The Daily Signal - Authors of New Book Explain How Abortion Is ‘Tearing Us Apart’ 

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Whether talking about the family, politics, or culture, abortion has created division and continues to do so, Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis say.  In a leaked draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “Far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, [Roe v. Wade] and [Planned Parenthood v. Casey] have enflamed debate and deepened division.” That statement, Anderson says, is a succinct description of what Roe v. Wade has done to America.  Anderson and DeSanctis are the authors of the new book “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.” They explain how abortion has affected many spheres of our society, and what can be done to instill a value for life across America.  Also on today’s show, we cover these stories:  The Jan. 6 committee conducts more hearings on the Capitol riot. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., accuses Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., of stalling legislation to protect Supreme Court justices and “jeopardizing the safety of the Supreme Court.” A new study from The Heritage Foundation suggests making it easier for minors to access transgender care may actually bring about more—rather than fewer—suicides. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, signs a new law authorizing teachers, principals, and other school employees to bring guns into classrooms after receiving 24 hours of training. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feeling festive. Catch classic holiday favorites like Home Alone, the Santa Claus and Die Hard, along with holiday episodes from Family Guy, Abbott Elementary, and more with Hulu on Disney Plus. From festive Disney flicks to binge-worthy Hulu originals, Hulu on Disney Plus is your home for the holidays. Celebrate the season with Hulu,

available on Disney Plus in Canada. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, June 14th. I'm Kate Trincoe. And I'm Doug Blair. whether talking about the family, politics, or culture, abortion has and continues to create division. In the leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Row and Casey have inflamed debate and deepened division.

Ryan Anderson and Alexander DeSanctus are the authors of the new book, Tearing Us Apart, How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. They joined Virginia today to explain how abortion has impacted. acted each sphere of our society and what can be done to create a culture of life across America. But before we get to Virginia's conversation with Ryan Anderson and Alexandra De Sanctus, let's hit our top news stories of the day. The January 6th Committee, which doesn't include a single Republican appointed by the top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, had more hearings Monday.

In this hearing, they aired selected portions of an interview with former Attorney General Bill Barr. Here's what Barr had to say via C-SPAN. When I walked in, sat down, he went off on a monologue saying that there was now definitive evidence involving fraud through the Dominion machines. And a report had been prepared by a very reputable cybersecurity firm, which he identified as a allied security operations group. And he held up the report. and then he asked that a copy of it be made for me and while a copy was

being made he said this is absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged the report means that I'm going to have a second term and then he gave me a copy of the report and as he talked more and more about it

I sat there flipping through the report and looking through it and to be frank it looked very amateurish to me. Didn't have the credentials of the people involved, but I didn't see any real qualifications. And the statements were made very conclusory like these machines were designed to engage in fraud or something to that effect, but I didn't see any supporting information for it. And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has

you know, lost contact with, he's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff. On the other hand, you know, when I went into this and would, you know, tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were. My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud. And I haven't seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the 2000 Mules movie. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, also questioned Ben Ginsberg, who was involved in arguing for the recount in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Here's that exchange via CBS. So are you aware of any instance in which a court found the Trump campaign's fraud claims to be credible?

No, there was never that instance in all the cases that were brought. And I've looked at the more than 60 that include more than 180 counts. And no, the simple fact is that the Trump campaign did not make its case. Ginsburg, however, has made no secret of his discipline. like a former President Donald Trump. In an op-ed that was published prior to the election for the Washington Post, Ginsburg wrote, President Trump has failed the test of leadership.

His bid for re-election is foundering, and his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multi-million dollar effort to disenfranchise voters. Following continued delays in the House to vote on a Supreme Court Justice Security bill, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, accused Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Monday, of stalling the legislation and jeopardizing the safety of the court. Here's some of McCarthy's speech via his Twitter.

But for some reason, Mr. Speaker, the Democrats on the other side of the aisle, even though 100 senators had agreed with this. Everyone in your party on the Senate side said yes, you still say no. I do not understand that. I do not why I do not understand why we would risk that. I do not understand why you'll make sure the Capitol's protected right now, knowing that something could happen in the Senate this week, but you won't protect, or something that could happen in Supreme Court this week,

that you won't protect those justices. The bill was originally introduced in the Senate by Republican Senator John Cornyn, Republican from Texas on May 5th following a series of protests outside the justices' homes. However, on June 8th, an armed man was arrested. outside of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home who said he'd come to kill Kavanaugh. On May 9th, the bill passed unanimously in the Senate but has remained stalled in the House. One of the most common refrains you'll hear is that denying minors access to puberty blockers and other methods of so-called gender-affirming care could result in suicide.

However, a new study from the Heritage Foundation, which is the parent organization of the Daily Signal, raises some important questions about whether this is true. According to the study, which was conducted by Heritage Foundation researcher J.P. Green, making it easier for minors to access transgender care may actually bring about more suicides. For the study, Green looked at 12 to 23-year-old's suicide rates. Then he looked at two types of states. States where parental consent is required for most health care for minors, and states that don't require parental consent for health care.

Green writes, Before 2010, these two groups of states did not differ in their youth suicide rates. Starting in 2010, when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available, elevated suicide rates in states where minors can more easily access these medical interventions, became observable. Rather than being protective against suicide, this pattern indicates that easier access by minors to cross-sex medical interventions without parental consent is associated with a higher risk of suicide. Specifically, Green found, by 2020, there are about 3.5 more suicides per 100,000 people ages 12 to 23 in states with easier access than in states without an access provision. Check out the full report on heritage.org.

In the aftermath of a series of mass shootings across the country, Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed a new law Monday authorizing teachers, principals, and other school employees to bring guns into classrooms after receiving 24 hours worth of training. The law will require school staff to complete four scenario training hours as well as 20 hours of miscellaneous training, including first aid. Here's DeWine, via W. What the bill does is essentially reverts back to the prior practice of allowing local school districts to make a local decision on whether or not they will permit certain school staff members to be armed on school ground. This is a local choice. It's not mandated by the legislature nor by the governor. Each school board will determine what is best for their students, their staff, and their community. Monday also marks the official start to Ohio's new constitutional carry law.

Now stay tuned for Virginia's conversation with Ryan Anderson and Alexander DeSanctus as they discuss how abortion has impacted America. For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels, find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C., and across the country. We can help connect you with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job-dash bank.

We are entering a new air in the fight for life in America, and here with us to talk about that is Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSantis, the authors of the new book tearing us apart how abortion harms everything and solves nothing. Ryan is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of the book, book that is banned on Amazon when Harry became Sally responding to the transgender moment.

And Alexander is a writer at National Review and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Ryan and Alexandra, welcome to the show. Thank you both for being here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks to having us. And you should mention or I should mention that I'm also a very grateful heritage alum, having spent nine wonderful years as a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

So it's good to be back. We're so grateful for all the work, Ryan, that you have. done here at Heritage and we miss you, but we're excited that we get to still collaborate and do things like this. So excited for the conversation today about this new book that is out June 28th. It's available, though, for pre-order now. Alexander, I want to get your thoughts. What exactly was the mission of writing this book? Because of course, it's such an important moment in history as we're looking at the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned. Why did you and Ryan say, hey, we need to sit down and write a book on life.

Well, I think the timing is the first and most important thing to keep in mind here, and we don't know what the Supreme Court will do in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization this summer, but it's clear that there's a big, you know, change in the abortion debate at the very least, if not in policy. We're hopeful still that the court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And if it does, that will launch a, you know, 50-state battle over what abortion policy is going to look like if the issue is sent back to the states and people can vote, their representatives can craft abortion policy again. And that's a conversation that Ryan and I felt like pro-lifers

needed to be well prepared for. And of course, that's something that's been going on for 50 years now. And pro-lifers have been, you know, doggedly persevering in this fight very well. But the particular angle we wanted to add was kind of a broad case about how abortion has farmed everything, right? I think pro-lifers are very good at talking about, you know, the unborn child is a unique, distinct, unrepeatable human being. He has the right to life. He or she has the right to life. You know, abortion harms women. But we hadn't really seen this kind of comprehensive argument about how abortion really harms every aspect of society. The law, our politics, our culture, you know, the field of medicine is a very big one. All these ways in which legal abortion has just decimated

our society. And we wanted to, you know, hopefully people who disagree with us will read the book and find value in it. We wrote it with that in mind too, but mainly we wanted to equip pro-lifers for whatever the next phase of the abortion debate will be. Yeah. So let's get into that a little bit more. So the book is called tearing us apart, how abortion harms everything and solves nothing. Ryan, in the draft Dobbs opinion that was leaked at the beginning of May, Alito wrote, far from bringing about a national settlement on the abortion issue, Row and Casey have inflamed debate and deepen division. And I'm assuming that you agree with Alito, since the book is called Tearing Us Apart, that you agree with him that Roe and Casey have deepened division. So explain

a little bit of that, of how abortion has actually affected our culture, what it's done to create division within our culture. Sure. I mean, great question. And Alito is exactly right. Roewey Wade didn't settle the abortion issue. If anything, I think it energized. the pro-life movement even more so. It's energized both sides, unfortunately. Both chapter five and chapter six of our book looks at the harm that Rovi-Wa-Wa-caused first, chapter five to the courts and to the constitutional system of government that we cherish in America itself. And then chapter six to the democratic political process. And what we mean by this is just think about the media circus that takes place every time there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

and a Republican president nominates an originalist or a textualist or someone who's actually going to follow what the Constitution says. And people on the left flip out because they know that if someone accurately interprets and applies the constitutional text, it means Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are on the chopping block. And so whether it was the Clarence, in first they bork, bork, right? Then we have the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. then we saw in, you know, recent living memory what happened with Kavanaugh, what happened with Amy Coney-Barritt, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that's just a way in which it's perverted something as simple as the Senate process

of advising and consenting to a nomination to the Supreme Court. In the Democratic context, we used to have a category known as pro-life Democrats. We used to have two political parties that were committed to, you know, a full. fundamental human right, the right to life. And now the parties have sorted themselves. And it's really, I think, stranded a lot of citizens who care about the life issue, but feel hostage to one of the two political parties because the other political party is so bad on this, right? And so one of the things that would be good about getting rid of Roe is that would actually allow legislative compromises to take place as a starting point.

It's not going to be our finish line, but we could at least get to a better place than where we are today with the ultimate goal in mind of protecting every human life at every moment of existence. Yeah, I love that in the book, you're so strategic in how you talk about in all of these different aspects that often we don't really think about, but how abortion has played that role. And Ryan, that's interesting to kind of hear you draw that line at the court and what we see, how the media has kind of continued to make. Anytime a Supreme Court justice is being appointed now, it's just such a circus, especially, obviously, when it's a conservative justice. Alexandra, I want to get your thoughts, though, on how this conversation around abortion, how Roeby Wade has specifically had an impact on the family. We see that marriage rates are continuing to fall. They're at record lows in America. Single parent homes are at a record high.

does abortion actually play a role in these trends, do you think? I think it's very clear that it does, and we obviously can't point out abortion and say this is the single culprit and the dissolution of the family. It really came about after that process started almost as a way of bolstering kind of the breakdown of the family. We needed abortion as this backstop, right? If you have a model where sex outside of marriage is normal or expected of women in particular, then women need some kind of backstop or so the pro-abortion.

feminist argument goes if they're abandoned with the consequences of that, namely a child, right? And so the argument from feminists is, well, women need abortion. And of course, we know that women don't need abortion. Women are harmed by abortion, let alone, you know, the unborn child. But we actually, one point we raise specifically in the book, to your point, is a paper by Janet Yellen, who, you know, most recently in the Treasury Secretary and her husband, George Akaroff, who made the point that, you know, abortion has actually been part of a, you know, a drop in shotgun marriages and what they call the feminization of poverty as a result. That's a major contributing factor. So I think there's no question that kind of this growing societal acceptance

of abortion has fueled that whole trend. Well, and I want to ask you a little bit more on that because I've recently been going out to a number of protests, pro-abortion protests, both in Washington, D.C. and at the homes of the Supreme Court justices. And Alexandra, one of the most common arguments that I'm hearing from those on the pro-abortion, side is, well, women shouldn't be forced to have to give birth to a child. That that is, you know, it's dangerous for them and that, you know, they have, they have the right to get to choose when they want to have kids. For people that are ending up in those kind of conversations right now, what is your response? Yeah, this is something I've seen a lot more recently. I think this is a very,

probably the most common pro-abortion argument that I've seen at least from kind of the activist crowd on this question. And I think the real response is, look, we all know where babies come from, right? And in 99, you know, probably more than 99% of cases, the mother and father consented to an act that naturally resulted in the conception of a child, right? And so at the point where they agreed to participate in that act, they were assenting to the possibility of a human in life coming into the picture. And so it's not fair to the child. It's actually an, you know, abdication of their duty to care for their child to then say, oh, you know, sorry, I actually didn't want a kid now. I just wanted to have some fun. And now the child has to pay the price

via lethal violence, right? That's sort of the argument that they're making. And I think it's like, as though they talk about it as though the government is forcing women to become pregnant, which of course isn't true. So I think we actually speak about this at great length in the first chapter of our book, because it's really a red herring that abortion supporters like to use to make pro-life or sound like we're anti-woman, but it's actually very clear when the, you know, kind of where the responsibility lies and abortion is an abdication of that. Yeah, yeah. Can I add one thing to that?

Please go ahead. In the book, we draw on the work of our colleague at EPPC, Erica Bakiaki, who's, you know, just a year or so ago published a really excellent book titled The Rights of Women, reclaiming a lost vision. And she goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft to point out that there was a vision of women's equality that didn't embrace abortion. She points out that all of kind of the founding suffragists, you know, in favor of women's right to vote, also thought that abortion was bad for women. They were more or less all pro-life. This is why the Susan B. Anthony list is named after

Susan B. Anthony, you know, pro-life women's rights leaders. And the movement that they launched was known as a voluntary motherhood movement. And by voluntary motherhood, they meant that motherhood should be voluntary, which means women, if sex is going to be justified, need to give consent to it. So they were responding to was a culture in which marital rape had been normalized and accepted, a culture in which women were expected to be sexually available. And so what they wanted to argue was not that women need abortion to be equal to men, but that women should have bodily autonomy and bodily rights, meaning that you need their consent before sexual activity takes place. But once you have a child in the womb, you're already

a mother. The decision for voluntary motherhood has already taken place. And so I think it is a huge red herring. If you're at these protests and people say, you know, the decision to be a mother should be voluntary. It's like, we all agree about that. The only question is, if you're seeking an abortion, are you already a mother? And the original kind of founding generation of women's rights activists, you know, had a perfectly clear understanding of how abortion would harm women. Yeah. Well, and we know, obviously, that, you know, not only does abortion harm women, it also, of course, takes a life of that baby in the womb. And we also see that there's trends that abortion has really negative effects on certain populations within our society. You all

recently wrote in your National Review article that more black children are aborted each year in New York city than are born. Wow. Ryan, does the left, you know, it's fascinating that the left who claims to be the defenders of minority communities, they don't talk about this. Why? Well, partly because there's a, you know, a terrible legacy here of Margaret Sanger's. I mean, I think it's only within the past year or two that Planned Parenthood finally stopped having an annual Margaret Sanger dinner, stopped giving out the Margaret Sanger Award. But the push for first contraception and then abortion is hugely tinged with eugenics, right? That this was about, I mean, in the words of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

about populations that we don't want too many of. I mean, that's how Ginsburg herself described what Roe v. Wade and what abortion was all about. I think it's a huge blind spot on those who care about racial equality to not recognize that racial equality begins in the womb, and that if we see a segment of our population with these highly elevated rates of abortion, it's a sign that we as a community are failing these women, these families, and these babies, and that the solution's not opening a Planned Parenthood clinic in the middle of their neighborhoods, but providing them with the resources they need. to choose life. And yet we just saw, you know, just several days ago, the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center, which does exactly that, was vandalized by pro-abortion activists, right? So the centers that actually are providing assistance and resources to women to choose life, to bring their baby into the world, to care for their baby, they're the ones attacked. And yet many of the pro-abortion activists turn a blind eye to the violations of equality in the room. In the chapter

where we discuss the eugenic roots to plan parenthood, and we discuss the statistic that you mentioned about more black babies being killed in New York than being born. We also discuss sex discriminatory abortion, where girls are targeted for lethal discrimination. And we talk about discrimination on the basis of disability, where you'll see these, you know, just perverse headlines of, you know, such and such a country eradicates Down syndrome. And you think, oh, they found a cure for Down syndrome. No, they've aborted every Down syndrome baby that was conceived. And so there are huge questions for, you know, human dignity and human equality that abortion on demand really elevates to the fore. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and when we have these conversations about abortion,

of course, there's this sort of big undergirding question of when does life actually begin? And on on the pro-abortion side, the central argument that I've been hearing most commonly from those who are pro-abortion is life does not begin until a child is viable, until a baby can survive outside of its mother's womb. And then, of course, for the pro-life side, we believe no life begins at conception. Do you all get into this in the book and how as a culture, as a society, we can actually address address this argument of when does life begin from both kind of the moral philosophical side, but also from the scientific side.

Alexandra, I want to start with you and get your thoughts, and then Ryan, feel free to jump in. Yeah, we do talk about this at great length, especially in our first chapter, just kind of laying the groundwork for the whole book. It's about the harm of abortion to the unborn child, which is the most basic case. But we go through and rebut pretty much every one of the most common arguments for abortion that's sort of targeted at the unborn child. So like you mentioned, you know, it's not actually a human being, or it's not a human person, or, you know, the mother's rights are more important,

even if the baby is a human and a human person. We do respond to all those sorts of things. I think it's important to start there because these are very common arguments for abortion, of course, but I would say on this point, they're silly arguments for abortion, right? We actually all do know that human life begins at conception. We don't know human mother in history. It's ever gotten pregnant with a substance. squirrel and doesn't magically, we know this doesn't magically become a human being at any kind of

line there before birth or at birth. This has always been a human being. And so people who say that are just trying to, you know, avoid the heart of the debate, which is why do you think abortion is morally acceptable? And then you'll have people who, you know, realize that's a very unsophisticated argument to say this isn't a human being. So they switch to saying, well, philosophically speaking, maybe, you know, whatever this creature is, maybe it's a human being, but it's not a human person. For whatever reason, you know, it lacks consciousness, it lacks memory. it lacks the ability to form its own desires or, you know, it can't breathe outside the womb or whatever the criteria might be. And the problem with those arguments, aside from being, you know,

false and an attempt at dehumanizing, is that they actually, in the process, unperson, so to speak, other categories of human beings who these same people would not want to unperson, right? They don't want to say that someone in a coma can be shot. They don't want to say that, you know, a person on life support should be shot. You know, some of them do, you know, argue with that consistency. but typically you'll find that they don't actually want to extend that type of dehumanizing, depersonifying language or argument across other categories as you'd have to. And so their argument kind of falls apart there. So we do go through these different steps and kind of respond at each point to these claims. I think that's so helpful.

Ryan, do you have anything you want to add on that? The only other thing I would add is in that same chapter, we also respond to the ludicrous claim that you can't base law on morality. You know, don't impose your morality on me or, you know, don't legislate based on religion. And I think, you know, both of these claims are, you know, just patently false as applied to the abortion context. Both because, first, all of our laws are based on morality. You know, whether we're talking about property rights or whether we're talking about environmentalism, whether we're talking about fill in the blank, it's based on some upon some vision of justice, some vision of the common good, some vision of rights, and all those concepts.

rights, justice, the common good, equality, those are all moral categories. And none of us would want to live in a system in which the human-made law, the man-made law, the positive law, wasn't based upon the natural law, the moral law. And this was, you know, an elementary point that Martin Luther King Jr. makes in his letter from the Birmingham jail, that the problem with racial segregation laws, they were man-made laws that violated the natural law, violated the eternal law, violated the moral law, violated God's law, right? And all those things are true about abortion, which also then highlights that there's nothing wrong with people drawing on the resources of their theological traditions, their religious traditions. The founders did this in the

declaration. They appeal to certain inalienable rights based upon the laws of nature and nature's God. Martin Luther King Jr. and many other civil rights leaders pointed to the, you know, the the brotherhood of man based upon the fatherhood of God, right? King cites both Augustine and Aquinas in his letter from the Birmingham jail. And so I think this is another way in which abortion has harmed our democratic system in that it's led so many people to internalize the lie that, you know, religion doesn't belong in the public square and that morality should be separated from the law when really you can't do either of those things.

Well, and as we're thinking about the future of abortion in America and the possibility of Roby Wade being overturned, we know that the moment that Roeby Wade is overturned, that abortion laws go back to the states. And there's so many states that have already put pro-life laws in place to protect life. But we do have to go further than that. Kind of what you all are talking about, we have to create a culture of life. And so the arguments I think that you make in your book are so critical for thinking strategically about what is life, when does life begin? But talk, Ryan, I'll start with you. And then, Alexandria, I want to get your thoughts.

Talk a little bit about how we practically do that, how we shift as a culture post-row to a society that values life, that treasures life from all the way from the womb to the tomb. Great question. I mean, to a certain extent, that's like the million dollar question because that's everything that we're going to be needing to do as a pro-life movement. And so I'll preface this by saying one thing strikes me as really important is that as pro-lifers try to answer your question, there needs to be a lot of charity, a lot of the ability to make prudential calculations and possibly disagree with each other without, you know, writing people out of the pro-life movement. And people are going to have to make compromises. They're going to have to do kind of like prudential. You know, what's the trade off of going this approach versus that approach?

And we should do it in a spirit of humility and charity. And the way that I think about this is that we should have a series of both ands where, you know, various forces will try to make us have either oars. In the very last chapter of the book, Alexandra and I go through a series of, you know, some people say, should it be law or should it be culture? And we say it should be both? It needs to be both law and culture. Some people say should it be the states or should it be the federal government? We say both, both the states and the federal government. Some people say should you focus on the supply of abortion, meaning plan parenthood and other abortionists, or the demand for abortion?

Meaning, you know, what are the reasons that lead women to think they need abortion? And we say, you've got to focus on both, right? And so we need, you know, various forms of public policy to assist women experiencing unplanned pregnancy and, you know, look at what Texas did. They got lots of media attention for the heartbeat bill, but they didn't get any media attention when they added $100 million to the Texas alternatives to abortion program, providing women with tangible resources. But they also went after the supply side of abortion by passing a heartbeat bill. And so, you know, we go through a series of these. And I think that's going to be, you know, the overarching framework answers, avoid false dichotomies and, you know, be willing to grapple with needing to, you know, walk and chew gum at the same time.

Alexandra, anything that you'd like to add? Yeah, I would just add one point. Ryan mentioned kind of the charity that pro-lifers need to have for one another in terms of kind of allowing different views maybe or on different questions, you know, things like the welfare state or, you know, the death penalty. There's a lot of leeway there, I think, that we have to give and try not to define people out of the movement as much as possible. As long as we all kind of have the goal of making abortion illegal and unthinkable,

let's start there and get to the other disagreements when we can. But also on that point of charity and I would say prudence is, I think pro-lifers have to realize that the strategy is going to be different in all different states and that that's okay. And I think we might have a tendency or I've kind of seen percolating this tendency to think we have to immediately, you know, rush to a complete and total ban in every possible place and nothing short of that will do. And of course, we have to get there eventually. That does have to be our end goal. But that's actually not going to be politically feasible. on day one in most places. And I think pro-lifers have to be, and I think most are and have shown a willingness to be realistic about that and to push for the most protective pro-life laws we can

get in each state, you know, and at the federal level, but while still, you know, making the case that only only total protection for the unborn is just. Yeah. The book is called Tearing Us Apart How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. It's available for Pre-Order Now. It's out June 28th. You can follow Ryan and Alexandra on Twitter, Ryan at Ryan T. And and Alexandra at XAN underscore Dysynctus. Ryan and Alexandra, thank you both so much for time today. We really appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and IHeartRadio. Please leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Bluey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Doug Blair.

Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.