Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - "Pro-Life Answers To Pro-Choice Questions." – Abortion Apologetics with Josh Brahm

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Abortion is one of the most divisive topics in society today. The abortion debate is one of those things that seems impossible for either side to ever agree on, and that’s because it’s hard for Pro-Lifers to understand the Pro-Choice mindset & vice versa.Alex Clark sits down with Josh Brahm, President of the Equal Rights Institute, to break down pro-abortion arguments and arm Pro-Lifers with the arsenal they need to debate Pro-Choicers. Josh answers the hardest abortion questions to debat...

It's the spillover. If you're new here, I'm Alex Clark. And today is all about abortion apologetics. Now, I'm pro-life. 100% no matter what I could talk about it all day. It affects our most vulnerable population in society. So the pro-life conversation is always relevant. And don't tune out yet. If you're not pro-life, you're still really going to like this episode. If you haven't been living under a rock, then obviously you know that abortion is one of the most. divisive topics in society, if not the whole world. I think that since we live in the internet age, so many conversations turn right into confrontations online and valid arguments get lost in the firestorm of personal attacks and identity politics that fill up comment sections and DMs. Even when you're standing up for life, it can be really tough to articulate why you believe what you believe, or even understanding the pro-life mindset if you're pro-choice, right? So, Q Josh Brom. He has literally built his career off of understanding the pro-choice argument in order to strengthen the pro-life conversation. He's the president of the Equal Rights Institute,

an organization devoted to cultivating pro-life arguments that are grounded in the truth. They offer tools to help people present polished arguments, engage in thoughtful discussions, and to be prepared for rebuttals. Their mission isn't to win debates, but to change minds with the truth. Or, in the words of Josh's Twitter bio, he helps pro-lifers to be more persuasive and less weird when they communicate with pro-choice people. I love it. Pro-lifers can be weird. Okay, our arguments can be convoluted or tasteless. We're not perfect and we never will be, which is why Josh an Equal Rights Institute are so impactful. I have a list of the hardest questions I've personally ever been asked as a pro-lifer, and I have a list of the hardest

questions cute servatives have been asked when debating abortion. Before we go any further, I want to make it clear again. This episode is as much for my pro-choice listeners as it is for those who are pro-life. If you are pro-choice, please stick around and listen to what today's guest has to say and then challenge the information he unpacks. Maybe you will find holes in his arguments. Maybe not. Either way, it's going to be a great time.

And the goal of this episode is to arm you with the strongest, most bulletproof answers to the most common asked questions about abortion and the hardest. Welcome Josh Brom to the spillover. Josh, before going into questions from curious pro-life and pro-choicers, explain what you in the Equal Rights Institute have learned from your research in how the pro-choice mind works. Oh, man, that's a great question. So what I like to say that we do at ERI is we try to help pro-life people to be less weird.

and by that what I mean, and there's good weird and bad weird. There's good weird, like half a million people showing up to the March for Life and the freezing cold every January. That's good kind of weird. Bad kind of weird is those pro-lifers, and we've all seen these people that come across. It's like they're well-meaning, but they are off-putting. It's like they're getting in their own way, which is a problem because it's really hard to change someone's mind about anything these days. And abortion is certainly one of those. And so it's kind of like, let's not make our life harder.

I always think of that quote from Greg Coker's Standar Reason. He said, the gospel message is offensive enough. Let's not add more offense to it. And I would say the same thing about the pro-life message. The pro-life message is offensive enough. Let's not add more offense to it. And so I want to help us to use more good arguments and fewer bad ones. I like philosophy and the apologetics and all of that.

And I care about that. We do that. And I think a lot of people kind of first find us because of that. but like at my heart, what I really care about is helping us to be more loving. What is it, what would it look like if Jesus talk to a pro-choice person? Like what would his body language be like? What would he ask? What would he not ask?

What would it sound like when he made arguments that were grounded in truth, but spoken with gentleness and grace. I want to help the whole pro-life movement to get closer to that mark. But I also want to help us with the arguments too. So that's kind of, that's basically what we do. We've been around for seven years. And we have a small staff, but we do a lot of R&D on college campuses.

Roy's trying new arguments, new dialogue techniques to figure out what's working right now because while truth doesn't change, culture does. And so the arguments that are really actually persuasive to purchase people, that can change sometimes, and we've seen that change. And so our founding staff have had over 5,000 conversations with pro-choice people. And we've just been trying a lot of things and learning a lot of things. And then we just want to share that what we learn with whoever is open to hearing it with articles and podcasts and YouTube videos.

and online courses and things like that. As far as how the pro-choice mind works, I think it is really helpful for people understand that like pro-life and pro-choice people tend to think very differently. Like we think so differently, it's almost like we come from different planets. We're like we're speaking different languages.

So sometimes like if a pro-life person says X, a pro-choice person hears Y and vice versa. And so trying to understand each other is like critically important. And I feel like the more that I talk to people, the more that I've built long-term friendships with pro-choice people, the more that I listen to podcasters like Sam Harris, which is like anyone on the left or atheist or whatever helps me to get a better sense of how pro-choice people think. But like generally speaking, so like there's been psychological research that's demonstrated that people in the right tend, obviously there's exceptions, but tend

to be driven more by things like traditionalism, not wanting things to change. too fast, society to change too fast, less maybe we lose the things that we care about. And also, we react to disgust a lot more, whereas people on the left, not so much on either those things. They tend to be more driven, at least primarily driven by things like openness to new experiences and things like that. And so we just, we basically just think that. Our brains are kind of wired differently. And then we end up having different intuitions and coming to different views about things, not to mention all the cultural things, you know, how were people raised?

What was their church like? Their school, their friends, what college they're in? All those things certainly have big influence on the way that people think. And so how do you even start a conversation with somebody about abortion? Because you're talking about pro-life people shouldn't be weird. So I'm assuming you can't just, you know, in an elevator be like, so what are your thoughts on abortion?

So like how in the world do you even talk about that? Yeah, definitely don't do that in the elevator. So I'm a big proponent of relational apologetics. I think the most likely place you're going to convince someone to become pro-life is with a friend at like Starbucks. And it's going to be over a long period of time. Like most people don't change their mind in one conversation about anything. And so for a lot of people like, it's going to take them months, maybe years. But if you can build a relationship of trust where they understand that both you're like a good person, like you're virtuous, you don't just like,

hate women or something like that. Like that's not like why you're pro life. And also thoughtful, if you have like thoughtful things to say, those two things make a very powerful chord. And then if you can, you know, kind of build up a situation

where you have a genuine friendship with someone. And then in that context, sometimes you can talk about this. But it's not, that's not the only point of the friendship. I think it's like, this would be like genuine love and, and trust there.

But also in that, I've had pro choice friends become pro life. After, you know, like in one case, a year and a half of friendship, in one case, like five years of friendship, finally came from pretty strong pro-choice position

to a very strong pro-life position and even converted to Orthodox Christianity. And so I do like whole talks just on that concept. If we're not doing it that way, like if we're doing our testing, we do that on college campuses, because college campuses are still the least weird place for strangers to talk about politics

or moralist things together. Yes, that might change at some point, but it still seems like contrast. with like one time I was working with a group, a pro-life group that I love. It's one of my favorite pro-life groups. They're justice for all. They're out of Kansas and they do a lot of campus work and I've been really influenced by them. But like I was hanging out one time and they tried a beach outreach. They tried like getting people to have conversations on the beats. And I'll tell you I will never do that again. That was the worst. Why? What was so bad about it? They're there to hang out with their

kids. They're like, it's so not the mindset that they're in when people go to the beats. It was just like super off-putting and weird to people for the most part. I mean, like, they set up a tent, and then sometimes people would come to the tent. That was fine. But, like, some of us were, like, going on and trying to survey people literally sitting on the sand looking at the ocean. It didn't work. I know, and we've done things.

Like, I remember I was training the staff of students for Life of America one time, and we did an outreach in, like, downtown D.C., like, not in, like, the touristy area, but more like just, like, where people work and live. It was, like, metro. There was, like, a subway station and a bunch of bus stops. So like in a pinch, we can do something like that. But I prefer college campuses. I prefer working with a pro-life club on a campus and setting up a table.

We'll set up like a poll table that says should abortion remain legal. And we'll have a yes and a no. And it depends option in a way for people to vote or participate. But basically, we're just fishing for conversations. We're trying to draw people over to us to start those conversations. Now, all of my, I would say almost all of my audience is definitely conservative. I know that when I've talked about being pro-life before on episodes either of popletics or now the spillover, a lot of times I will get this answer of, well, I'm conservative and I would never have an abortion,

but I do believe in personal freedoms because I'm conservative, you know, and I don't believe in the government involving themselves in people's personal life decisions in health care. So therefore, I feel like I have to be technically pro-choice. And so what do you respond to somebody that says something like that from a conservative point of view? That's a great question. Like I've got a lot of like, for example, even libertarian friends. Like, like think of a libertarian who thinks that there should be a lot fewer laws. And that frankly even makes sense to me.

I like this thing that Dennis Prager said one time, I think on a on one of his stage shows with Adam Corolla where he said like there's too many laws. The fact that people could actually like break a law and have no idea, it seems not ideal. So like let's try to simplify the legal system. That rings true to me, but even most of my like pretty hardcore libertarian friends, with some exceptions, would say that there should be at least a few laws, though. So what kinds of laws do like this like almost ever agree? Well, there ought to be laws against murder. There ought to be laws against rape, sexual battery, things like that, assault.

And then to be fair, also my libertarian friends tend to be pretty strong like property rights people. So like the laws against like theft or something like that. But they're like, we can at least, even if you make all. the drugs legal, you take out speed limits, like all the stuff. Like there should at least be these laws that are trying to protect super vulnerable people for being like significantly harmed. And I think that's why even if you took out a bunch of the other laws and said like people should have a lot of personal freedoms to do a lot of things that they want to do, I agree with that. I don't think we should have the right to directly kill innocent people. Even if even if they're in the way of something

that they want, even if they're super inconvenient to us, like all those different things. And I'm not going to go that far. And so I can find a lot of common ground with people from different earth policies who are like, look, we shouldn't make everything that's arguably immoral illegal. I agree with that. I'm not, that's not me. I'm not one of those guys. But I do think that killing people should be illegal.

And so then the question is, is the unborn, a valuable person like you and me? Or is it like this other thing for a while in the pregnancy that then becomes a person? That's at least one of the two major questions in the abortion. And so I feel like that's a good segue to go into. I have all of these questions broken down into categories. So from there, I think we'll go right into science. So how have scientists proved that

life does begin at conception? Good question. So it's very important for people to understand. I'm going to answer that question, but we have to distinguish between two things that pro-lifers mix up all the time. Purchase people do too, but especially pro-lifers. Is biological life and philosophical

life. So the biological side, it's very clear cut. And pro-lifers love to talk about the biological side because this is where we get to be like, science is on our side. Don't you care about science? Are you being anti-science? Like that kind of thing. And you're exactly right. Like there is not much debate among embryologists, among the scientists who study fetal development about when biological life begins. So like we know, we basically know scientifically that by the time the process of fertilization is over, you have a biologically living, human organism. It's alive. It's growing. Dead things don't grow. We know it's human. It's come from

human parents. You can test it's a DNA. It's got a human DNA fingerprint. It's an organism, which means it's not, it's not part of the mom's body. It's not like a sperm cell or an egg cell now. It is this own organism where it's parts are working for the good of its own whole. It's on a self-directed path toward maturity. It has a symbiotic relationship with the mom's body for sure, but it's not the same thing. And so we know that scientifically. The problem is a lot of pro-lifers just want to say like that's the end of the debate. Hey, we know that life begins a conception, there you go. The problem, it doesn't prove that's a valuable life. It doesn't prove that's a life that's worth protecting like you and me. Like there's a lot of things that are alive, like squirrels,

that we don't give the right to life to or that aren't persons. So the question is, is this the kind of thing that matters? Uh, or is it nine? This is a, why this is where we, you know, we, and I won't go too deep into this because you're still in science, but like we're arguing from an equality place, that they, that the unborns to be given equal rights. And if you're going to be for equality, then you want to be pro life. Okay. And so then if the, the argument gets more philosophical and really when pro choicers ask that question, they're asking about personhood, essentially. When does this life mean that they're a person? Then what is the argument for that? Yeah. So what, what I want

do is, and I'm going to make a totally non-religious and non-emotional argument, because I'm not pro-life for religious reasons, and I'm also not pro-life for emotional reasons. I don't get the warm fuzzies when I look at his zygote. I'm sorry, pro-lifers. I just don't. My heartstrings go to the woman who wants the abortion, frankly. But the question is, what should we think about this kind of odd group of humans that don't look like us? And it's just like, it's just not an obvious case of person to most philosophers. So when I go to my metaphysical basement here, here's what I'm starting with. I'm starting from a place of equality. One of the most obvious intuitions that I have at a gut level, and everyone is starting from some intuition at some point, this is mine, is that human adults

should have an equal protection from violence. That, like, your protection from violence shouldn't be based on your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your disability status, any of that. None of that matters. Everyone's equal, at least when it comes to the right to life or the right to protection from violence. And so then I try to think deeper about that. What, like, what about newborns? Well, it seems like newborns pretty obviously fit into that category too, but then it seems like squirrels don't. Even the squirrels are alive. I don't think squirrels are persons. Like, I think when I accidentally ran over a squirrel one time on the way to work, it's like, it's not ideal, but it's not, it wasn't the same kind of thing as if I had a kid and then like kept driving to work. And it's like,

hit and run. Right. And so when I think about that, well, then, like, what is it that gets us into this, like, imagine a circle. Like, everything in the circle has this equal protection from violence and everything outside of it doesn't. Like, how do we make sense of that? Well, in the end, like, there's a lot of pro-choice responses to that. And we can get into that if you want. But my answer is something like human nature. I think something like human nature gets you in because it makes more sense of all of our intuitions about the obvious cases. And then, And if that's the right answer, and I think it is, then and then if the unborn have that thing, which they totally do, then the unborn get in. They get that equal protection from violence regardless of what our intuition is.

And I always kind of finished by making this point. Notice the way that I'm reasoning here. I am not reasoning the way a lot of people do, which is ad hoc. In other words, reasoning backwards. I'm not doing the Google Maps version of reasoning where I plug in the destination that I want to end up at. And then, okay, what steps do I need to do? like I'm not doing that. What I'm doing it is starting from equality and I'm reasoning from there and I'm letting the truth lead kind of wherever it's going to go. And I have in the long sad history of the human race, we have discriminated against all kinds of groups of humans. And it's always been looked at later as like a really, really bad thing. And I don't think for the first time we're like right by discriminating against a group of humans. So good. And very, very true. I don't know if you saw this, but the Texas.

Tribune said a few days ago with just everything obviously going on in Texas right now at the heartbeat law that medical and reproductive health experts say the reference to a heartbeat is medically inaccurate as an embryo does not have a developed heart at six weeks gestation and that ultrasound in early gestation is electrical impulses not a true heartbeat because at six weeks of gestation, those valves to make a heartbeat sound don't exist. So they're trying to say that the Texas heartbeat law is bogus because there is no heartbeat. What would you say to that? It's a good question.

So I am pretty open. I haven't been able to quiz embryologists on this yet, although it's definitely been on my radar as something to ask about. I remember a pro-life friend of mine who was really into the science a long time ago. Her name was Cheryl Camp. and C had was careful to use the phrase developing heart beat. A developing heart begins beating at, you know, 18 to 22 days after fertilization. And, and I think she was being careful about that language for this reason.

So I, I'm not going to die on the hill of, like, what do we define as a, as a heart? Like, I feel like this is, you know, like, this is not even where the pro-lifers in Texas are coming from. I don't think as much what is the heart versus just like a developing heart that is beating. It's kind of like they're pointing as something that a lot of people think of as well, it seems like something with that is alive. But in the end, the pro-lifers there, they don't think that life begins at six weeks. They think that life begins in fertilization because you've got this living human organ. Like you're able to live for at least three weeks without anything like a heartbeat.

That's super cool. You can't do that now. But for three weeks, like your body is super, super different. And the way that it functions is this growing in the beginning of the days is different. Heartbeat is meaningless. Everyone knows. I think everyone knows that a heartbeat is philosophically meaningless. It doesn't change whether or not you're a valuable person or not.

And you can, I mean, any biologists will tell you you can live without a heartbeat at the beginning of life. And frankly, you can even live temporarily with your heart stopped. And so, yeah, it's not about a heartbeat to me. And I'm not going to die on the hill of exactly what is a heart. I would be, if a purchase person said that to me on a campus, and it hasn't happened to me yet, but if they said that to me, I would say, okay, granted, I'll concede that argument. How does that change whether or not this is a living human organism from fertilization? Help me understand how dead things can grow because the embryo is growing rapidly from fertilization.

And I don't understand how that can work when it's dead because the cells are working together. Well, one thing that I get told, you know, when I point out just the greenerals, gruesome violent realities of what an abortion is and how it's actually done in each trimester. You know, they are very, a lot of pro-choice people are mushy middle people on the issue of abortion will say, well, I'm very against it once the fetus can feel pain. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's coming from an intuition that a lot of people have, and I think even have more now than we did, let's say, 20, 30 years ago, like when we think about like animal cruelty,

you know, like that more and more people are having a problem with the way that we treat chickens and cows in factory farms. Maybe not all of your audience resonates with that, but certainly a lot of people do. I do. It doesn't mean I think that chickens and cows are persons, but the fact that they can feel pain and fear, I think, matters, and the fact that we know that matters and how we treat them. I know there's a lot of other concerns there and we can get into that, but, you know, I'm basically, I've got the common ground with the animal rights people who are like we shouldn't have like killer whales and dolphins and sea world. Like I'm in agreement. I'm with them on that.

So we've got common ground. I don't think animals and humans are equally valuable, but we've got some common ground there. In the end, I like if you if prolifers try to throw it all on fetal pain, as some do because it's an easier argument to make, can't we agree it's wrong to torture a baby to death by like dismemberment? that might get you to convince them that 10% of abortions are wrong because fetal pain probably begins as early as 13 weeks. It's kind of the earliest that we know fetal pain is actually really, really complicated to know when it comes on. But early last year, there was a really interesting paper that was written by two people,

one pro-life, one pro-choice, and the pro-choice person is a scientist who used to be publicly publicly on the side of fetal pain doesn't begin until 26 weeks, had published on that. and then has changed as mind as it might come on as early as 13 weeks. So even if that's true, that's the most conservative estimate from a scientist right now, even that's true, that's only like 90% of abortions happen before that. So you're not going to get someone that pro-life by just focusing on fetal pain. You can argue it's certainly worse to kill someone in a way that causes them pain. Like if you, you know, the choice between killing a person in a coma and like torturing someone else to death,

clearly one of those is more wrong than the other, but they're both really, really wrong. Because the most wrong thing happening is you're killing someone. And so I think we got to focus on that we're killing the unborn, not just focus on fetal pain because I don't think is happening in the first trimester. So let's get into women's rights. How can pro-lifers best respond to an emotional debater? So somebody who has had an abortion or knows someone who's had one, they, and so they're getting very emotional because they're like,

well, you don't understand. and I had to have an abortion. Yeah. That's a great, great question. So we've created two online courses, and one of them is on apologetics, like pro-apologetics, and one of them is on sidewalk counseling.

And there's a reason we kept those things separate because a conversation you have with a woman outside of an abortion facility who's pregnant and thinking about having an abortion that day is just so different from the philosophical kinds of conversations that we have on college campuses. Like, and the analogy that Jake, Jacob Nell's on her team, who's kind of our sidewalk counseling guru, he's used a great analogy

that I always think of that I think is relevant to your question, which is like the woman thinking about having an abortion day is she feels like she's in crisis. It's like her house is on fire and she's just trying to get out. She's trying to figure out a way to get the house to not be on fire. Whereas the conversations that I typically, like that I had a few weeks ago on college campuses in Wisconsin and Minnesota during these like all-day kids. campus outreases, those are more like, we're standing, you know, 100 yards away from this house on fire theorizing about it. We're talking about it, thinking about it, how to the start, you know, like, it's not a perfect analogy, obviously, but like it's a different conversation.

And clearly, the more emotional someone is about any topic, the harder it is going to be for them to think objectively about it. That doesn't make it wrong for them to be thinking emotionally. total sense for someone who's post-abortive or who has friends who've who've had abortions or maybe they're a survivor of rape. Like there's all these different things that might cause them to be very, very emotional about this topic. And I get that. And it's not like I'm not going to talk to them, but my conversation is probably going to be different. I'm probably not trying to get them to think philosophically a lot different that day. I'm going to spend more time listening to them, listening to whatever they're willing to tell me. So like if someone says, I had an abortion,

I want to do a couple of things. But the main thing I want to do is I want to thank them for sharing that with me, for honoring me with that personal information, and trusting me with that, and say, is there anything that you would like me as a pro-life advocate to know about your experience to understand abortion better? It's okay if you have nothing you want to tell me. If you're just like, screw you, I'm leaving. I understand. I'm not going to like pry you for personal details. But if you would like to share more about your story with me, I will listen. I'm not going to interrupt.

I'm just, I'm there for whatever you want to tell me. That's the primary thing I'm going to do. I'm also going to try to say something like, just so you know, there are some women at some point after an abortion that experience minimally feelings of guilt and shame,

sometimes years later, sometimes actually like when they start having other kids, for example. and some women have said that they've experienced even worse, like feelings of something like a PTSD response. And I just want you to, just in case any of you feel like your friends experience that, I just want you to know there is help for that.

There are people in this city that are trained in that at like pregnancy centers that they've got like healing programs for that. Just in case that would be of any interest. I want them to know that. But if they're super emotional for any reason, typically we don't end up getting into a very philosophical conversation. It's more I am de-escalating, trying to help them to see that I care about them. I don't just have fetus tunnel vision.

I care about women too. I care about them. I care about this person that's standing right in front of me who also matters, who's also, I think, made in the image of God and is intrinsically valuable just like the unborn are and treat them that way. And just know that it's okay that there are a lot of people I talk to that I don't change their mind that day. That's most people.

We see usually a few approach which people change their mind at every campus average. But like, not most. Those are more of the exceptions. And, you know, if God exists, for example, then he loves this person way more than I do. And I can trust that God will put someone else in their path later when they're more open to having that kind of deeper, more kind of morally nuanced conversation. Well, what about when you're having those types of conversations and they absolutely do not regret their abortion? And they're saying, actually, it made my life better. And if it wasn't for my abortion, that I wouldn't be where I was.

And so I'm very pro-choice because it helped me and I don't regret it. And I've never experienced any emotional despair over it. What would you respond to that? Yeah, I would say, okay, it's not my view that everyone experiences some kind of post-abortion syndrome. And certainly I don't think, like most people do soon after. So if that's true, if I'm right about that, then you could be, you know, not having any issues right now doesn't mean that you won't later.

I don't want you to. I don't like, I'm not wishing for you to have like nightmares later about your abortion or something like that. I'm just saying I have a lot of friends who've gone through the abortion experience and have experienced that and I care about you. And I just wanted you to know that there are those resources. I'm not trying to like plant this idea in your head, you know, or whatever. And I'm not denying that it didn't make your life easier. It is so understandable to me why a lot of people choose abortion. I get it, especially if they don't think that the unborn matters.

If they believe that the youngborn is just a product of conception, like Planned Parenthood says, and maybe their parents, their friends, their teachers, their college professors, every person has ever spoken from Planned Parenthood at their school, their entire lives, like of all their community, their life, their culture, has said, this is a potential person. It'll become a person later if you give it enough time. But right now it doesn't matter at all. It's not weird to me that people choose abortion if they're in a crisis pregnancy. That's not strange to me.

I get that. I'm of the view that a lot of people are confused about the unborn. I think understandably confused. Like, it's more understandable than like when people were confused about black people. Like that is hard for me to wrap my mind around. Like, how could you see the, like, you know, slaves and not see humanity in them? That's hard for me to wrap my mind around. It's not hard for me to wrap my mind around people looking at a picture of a, you know,

three-week embryo and be like, yeah, I don't think it matters. You know, I get that. I think they're wrong and they're wrong for philosophical reasons. And if they're willing to have that philosophical conversation with me and go deeper into it, I'm in. And so what is the best argument when a woman acknowledges? Because, you know, usually they say it's my body, my choice. We know that answer. I've talked about it 100 times on Poplittics, my daily show, is obviously, well, it's not your body.

We have a separate body, separate unique DNA, so it's not your body. But they acknowledge that. But she says, well, it's against my rights to be forced to loan my body to somebody else, aka the baby. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really good question. So I think something my friend Trent Horn and Catholic answers, the most valuable thing

has ever done for the pro-life movement is to distinguish between two different kinds of bodily autonomy arguments. One of those is in the one I think you referenced, he would call the sovereign zone argument. That's like this kind of very extreme statement. This is a woman can do whatever she wants with anything inside of her body. And my response to that is to say that means that there should be no restrictions on abortion, if that's true. So I'm not going the direction a lot of pro-lifers go where it's like it's not your body because I don't think that's directly responding to what's in their head typically, although occasionally it is. What I want to say is that means there should be no restrictions on abortion. If you can do whatever you want, your body or choice, like most per choice

people are opposed to third trimester abortions. How? How do you get to do that and then say her body, her choice? Like it's still in her body in the third trimester. So I'm doing a reduct you out of absurdum there. But then you're right. So when you brought up, there's a more nuanced version of this argument that says, okay, so you can't do whatever she wants with anything instead of her body, but you should at least have the right to refuse to have her body used as a life support scene. So then like, you know, like the most famous verse of this is the violinist thought experiment from due the service Thompson, where he says you wake him in a hospital bed and you were kidnapped by the society of music lovers and plugged into this violinist who's got a kidney problem.

And then the hospital's like, sorry, we can't unplug your or he'll die. And so he's like, see, you pro livers want to force people to be hooked up to other people, even though he's got his own body and it's his own thing and he's a person, we shouldn't handcuff people to hospital beds and force them to be hooked up. It's a very interesting pro-to-tweights argument. The first place I'm going to go is what some pro-life is called the responsibility objection, which says that when you have consensual sex, you're engaging in an action that you know might result in the creation of an inherently needy child that you then owe compensation to. So imagine a room with a baby-making machine in it. It looks like a Coke machine. It's got a button on it

and a shoot at the bottom. If you push the button, you have a button. You have a little bit a very pleasurable experience. Every once in a while, though, a full-form newborn baby comes out to shoot. Okay, you're tracking it. We've simplified pregnancy. Okay, if a guy goes up and pushes the button and a baby does come out,

it seems obvious that he can't just walk away and leave it to starve to death. It seems even more obvious that he can't directly kill a bibatius brains in. Why? Because we all kind of know that it morally matters that he pushed the button. In other words, he engaged in an action

that he knew might result in the grace of an inherently needy child. that he knows compensation. He's either got to care for the child or he's got to transfer that care to someone else. Like, fine, you can do that. But he can't kill it. So I think that is a very strong response to the violin.

It's for 99% of pregnancy. It obviously doesn't cover the question of rape because it's not going to, because a woman who is a survivor of rape is not analogous to someone who's been, you know, who's pushed this button and basically gambled to have this pleasurable experience.

We've got a video on our YouTube channel that goes into more depth than I can right now on that. I'll simplify it. But just if people want to go deeper on this, the video on our YouTube video on our YouTube channel is called blood donation and abortion. Because purchase people will compare abortion to blood donation a lot. But I'll share just a kind of a brief part of that response. If you want to respond to that top 1%, the toughest area of purchase arguments,

is first I'm going to respond emotionally and relationally to the topic of rape. Now that we're talking about rape, I'm going to talk because I don't like it when pro-lifers is just like immediately going to talking about the baby. We need to acknowledge how horrible rape is first. So I'm talking about horrible, I think, rape is one of the worst things I know about. I think our society is screwed up on it. Our legal system has problems. And if he becomes pregnant, it's like he's committed multiple moral crimes.

He used to go to jail for a super, super long time. But part of the reason why I'm against rape is because it's an act of violence against an innocent person. And the reason I'm against abortion is because it's an act of violence against an innocent person. So I'm going to do that first. But then, okay, now if we're going to get all philosophical and Rubik's Cube, you know, solving on it, like what do you do when you combine this bodily rights argument with the topic of rape? I'm going to try to demonstrate that it is always wrong to kill an innocent person. And abortion is killing. So bodily rights arguments, including the violinist thought experiment,

try to, like they pretend that abortion is just unplugging from someone. It's just not helping someone. And that's very persuasive because there are a lot of cases where you aren't obligated to help someone. You know, if you, Alex, you know, needed my kidney. If you asked me for a kidney donation, I have three options. I can help you by donating my kidney. I could choose to not help you by not, you know, saying thanks, but no thanks. Or I could directly kill you, right?

I could be like, I'm so uncomfortable with you even knowing that I'm going to say no, and I'm pro-life, that I sneak up and I kill you because I don't want you to know that I said now. Those are, I've got these, those are just three distinct options. But in pregnancy, you only have two. you can either help by carrying the child at least to term or you can kill but there's not a don't help option it's more like if you took a boat right if you took if you drove your own boat out to sea for a couple hours and then you realize that a 10 year old kid a stranger has hidden on your boat you didn't realize but this idiot kid was playing hide and seek with his parents and snuck up and snuck onto a stranger's

boat shouldn't do that you have two options here you can help him by driving back to shore or you can throw them overboard. But there's not just like a like a this neutral kind of don't help option. And I want people understand pregnancies like that. You don't always have to help people. You don't always have to like donate blood and organs to them. But you don't get to directly kill them. That is so well said and very helpful.

And since you brought up rape, let's go into rape. How do you respond to somebody saying, okay, well, fine. Abortion should be illegal. I'm with you. except in cases of rape or incest. Yeah. So the first thing I'm going to do is that that relational response. Especially as a pro-life man, I need them to understand that the difference between us

is not that they care about women who have been raped and I don't. I need them to understand. We're on the same page. Complete common ground on that. So I'm going to talk about how horrible I think rape is for like at least a minute or two. Really help them understand that's part of who I am. But then I'm not going to dodge their question either. So then I'm going to use that soundbite that I use.

earlier that came from Jacob Nels on our team. Part of the reason why I'm against rape is I think it's an act of violence against an innocent person. Part of the reason I'm against abortion is I think it's an act of violence against an innocent person. If I need to go further on that, like something I can do is like it's a thought experiment. So I did this one time in a public debate with narrow, no, sorry, this one was Georgians for choice. Like this network of pro choice organizations in Georgia invited me to do a debate after this like pro choice celebration conference thing that they had. they kind of tricked me into coming to doing this thing.

I'm like the only pro-lifer in the room with like 300 excitedly pro-choice women. It was not my favorite day. But rape came up a lot. I was the only dude there. And the last thing that I said, and this isn't, I don't think it's original. I think I'd heard this from someone else. But I basically use this thought experiment, like imagine a woman is raped and becomes pregnant and chooses not to have an abortion.

Not all pregnant rape survivors have abortion. So she's one of those. He chooses not to have an abortion. He gives birth to a baby boy. The rapist butt is in jail where it belongs. He's getting therapy. Things are for sake of argument going as well as they can be. It's not easy, but he's on the road to healing, the long road to healing, right?

And everything's going okay until her son turns one. And let's say now he suddenly, because he develops, as he physically develops, he now looks less like a little baby and more like a little boy. And unfortunately, he got his looks from his biological dad. he looks like the rapist and now it is causing PTSD symptoms in her she's having nightmares every night to get some point there's even hates her since he even wants to kill her son to make her feel better should she be allowed to do that the entire audience collectively shook their head no i said why and it was someone from the audience that spoke of so they said well that's different i said why they said because

you can't kill humans and i said right and i made a scientific and philosophical argument that today that No one has responded to you that said that the unborn is not only human, but it's a valuable person. And if that's true, big if, but if I'm right about that, then we can't kill the unborn to make her feel better either. And that's coming from. I'm a codependent, okay? I want to make her feel better. I will do anything to help.

Does she need a place to stay? Let's get her a place to stay. Does she need baby items? Let's get her that. Does she need therapy? Let's get her that. I'll get her anything. I am not willing to kill someone, though.

to make her feel better. That's where I draw the line. And what if that mother, who has been raped, though, is under the age of 15? We're talking about a 12, 13-year-old girl because that's the, then they'll go to that. Yes. That's exactly right. You'll start seeing layers of hard cases getting layered onto them. What if, you know, all these different things.

Okay. The question becomes, like the most relevant moral, besides how horrible it is that a pre-teen or pre-15-year-old is pregnant, that's horrible. clearly that's rape. Like, it's horrible. The, the only thing that changes here when you add in a young person, what the purchase person is trying to do is added this question of like, is her life at risk? Is she too young to have a, like physically have a baby or for a C-section to be able to be

done safely? Because very young girls around the world have babies. Like, that is a thing. It's historically been a thing. People were having babies at 11, 12, 13. Like, that has happened and not everyone dies. But the question becomes, is this a, is her life at risk or not? If doctors examine a given person and say, because of her size or whatever,

her life is at risk. And we can't do a C-section and deliver a preemie and try to help the preemie. Like, there is no way to save them both. We have to intervene in order to save her life. Then at that point, I'm with them. At that point, okay, that is the only time when I am okay with something that a lot of people would call an abortion. Now, pro-lifers will sometimes argue about whether you call that an abortion or not.

Yeah, I was going to say, because I felt like in the, you know, the situation of mother life at risk, abortion is never actually a viable option. You never need to actually kill the baby in order to save the life of the mother, correct? It depends on how you define abortion. And this is where I am a little bit different than some popular pro-life speakers who want to be able to say you never, ever, ever have to have an abortion. Well, it depends on how you define it. Some people, they're defining abortion as purely elective procedures. Well, if you define abortion as only an elective procedure and then say that we never need abortion to save the mother's life, that's a circular argument.

You've defined out the life in the mother cases. For me, I don't care as much what you call a given procedure. I care whether it's morally justified. So a self-injectomy, which is the procedure to intervene in a tubal pregnancy that even Catholics agree with, where you remove the whole fallopian tube or at least the section that has the embryo

so that you least directly interact with the embryo, but you know the embryo is going to die. Like even the Catholic Churches 4 that for double effect reasons. Some pro-choice people would say, I would call that an abortion. I'm not going to have a whole debate with them about how they label this procedure. I don't care. What I want to say is that's clearly, to me, a morally justified procedure

because no pro-lifer, almost no pro-lifer, thinks that women should have to commit suicide via pregnancy. That's not where we're coming from. What we're saying is you shouldn't be able to directly kill innocent babies when her life is not at risk. So it's not to me as much what do you label a different procedure. The question is, it's going to be a case-by-case situation in the end. Tuble pregnancies are the most common cases that get talked about, but they're like, approach this person could say, like,

well, what about this other case? And I'd be like, tell me the details. And I want to know what doctors would say. I want to know, can we save them both? It's triage.

In triage, doctors do this all the time, where they make in the moment decisions, how can we try to save the most people? If you put a medical soldier on a battlefield, I just watched, I just rewatch Band of Brothers. It's an amazing,

HBO series, and ESPO's doing a podcast about it now. This is amazing. I'm super. into that stuff. But like you've got medics on a field having to make judgment calls where there's multiple injured soldiers. What do I

do now? And sometimes those are life and death decisions. It's not ideal. But we also don't say as a murderer if you picks this one over this one. Like we save as many people as we can. Let's go into the law in Roe v. Wade. Okay. What will the country look like

from a pro-life perspective if Roe v. Wade is overturned? Good question. So first of all, you also probably have to see Casey v. Planned Parenthood overturned, and no one ever talks about Casey. But Casey's functionally more of the abortion law of the land now. That was passed in 92 or it might have been 91. But it basically gutted all the arguments from Roe that were pro-choice instead of abortion

should be legal for these new reasons. So you have to have Casey get overturned or changed too. But if Roe and Casey were overturned, then functionally what happens, abortion goes back to a state's rights issue, the way that it was before Roe. So before Roe v. Wade, there were some states that made abortion legal, like Colorado, New York, for example, and different states, and every state was kind of different. Again, some states where abortion was legal only for life of the mother, or only legal for rape and incest, and then there's some where, you know, it was more generally available, and somewhere

was completely banned still. And then in Roe, the Supreme Court made it a constitutional issue and said, you know, this wipes off all the state's laws and replaces it with you can have abortion and set up this trimester framework that then Casey replaced with a viability framework. So you can basically not really prohibit abortions before viability if it's going to cause an undue burden. And that's now part of what's getting debated in Dobbs at the end of the year. It's a very, very interesting. That's the most important Supreme Court case since Casey is going to be Dobbs. It's going to be super interesting to see what happens there and maybe what happens is we end up seeing America become more like a lot of

European countries. Like there's not a lot of countries where abortion is legal and tell viability. That's pretty extreme. In some places like New York, it's legal until birth. That's extreme. A lot of places it's legal for like just like the first trimester or first, you know, you know, 15 weeks or something. That might happen in Dobbs. But if, yeah, again, if Roe in case we went away, it becomes a state's issue and every state is going to battle it out. Unless there's a like constitutional amendment that functions like the 13th and 14th amendments that basically says like, you know, the right to life. The definition of person includes the unborn. Like if something like that happened, you can see that happen.

But then the other side could respond with a bodily autonomy kind of a constitution all amendment. And so it's not super obvious what would happen at that point. But I think a lot of abortions would go down. So like a weird thing that approach which people say sometimes is like there would be no change in abortion numbers. it just means that more women would be having abortions dangerously. Right. It's like, no, there are a lot more abortions after row. Like, you know, the abortion rate went, went way up in the years following Roe versus Wade.

And that tells me there were a lot of women in the early 70s who were morally willing to have abortions, but we're not willing to break the law to do it. I think that would be the case here. I think a lot of women would choose not to break the law. And some might, and we should have a lot of education programs and try to put a lot of money into resources for single moms and things like that to try to, you know, convince people not to do that. But ultimately, I'm not convinced that the fact that some people might do something dangerous means that we should keep it legal if we're, if abortion is killing some.

Is it true or false that Roe versus Wade legally allows for abortion at any time during pregnancy? It's complicated. So in Roe versus Wade, they set up a trimester framework where you could do abortions, like no state could prohibit abortions in the first trimester. States could maybe start thinking about prohibiting them in the second trimester and the third trimester for sure they could they could have prohibition. And then Casey again wiped all that off the books and replaced it with this framework that said states cannot really meaningfully prohibit abortions before viability. Of course, viability is a moving target. But generally speaking, like I think it's fair to say viability is about 23 weeks after fertilization. March of Dime says you've got a 50-50 chance of survival

after that point. That feels like a reasonable place to, you know, throw a dart and call that viability. Although some babies have survived younger than that. Some don't, you know, it just depends. So something like 23 weeks, but as our technology improves, that gets younger and younger. Used to be 26 weeks, now it's more like 23. It's like the weirdest line to draw when people are like, this is when it becomes a person. I had this happen in Minneapolis, or I'm sorry, Minnesota a couple weeks ago where a purchase person said, I think you become a person when you're viable.

It's like, you pick the only moving target, dude. Like, like, it seems weird to say that a woman in a first world country with a viable baby, like that's a person, but this gets on a transatlantic flight to a third world country with not as much

medical technology at her disposal. Yeah. It's different everywhere. That's a non-person. Like, like, that seems metaphistically very, very strange to me.

It's the weirdest line to draw. But, uh, what was your question? Okay. So, so now it's, at viability, after viability, states can choose to have bigger prohibitions if they want to, if they pass it.

But before that, they cannot cause a, quote, undue burden, end quote, on abortion. And that's why that phrase gets debated a lot in other supremacquerque case. What exactly is an undue burden? That's a very weird phrase. How many miles does someone need to drive to an abortion clinic before it's an undue burden? And that's why that gets debated a lot. So that's currently the law. And then again, like New York recently did the opposite,

where they like really made it clear in the law. You can read the law. You cannot prohibit abortion. No pro-biscence on abortion at all until birth. So in regards to race. Yeah. What is the strongest response to the statement that it's racist to not be pro-choice? It's racist to not be pro-choice.

I guess presumably because abortion laws could, disproportionately affect people of color. Would that be the argument? Okay. So I would say, I don't think that killing people should be legal, even if that means that, like, so anytime you make something illegal,

some people will still do it, right? Like laws against rape. There are still rapes happening every day. It's still horrible. We don't want that to happen. But of course, like, no one thinks there's ever going to be a completely abortion free anything, just like there's never going to be probably like a rape free anything.

We want to minimize as much as possible. We want to punish rapists. We want to educate, you know, people. I think like the Me Too movement has done some valuable things on helping people think better about consent and things like that. Doesn't mean everything that they say is great. I'm just saying, like, there are some props that we can give to them for that. Our society is going the right direction, generally speaking, the way that we think about

things like consent. All that to say, it's like more likely if, you know, with murder illegal, well, who has the ability to hire a hitman? Hip men are expensive and hard to find. So you could argue rich white people have the most access to hiring hitmen. That doesn't mean that the laws against hiring assassins is wrong or that we shouldn't have them just because the effect is disproportionate. It just, like, that's just a fact.

What I want to see is, can our society get to a place where it is no longer true that, your race means that you have less access to anything, like any even good thing. Like, I think it is still true that people of color, generally speaking, have hurdles to leap over that the average white people don't. I think there are some things true coming from Black Lives Matter. I don't think everything that people from Black Lives Matter say is true, But I think that there is common ground that I find with them. And it's okay if some of your listeners disagree about that.

But I want to see that change. I want to see the effects that I think are still true from pre-civil rights movement that are still happening generations later. I want to see that go away. But I'm not going to say, well, let's take away any law that disproportionately affects people of color. I think the question is, should that law be there, period? And laws against directly killing people, I think, clearly ought to be there, even if white people are having easier time getting around that law.

Okay, so quality of life. One thing about the spillover, I've had some incredible survivors of unimaginable tragedy come on the show and share their story. One of them being a child serial killer survivor. She was abducted at eight years old, sexually abused, escaped, survived. You know, people say a lot on the pro-choice side, well, if this child is going to to face child abuse that is that severe, you know, that mother, her mother should have been allowed to have an abortion. If you would know that a child was going to have unimaginable suffering.

Yeah. So, first of all, in any given case, I'm not sure how someone knows that, that a, you know, a fetus if it's allowed, a human fetus, if it's allowed to continue to live and grow into an older child is going to be abused for sure. I want to find that crystal ball. But let's just say, I certainly will concede that some kids are going to get abused. It's really, really wrong. We don't want to see that happen. We just described to what an eight-year-old is horrifying. We don't want any of that to happen. Whatever we need to do in our society and our legal system to make it harder for something like that to happen, basically I'm four, you know. But then it just seems, I think there's a hidden premise basically in that pro-tooth's argument that the unborn is not a person.

Because no one says like, so I'll use this example sometimes. Like, okay, if we really want to prevent all the child abuse, if we want to prevent child abuse more, let's not stop at abortion. Let's make it the law, a federal law that child protective services knocks on every single door at least once a year looking for signs of child abuse. And if they find, like, for sure, proven child abuse, they instantly euthanize the kids. That would prevent a lot more child abuse. But, of course, none of us are for that because we know that it's wrong to kill people. And it's just easier to tell that this, you know,

five-year-old in the thought experiment in front of us with the black eye is a person that should, that should not be killed. It's not as obvious about the unborn. And so, like, we don't disagree about child abuse. we disagree about the unborn. Let's talk about that. I'm not for killing anyone to prevent them from suffering later. I think, of course, we want to do other things to prevent suffering, but I don't think

it was to kill people to prevent suffering. Here's one of the weirdest things that I was sent from acute servitive, Josh. Someone told them God was pro-abortion because he gave his only son. Oh, that's a twist. Okay. I haven't heard that one. I've heard a couple of different versions. They sent this.

They said, I have to ask him about this. I've heard a couple of versions of God has approached twice. But that's a new one. That's so weird. So, Thea, assuming, like, first of all, I don't think this is usually coming from a pro choice Christian.

I think this is usually coming from a pro se atheist. It's like you don't actually believe that God did that. So it's a little bit, like, it doesn't feel like arguing in good faith to me. And what would they say to, like, one of my friends from secular pro-life who are also agnostic and atheist, but they're pro-life? Like, what would you say to them? Kind of like, do you have any other true-toist arguments besides this?

Because if anything, the only thing you're going to prove to me is that maybe I shouldn't believe in God. Maybe there's something wrong with Christianity. But that doesn't mean that abortion is wrong. It doesn't mean it's wrong to kill people. But as long as you're bringing God into it, if we're assuming for sake of argument that the Christian God is true and exists and that Christianity like Christian theology is roughly true, then the kind of calculus that God is able to do is just different than what

humans can do. Because under Christian theology, we would say that God is the author of life and that objective morality comes from God's nature. And so God is the author of life can kind of do whatever he wants. And that's just different than us. Like we're like none of us are in that in that situation. It's just it was like I'm just so not interested in debating theology with an atheist though. It's like I'll debate theology with other people who are Christians and stuff.

It's like I'm not in that interested in this debate because like I don't like what's the point? Right. I'd rather to say let's just say atheism is true. I'm willing to have this debate like basically. functionally as an atheist. I'm not referencing God or religion. I'm not those Christians are like, oh, you're pro-choice? Well, Psalm 139 says that God knit you and your mother's woman. Jeremiah 1-5 says that God knew you before time began. And the new testament. That never works.

That never works. It doesn't work. So I'm not doing that. Why are you like, how do you know what I believe about God? Like I'm not bringing God into this. Why are you bringing God into this? Yeah. Okay. So the last listener question is about the phosphorus. care stuff. You know, how can you say that a mother should place her child for adoption when we have all these issues in foster care and we're overflowing in our foster care homes? We don't even have enough foster care homes in this country. What is your response to that quickly? First, common ground. There are major issues in foster care. I do not want kids growing up in foster care. There are kids growing. There are kids turning 18 in foster care. That's horrible.

My first debate with an abortion proponent, the executive director of Newell, Georgia, we hung out in the green room before the debate and had a great time finding common ground about the problems in the foster care system. Completely agree, that's a problem. And there's even abuse that happens in the foster care system. But foster care is different than newborn adoption, which is more relevant to the abortion debate. If a woman becomes pregnant, was not planning on becoming pregnant, does not feel like sicking,

you know, parent right now, but chooses not to have an abortion, gives birth to a baby, and then, you know, quickly, like, you know, on friends, like you saw this happen, like, quickly offers a child for adoption, there's roughly 30 to 40 couples waiting to adopt for every newborn available. There's like the supply and there's a supply and demand issue there because more people want to adopt a newborn that's like a blank slate, then they, but they might be kind of freaked out by adopting like a teenager who might be coming with a lot of like behavioral or even physical issues. Now, I don't like that. I understand it, but I don't like it. I want us to be more willing to adopt foster kids, but it's not so much an issue with newborn.

However, just to tweak pro-lifers one more time, because I offend pro-lifers all the more often than I offend pro-choice people, frankly, we have some podcasts recently with a friend of mine named Robin Atkins on the Equip for Life podcast where she got me thinking about adoption differently. And I think generally speaking, pro-lifers are too excited about newborn adoption and are not taking into consideration of trauma that can happen to kids who are adopted. I think we too quickly think of adoption is this easy way out, this easy solution. Oh, just do adoption. I think we should more often try to point people towards parenting if it is at all possible for them to do so and then have adoption be a last resort adoption. Interesting. Okay, I'm going to have to have you back on some time

and do a part two and get more into that because that sounds really fascinating. Okay, so what does the Equal Rights Institute provide for people wanting to become expert debaters on the topic of abortion? If you want to know the best arguments that we are finding to not just be true arguments, but also would be persuasive to today's young pro-choice people, then we're the place for that because we're doing R&D on college campuses and testing the arguments and the ideas. And so there's a couple of hundred articles on our blog on our website. There's a whole bunch of podcasts, YouTube videos, and all of it is kind of oriented towards

helping pro-life people to think better, to reason more honestly and to argue more persuasively. So if that's something that you want, we have a lot of free free free resources on a YouTube channel or podcast and our blog. And then if you want a more systematic approach to what we've found to be the most effective, we have two online courses that are very inexpensive that people can buy that will just more systematically take them through that process piece by piece on pro-life apologetics and sidewalks. Thank you. Okay. And how can students or pro-life groups get in touch with you to have you actually speak at pro-life events or their college campus. Yeah.

If they go to Equal Rights Institute.com, there's a place for speaking where they can put in, you know, we're interested in having someone come out and speak. We've got a couple of speakers, myself included. And we also have affiliate groups now. If you've got like a college group or high school group or something like that and you would like a bunch of free resources, like do you want all those courses completely for free, unlimited for your people and free coaching from us on how to grow your club and to do effective outreaches. We actually have an affiliate program now. That information is on the website as well.

Equal Rights Institute.com. Josh, you are my favorite person in the pro-life movement. I just want you to know that. I love the podcast. I listen to it all the time. I feel like there's not enough time in the world I could sit and talk to you for 15 hours on this. And I learn so much every single time you talk and how to debate abortion and just why I'm pro-life and a big part of you are a huge part of that. So thank you so much for coming on the spillover. Super kind. Thank you so much, Alex, for having me. Boy, this conversation, definitely one of my favorites ever.

For all my pro-choice listeners, thank you so much for sticking around until now. I know that not every single conservative is pro-life. Obviously, my goal is to change that. But if there was anything new that you learned in this episode with Josh Brom, I would love to know if your mind was changed on something. It really means a lot to me. You sticking around to listen to this, your willingness to engage in this. this conversation is half the battle when it comes to the abortion debate in this country.

And for the audience as a whole, I hope that you took notes and you learned something that you didn't know before, even if you are pro-life. Maybe you felt challenged. Maybe you had all these questions answered already. Or maybe this has inspired you to ask more questions. I really want to know what resonated with you, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life. And I also want to know if there was any questions that did not get answered. So make sure you're following my daily show.

It's at Pop Politics on Instagram. I cover pop culture from a conservative perspective. And you can DM on there or at Real Alex Clark, which is my personal Instagram, and let me know if there was some other questions. Because we can have Josh back. Like I said, I'll have him back. You know, in a few months, who knows? And we could do a part two of this. So, you know, one other thing I want to say before we go, remember when people used to stand in line for Black Friday?

You would eat Thanksgiving dinner and then you'd bundle up and stand in line for hours with your friends, waiting for Forever 21 to open up so that you can snag a bunch of stuff. stuff on sale. Was that just me? Okay, well, for those of you who know what I mean, subscribing to the spillover is like being first in line. You're going to know all the conservatee first. And if you leave a five-star review, you'll have good luck for a whole year and clear skin. Okay, maybe not. Don't sue me or hold me to that in court, okay? But click subscribe, leave a five-star review, and then make sure you tune in next week because the tea just keeps on spilling, baby. Very saucy. New episodes of the spillover are posted every year.

Thursday at 9 p.m. Pacific and midnight Eastern on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if you do not know this, some people don't. You can watch the episodes. You can watch me talking to my guests. Some of them are in person. Some of them are some of them are on Skype. But either way, you can watch them on Poplitex's YouTube and on TPSA Live at 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday. So share this episode absolutely everywhere. If there was any episode, I mean, all of these spillover episodes I think have been absolutely crucial in life-changing. Maybe I'm a little biased. But I do. think that they've all been important topics. This one especially, though, share with your pro life and your pro-choice friends. It really could save so many lives. So love you. Meenit. Bye.