Theology in the Raw - Is Abortion Ever Morally Permissible? Lila Rose

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Lila Rose is an anti-abortion activist who is the founder and president of the anti-abortion organization Live Action and the author of Fighting for Life: Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World. She's the host of the Lila Rose Show on YouTube and has engaged in a number of debates over the ethics of abortion. Join the Theology in the Raw community for as little as $5/month to get access to premium content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Arama. Our guest today is the one and only Lila Rose, who is an anti-abortion activist, who is the founder and president of the anti-abortion organization, Live Action. And she's the author of the book Fighting for Life, Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World. Lila is all over YouTube. If you punch in the name Lila Rose into YouTube, you'll get all kinds of really fascinating debates that she's engaged in on college campuses and other places. And I've always been so impressed with Lila's intellectual ability. I would not want to debate Lila on any topic, but I've been most impressed with her tone and her posture.

Sometimes people that engage in debates, they just can become belligerent or it seems really clear that they're not listening. They're just trying to win an argument. I don't get that impression at all from Lila. She seems very genuine, honest, wise, gracious, and yet very clear and forthright with her arguments against abortion. So I absolutely love this conversation and I think you will too. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only, Lila Rose. All right. Welcome to Theology in the Raw, Lila Rose, as I was telling you offline, I

sent a message to our mutual friend, Sean McDowell said, is there any way you can get Lila Rose to consider coming onto theology in the raw? And he did. And here we are. And I'm super honored to have you. I know you have a lot going on, but I've been following your work for a while. My daughter is a huge fan and just really impressed with both your posture and your wisdom in your fight for the pro-life cause. What first got you into this? Was there a moment, an incident, a story behind all the work that you're doing?

Yes, definitely. And first of all, thank you so much for having me on. Sean is amazing. And I've also admired you, Preston, because you are very charitable. I think that's something that's a lost art, especially in online discourse. And whenever I come across your work, I'm always impressed by the love that I believe is motivating

it. So thank you for being a voice of love out in the world, because we need more of that. But yes, I started this work when I was a teenager. I became passionate about the issue of abortion after learning about it for the first time. And my big moment of revelation was reading this book, actually, when I was a kid.

I'm from San Jose, California. We had a lot of books in my house growing up. But this book was this sort of activist manual. It had a lot of historical data about abortion in it, but it also had images. And there were images of fetal development. And you see the beauty of this developing baby and the embryonic stage to the stage of it

being the baby being a fetus. But then there were images of babies who had been killed by abortion, including a 10-week-old baby that I'll never forget looking at this image of just torn apart by a powerful suction abortion. Ten weeks, you can see arms, legs, this beautiful little face. The humanity is so there. You can see this is a human being.

And you see the violence that abortion did to this precious life. And so I was deeply, really heartbroken. I was convicted. I learned more about the issue of abortion, that this was happening 3,000 times a day. Children were being killed, 3,000 children, that this was legal, and that even in my church growing up, and there's a lot of beautiful churches

who address this issue, but there are many who are silent. Even in my church growing up, it was almost never mentioned. And yet they would sometimes talk about other human rights issues or, you know, poverty issues overseas. But we were killing babies in our own community. There were people feeling the need to do this, being driven to do this. There wasn't enough of a system to save these lives and that their legal system was allowing the killing. And so that convicted me deeply that I had to do something. I thought education is the first step. People just don't know this is happening.

This is the greatest human rights issue in the world and we're just blind to it. And that inspired me to start live action. Wow. Could you capture in just like a really concise way? I mean, you've done this a thousand times, so I'm sure you could do this in your sleep. Like, what is your basic moral argument against abortion?

Yes, there's a very simple logical syllogism we can use for the case for life. It's two premises and a conclusion. So the first is, it is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. And most people will say yes. Like 99.9% of people I talk to say, yes, it's always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. And most people will say yes, like 99.9% of people I talk to say yes, it's always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

Well, the second part of the logical syllogism is this abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. And so the conclusion would be abortion is always wrong. And so some people might stick a little bit about, you know, say, oh, well, that second, you know, premise abortion is not the intentional killing of an innocent human being. And you say, OK, well, what is the unborn? Are they human? Yes. Are they alive?

Yes. Are they innocent? Of course. The unborn baby hasn't done anything wrong. And is abortion killing them? Objectively, yes. And so based on that logical syllogism and the fact that killing someone who's innocent is always wrong, no matter the circumstances, that is the case for life.

And then the positive side of it is human life is precious. Human beings have human rights. Those rights do not begin at birth. They're not dependent on our age or our strength or our level of development or our intelligence or our sex or our race or anything. Human rights are innate to all humans. And therefore, if the child in the womb is a human, which they objectively are, according to science, then they have human rights too.

And the first human right is the right to life, to not be killed. That's fundamental to any other human right being enjoyed. And so when we deny the right to life from that baby in the womb, we are committing the greatest human rights abuse against that life. That was a little longer than maybe you were. That's great, that's great. Well, I mean, I mean. I did a twofer.

So, I'm not very, well, I've not done extensive research on the topic. I, when I hear your presentation, I can't help but agree with that. And from what I have looked into it, it does seem to be, like you said, just a clear violation of human rights. It does seem to be immoral. And as I've looked at counterarguments, they just don't seem compelling from a Christian

ethical, well, not even a Christian ethical, but just a basic human ethical system, you know? Okay, so the one thing I often see in the counter argument is a distinction between life and personhood. Peter Singer obviously makes that distinction. Even the Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, I have a quote from him somewhere in my notes that he makes that distinction. Yes, it's a human life, but it's not a human person. First of all, there does seem to be a scientific consensus that it is a life.

Is that correct? Like that's something, the definition of life. Like if we found an eight-week old unborn fetus on Mars, we would say, oh my word unborn fetus on Mars, we would say, oh my word, there's life on Mars, right? But is it a person? How do you handle, do you find that distinction often in your conversations and debates, and how do you adjust that?

Yeah, and I understand there's philosophically different frameworks we can understand personhood through. And I think, you know, human, I would say all humans are persons, and then, you know, God is three persons and one, angels are persons, you could say, but that doesn't mean, and you know, according to law, you could say a corporation is called, considered a person, according to this kind of

legal framework, right? But it comes back to the question of human rights. Human rights are not persons' rights, they're human rights. And, you know, the rights. And the declaration by the United Nations on human rights says that all humans possess these rights. It's not about persons and this group of humans is persons and the other group isn't. And historically, if you look through human history,

when humans, some groups have been said, well, you're not persons. And I'm talking about in America as an example, our sordid history with slavery. Oh, blacks are less than full persons under the law. They're just 3 fifths of a person. They're not considered full persons. They only have this much of personhood.

Or you look at the 20th century and all the carnage and the consideration in Rwanda of certain groups of people. You're not a person. Or during the Rwandan genocide or Nazi Germany, the Jews are not persons, whatever. Always that posture of saying some humans aren't persons, some humans are less than, they're subhuman has always led to human rights abuses because there's no factor beyond your innate humanity that should give you those universal human rights.

It is your humanity to be human is enough. So you can have a conversation all day long about what you think personhood means and the frameworks and angels and God and legal systems and everything else, but human rights are for everyone, for all humans. So it's all, so you're saying the distinction is almost an arbitrary- Well, it's a distinction without a difference.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. But do you face, does that come up a lot in your- Oh yeah, for sure. And what I've found people to do, and Peter Singer, you know, this very pro-abortion ethicist, it's kind of funny that he's such an ethicist when he's, he literally is for infanticide. I mean, this is what this guy teaches.

So there is this argument that well, personhood is for humans that have consciousness and a certain degree of consciousness. And only those humans deserve legal protection. The rest of them treat them like meat. You can just kill them. It doesn't matter. Right?

So that's the argument of some people who support abortion. And they wouldn't say just kill them. They just say, well, abortion is fine. It doesn't, you know, it's okay, whatever you want to do. Peter Singer not only says that, but he says a newborn doesn't have enough consciousness. And so if parents want to kill a newborn within the first three months or so, they're so undeveloped in their own consciousness that it wouldn't be like killing a person. So infanticide should be acceptable, legally and morally speaking.

So that argument that consciousness defines your personhood and personhood means you have rights is a terrible path because it takes you down any number of It takes you any number of directions that lead to Killing people that are seen as less than and the argument that consciousness is your humanity The reason that's wrong is because consciousness is absolutely an element of humanity and a crucial one And it's certainly one that you develop as you get older, more and more different kinds of consciousness. But even defining consciousness exactly

is a very difficult task, right? Like what exactly is consciousness? It can mean a lot of different things. And your ability to kind of activate a particular aspect of your humanity doesn't mean you're human or not. It just means that you're activating that aspect or you've developed that aspect. So that's the other reason that argument falls apart.

Yeah, the unborn baby doesn't have full consciousness. Neither does the newborn, neither does the five-year-old have as much consciousness as, say, an adult with more self-awareness, memory, et cetera, but that doesn't mean they're less valuable. Consciousness exists on a spectrum, you're saying. Like, even post-birth, there's variations of consciousness. I have seen just bits and pieces of some of your, I don't know if it was one debate or

several with Destiny, the famous, I mean famous for YouTubers, I guess. He's a good arguer. I find, I personally find him more annoying because it just seems like he's not, he just is trying to win an argument, but he's not dumb. I mean, he's very quick and doesn't he, how many times have you engaged him? Is it just the one time?

Or I know there's another time recently they got canceled. I've done at least two debates with Destiny on different topics. We were supposed to do another debate recently at UC Irvine. But there was a flight issue, so we weren't able to complete the debate. But hopefully, we'll actually be doing a redo of that. But yeah, Destiny focuses his whole argument

around the 20-week mark in pregnancy, saying that when the baby is around 20 weeks old, they're starting to develop more brain waves. And so he argues that that's consciousness and therefore that baby is suddenly has human rights and should never be killed. But then moments before, although again, there's no scientific way to actually know for a fact that there's this particular consciousness moments before.

Like when is that line? There's not really a clear line. But then he would say it is okay to have an abortion for any reason. So I think that's a very, I think he's wrong. It doesn't really follow that you're this sort of, first of all, the definition of consciousness, he's never really able to fully define. He says, we kind of know what it is. It has to do with these things.

But even the things that he says we know that it is, like having to do with memory as an example, obviously the baby at 20 weeks doesn't really have any of that yet. Brain waves can be detected by the way, as early as eight weeks old in utero. So there is a brain activity happening earlier on. The early brain is already firing. So I just think it's not a pathway to a reasonable case

to justify killing a baby. Because that's what we're talking about in the end, right? It's one thing to say, well, what are these statuses? What are these terms? But what is the argument being used for? The argument is being used for justifying abortion on demand. That's why they're saying consciousness is the cutoff. So now it's okay to kill this whole group of people.

Well, I just don't think that that's a compelling enough reason to say it's okay to kill human beings. I watched the UC Irvine, most of it, where Destiny wasn't able to make it. He did seem to have a surrogate, an avatar in the crowd who a young kid, he was really sharp and you guys were going after it. And I really, I was like, oh, that's a good point. Ooh, that's a good comeback and all this stuff. But it seemed like he was making a distinction between say somebody who's in a coma, who was conscious, but now is no longer conscious,

but killing that person would be wrong. But a 20 week, let's just say 15 week year old unborn baby has not yet even experienced consciousness. I want to make sure I'm accurately summarizing his books. That's it. Exactly. Because you could say, well, there's people that are asleep or in a coma that they're unconscious.

And so therefore you're saying that they're not human all of a sudden because they lack that active conscious ability. And they would say, well, no, because they had consciousness at one point before that. Right. That's the that makes them human. But again, based on what I mean, I understand the argument, there's sort of a, there's sort of a cohesiveness in terms of, okay, we just picked consciousness as the standard. And by the way, we're not defining consciousness.

That's the other problem with their argument. They can't fully define it, because consciousness means a lot of different things and looks a lot of different things. And the consciousness of a 20-week-old hypothetically is very different than the consciousness of a one-year-old, than a five-year-old, than a 20-year-old. So I understand the argument, but again, to use that to say, now it's okay to kill someone who's about to have the consciousness if you let them live for a couple more weeks. I don't think there's any justification for it.

I'm not recommending Bill Burr's comedy because it's not always the cleanest, but he has a pretty brilliant take on abortion. On the oven? Yeah. You're baking a cake and someone comes in and rips it out of the oven and you say, what are you doing to my cake? It's like, it's not a cake. It's like, well, it would

have been if you didn't throw it out of the oven. You know, comedians aside, Dave Chappelle again has something similar. Yeah. Comedians are, they're brutal. I have such a fact, by the way, some of these more, yeah, they're raunchy comedians, but they're going at it on abortion because again, you just take away the rhetoric, strip off all the sort of justifications, rationalizations and you're like, this is a human, abortion kills human,

that's what it is. This is what we're dealing with, we're talking about killing humans. Are we okay with this? And I think if we're gonna build a just and loving civil society, we can't be okay with it. We just can't. Now, are there things to work out

in terms of caring for mothers who are pregnant in terms of fostering healthy environments so that children can be raised in families and have a great future? Those are important projects that we need to be focused on, but there has to be a foundation that we're working off of. And the foundation needs to be, you don't kill humans. That has to be a foundation that we're working off of. And the foundation needs to be you don't kill humans. That has to be the foundation.

Right. How do you handle the exceptional cases? Rape, incest, I always forget how to pronounce it, entopic pregnancies? Entopic, yep. Or any situation where the life of the mother is at serious risk. Yeah, how do you handle those cases? Yeah, of course. Well, let's go through them.

And I want to make the larger point about these arguments and how important it is that we engage them, because these are being used daily as justifications to make abortion on demand legal. So 1% or so of abortions or less are because of rape or incest or life-threatening conditions for the mother. So you're talking about 99% of American abortions or less are because of rape or incest or life-threatening conditions for the mother. So you're talking about 99% of American abortions, and there's a million of them a year,

are because of just other reasons, lifestyle reasons, relationship reasons, economic reasons, whatever it might be. So I think that's an important first point, that these small amount of abortions are used to justify the rest. But let's address them. So you mentioned we'll go backwards,

topic pregnancies. So in that situation, the baby is implanted outside of the womb. So often it's in the fallopian tube. The baby can't survive. There's no baby that's ever survived a fallopian tube pregnancy because there's no way for the baby to grow. The fallopian tube is going to burst. The baby will die. The mother could die too. So in that situation, removing the baby to grow, the Philippian tube is going to burst, the baby will die, the mother could die too. So in that situation, removing the baby from the Philippian tube, removing the ectopic pregnancy is not intentional killing of the baby. The goal there is not to end the life of this child. The goal there is to save the life of the mother.

And you're also removing the baby from a hostile environment, the baby can't grow and survive there. So that's not an abortion. It's not the intentional direct killing of an innocent human life. It's not going in there because they want to just be done with the baby or done with pregnancy. It's a life-threatening condition for both mom and baby. I wish we had the technology, by the way, precedent to, you know, re-implant baby and mom's uterus or, you know, safe harbor the baby some other way. We don't have that technology at this time. So that's

that. Real quick, I heard a couple of years ago, I remember seeing or hearing, and you never know what to trust on media, and that's a whole other conversation, but that some of the laws being passed in certain states against abortion, it had been said, if I remember correctly, that it was actually prohibiting women with entopic pregnancies from... No. Is that not... There's never been a pro-life law that said that, ever.

Really? Okay. Yeah. No, because that's not an abortion in that case. It's a life-threatening medical emergency for both baby and mom. You're not going in there to kill the baby. You're removing the baby to save the mom, and the baby's going to die or is dead in many cases.

There's not a single pro-life law in America today that prohibits removing a baby in an ectopic pregnancy. Has that been said though? Am I right to say that people are saying that? I don't think any pro-life person, there were probably, this is where it gets kind of dirty media, dirty politics. There are certainly activists or advocates or maybe just well-intentioned misled people who say, well, pro-lifers want

to ban removing ectopic pregnancies or treating ectopic pregnancies, but that's never been the position of any pro-life organization, law, pro-life politician, policymaker, anyone, because it doesn't make sense. So, and it doesn't, again, removing an ectopic pregnancy does not violate the principle of intentional direct killing of an innocent human being. So that's the other piece of it. But then with some of these other conditions, so if there's a life-threatening emergency that the mother has,

the pro-life answer is try to care for both patients as long as possible. And in a severe and immediate life-threatening emergency for a mom, you can do an early delivery of the baby. But you're doing it with respect for the baby's body, trying to let that baby have a chance, trying to delay the time of delivery as long as possible so that the baby can be delivered alive and maybe put in NICU.

That is, again, different from abortion. But again, in media reports, these are often conflated. It's like, well, you had to do an early delivery. That was an abortion. Or you had an ectopic pregnancy. That was an abortion. Or you had a miscarriage. And that removing of the baby after the baby has passed away is somehow an abortion.

No, no, and no. And these distinctions are really important because I think those cases are being used to legalize, again, the abortion on demand that we have in our country. And then you go to rape and incest, which is the last category, and horrific category, right? I mean, this is where sexual violence has been perpetrated on this innocent woman or a child, girl, and then pregnancy results. When that happens, there's another life now involved, innocent third party of the crime, the baby's not guilty of the rape.

The baby's innocent. The rapist is guilty. The rapist needs to be held accountable. We don't punish, in my view, child exploitative actions enough in our culture. Both rape, assault, abuse. In my view, we don't do that enough, punish that enough. That needs to be fixed. But is the solution in that case

to do an abortion on the mother, is that a just answer? And no, it can't be because that baby has a right to live, even if that baby's father was evil or he was conceived in an act of violence. And then there's the other part of the story. Is this gonna be good for the mom? I think there's a narrative that if you get pregnant and after being raped, then you need an abortion. That's going to be so important for your healing. There's no evidence that having an

abortion after being raped is going to help you heal. In fact, there is evidence that having an abortion after rape is more trauma that is added to that initial trauma that you endured, because abortion is an act of violence against the baby and it's an unnatural act against the mother too. So to say that, oh, this woman's going to be better off or the girl's going to be better off if she has the abortion is patently not true. There's no evidence for that. There's actually studies that have been done that show, you know, surveying a hundred rape

survivors that the ones that chose life for the baby and had the baby were overwhelmingly glad that they allowed that baby to live. And the ones that chose abortion were actually the majority of them regretted it because they felt a pressure to have the abortion. People are saying, of course you have the abortion. And then they felt that was the one thing I had control over. I couldn't control the rape,

but that was the one thing I had control over and I let them kill this baby, this innocent baby. And so now I'm haunted control the rape, but that was the one thing I had control over and I let them kill this baby, this innocent baby. So now I'm haunted by the fact that there was a life that was ended with my consent and I don't forgive myself for it. So we don't talk enough about the fact that survivors of sexual trauma are not benefited by abortion and certainly the baby deserves not to be aborted. They deserve to live. I've heard people, I think I heard Bill Maher or somebody,

not that he sit around watching all these comedians all the time, it just happened to be discussed, but I think he was just horrified. He had, maybe his bench appeared. I think I saw that. Yeah, he's like, you're gonna tell a teenage girl who has been a victim of sexual assault that she has to carry this. And it was so, it was, I was listening to this and I'm like, Ooh, yeah, that, that just

seems like, how do I? Like, I- And it's horrible because, yeah, I mean, she's a teenage girl and she shouldn't have been raped. It's horrible. I mean, it's the fact that she's pregnant is a violation to our sensibilities of what's right and wrong because she shouldn't be. She shouldn't be and she is because of violence. So that all makes perfect sense.

But I think we shouldn't, I think I've seen this thing where we put the intensity of the anger and the concern on against and on that baby saying, okay, we'll get rid of that. Just get rid of that. As if that's going to somehow move the ball forward for this girl and move the ball forward for healing, which there's no evidence for, of course. And instead of being angry at the rapist, it's like we're angry at this baby for existing. And I think that that's not a posture of justice. I mean, it's a tragic situation.

It's a horrible situation. But we can't commit an evil because another evil was done. Two wrongs do not make a right. And so we're adding injustice ourselves with abortion on top of that first injustice of the rape. And if you just look at it just from an objective, ethical standpoint, your point, I don't know how you'd argue against it that the innocent third party shouldn't be punished in a sense, that their life has ended when they are the innocent

third party. But your, since there's objective evidence that it actually doesn't actually help the mother either, that's, to me, that's huge. You're adding trauma to trauma. But even theoretically, if there's a case, a woman says, well, I had an abortion, I was raped, and it was great. It still doesn't make it right, right? And so that's the other thing of people's subjective experiences

do matter, and we should pay careful attention to them. But at the end of the day, even if they are a burden, even if they are seen as unwanted, even if they were conceived after sexual violence, you're still human. You still get those human rights. And I think that's another modern society mistake that we make often is if someone is seen as a burden,

if someone is seen as unwanted or inconvenient, if someone is seen as, you know, again, their father was a rapist, then all of a sudden they're expendable. But that's not following the reality of human rights. I mean, it's saying there aren't all human rights. And it also enters into a very scary playing field where you're saying, now, if you're not strong enough,

if you're not good enough, you can be killed. You're not good. And we are having that happen, Preston, with euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, Canada through the MADE program, which is this assisted dying program. They're now euthanizing children with mental illness because they're seen as, you know,

well, we're doing good for them, but basically they're burdens, right? They're seen as not happy with their life anyway, so let's just off them. I mean, that's where this ideology takes us. It is a culture of death ideology. There are some other arguments that I find pretty bad, if not just profoundly, well, I don't want to bias.

Let me just ask it. What about cases where the unborn is diagnosed with some sort of physical or mental disability? First of all, is it true that people are motivated or encouraged to get an abortion if, say, their unborn child is diagnosed with like Down syndrome or something? Is that actually happening? And if so, how do you respond to that argument? I can't tell you the number of times I've heard from people. And I bet if you just talk to any number of friends who have in the last 20 years had a baby with any kind of disability

that they detected in utero, termination is offered and often encouraged. And by termination, I mean kill the baby because it's not good enough. That's in plain speak. That's what that is. Even my nephew, he is missing his hand. And that's because of some, not genetic abnormality, but some sort of developmental issue in utero, maybe like a amniotic band that kind of just stopped the development of his arm, right? Handsome, beautiful little boy, healthy otherwise.

When his parents found that out at the 20-week ultrasound, the doctor was just like, okay, well, you can do termination. This is a baby that is weeks away from viability, beautiful baby, and that's just the knee-jerk reaction of our healthcare system. If there's any chromosomal abnormality that's detected, if there's any developmental disability that's detected,

if there's any other condition that the mother even has, like she has some diabetes or hypertension or some issue, and maybe her health isn't great, they'll be like, well, you can just terminate. And even myself, I remember going, my first, I had my first baby, I have three kids, five, three, and one, first child, going to this doctor's office

and hurrying from another person, oh yeah, I think she's pro-life, I go in and we're talking about genetic testing, they always offer those tests, and I was saying, I don't think I need them. I'm OK. Not that genetic testing is inherently wrong. It's not. But I was like, I'm not going to change what I'm going to do.

And she's like, well, it's really important. I said, why? Well, because. I said, why? And she said, because you have this zero opportunity to terminate. Even then, we hadn't even done any tests on this baby yet. I don't even think we had the first ultrasound.

The baby's seven or eight weeks old. She's already talking about when you might be able to terminate because I asked why enough times, like why would we do this test? It is so pervasive. Over 60% of babies who have been detected to have Down syndrome in utero are aborted. Oh my God.

Those numbers may be as high as 90%. In places like the Netherlands, it's virtually 100% or 99.9%. In fact, it was apparently five or 10 years ago now, there was this big news story out of the Netherlands. We are down syndrome free. We've solved down syndrome in the Netherlands. No, you didn't solve down syndrome.

You had a search and destroy mission for any baby that has the wrong chromosomes and you killed them all. So you are missing those angels walking among you. And that's in large part how American society is today as well. I know of several friends who have either one or more than one kids with Down syndrome. And there's obvious challenges that come with that. But every single one would say, come with that, but every single one would say, my kid with Down syndrome has brought so much joy in life and from a Christian perspective, Christ-likeness into our home that we would

never have experienced without this beautiful child of God. It's a little icky. I mean, that is eugenics, right? That's where... K-School is eugenics. Yeah, they're not the right genetic. They're not good enough genetically. That's what that is. And you know, unfortunately, even IVF today, there's a lot of push, new technologies that people are excited about. There's a big New York Times article recently about this new startup that's so excited because they're going to now give you the ability to test all of your little embryos that you create via IVF to batch them and decide which ones are better based on genetic screening not just for general even big-picture health more for specific distinct traits like I

want a blue-eyed blonde haired boy who's likely to be six foot tall and have a high IQ and so but the way you get that blonde haired blue- be six foot tall and have a high IQ. But the way you get that blonde hair, blue eyed, six foot tall boy, potentially, is you got to create several dozen. And then what do you do with the several other dozen babies that you just created? Well, they didn't make the cut. You kill them or you indefinitely freeze them. Totally inhumane. But again, this is the way we are thinking in modern society.

You're not good enough. You don't make the cut. We don't want you. I had Trinnae McGee on the podcast a few years ago. And I was going to ask you about... But then I saw you had her on. So I was like, oh, you already probably know what I'm going to ask. That's so cool that you had her on.

She was brilliant. So she's a state representative, Democrat, a black woman, and her main, one of her main concern, because she's pro-life, pro-life Democrat. They do exist. They do. And she's passionately pro-life. One of her biggest concerns, as she says, the abortion industry is systemically racist. It targets women of color, specifically who are lower on the socioeconomic rung. And have you looked into that?

Do you have thoughts on that? Would you agree with that? Yeah, 100%. I mean, so if systemic racism is institutions that have developed basically systems to unfairly or to target and harm people of color, right? That's absolutely case book. What Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion chain is, they are predominantly in black neighborhoods.

At different times, they've given specific funds specifically for black baby abortions. I actually uncovered this back when I was a college student. We were doing these because I was looking at Warren Buffett. He's a big philanthropist, but he's a really big pro-abort philanthropist. And he was giving tens of millions of dollars in direct cash payments to Planned Parenthood for their justice or women in need funds. So I was curious, who gets a justice fund? Who gets a women in need fund? You get your abortion fully paid for by Warren Buffett. What's he doing? Why is he doing this? Oh, it's not like white college girls having these abortions. It's low income black women having

these abortions that are being paid for by Warren Buffett to basically eliminate troublesome communities effectively. And that's what abortion has done to the black community. It's decimated it. And black women today are three to five times more likely to have an abortion than white women. And the abortion rate in the black community is higher, dramatically higher than the abortion rate in the white community.

It's even higher than the Latino community that's still higher than the white community. But minorities suffer the brunt of abortion and Planned Parenthood knows this and they are set up in these communities. That's been a focus from the beginning. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood. She wanted to use eugenics to clean up the population in America.

She'd hated poverty, rightly so. It's good to want better things for people. It's another thing to want to eliminate the people who are poor or black or whatever your standard is because you don't want them to exist. I mean, that's a different situation than I wanna make your life better, then I'm gonna end your life or I'm going to make sure you mean, that's a different situation than I want to make your life better, then I'm going to end your life,

or I'm going to make sure you don't have future lives be born. Wow, golly. Yeah, I remember her. I heard a little five minute speech she gave at a pro-life rally a couple of years ago. She was on fire. But I've never heard that angle. And then I looked into it a little more.

It's existential for her, because she's in the black community, and she sees it. Right. And one of our spokeswomen at Live Action, our news correspondent, Christina, her mother almost aborted her. And it was like an act of God. The mother had this sort of supernatural experience

being told, don't do this, right before she was going to have the abortion. She was on the table about to have the abortion or physically at the abortion clinic about to have the abortion. But she talks often about the black community being targeted from the beginning by abortion and the abortion industry. And we need resources.

We need solutions. We don't need to kill your future. We need to provide for your future. Yeah. I'm curious. It seems like more and more people culturally, in the West at least, are more accepting of abortion. And yet the more science and technology develops,

the more we can see like what a 12 week, 20 week fetus looks like. And it just seems like the more technology advances, more and more people will be like, oh man, I don't know about killing this baby, you know? Is it true that more and more people are accepting abortion? And why is that? Well, I think there's a lot of trends happening

all at the same time. It's kind of this crazy time where there's so much good happening right now, and then there's a lot of evil happening. And there's a lot of evil happening and there's a lot of competing narratives about what is true, right? Or if even there is truth. And so you have definitely, I would say, a awakening, especially among younger people

who are getting very passionately pro-life. It's like, we don't, this is not okay, right? And that's a little different than maybe their parents' generation, like even boomers, who were sort of accepting of abortion because they thought it was feminism. This is the other kind of interesting cultural or generational gap. The feminists of the 60s and 70s effectively

were hijacked by the sexual revolutionaries and the pro-abort activists. And so they all kind of became one. So now if you're a feminist, if you're for women's empowerment, you must also be for abortion and you must also be for basically promiscuous sex, you know, sex without any moral code. And that weird convergence wasn't the original vision of the first feminists, you know, that wasn't like authentic feminism.

That was this kind of hijacking. And so I think there was confusion for like the children of that generation who grew up thinking, oh, well, if I'm a feminist, I have to support abortion or if I care about women, I have to support abortion. And I think younger generations, certainly many millennials and definitely Gen Zers are saying, oh, this is not really the case. You can be for women and pro-woman. You can be pro-feminism in terms of original feminism and be very pro-life and totally reject abortion. In fact, the early feminists were pro-feminism in terms of original feminism and be very pro-life and totally reject abortion. In fact, the early feminists were pro-life and they rejected abortion passionately.

And they were very pro-marriage, by the way, the early feminists, like the suffragettes. So that's one thing that's kind of happening and shaking out. And then you have the technological changes, which are contraception, the birth control pill, IVF and the power to create life in test tubes, all of this other crazy technology coming down the pike, human cloning, AIs rolling all of this. There's a new thing called IVG, in vitro gamiotangenesis, which is, I hope I'm saying that right. We just had Aaron Kiriade on my show to talk about this, a great expert on this, but talking

about how you can actually create sperm and egg cells out of skin cells. So you can get a man, take his skin cells, and create an egg cell. And so we basically destroy this idea of paternity and maternity all with technology, right? Creating human-animal blends. So you have this, is know, is this a pig or is this a human, right?

You can try to combine their genetics to try to develop them that way. So there's a whole scary world of what technology can do. There's good things technology can do, and there's a lot of bad things technology can do. And so I think what is also happening is there is sort of this generational difference of people are like, technology, good.

Like, yay, we landed on the moon. Good. You know, oh, worldwide web. Good. You know, oh, good, good, good. Birth control. Good. We got this pill.

It's magical. Good. And then there's other people that are looking at it. Excuse me. And then there's other people who are looking at it. After the fact, they're saying, wait a minute, just because you could do it doesn't mean you should. And so I think that's also a thing happening with a lot of younger, and they're saying, wait a minute, just because you could do it doesn't mean you should. And so I think that's also a thing happening

with a lot of younger people, where they're actually excited to return to tradition, because they see how crazy post-modernity has gotten and how these technologies are just being, like even social media, the technology of social media, just like use it endlessly. It's like, wait a minute, you're being actually controlled by your phone, right? So I think there's a new push among people who say, okay,

these are all real technologies, but they're not necessarily good for us to deploy. And I think that is what gives me a lot of hope about the upcoming generations. I have seen that across different areas. Yeah. And sexuality and other areas with younger generation that is not just following the kind of progression that is happening among millennials and older people. And even like you brought up, yeah, the sexual revolution, there's a fascinating book by Louise Perry, The End of the Sexual Revolution.

Are you familiar with it? Yes, very good book. Yeah. I mean, she's not a believer, she's not conservative, you know, but she's like the sexual revolution, are you familiar with it? Yes, very good book. Yep. I mean, she's not a believer, she's not conservative, you know, but she's like, the sexual revolution ended up harming women and children. This is not liberate. She comes like inches away from almost like a traditional Christian sexual ethic. Just from looking at where, you know, boundless sexual opportunities leads us as a society in particular, how it affects women.

So, yeah, we are at interesting crossroads. I mean, do you see then percentage-wise like a growing number, like an uptick of people starting to become more pro-life or at least moving in that direction? And do you see that as possibly changing the political scene? Because it seems like abortion is not the dividing issue that it used to be between like conservatives and liberals. It just seems like even now more and more Republicans seem like they're not pro-life or at least aren't passionate about it.

Yeah. I mean, it's a time of a lot of dramatic change. And then you had the fall of Roe v. Wade, right, just three years ago. And then you had this huge backlash because you had these powerful institutions. The media at large is pro-abortion. Academia at large today is pro-abortion.

The Democratic Party is entirely pro-abortion and then part of the Republican Party now. And then you have a lot of business corporations that are pro-abortion. And so what you had happen after the fall of Roe v. Wade is everyone's like, oh my gosh. And the pro-life activists, which is like this kind of scrappy group of like underpaid, you know, nonprofit, you know, not government funded people are like pro-life, yay. You know, we're going to try to help the moms with the pregnancy resource centers.

And then you have this immense amount of cash, literally a billion plus dollars over the midterm elections and then subsequent political, you know, the presidential election in just pure pro-abortion propaganda campaign, like literal ads telling women that if they don't have abortion, they're going to die. And so that definitely had an impact politically where people are like, oh, some of the Republicans were like, oh, we can't compete with this cash. where people are like, oh, some of the Republicans were like, oh, we can't compete with this cash. Literally, there's like billions of dollars being spent telling the voters that I'm bad because I'm pro-life and I don't even have the money to compete with that. So maybe I'm not as pro-life as I was before, you know? Which was a tragedy. Now that didn't happen to all the politicians and the Republican side.

You had really passionate pro-lifers like Ron DeSantis in Florida and he won his reelection in a landslide and he has a really strong pro-life law in his state. So it didn't have to be that way, but some of them caved. So what does that mean for today? There's all these things happening at once, but I do think there's an under swell right now, I would say an undercurrent right now of a return to truth and a return to,

you could say traditionalism, but it's not just traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism. It's traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism. It's traditionalism for the sake of Big T truth. What is actually real here, guys? What is going to stand the test of time and what is going to actually be a foundation that we can build a flourishing civil society on? And I think that is a passion for increasingly more people to explore that.

And you see all these people converting to Roman Catholicism as an example. I mean the Diocese of Orange here had it, I don't know if it was unprecedented, but it was certainly more than in recent years. They had over a thousand people, adults, come into the church here in our diocese, which is a big number for the diocese. But you see this across the country, people's becoming Catholic or people becoming Orthodox or people just eager to return to Big T truth as they can find it. So I do think that the political parties, to kind of wrap this up, the political parties,

as they are today, are kind of in disarray. They're having identity crises. What does it even mean to be Republican? What does it mean to be Democrat? Republicans are looking more like Democrats. Some of the Democrats are going super far left. What does it all mean? I think in 10 years from now, certainly in 15 years from now, there's going to be a new, you could call it maybe even political party, but it's certainly a new shape, which is much more traditional and grounded in Big

T truth. And I think that is what I'm excited for. It's not here yet, but the beginnings of it are here. I want to go back to your ministry. Do you enjoy debates? First of all, how many debates do you think you've... I mean, if you just look up Lila Rose on YouTube, it's just endless, endless debates you've been involved in and some really intense, like, is that stressful? Or do you enjoy it? Has there been time? That's funny.

And maybe you can relate to this. I'm going to guess, I'll make a guess that we're similar, but tell me what you think. I do not personally enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing. Some people, they're just like, love it, and it's fun. I do like debating for the sake of persuasion and the opportunity to save lives. There have been lives saved that we hear about at Live Action regularly because of our work, and there is nothing more rewarding. It's just such an honor.

It's a privilege. Is it difficult to do the conflict stuff? Yes. I don't wake up saying, I'm ready for conflict today. Now, I do wake up and say, I'm ready to go to war to fight for human beings. So there's a little bit of a difference I'm trying to make there. And I think temperamentally, some people are more born for, they love fighting. I would say that their you know, their particular cross

is gonna be to be more discerning about what fights to pick. And then other people like myself are more born for I love harmony, I want to be friends with everyone, but then I'm gonna discern, okay, this is a fight that I have to have because it's out of love for you. And so that's the kind of posture that I try to go into debates with. And yeah, it's not like fun.

I'd rather go out to ice cream with you, quite frankly. But I'm going to have this conversation because I care about you and I care about the people who are listening. How are you able to keep your cool so much? I mean, I've seen you in some really intense moments and you'll fight back and you'll push back. I mean, there's nothing, you don't cave in at all. You know, like I wouldn't want to be on the other side

of your arguments. But you just seem so calm and collective the whole way through, which is really unique. Cause a lot of times debate, they just get so riled up and frustrated and then they start losing, they start losing, right? Because they get out of control and they don't, is that a discipline for you? Does that come natural? Is it, is it deep down? Are you really

fuming and you're just able to like suppress it or? That's an interesting question. I mean, I do get fiery, like with my husband, if we have an argument, I might get, I'm Italian, but like, I couldn't, I definitely can get fiery or passionate about stuff. But I think, you know, I have been doing this since I was a teenager, right? It's been 20 years. So I, that's a lot of conversations I've been privileged to have. And I think I just understand. I feel that I do really get where a lot of people are coming from.

And when you, when you empathize with someone and you understand where they're coming from, it's more difficult to just get angry at them. Now, I do get angry sometimes at the fact that babies, I mean, I often get angry that babies are being killed and it's an injustice and it needs to stop. But I've also just learned on a practical level, like anger doesn't often persuade people when it's directed at them. Right? Righteous anger is one thing to like champion for something. But if you're like just yelling at someone, good luck, right? Persuading them. So it's also just a practical thing. And, you know, is it hard to do?

Yeah, I think sometimes it, you know, I don't get personally worked up because I also understand it's not about me. I think that also, again, 20 years in, it's not about me. It's about a deeper confusion that exists here, a wrong thinking that exists here. And my job is to help shed some light if I can. Do you have any memorable moments in your 20 plus years of doing this

that particularly stand out where it got extra heated? Did you ever feel like your life was at risk? Or when about life, but like, was there ever like physical violence or anything that breaks out? I mean, I've seen some stuff on college campuses, not necessarily with you, but it's like, oh my word, this could get hostile really quick. Have you been in really hostile environments or?

I mean, the one physical altercation I've been in, which was, I don't know, 15 years ago now, probably was I was praying outside an abortion clinic and I was trying to, I was earnestly pleading with one of these kind of guys. It was this older gentleman. He one of these kind of guys. It was this older gentleman. He was standing there to defend abortion. I mean, he was in the parking lot with the pro-abortion vest that I was trying to talk to him.

I mean, his name was Hilton, I remember, and it was this Planned Parenthood saying, I was like, Hilton, like, I knew he had grandkids because he had had a conversation with one of the other gentlemen who was a sidewalk counselor. Anyways, it's like, you have grandkids, like these are people's grandkids. And he got angry at me and he slapped my hand. And, you know, very small altercation there, but it just reminded me that the anger that exists behind the abortion ideology is a real thing, right?

So we gotta be careful with that. We have gotten death threats, we've gotten threats against our family, but I would say largely speaking, most people who support abortion are not trying to kill anybody. They don't go into it thinking, I wanna kill somebody, right?

When you have a abortionist, they're definitely doing the killing, but your average pro-choice person is not like a raging zealot. They just think, oh, I'm for women, right? I support women. So in that sense, we're just trying to persuade people who don't know any better.

And the real militant ones, yes, you gotta be careful about those, but that's the minority. Do you ever feel like you lost a debate? I don't love like debates personally, because oftentimes people aren't mutually searching after the truth. They're just trying to use rhetorical tactics to persuade the audience sometimes.

And so I think somebody could lose a debate, but still be true in what they're arguing for. Of course. So, but do you feel like there were times when you walked away saying, oh man, I think I might have lost that. I think the audience might be less persuaded in my viewpoint. I definitely, there have been a lot of times, and this is pretty regular for me, that I think, oh, I would have done this differently. And I try to do it differently and better the next time.

Because I think we can always do better. And so I'm always thinking about how can I do better? I mean, the comment section will usually make those judgments, right? You won, you lost. I think particularly one of the debates I did with Destiny, I had a kind of impromptu debate partner that wasn't really, we weren't aligned in our approach to debate. And so she was kind of going her track and I was going mine and we're trying to kind

of work as best we could together. But I thought that was a debate that was kind of a train wreck in many ways. And I think the comment section agreed. It wasn't so much that the arguments were necessarily better on the other side. It was more that the interplay of the conversation was, there was a lot to be desired. So I've definitely like walked away from conversion and been like, that could have been way better. And I wish I could have done this differently and you know, blah, blah, blah. So that's gotta be so stressful. Like a few times I've only done maybe one or two kind of public debates and oh, I walked

away from one for weeks just saying, here's a hundred things I wish I should have said, didn't say, it was just like, oh, and I didn't represent my viewpoint, which I believe is true. It was on same sex marriage. I was debating a guy, I was arguing traditional marriage, he was arguing against it, and he was way more winsome than I was.

It turned into a lot of emotional stuff and I'm very analytical and I just wanted to look at the Bible and he was winning the crowd. Personal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Certainly, yeah. I mean, that issue is a really tough one. As tough or in some ways tougher for certain people

than even abortion and how to like engage that one in a way that's really winsome is tough. Yeah, yeah. It's tough. I enjoy, I'm a way that's really winsome is tough. Yeah. It's tough. I enjoy, it takes me a while to reflect. I love blog post debates where you can, where you have a week to read their posts, respond, look at their sources, think through the arguments and then respond to that in a written form that's more thought out.

Because a lot of times in a verbal debate, people may throw around stuff, but they might like assume they might miss side of source or assume the sources justify this position. And then in the heat of it, you don't have time to like say, okay, we'll stop. Let's go read that art, that study you're citing. And let's see if it actually supports your position. Whereas in a more written back and forth, you have time to really check sources.

Me personally, I enjoy that a lot more. But yeah, hey, I want to get to a few questions. I got some people listening in that have some questions here. One person asks, could you please provide the source for the made use in Canada for miners? That was a while ago in our conversation. Do you have that available? Let me look up something for that right now for miners. That was a while ago in our conversation. Do you have that available?

Let me look up something for that right now for you. I mean, it's not really a... It's something that there'll be a lot of sources for it because made is being used on miners. So I can try to pull up a news article right now, Canada. So you have, this is from Canada's website. You can keep asking, you can keep asking if you want and we can, I'll find it while you're asking the next one. Yeah. I've got another really good question here. Okay. Here it goes. It says a pro-life movement is

often criticized for not advocating for programs to help families once the baby is born, food stamps, welfare, et cetera. Do you think that's a fair criticism? Are there programs like that? Meaning should we have more of those programs? Yeah. Are there programs that do help families so that abortion doesn't seem to be the only realistic option? I think we definitely need programs to help families, 100%. And one of the things we do at Live Action is we want to advocate for, we work on advocating for more programs to help families.

So as an example, we should have cash credits for families who have kids. Make birth free would be another thing. But I think social safety nets are incredibly important. Yeah, Okay. Good. So right now it's 18 and up, but in Canada it's 18 and up for maid at this time, but there's a push right now to expand maid for children under 18. Okay.

Okay. So yeah, that's the current. But in parts of Northern Europe, in countries like the Netherlands as an example, there is actual active euthanasia for children under the age of 18. All right. Another question. Does pro-life apply to the death penalty too?

I could answer that one, but I don't. Well, I think first of all, we're talking about different categories. In the case of the death penalty, you should have a convicted person who is not innocent. In the case of an abortion, the baby is, of course, innocent. It's not being convicted of any crime. I'm against the death penalty personally for a number of reasons. But I think you can make the case to support the death

penalty and still be passionately anti-abortion. And that's very coherent, logically speaking. I just think in a civilized nation like ours with maximum security prisons, we don't need to be killing people on death row, especially when there's a potential for getting it wrong and killing innocent people on death row. So that would be my position.

I'm a hundred percent agree with you. Yeah, I'm against the death penalty for logic, for ethical and theological reasons, but and practical reasons. But to me, those are two different scenarios. Like, even if I was in support of the death penalty, that's still within a framework of somebody doing something. Anyway, everything you said, I would have said the same thing.

Legally speaking, how can we protect the unborn, but at the same time give doctors the freedom to an abortion to save the mother's life if the parents want to go that way? That's an interesting question. Yeah. That already pro-life laws all accommodate for that. So there's already accommodations in pro-life laws that in a medical emergency, you can do an early delivery if need be. So they call them kind of the way that they're usually put in the legal code as a mother's

life exception is the way that they put it. I'm not, I'm personally a critic sometimes of the way they put it because I think it's too broad. Okay. Because I don't think it's an abortion in the case of an early delivery or the removal and ectopic pregnancy. So to say that, oh, we're making an exception for abortion in these cases, I don't think they should word it that way. Some states

do, some states don't, but every pro-life law will have an exception. Okay. That's good. That's a uniform thing. Lila, do you have a few more minutes to stick around for some extra innings or do you have to run? I've got maybe just a couple more minutes. We have our all staff call shortly. We're working on defunding Planned Parenthood right now. And we've got a new campaign we're about to roll out.

So more on that if you go over to some of Live Action's social accounts. But it's a big time, because we're close to defunding them. They're $800 million taxpayer funds. And it may be going away soon, which would be historic. If you would like to listen to our Extra Indians conversation, then head over to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw to become a member of the theology in the rock community

and get access to all the extra Indians conversations and other premium content. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.