The Sean McDowell Show - A "Christian" Case for Abortion? No Chance!

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

Is there a Christian case for abortion? According to author Rebecca Todd Peters, abortion can be the result of thinking Christianly about justice. In this video, Sean invites on pro-life speaker Megan Almon to discuss the book "Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice." Megan is a speaker for Apologetics, Inc., and she graduated with her MA in Christian Apologetics from Biola in 2011. Invite Megan to speak: https://meganalmon.com/ READ: Chasing Love: Sex, Love, and Relationships in a Confused Culture (https://amzn.to/3AKMEmA) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Is there a Christian case for abortion? According to author Rebecca Todd Peters, a self-proclaimed progressive Christian who wrote Trust Women, abortion is consistent with the Christian faith and in fact, abortion is a moral good. Here to break it down is my friend

and one of my go-to thinkers and speakers and writers on the topic of life is Megan Allman. Megan, should have had you on a long time ago, but it's great to have you on. Thanks for coming on to talk with me about this important, but honestly, also disturbing book. Yes, good to be with you, Sean. Good to dig into this. It is good to dig into this. And I think it's vital because I think so many people are being misled by this. And the fact that she says this is a Christian case got my attention more than any other case. Well, she says in the introduction, quote, Peter says,

I did not choose to end my pregnancy despite my Christian identity and faith, but rather because of it. I want to know, Megan, not only what you think, but how such a claim makes you feel. Yeah, well, I have many thoughts, of course, but I think the feelings come first, that visceral reaction to reading something like that. And even as I read her work, trying to understand, where are you coming from? How are you reasoning through this?

I've just fluctuated back and forth between, I mean, sympathy in some parts, because she did walk through two abortions, but also just horror at where she's trying to ground it and how she's justifying what these choices are and the choices in general that women make with regard to abortion, but also anger that this is something that's being taught regularly by her and by others who are like-minded with her. Of course, the thoughts are, I don't know how we can call this Christian. That's the first thought.

But there are many reasons I'm sure we'll dig into as to why that is. When I read her work, and there are some others I've read of late, and the idea that comes to mind, I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's book, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Just the idea that there's a veneer on this that when some people come to it it seems very attractive because it's giving people a lot of what they seem to want it's justifying in a way and then couching it in this Christian language but it makes me wonder about the portrait in the closet if we pull that portrait out what would we really see dangerous Dangerous ideas.

I appreciate your honesty about wavering back and forth because that's how I felt for a lot of the reasons that you mentioned. I think what made me more angry about this, to be completely honest, is if someone, for example, is an atheist, and I know all atheists don't feel this way, and they're pro-choice. In some ways, if you're a naturalist, you don't believe we have objective human value built into us from God. You don't believe that all life is made from a creator and valuable because it bears the Imago Dei. You don't have certain Christian ideas of equality and justice built into the world, I get it on one level. Take issue with it, but I get it. When somebody says not only are they pro-choice, but they're pro-cho most vulnerable amongst us, but say that Jesus would side with them. That's why I say timeout.

And I was so motivated to respond here to this book and glad he joined me. Now, some ways in this book, it's kind of hard to figure out exactly what her case is and what's central. She makes some political arguments. There's a lot of emotional arguments. So I'm going to kind of do my best to walk us through some of the bigger claims that she makes. So we'll kind of get there one by one. But early on in the book, she said something that I thought, I can't be understanding what she's saying here. Maybe I am. Early on, she said, considering that one in three women have abortions, we can see that abortion is a normal part of women's reproductive lives. Now, what do you make of that claim?

Well, my training would tell me go to that word normal and ask, what in the world do you mean by the word normal? Because there are different ways we could look at that. I think she's trying to do a very typical progressive Christian thing with this going, well, the cultural trend is leaning this way. Therefore, let's shape the ethic to the trend. But just because something might be deemed as normal or something that we see more often does not make it normative right so that's i mean we could say the same thing about slavery at one point in our country something that was popularized something that the majority may be bought into but it certainly wasn't a normative practice or a right in good practice um so that's where i went with that

initially but yeah always what do you mean by normal? Yeah, that's fair. I mean, you can make a lot of issues. Like, is it normal that people look at pornography? Well, that certainly doesn't make it normative, uh, sexual abuse. The numbers are horrifying how much they exist, but that doesn't make it good or normative, let alone slavery. There's a lot of just simple, basic philosophical mistakes that she makes all riddled through this book. Now, she seems to kind of take a relativistic approach.

As I read a book like this, I'm asking what's her worldview, what's behind this. And by the way, for those of you watching, we're going to get to her claims about when the unborn allegedly becomes human. Some of these cases she makes, we will get to. But as I'm reading it, it struck me that she kind of has a relativistic ethic underneath this. So I found this quote where she says, this question about what a woman should do when she's pregnant, the morality of abortion, can only be addressed with the life of a particular woman at a given moment in time. When a woman is faced with this ethical question, her answer will vary depending on the individual and the many factors that define her life at any given moment. So is that relativistic and does that help her case or to ultimately undermine it in your eyes? Well, it's the epitome of relativistic to take something out of the

concrete or the objective realm, which speaks to what is the nature of the whole conversation about abortion right now, but to plunk it into kind of the individual subjective, not only feelings, but lived experience. Again, very much a progressive Christian move on her part. In one sense, I guess you could say that it helps her case because now she's allowed to say whatever she wants. It's up to her. On the other sense, it definitely hurts her case because we can't deny the givenness of life or the way that reality actually works. And for the sake of consistency, what we see is that when Peters writes about these issues, she takes a moral stance against several other moral issues in our nation. She takes a moral

stance against racism. She takes a moral stance against the oppression of women as she defines that. But she does not extend that to the moral issue of abortion, though she calls it a moral decision. So there is rife with inconsistency in terms of wanting to take this particular moral issue and plunk it into the realm of this is a subjective preference issue or this is up to the individual to decide for herself in this case. I think that's a common move in our nation. In fact, it's one of the biggest hurdles that we have to get over in conversations about abortion is that it has been framed subjectively in our nation, even at the political level by many. So when you're having conversations with people, you will more likely hear this relativistic language surrounding abortion.

Like, well, I would never have an abortion, but I can't tell other women what's right or wrong for them. Now she would take issue with that position for a different reason. Or you'll hear people say, well, that's your truth, but you can't push your views on other women as to what they can and cannot do with their bodies so this same thinking though would not be applied to other moral issues that we more readily agree upon in our nation as objectively or universally

wrong anyway i think it hurts her case in terms of trying to tell us how we ought to be thinking about it when she's kind of done away with any oughtness whatsoever. So I think you're right because she talks about how a justice ethic should inform everything that we do. But you can't just say there's this justice ethic way to follow and then say it all depends on the individual experience and preference, which is relativistic. You cannot have both. So I think sometimes we err on saying just like is lying wrong. Absolutely. Well, the Bible might allow certain circumstances in the case of say Rahab or the midwives when

life is at stake. But just because there are certain circumstances and circumstances matter, doesn't mean all of a sudden we have this relativistic ethic that gets rid of objective truth, which she wants to appeal to in other part of the books. So I think framing it that way undermines her case. Now let's probe a little bit more deeply into her worldview. So clearly there is some relativism at play here, although it's inconsistent. I have some thoughts on the worldview she has behind this in part because

she states it really clearly. That's one thing I appreciate about the book. She's like, here's where I'm coming from. Here's my worldview. I was like, thank you for making that clear. But what do you see as the worldview she's bringing to this issue that informs the conclusion she comes to right well right like you said right up front the progressive christian argument for what she terms reproductive freedom is the subtitle of the book um so that progressive christianity which takes christianity kind of out of the realm of beliefs and doctrines that are fixed things and places it into this individual conscience type of thinking. And it has all the earmarks of that. She attempts to redefine the Bible in many ways. I'm sure we'll

get into a little bit of that. She's definitely embracing some secular thinking, particularly when it comes to the way the culture is thinking about sexual ethics The way the culture thinks about sex in general She wants to redefine several words justice being the utmost I think in this book and then to call traditional Christian beliefs Oppressive when she does a lot of that. I think her favorite words in the book are patriarchal and misogynistic. She uses those words quite a bit. But there's also lurking in that the worldview she brings to it is an underlying anthropology that she doesn't state, but you can infer it by

reading what she's writing. I do think she takes a view of what it means to be human that places the emphasis on the self, like the immaterial part of us, and then kind of devalues the body as something that the self is able to use. It's very Gnostic. The church defeated that in the first century, but I think it's Robbie George who called it a durable heresy. Like it just keeps rearing up its ugly head. But that comes through in the way she talks about sex, sex for pleasure. We can't expect women to stop having sex. And then the way that she would take on her emotions-based center or her feelings and attempt to redefine reality to suit this ethic that she's trying to shape,

right, to fit today's culture. I mean, she's even redefining biology outright, as we'll see. So the, you know, we call that, that's the body self dualism. I'd have to ask her questions to see, is that really what's lurking here? But that's what I see, this kind of paired with this, what she calls a Christian worldview, but that's what I see that's kind of paired with this, what she calls a Christian worldview, but it's definitely not. I think you're right about that. And I assume you'd agree with me that the word progressive Christian can mean a lot of different things. So there's some that might hold on to more traditional Christian beliefs, broadly understood and identify as progressive Christian. Some might, she certainly doesn't. What she means by it is, I mean, she again writes this on page eight. She says, as a white middle class intersectional feminist whose work on questions of poverty and oppression has always embraced a hermeneutic of justice. Now, she first wrote this book in 2018, and a lot of critical theory

exploded onto the scene around 2020 and 2021. But she is bringing this worldview of critical theory to the question of abortion and sees the world through the lens of the oppressed and the oppressor. That's what she means by justice. So she doesn't have a classical view of justice, which is giving one its due. This is not a biblical view of justice. This is a view of the world is divided into oppressed and oppressors, and we interpret it through that lens. That's kind of the worldview that's at play that will play itself out as we get more and more into her argument. Now, when I read a book and someone calls himself a Christian, I'm going through the book looking, how often do they cite the Bible?

Do they cite it appropriately? Do they – and I'm not saying that number of references mean you take the Bible seriously. That's not my point. But when there's basically none or very few, that's informative. And what is said about the Bible? Now, I'm curious. I found a couple of statements of what she says about the Bible, but did you have any thoughts about her just approach to the scriptures and use of it? Yeah, I definitely pulled a statement of what she said about the bible as well it might be the same one that you did and just discounting it as irrelevant because it's 2 000 years old

she quote clearly she said there are limitations in seeking direct ethical guidance for contemporary sexual behavior from a book that reflects sexual and cultural attitudes 2000 years old. But just generally speaking, I don't think she cites the Bible often, of course, as we read the book, we don't see that unless it is to suit her purposes for the argument she's making. She will cite it negatively many times to kind of,

as you pointed out, build out this oppressed, oppressor worldview that the Christian tradition is patriarchal and oppressive to women. And that's what people like me or people like you have bought into. But then she'll also cite it positively as it suits her in that she would hold to God's goodness, God's justice. Now, one of the things I found most interesting is that she never cites the gospel. And when I can't imagine a conversation about abortion and justice where the gospel isn't even mentioned or alluded to is shocking in a book that purports to be a Christian understanding of these issues. That's a really good point, in part because

at the root of critical theory is you have to work and act and bring about change. It's a kind of works-based salvation. And so I wouldn't expect there to be talk about grace and God's forgiveness and the gospel in a book that has a very different worldview. But the fact that it calls itself Christian, that's what makes it so jarring. Now, I had pulled up that same passage, and there's two ways to read this. Like if I try to read it charitably, she says, there are limitations in seeking direct ethical guidance for contemporary sexual behavior from a book that reflects sexual and cultural attitudes 2,000 years ago. On one level, there's some truth in that, right?

Like the Bible doesn't discuss IVF. The Bible doesn't discuss, it sufficiently discusses same-sex sexual behavior, but there are different nuances in our contemporary conversation that are different. And so I read that somewhat charitably towards her, but on the other hand, it is kind of a dismissal. The only other reference I found on page 182, she says, people of faith read it, referring to the Bible, to seek its moral wisdom. I thought, okay, I might read Aristotle for moral wisdom. I might read other religious texts for moral wisdom. Throughout church history, although people differ over what inspiration means, the nature of inerrancy, the Bible has been held as God's word that's authoritative, that we understand and conform our lives to. That is absent from this book.

And so in many ways, that in itself disqualifies it from being a Christian position to me. I think that shuts it. Now, let's keep going here. Okay. Early on in the book, and when I say, if you have something else to add, throw it in there. Always feel free to do that. If there's anything else that's important.

Oh, we could go on and on, but that's okay. I think that's sufficient. Rejecting the authority of scripture and also transplanting, again, morality from the transcendent as the Jewish and Christian writers thought. And not only the Jewish and Christian writers, but the Greek thinkers as well. Morality has to come from something like Plato. For it to be real, it has to come from somewhere beyond us it is real knowable woven into the fabric of reality around us to be discovered but she's transplanted again to that relativistic place up to the individual or the culture to decide so good stuff now she starts the book with a story of her own experience with abortion and then lists another one in the book and kind of comes back to like her personal experience with other women who've had an abortion.

And obviously, you and I are both pro-life. We both speak and write on this. This is more your specialty in your lane than it is mine. I'm more of a generalist. But I also want to know your take on, as you're reading a book like this, just her backstory and what you make of it as you process an argument like this. And also you've counseled many women who have had abortions. What's your take on her including that throughout this book? Well, my first take is, I think it speaks to the way that a pro-life apologetic grounded in Christian worldview ought to be approached, which is, you know, apologetics is so wonderful in that it takes these really hard things up into the abstract where we can reason through the ideas and see, does this work? Is it reasonable? Is it logical? But the thing that you and I never forget, Sean, and others who do this well,

is that those ideas are tethered to real people like Rebecca Todd Peters and like the women that she mentions who have faced incredibly difficult circumstances, who have walked through scarring things. So part of that is what makes the conversation so difficult, even though morally speaking, the argument over abortion is pretty simple at its core. So as I'm reading through her experience, of course, my heart breaks for the woman who walked through these things. A difficult marriage in the case of her first abortion that was brand new, being a grad student along with her husband, not much money, no community around her, and found herself unexpectedly pregnant. I don't know the number of women I've talked to that this is the road that they've walked. It's terrifying to them. So we can't discount that as something that really happened. Her second pregnancy or

second abortion actually came after she was already a mother to a three-year-old child and involved a fetal diagnosis that was really hard. And of course, she's walking through this from this thinking, this worldview, this understanding of what it means to be human, this understanding of justice and made these decisions. I mean, I, she would not probably like me saying this from what I gather from her book, but there's a part of me that just knows that there has to be parts of her heart

that do wonder and regret, although she would deny that, reflect on those choices. And so I see that a lot. In fact, what I see is that abortion is largely driven by two things, and that's no matter where anyone stands on the issue, from the staunchest pro-abortion advocate to the most passionate pro-lifer. Pain is one shared experience across the board. The knowledge and understanding that abortion causes pain. The second thing that's in common, no matter who I've talked to and no matter where they stand on that spectrum, is that this issue is driven by compassion. There's nobody talking about it who isn't doing it because they don't care for someone. What I love about the pro-life argument is that even in the midst of that, you and I can look at those realities, those hard things with our eyes wide open, accept that they're seemingly impossible

things to walk through for people and still say the pro-life view extends that compassion much further and is on the whole more beautiful with room for walking through healing, with room for walking through a better story of what it means to be human than the one the world tries to sell us. So as I read those things, that's where my mind went. I can't help but bleed on the inside for this woman. I don't know. I can't help imagining having a real conversation with her. I don't know what that would go like but um all that to say it doesn't change my stance on the issue but it is something we have to be aware of as we deal with the issues and talk with people who walk these roads that's helpful and i appreciate the balance between like

head and heart as you're approaching this i try to do that as well. We're going to jump into some of her, just some of the more specific claims that she makes to advance her case. But one last point, I'm curious what you make of this. It seems to me if a woman has had an abortion, and I know it's not the same, but there's also a lot of men who feel guilt from not supporting their wives and encouraging them to have abortions. So it's not, although it's more intimately a female issue, there's a lot of men who have regret from this as well. And there's this natural sense of this unborn is human and a part of me.

Well, it seems like a woman who has abortion has three options. One could live in the tension and the cognitive dissonance of having that abortion. And I've talked to many women who have for years carried that. Yeah. justify and claim to the world that what you did is right and good, which she does in this book, I have no regrets. This is a moral good. I mean, over and over again, and tries to silence any women and shame them who call out women for having abortions, or you seek God's grace and forgiveness, which is available for everybody, and healing moving forward. I think those are the only three options. And she's taking the option, and I don't know what's in her mind. I don't want to psychoanalyze her, but I read this. I'm like, here's somebody who to go out of their way so many times, I don't have regrets.

This is good. Shame on women who judge me. There's more at stake here because we know the unborn is human. That's how I read it. Am I reading too much into this? Do you agree or not? No, I do agree with that. I think there is a denial in that. What we can see with that is the changing of the language all around it. She's talking about what she calls the pre-nate. So she's given it this other name in an attempt to push it away or redefine it as suits this, again, reframing of justice she's trying to promote. Like you said, to shame women or men who hold to a pro-life view as being somehow

victims of this patriarchal tradition that's been passed down, whereas she would blame them for shaming women who are doing the right thing in pursuing abortion for their reproductive futures and their own good. But yeah, there's not any denying it. You can see the language denies it. In fact, the first thing in the pro-life argument is that question, what is this entity that we're talking about? What is, in her terms, the prenatal? I would call it the unborn, and you could call it a rose by any other name, would smell as sweet. Still, what is the thing we're talking about? Agreed. And in both of the reasons she gives for her abortion, the first abortion where she says, and this is again, I'm holding that tether, but I'm going up to the ideas here.

It was not the right time for me to be a mother. And in the second abortion, we had to decide what to do with this information, this diagnosis about this potential child. Both of these claims deny or, well, they deny that the unborn is human, but not only that, they skip over the question of whether or not the unborn is human. She just outright denies that it is. She doesn't ever give a case for that. She doesn't refute it. And in fact, part of her worldview, as it were, is that she takes the scientific argument that people like you and I would rightly make and dismisses it as a theological position. That's right. Yeah. So that life begins at conception.

That's a theological position. Interesting coming from someone who claims to be a Christian that Christians make. So, unfortunately. I'm not sure reading it if she really believes that or if she doesn't understand the argument on the other side. I don't know, but that is the secular dismissal of a Christian claim. Even if the Christian claim is not rooted in theology or the Bible, it's a way of just dismissing it as faith. The fact that she made it and is a religious person and calls herself a Christian gave me pause and thought, you've got to be kidding me. This is not a theological claim. Now you can make

the theological claim, but you and I make the scientific and philosophical claim, of course. Now, a couple of quick things on her theological case, and then we'll get to her more philosophical case. She says abortion was not a major theological issue until recent times in Christian history. Now, when I read that, I thought, well, why does the Bible not talk about abortion more? In some ways, it was just unthinkable to a woman. You didn't have to defend it. It was obvious as a Christian you wouldn't have an abortion. And she cites on page 93 the earliest sources that did okay from the first century, Apocalypse of Peter, Clement, and Tertullian, now you move into the second and third century, who unanimously hold that abortion is wrong. Now, they approach it a little bit differently. So there's some differences there.

But the commonality from the earliest stages of the church forward is a consistent pro-life univocal voice. Now, I think it wasn't an issue. And this isn't a reflection of the church or theology. It's a reflection of all sudden culture, it became a bigger issue. And so we brought to bear certain theological issues that were always there. So I think this point she's making is frankly irrelevant. Would you add anything to that or answer it differently? No, I wouldn't answer it differently.

And I had a big question about what do you mean by a major theological issue, given the fact that she defined science as theology in that she'd already done that. So, I mean, I would need some clarification there. But she tries to make this argument around the fact that abortion was being practiced in the first century. So in that Greco-Roman society society and she's not wrong about that abortion was practiced then it was um more guesswork at that time it was dangerous at that time um and which is why not only abortion was practiced but infant infanticide so infants who were left to die from exposure

was practiced back then. Now, she links because Christianity was dropped into that point in history to say, must have been a normal practice for them, too. That's at least implied, or at least I thought that in the reading. But it didn't make sense that the Christian ethic or the Jewish ethic was, you know, welcoming to abortion for the reasons you cited, the Hebrew midwives and others who would defy these mandates that they were to kill the children. And we know that because looking back to the very beginning, we see that the, goodness, the Jewish tradition was couched in that promise to Abraham

that you will be a blessing to future generations because of all the children that you will have will blessing to future generations because of all the children that you will have will number the stars in the sky. The blessing, of course, to come was the descendant that was the Messiah, that was Jesus. So in the Jewish tradition, children were viewed as gifts. They wouldn't be looking to abort their children. In fact, barrenness or the inability to have children was a curse. We see that in the, or was understood to be that way or was received that way.

We see that with Hannah, for example, you know, crying out for a child. What happened later was in the 19th century, the scientific advancement gave us insight into the womb, insight into cellular realities and what was actually already happening all along. So of course, the law at that time changed to fit what was discovered. And that's where we saw the abortion or anti-abortion laws really ramp up. Prior to that, there just wasn't a lot of insight into the womb and what was taking place. That's really helpful. Now, here's where, when I first read this book, I thought there was going to be a more advanced biblical case for abortion. And I was kind of jarred by

how minimal there was. But she says this, a direct quote. She says, Christian scripture is completely silent on the topic of abortion. Now, for me, here's my quick case, and then tell me what you think. We could do a whole show on what the Bible says about abortion or doesn't say. Now, just the fact that it doesn't mention the word abortion is irrelevant to whether or not it sufficiently addresses the value and right to life of the unborn. So I think we need to only establish two things, that all human beings, king, orphan, male, female, rich, poor, Jew, Gentile, if you're a member of the human race, you are made in God's image and have value and a right to life. The unborn through scripture is consistently treated not as a possible human, not as a potential human or a future human, but a member of the human race. One simple case is John the Baptist leaps in the womb. This unborn is identified as John the Baptist.

The same Hebrew and Greek words are used with a continuum of the unborn as those outside of the womb. So if all human beings have value and right to life, the unborn is a member of the human race. Biblically, you have a case for life. And of course, scripture says do not murder. If the unborn qualifies in terms of what I said, then taking the life of the unborn intentionally would be an act of murder. That's my quick case.

What would you say to her claim that scripture is silent, completely silent on the topic of abortion? Yeah. I would say I agree with you on the case for life. It is clearly inferred what scripture understands about human life and human value. And in fact, that's where we ground our pro-life case beautifully. I might add it fits into the Christian worldview as its bedrock. But that argument from silence is one that I'm hearing a lot these days, especially right now. We're in an interesting time in our society with this election cycle having really ended. And people have making these types of arguments for leading up to it. And now afterwards, we're seeing we're going to see this backlash kind of continue. But the argument

from silence, the Bible doesn't speak to abortion. As our mutual friend, my mentor, Scott Klusendorf would say, when somebody makes that argument, he just simply wants to ask him, so are you saying that whatever the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn, it condones? And if they say no, then your response is, so what are you saying? Right? The Bible doesn't say a lot of things about a lot of things. It doesn't talk about drive-by shootings. It doesn't talk about, you know, the lynching of people with color specifically that happened in the past. So though the Bible doesn't explicitly mention these things, there's a clear case as to why these things would be wrong. And

you beautifully stated that case. So because of her kind of critical theory approach that she brings to this, she talks a decent amount of what she considers an injustice that poor and women of color don't have the same access to contraception and abortion. Now, there is a tension in the book because she says they don't have access, but on the other hand, they're disproportionately high among those who have abortions. So I thought, you can't kind of have it both ways, interestingly enough. That's just an underlying tension in the book. But I was speaking at an event recently, Megan, and somebody said they made the case. They said women of color have less access to abortion.

Rich people, presumably not of color, have greater access. Is this an injustice? How would you respond to that, especially since it comes up within this book? Right. Well, I would respond with the question, what do you mean by injustice to start with, and I would want to see how they might respond to that. Just as there's an underlying tension here that you mentioned, like even an inconsistency in those two things,

there's also some underlying assumptions both about the nature of sex, thus the need for access to free contraception, but also the nature of abortion as this moral good. And so that makes me go, if abortion is what we think it is, and just to define it, abortion is the intentional killing of the human embryo or fetus. Christopher Kayser says that, the intentional killing of a human fetus. It doesn't beg questions across the board, but if abortion does that,

and we want to further dig into the science and the philosophy that tells us that not only the unborn is a fully fledged human being, scientifically speaking, but also a full fledged member of the human community in terms of value, that's the more consistent philosophical argument, then the injustice we're talking about here pales,

if it is such a thing, pales in comparison to the injustice of essentially saying that there are some human beings who matter more than others which is the purported injustice underneath her complaint about people of color and their lack of access. Abortion is an even greater portrayal, outplaying manifestation of the idea that some human beings simply don't matter as much as others. And in this case, they're disposable. Hmm. So we're going to get pretty soon to her case that abortion is a moral good, but you're right. The prior question to whether it's an injustice

or not to poor women and women of color is, is abortion a moral good? If so, one could make that case. If not, then it's not something you have a right to. And in fact, that's one of the things that came out in the book is that she worked at Planned Parenthood, defends Planned Parenthood, decries some of what she considers the injustice that minorities don't have the same access to abortion and contraception, and yet completely ignores the eugenics and racist roots at the basis of Planned Parenthood. And I pulled up, I want to read this thing, your thoughts. I pulled up a break point by John Stonestreet. This is in 2020. And some of the things he observed, he said that proponents of eugenics like Sanger wanted wealthy, healthy, and strong people to have more babies.

And poor, sick, disabled, and minority people to have fewer or no babies. So in 1939, Sanger and Planned Parenthood launched something called the Negro Project, whose aim was to push birth control on black women. So they made it more accessible actually to limit the number of babies and children that they would have. Now, Stone Street points out, he said, it's 62 million babies to be killed by abortion since Roe versus Wade. This is 2020, so it's higher now. Well, African Americans make up 13% of the US population. Black babies account for nearly 40% of the abortions committed each year. He said in New York City, for example, there's thousands more black babies aborted than are born each year. Now, what's especially interesting about this is that at the root of

critical theory is not equality of equal opportunity, but equity, equal outcome. So clearly the efforts of Planned Parenthood is resulting to unequal outcome with the number of black babies born. They said there'd be over 19 million more African-American people in the world today if it were not for legalized abortion and Planned Parenthood. And yet she is completely silent about that in the book. What you notice that silence I actually commented as I was reading I think I messaged you Sean and said I'm just having some reactions to this book as I'm reading so my husband and son are kind of looking at me every few minutes um and that was one of them so she's not even talking about this history or not even talking about the roots of where Planned Parenthood came from or the strategic placement of Planned Parenthoods for the sole purpose of access

from different communities that they were targeting at that time. But I make of this convenient for her not to have mentioned it. It might have at least strengthened her case to go into it a little bit and kind of reason through why she would now champion Planned Parenthood given those roots. But it's also the same kind of thing. Eugenics was simply another manifestation of this idea. Some human beings don't matter as much as others for arbitrary reasons. And so we may limit the amount of them that come into the world or whatever else that these proponents of eugenics gave themselves

permission to do at that time. It was a heinous evil. It is something that comes up in the teachings that I do and the conversations that I have, but it's not where I ever land ultimately, because even though that is an additional evil to the evil of abortion, the roots of Planned Parenthood, the racism and eugenics that were kind of propelling it into being, that is not the reason that abortion is wrong. Abortion is wrong because it intentionally kills innocent human beings. So in conversations, it's helpful if it will bring the person you're talking to back to the key point. But the key point is what is abortion and what does it do? It either intentionally kills innocent human beings

or it doesn't. We have to start there. So that's what I thought about. Yeah, that's totally helpful. And I appreciate that. Bringing it up is not meant to say, I guess bringing it up is just to show when you try to claim to have the moral higher ground in what you're doing and completely ignore this, I'm like, okay, you at least need to address it to possibly have the moral high ground. But the root of the claim she kind of gets to at the end, as far as I can tell. And here's kind of the core of her argument in itself, which either stands or falls, regardless of the motivations of what started Planned Parenthood. We need to take this argument as it is. And that's why I'm not convinced and don't think they have the moral higher ground. But she makes this claim. First off, she says, women, she talks about how women have no obligation to their unborn children. So a woman who's pregnant should not be expected to carry the preborn, which she calls the

prenatal, to birth. And I'll just read a quote here to kind of explain it. She says, rather than women owing any obligation to the prenate, the circumstances of surrendering one's whole body to the process of gestation are so absolute that it requires a woman's consent. What do you make of this? I mean, this is autonomy taken as far as it can go. Zero obligation to the unborn, unless the woman concedes it. And this is kind of at the root of her argument. So do pregnant women have obligations to their unborn children?

Well, this simple answer is, of course they do. To assume otherwise is to assume, as she does, that the prenat, as she calls it, is not human at all. And I don't think she would make the same argument about her born children or anyone's born children. In fact, she goes to great lengths to talk about the covenant relationship that you enter into with your children. However, I don't know how she can escape taking this type of autonomy and then not being able to apply it to any relationships that we're in. That comes back some of it to the philosophy of the pro-life view. There's not an essential difference between the unborn and us that would warrant killing them at that earlier stage of development. But it also comes back to this idea of what our obligations and

duties are, which again, Christian worldview teaches very specifically about our duties toward other image bearers. I mean, the whole idea around moral obligations is that they're just that, they're obligations. We don't consent to them. We're obligated to them. This happens, gosh, I always go back to the Pixar film Up with Mr. Fredrickson and then Russell, the little boy, where Mr. Fredrickson, his house is floating toward really the place that his wife always dreamed of going. And now he's lost his wife. And so he's just going to float away into oblivion and go live out the rest of his years there. And as soon as a liftoff happens, he has the knock on the door with this little boy who's on his front porch, who has been trying to like sell him stuff or whatever, because he's a Boy Scout. And that's such a beautiful story that stories do that they

can reveal to us about realities yeah about obligation like what was he going to do boot the kid off the porch he didn't want it there right he hadn't consented that this kid would join him for the journey he was greatly uh troubled that this was even coming about but the movie tells a different story about what his obligation was to Russell and what came from that so just assumptions all around. As Christians, we are all image bearers, as you said, from the unborn to natural death. And I think long after that, given the Christian worldview and its reality and what it talks about is where we're going when we die or go to sleep, as Paul says.

It was Christians. Christians were known for this throughout history. The Christian worldview tells us that I'm not the major player. I'm not the main character. I'm not the one that it's all about. God is the main character. And he's endowed us with this unspeakable worth such that we are to see one another in this way. And in order to flourish as human beings, which of course is pulling about all kinds of, what do we mean by flourishing and good? She's taking these terms in a different direction. But it means that we do have obligations to one another. And that's what Christians were known

for. You think about in the middle ages, during the plagues, the Christians were the ones who didn't leave. Like they were the ones caring for their sick and dying neighbors. And other people were watching them going, why you owe them nothing. What are you doing? And the Christians responded, well, we, it's because we know this man, Jesus, and he says that we must, um, not only that Sean, but just this rails against just our intuition, like the way that we experience the world. I mean, you're a dad, I'm a mom. There is an undeniable link that we have with our children.

I'm often giving scenarios when I'm trying to make a case for the pro-life view. I'll talk about a hypothetical. If the room caught on fire and you were all stuck in your place and you know I could only rescue who I could get to because I'm free to move about the room that that's for a purpose in teaching but that hypothetical changes if my kid is sitting in the back of the room because where am I going first I'm going to go save my daughter or my son whoever is whichever one is back there or both of them I'm going to do everything I can because they're my kids. And that's something we see across the board in reality, of course, not always lived out perfectly in a broken world, but parents understand when you have children, you have an obligation to them. She just wants to make the obligation begin at a

later point in time at birth. I had never thought of up that way. I might use that example. I'll do my best to give you credit if I can remember. This is where I first heard it. I heard it from Scott. So you can give him credit. So many of our arguments go back to Scott or Greg Kokel anyway. So even if we don't know, we'll just give them credit as a norm. But if you're

right about that, and I think most people watching this would say the older fellow has a duty and obligation to the child. For a mom and the unborn, it's only that much stronger, right? So you've made a case that gets us like 80% of the way there, But it's like, wait a minute, if you concede it there, you've got to concede it for pregnancy. Now, the way she gets out of this is by just taking this Gnostic worldview again that you described that says basically a woman has the right to have sex and she doesn't intend to have kids, she has no obligation to those kids because she can do what she wants unless she concedes to it. And I think at the root of this, which is the opposite of Gnosticism, is a completely underdeveloped theology of the body. That it's not just our words that give meaning, but physical actions do themselves. I was a comm major and they tell us that we communicated far more with our bodies than we do with our words. And so engaging in the sexual act, and of course, we're not talking about rape. That's a separate issue. When consent is giving, with your body is making a kind of promise.

It's making a kind of commitment. And so our recognition of this is meant to match what our bodies have already committed to and cannot simply override it because we have different desires. I think that's at the root of some of the failure of the ethic here is just Gnosticism and doesn't have a theology of the body. Now, to fit a theology of the body would take us aside, but that's something I just wanted to draw out. So her first argument, women have no obligation to their unborn. Did you want to jump in? No, I was just going to say that to your point,

what we see is the outcome of this behavior would lend itself to our view of the importance of the body-soul connection, of the Christian understanding of what it means to be human. What came to mind as you were talking, there was a 2022 article in the Washington Post written by a young woman who was not a Christian. And the article was titled Consent is Not Enough. We need a new sexual ethic.

And she went into this discussion about how she and her peers were seeking happiness and that they thought that this was going to bring it about through things like the Tinder app and casual hookup culture. And what she was finding in her interviews and also in her own lived experience is that this was not bringing about the happiness that it promised. Now, at the end of the article, she had no real solution other than something has to change. And so did her friends. I don't know what to do. We just keep doing it,

but it's not working. So to your point, a grounded theology of the body would better explain what we're experiencing in the emptiness of the outcome of the sexual revolution and what's followed it. Anyway, I just, every time I turn around, the Christian worldview shines. It just shows itself to be true, better, beautiful. Amen to that. So the first point is women have no obligation to unborn children. You have sufficiently responded to that. The second one she says, this is an interesting distinction, is that prenatates are human, but they're not persons. Oh, gosh. And I appreciate

that response. Let me read a couple of things just so those watching this can hear it directly from her. She says, before birth, prenatates are still dependent on a woman's body for life. Until they have drawn breath, expanded their lungs, and activated all their own vital bodily functions. Prenates are utterly dependent and utterly not yet. Now, one more quote just to give backdrop for this. It's on page 161. Prenatal life represents the possibility of personhood while still recognizing an important ontological distinction, which has to do with being, between prenatal life inside the womb and newborn life outside of it. And of course, her conclusion, since the prenatal is not a person, it has no rights at stake,

has maybe some value, but less value than those outside of the womb that are ontologically different. What do you make of this claim? It's not an argument, it's a claim. Right. The first thing I make of this claim is it links us right back to what we were talking about. The distinction here is that apparently there are some humans who are merely human, while there are other humans who have reached this special status that we want to call personhood so some human beings don't matter as much as others this is a question of human value it is the philosophical argument that she's trying to make it is unsuccessful but here's why if someone's going to distinguish between mere humans and persons then then our question has to be, what is it that makes merely human beings into valuable persons?

What is the value giving thing? Because philosophy only offers us these two ways of thinking about it. Two avenues. One of them is what we would call a performance view of human value. Some people would call it a functional view of human value, instrumental view. That's easy to remember because instruments serve a purpose. They function in a certain way. The other avenue is that we are intrinsically valuable.

This would be the endowment view of human value. This one is so simple. It's most often overlooked or rejected because it just means you're valuable in light of the kind of thing you are. Now, philosophically speaking, the endowment view is the only one that provides us with any grounding for human equality at all. Because humanity is the only thing we happen to share that doesn't come in degrees, right?

On this performance view, that's what she's chosen to take. So our job as careful thinkers is to ask her, okay, she's named several kind of stages here. She names birth, she names first breath, lungs expanding, so different things. So we're gonna have to take one at a time because it needs to like, which one of those is it?

And then we ask the grounding question, like Ms. Peters, why is it that trait and not something else? In other words, what is so value giving about taking the first breath, especially when we understand, according to the best that science and medicine have to offer, that all that changes is birth is the mode of breathing. It's like switching from an AC current to a DC current, right? Not the breath itself. And then what do we do is we take that. So what is it so valuable about that? How much of that is necessary? In other words, are there other classes of human

beings who possess this trait or ability to a lesser degree who are now disqualified from valuable human community because of your reasoning? Those who are on intubation who cannot breathe on their own. Those who have to carry around an oxygen tank with them. There are other examples we can give of human beings outside the womb who are affected by this ability to a certain degree or disability to a certain degree. And then we have to ask who gets to decide that? You, Rebecca Todd Peters? Because the only thing that makes sense at the end of the day that gives us any grounding for the type of equality she seems, even the type she seems to be talking about is that we're all human. We share that

humanity, that human nature that grounds our value. Anything else is going to create a spectrum because it's going to create this scale or this society in which some human beings possess this trait to a lesser degree. So some human beings simply matter less than others. It proves too much every single time. The distinction you're making is really helpful because she brings in the word ontology

and ontological. And she says specifically, there's an ontological distinction between prenatal life inside the womb and newborn life outside of it. And ontology is being. And so the question is, when a child moves its location outside of the womb and takes a breath, what has changed in its being? And the answer is nothing. It's functioning differently, but the kind of thing that it is, is exactly the same when it's moved however many inches back into the womb and just breathes differently. So it's like she recognizes that to make her case, she has to argue that the unborn is ontologically different to justify snuffing it out. But her definition of personhood is exactly right. The way you described it,

it's functional. So she talks about how pregnant women, their partners, their families, and their communities work together to call the prenatal into personhood during pregnancy in ways that are a meaningful part of becoming human. Well, if there's an ontological difference between one inside the womb and outside of the womb, then no mom or no one in the community can call that into existence because either it has that nature or it doesn't. So she's confused that, yes, something changes when the unborn comes out of the womb and we can hold it, we can hear it, we can see it's recognized, not called into being. So on her definition, like you could have an unborn brought into the world and a mom ignores it and the community is not there to celebrate it. And technically it hasn't ontologically changed, which would justify a kind of post-birth abortion. Now, she doesn't go there, but that would logically follow from her case.

Yeah. She would even just say that the infanticide is something that is distasteful universally. And so the culture hasn't gone there yet. I like the way you worded that. It's always fun to hear how different people word it because it helps me think about it more carefully. But Stephen Schwartz was the philosopher that said that the only four areas of difference you can point out between the unborn or the prenatal or whatever, and us as adults, our size, it's smaller, level of development, environment, which is exactly what she's talking about there, her location, and degree of dependency. Those are what change, but Schwartz says none of those differences are determining a value in the way that an abortion advocate would need them to be to say that you and I, Sean, could have been

killed back then, but not now. So you're right about that. In this case, she switches from breathing being the value-giving thing to a shift in location being the value giving thing. So if we're using our thinking carefully, we can reverse that reasoning real easily and go, well, what happens if I move 10 inches geographically speaking? You know, can someone define me out of valuable humanity? But you're also right in terms of the ontological what is the unborn how we feel about a thing what we perceive about a thing does not determine what it is that's exactly right and if it's something that has value it's our job to recognize its value and treat it accordingly that's what it means to be moral. And that's true across races. That's true across sex. That's true across economic value. That's true across rich or poor. That's exactly why

Christians from the beginning started orphanages, started caring for infants, started caring for widows whose society did not functionally value. But Christians said, wait a minute, they are image bearers and have value because of the kinds of things that we are. We will treat them accordingly. That is the root of the Christian faith and why Christians have almost entirely from the beginning been pro life and continue to do so today. Now she makes some other claims in here. I don't want to spend too much time in this, but I mean, she says, for example, I mean, just your quick thoughts on this, because I was talking about this just two days ago in my class at Biola, we're doing a unit on

pro-life. And she's like, when does life begin? Most people do not agree that life begins at conception. I read that and thought, this is insane. First off, it doesn't matter what most people believe. If she wants to do numbers, most Christians would say she's wrong and she claims to be a Christian. I mean, that gets us nowhere.

But every embryology textbook I've seen doesn't have equivocation about when life begins. In fact, one of my students said about when life begins. In fact, one of my students said, you know, when we talk about IVF, for example, we all know when life begins. And I think it was another student who's like, if we found something on Mars that was remotely similar to an embryo that was first fertilized, we would all know that that's life. And yet all of a sudden, when it comes to the issue of abortion, we're not sure and nobody knows. Do we know when life begins?

We do, Sean. We do know when life begins. Again, how we feel about a thing does not determine what it is. I think that what she's doing here is something that I see done often. She takes the word life and transitions it from the category of science. Because when we ask, what is the unborn? When does life begin? Science is the place that we go to understand, uh, you know, the categorization of living things, the study of the natural world, what we can observe. She takes that word life and drops it into a different category.

In this case, philosophically kind of obscuring the idea of when life begins, something like the circle of life, Lion King kind of, I don't know, thing. So I think when we look at biology, what we can determine with the best of what science has to offer is that from the moment of conception, and in fact, gosh, I believe it's Dr. Maureen Condick, who's a brilliant neurobiologist, who even has more to say about how carefully we can observe the beginnings of human life. Like observe, you know, when sperm and egg meet, I remember her saying within 250 milliseconds, the plasma membranes of those two cells begin to merge to form a hybrid cell

surface. So the egg cell changes in its material composition, like the stuff that makes it up. And that biologically speaking constitutes a brand new cell. So the whole, she used the term like fertilized ovum several times, fertilized egg throughout the book. That's actually a misnomer. Scientifically speaking, there is no more egg there. It surrendered its constituents to this new entity, which is a brand new human being, which fits the embryology that tells us that from that moment, what we have is a living by every checked box and seventh grade life science of what an organism is and does

a living, distinct, separate entity from the mother and a whole human being it's not part of me like my skin cells are or like a sperm cell would be part of a man or an egg cell part of a woman living cells but with a specific role with regard to the larger organism of which it's a part the embryo is different in kind even at that earliest stage, that single celled stage and its parts work together toward its overall function such that, and this is still under the idea of it being a whole human being, it's not something that's constructed piece by piece,

which is what the culture tends to think about it with our language, a clump of cells, a mass of tissue, even the word reproduction rather than procreation like we should bring back my grandmother's word um it's a factory term right so the ideas we have surrounding it is that it's something like on an assembly line that we get the end product is a baby but no you and i from the moment we came into existence, have driven our own development from within. And everyone listening to this or watching, you and I still sitting here, our kids certainly, we're still doing that. It's incredible.

No, I teach mostly in our Masters of Apologetics program, which Scott Klusenworth did, by the way, years ago before I was here. But I have an undergrad class, and we look at different ethical issues. And like I said, two days ago, we were looking at this issue and I laid out the case that you laid out. It's not unique to me. The young born is a living human organism, distinct from the mother at the moment of conception. And I said to him, I said, how would you respond to somebody who said, but it doesn't look human? And the answer I gave back is I said, well, it doesn't look like a teenager. It doesn't look like an adult, but it looks exactly like a human being looks at that stage of development. And that's a moment with the students. I could see it in their eyes.

They're kind of like, oh, I never thought about it that way. We shouldn't gauge somebody's value based on how they look. In fact, we have a terrible legacy as a human race and many people who called themselves Christians, treating people of the opposite sex, of different races, children, people with disabilities because of how they looked. But how you look doesn't determine what you are. And these are the distinctions just missing in her book. I really read this a few times and wanted to just make sure we got to the heart of her argument, represented it fairly, and responded to it. I think we did as far as I could tell. But I just got a couple last questions just for you, kind of like takeaways from this. As a whole, what do you think – I mean, what lessons can we take just as believers from the story she shares and or the argument in this book? What are your takeaways? On the one side, I think as believers, we take away the warning of what happens when we want to lessen the authority of scripture, when we want to position ourselves as the authorities and we want to create a lesser

reality because that's inevitably what will happen um if these are stories that are happening all around us right now people seeking an ideal human existence but in the process pushing against real human limits that god called good uh gosh kelly caik's recent book, You Are Only Human, is all about that. And in doing that, they're only becoming less human. They'll never have the thing that they want. They're just trying to find it in all the wrong places. So there's a real warning in this about that. I think that it's a reminder that of God's goodness, that we tend to underestimate his goodness and underestimate our sinfulness. I mean, God's goodness is so big, right?

It's not the kind of good that's subjective that we think about. It makes me feel good. That's normally where the culture stops. And that's leaked into the church as well. I want to be a good person. That comes out as kindness or giving people what they want or affirming things that might not be truly good in the larger term of this moral perfection. When we look at that kind of goodness, it should overwhelm us because it demands things of us. It actually demands that we change.

I was reading my, one of my favorite philosophers is Peter Kreeft, and he talks about this beautifully, writes like a poet. But he says this, that we change, and mainly what we change is with regard to those appetites and desires that we deem good for ourselves. But larger than that is the church. What we should see in this is

that Christianity not only has relevant things to say about the issue of abortion in our culture, which is why we should be talking about it and thinking about it carefully and reading what those who disagree with us think and interacting with that fairly as we're trying to do here, but Christianity also offers the solution. Often I think in the churches,

we don't want to talk about abortion because the fear is inciting further pain. But as I talked about earlier, the pain of those who have had abortions, women who've had abortions, men who have supported someone or paid for abortions and are walking around with that, the pain is already there.

So we're not sparing pain by not talking about the issue, but we might be sparing them the healing that the gospel truly offers. And finally, Sean, I'll say this. I'm sorry, my mind just goes, because these are the things I long for people to understand about this issue. I think this informs our posture because the gospel, which Rebecca Todd Peters didn't mention, is the great leveler. It's the thing that says that even the thing she's railing against, which is Christians of a certain type or whatever she's talking about, are belittling women, shaming women, right? The gospel is the leveler that when properly understood says, we can't, and that's denoting ability, we cannot condemn others.

Because apart from the grace of Christ, we stand on equal footing before God the Father. So this whole idea of justice, like goodness, it's unflinching. It doesn't have exceptions. That's mercy, right? And the gospel is the thing that offers the mercy or the way that God provided when all of us in the traditional sense of justice owe him because of our brokenness and our sin after the fall. So I just, at the root of it is the hope the church understands that we have a bigger and better story to tell the world about itself because we serve a bigger and better God. Um, so this is not

the answer. And, um, the whole idea that we need abortion in our society in order to love women well, it just, I don't have a word for it. It's a limited way of viewing society. And Peters falls into the trap, too. It's a way of saying society is this way. So in order for women to succeed, they need access to abortion. In other words, in order for a woman to flourish in our culture, she has to deny an essential part of her biological makeup, which is the ability to bear children, the miracle of being able to bear children, which she may or may not choose to, you know, she may choose to live as a

single woman. She may not choose marriage or that route at all, but she has by nature of being female, the ability to be a mother. And our society is saying that you can succeed if you deny that, if you treat that as a handicap, that is not a society that loves women as women. So my question to the young people that I work with is why aren't we changing the society? What would it look like to have a world, a culture that is more welcoming to women as women and to children as children? Babies cry. That's what they do, but they're welcome parts of our community. So in our churches and in our schools and our businesses, our institutions, what does it look like to change in that way?

I'm much more interested in that conversation, which I think reflects Christian values much better. I think you're right at the root of this discussion is about biblical authority. What kind of book is the Bible? And those of us who claim to be Christians, do we seek to understand what it says and why and conform our lives to it? There's also confusion about freedom. She seems to believe that freedom is just having absolute autonomy over my body, over my life, whatever I want, live it without regrets. But you're saying, wait a minute, freedom actually comes from asking the question, what does it mean to be a woman? And of course,

what does it mean to be a man? What are our bodies for? And when rather than rejecting reality, we recognize reality and live according to it and embrace it, there's actually a deeper sense of freedom and contentment that comes. You know, one other small observation I had is she tells us early in the story, and this one, it just kind of, this one broke my heart. She talks about growing up in the church and the message about sex from the mentors

was basically just wait until marriage. That's it. Don't have sex until marriage. And she says, I got the message, but it didn't make any more sense to me than it had to my sister. Now I thought this is a recognition. I think she's probably talking about maybe in the eighties or maybe the seventies. I don't know exactly how old she is, but in the church she grew up in, was never taught what is God's design for sex. Why does the Bible teach this? And why is this good and beautiful to live it out? That, in some ways, I read her book and I'm like, this is a condemnation of the failure of the church to do this. We've come a long way since the 70s and 80s,

but a reminder today, if we think we can tell kids, just wait, don't do this, don't have an abortion, don't without explaining why. And like you said, the flourishing and reasons behind it, we're just fooling ourselves.

We're fooling ourselves. And so this book was a reminder and encouragement and broke my heart at how many other people are out there that have never heard why God's design for sex and marriage and parenting is good and sets us free. Just breaks my heart over that. So in some ways, reading this encourages me to just double my efforts and keep making a difference where yeah i can well you've made a difference i'll say your book finding or chasing love has one that i recommend widely uh when it comes to those conversations but um i think you're right and we see throughout the book that she has that limited

understanding because she only defines the christian view of sex as for procreation only and there's far more to the purposes than that. So to your point, Dr. Howard Hendricks, right? We should not be ashamed to discuss that which God was not ashamed to create. Oh, that is a mic drop moment. We'll end there in terms of the content, but tell us how people can follow you. I speak on this topic, but I'm telling my audience right now, don't invite me to speak on this. Not that I wouldn't, but first invite Megan. Tell us where people can track with you. Tell us about your ministry. How can people follow what you're doing? Great. We need all the help we can get, Sean. So that's, it's fine. I work with a ministry called Apologetics Inc. You can find us, website is easy.

It's apologetics.org with an incredible speaking team with different areas of focus, but all generally trained in Christian apologetics to make Christianity something that is, or to help people see how wonderfully attractive it really is. So you can find me there. And yeah, that's, I love, I love what I get to do. Awesome. Good for you. Well, Apologetics Inc is doing great work. Your boss, Mike, buddy of mine going back many years, had him on the podcast. So keep it up. We will do this again. Really appreciate you.

I'm going to link below. You wrote an article in the Christian Research Journal. I'm going to link to that below where you make some of these key points for people to make sure they can follow it. But for those of you watching, make sure you hit subscribe. This is a topic we will come back to as well as other apologetic conversations. And if you thought about studying apologetics, who shaped Megan probably as much

and more than anybody else, Scott Klusendorf, one of our friends, did our Masters in Apologetics program years before I was there and just recommends it to people all the time as the top or one of the top rate apologetics programs in person or distance. Information is below. We'd love to have you. If you're not ready for master's, we have a certificate program where we will just

kind of walk you through the right lectures and experts we trust and kind of give you some accountability to learn apologetics in your context. Information below. Megan, a lot of fun. Thanks for preparing so much for this and for joining me. We'll do it again. Thanks, Sean. It was a pleasure.