond is a year you know like what year does it actually implant and what you're like it does it's there's no hard line it just doesn't exist and that's why it's so confusing and medically a pregnancy doesn't begin until implantation so like the medical definition of the pregnancy requires implantation not just fertilization but the medical definition is a human construct we're talking about philosophy and theology of what is life what is a human being when does that human being become more important than the choice for a woman to be able to not have to be pregnant that's like a philosophical issue and a theological issue but it has like these huge implications it affects whether some christians i know support the most effective forms of birth control because there's a small chance that certain forms of birth control might prevent a fertilized egg from implantation and so therefore they're against all of these types of birth control that would save 280 000 uh lives a year or roughly uh so it's like crazy though how quickly that very those few nanoseconds or well i guess it would be days really uh between fertilization and plantation can make a huge difference in the discussion because practically it really matters to people all right let's cut through the clutter here i'm gonna take some subtext and make it overt condoms are terrible i don't mean effectively they're very effective what i mean is it's like trying to knit with mittens on it just it doesn't work so i understand like there's this resistance to people using condoms but then that puts the onus primarily on women with methods of birth control that like rachel are talking about have some miniscule chance of preventing an egg from implanting or even just like traditional birth control pill isn't totally effective doesn't really protect against stds and can have all kinds of crazy side effects that's what makes me so excited about the kind of impending developments we see with like male birth control pills that prevent the release of sperm i'm actually hoping that those kinds of medical technologies can help alter this conversation completely let's remove the philosophical component if we can prevent those swimmers from leaving the tubes and also still allow people to actually completely enjoy sex because anything that involves some kind of a membrane just messes up the whole experience maybe we could see the rate of undesired pregnancies plummet either further as long as we have the societal conviction to make sure those additional forms of birth control are socially acceptable and fiscally accessible yeah i mean that when people are against like insurance coverage for contraception and also pro-life i'm just like i really don't understand that i just don't get it um but you know iuds as we're talking about birth control you know iuds are very effective especially for in developing countries where i think it's like super crucial that we get women more women access to contraception and and the ability to make decisions about their spacing up their pregnancies that's huge it would save so many lives of women and babies and children melinda gates is a huge supporter of this and i support an organization hope for healing hands that has focuses on maternal health and focuses on access to contraception but anyway everybody seems to think that iuds which are basically like shots that you can get women like that option because especially in developing countries they can go in when they get their other shots and other healthcare they he just gets this shot and it's very very effective of course the problem is there's a small chance that might prevent a fertilized egg from implanting and so you see all of this opposition to it from conservatives which is something i've been frustrated with so i spent quite a bit of my time arguing people about this space between conception and implantation has a big consequences for hundreds of thousands of women and hundreds of thousands of children in the world uh but anyway iuds i think uh from what i understand are an effective form i don't like iuds as much for two reasons one it still puts the ball completely in a woman's court right it's all on her and two they can have some pretty gnarly side effects whether you go with copper or hormonal it's still like a small prosthesis being inserted into a woman's body i'd like to see something other than condoms as an option for men to contribute to a decline in unwanted pregnancies especially because i think it's only fair the process of child development or specifically conception and childbirth is much more fun for men than women and it is unfortunately much easier for a man to walk away from an unwanted pregnancy and so i think societally we should look for opportunities to shift the illness away from women and toward men on preventing that unwanted pregnancy in the first place typically it's just less traumatic medically to keep sperm from getting out than it is to prevent eggs from being released or implanting right it's pretty simple you know they're working on a temporary adhesive based chemical vasectomy they're looking at a male pill i think all those sorts of technologies really have a present an opportunity to alter this landscape because the side effects for men are typically nothing there's no it doesn't interfere with any any cycling if there's no risk of infection all you're talking about is keeping a very small tube closed that stuff just really excites me that's why i was all in on the vasectomy personally because it was so much simpler for me when we decided we didn't want to have any more kids to make that issue go away than it was for the illness to always be on my wife as far as though in in the developing world you have a lot of patriarchal obstacles in that regard it's convincing men to want to be a part of that and to want anything to do with it is is way more challenging than i think we realize and so in the meantime i think women in a lot of places and a lot of circumstances kind of like having the ball in their court because that's the only way to make it happen i've once again gone western-centric and we tend to do that especially with abortion and maternal care and childbirth and children we think everybody has access to what we have access to here and they just don't around the world and it's it really is it's it's 280 000 women every year dying from preventable complications related to pregnancy and access to contraception would make a huge huge difference in that rate and in the rate of infant mortality and child hunger it would be huge it would change everything melinda gates has a great ted talk on this and i can't remember the title of the ted talk so just google like melinda gates ted birth control it's really good and super informative talk on how all this affects women around the world it's just so unfair like i was that when mike mentioned the disparity between men and women and the the conception and birthing process i was trying i was trying to think of a metaphor for a second of like how different it is but they're you can't come up with a metaphor because it really couldn't be there's no more extremes like the guy has an orgasm it's the most pleasurable experience and the woman has the most like painful experience that a person can for what it means for a woman to be pregnant thanks evolution oh my goodness or people would say well it's just eve's curse you know shouldn't have given him the apple oh my gosh i bet tertullian said that exactly tertullian you know that got that like church guy from like 100 years ago no no more than that like you know all the church fathers were like oh well you know if a woman has to die giving birth it's her glory because you know i think martin luther said exactly that i believe he said that if women have to die in childbirth well at least they're doing what they were made to do oh my gosh so we've come a long way uh that doesn't seem to be the accepted premise anymore well guys thanks for listening we're sure you're gonna have lots of thoughts and additional questions and comments and research that i should read because i'm an idiot so if you want to go to facebook.com slash the liturgists the liturgist.com podcast or even just at the liturgist on twitter we'd love to hear from you there got some really great episodes coming up that we can't wait to tell you about we also let you know that uh we've got more belong events coming one in london november 13th and 14th by the time you hear this episode you should be able to buy tickets at the liturgist.com planning another one in los angeles in the near future so keep your ears peeled for that we've got a tour coming up we're going to be doing our lost and found liturgy and a few select cities if you'd like your town to be one of them go to the liturgist.com and send us a contact form and our booking folks will be in touch thanks so much for listening we hope you got something out of this conversation i know i did for sure i'm science mike i'm michael gunger i'm rachel hold evans thanks for listening everybody