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SHAWN CARNEY & STEVE KARLEN | What to Say When Abortion Comes Up (Ep. 262)

December 7, 2021 1h 4m Full transcript available
SHAWN CARNEY & STEVE KARLEN | What to Say When Abortion Comes Up (Ep. 262)
0:00 / 1h 4m
In this episode, Kyle Thompson interviews Shawn Carney and Steve Karlen from 40 Days for Life, diving deep into the abortion debate. They discuss effective arguments for the pro-life stance, the impact of abortion on society, and how to engage in these critical conversations with confidence.
Transcript
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0:00 This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:21 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:23 Let's get into it.
0:24 I guys today, we've got a special interview for you today and it is with two guys.
0:27 It is with Sean Carney and Steve Carlin.
0:29 Both of them work for 40 days for life.
0:31 40 days for life is an international anti-abortion organization that campaigns against baby murder
0:35 in more than 60 countries.
0:37 So Sean Carney is the CEO and president of 40 days for life.
0:40 He is also the co-founder.
0:41 He helped co-found the organization back in 2004 and he's written now four best-selling
0:45 books and he was depicted in the pro-life movie Unplanned.
0:48 I actually did an entire episode on that movie and that book back on episode 70 of this podcast
0:53 and then Steve Carlin is a campaign director for 40 days for life.
0:56 He's an author and a co-host of the 40 days for life podcast.
0:59 Both of these guys are sought after pro-life speakers and they're actually co-authors
1:03 of the new best-selling book called What to Say When, The Complete New Guide to Discussing
1:08 Abortion, How to Change Minds and Convert Hearts in a Brave New World.
1:11 And the foreword by that book was written by Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire.
1:14 Guys, this was a very good conversation because we got into a lot of specific topics in terms
1:20 of abortion and a lot of arguments in terms of abortion.
1:22 I've made reference to their arguments before on this podcast when I talked about how to
1:26 destroy a lot of pro-abortion arguments.
1:28 We get into some things that we didn't have a whole lot of time for but we got into in
1:31 vitro fertilization.
1:32 We got into when people say I believe life begins a conception.
1:35 A lot of great things.
1:36 Guys, there's so many good nuggets in this conversation.
1:38 Again, it's always interesting when you can get one guy on here to talk about this but
1:41 now there's two of these guys, they're very well versed on this.
1:44 They've spent literally hundreds if not thousands of hours debating people whether on a stage
1:48 or just in one-to-one conversation on the issue of abortion.
1:52 So they're very, very versed in this.
1:53 They know what they're doing.
1:54 So I don't want to keep them from you any longer, so without further ado, let's get
1:58 into it.
1:59 Sean Carney and Steve Carlin, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
2:02 Good to be here.
2:04 Thanks for having us.
2:05 I'm absolutely happy to have you guys here.
2:06 We're going to get into a lot of stuff here today but I always like to start a little
2:10 bit generic without being too lame.
2:12 The most generic way to start is there's not a whole lot of people that have dedicated
2:15 their life's work to the fight for the pre-born.
2:17 So in the most generic fashion possible, why did each of you get into this fight and make
2:22 it your life's calling?
2:24 That it was the right thing to do, not my plan and my wife or my answers to that.
2:32 Okay.
2:33 Very good.
2:34 Yeah.
2:35 Similarly here.
2:36 Similarly here.
2:37 I've always been pro-life for much of my life.
2:38 Never did anything about it.
2:39 And my wife had a friend who had an abortion.
2:41 That was sort of the wake-up call that got me off the couch and out to the sidewalk praying
2:45 in front of abortion facilities.
2:47 Okay.
2:48 Yeah.
2:49 And that's the thing that kind of leads to 40 days for life who you both work for and
2:52 it's a very large international anti-abortion organization that's been around since 2004.
2:57 So you guys know what you're doing, but Sean, you're the co-founder of this organization.
3:00 So give us some generic details on how the organization came to be and really what its
3:05 impact has been up to this point.
3:08 Well, we started it when I was in college.
3:10 I went to Texas A&M University and we just saw our abortion numbers going up.
3:15 So we just decided to go all in and do 40 days of prayer, fasting and a 24-hour vigil,
3:22 peaceful vigil outside of our Planned Parenthood in college station.
3:25 It was all men who took the night shift from 11 o'clock at night to 7 a.m. in the morning
3:30 for that 24-hour vigil.
3:32 And then in '07, following that '04 campaign, we saw so many cities wanting to do 40 days
3:39 for life.
3:40 So we launched it as a national effort in '07 and we do two campaigns a year.
3:44 The fall and in the spring during the season of Lent and it's just exploded and gone from
3:50 a college station, one city to 1,000 cities in 65 different countries.
3:55 And we now have over a million volunteers worldwide.
4:00 This past fall campaign, we had 612 cities doing 40 days for life all at once and that
4:06 was a record for us.
4:08 That's incredible.
4:09 So Steve, for you obviously you weren't there at the founding, but what was it that kind
4:11 of brought you to 40 days for life?
4:13 Well, as I mentioned, it was a personal encounter.
4:16 My wife's friend who had an abortion.
4:18 So I got involved in 40 days for life and one thing led to another and I was leading
4:22 as a volunteer, the local 40 days for life effort here in Madison, Wisconsin, where I
4:26 live.
4:27 And I got through that first 40-day vigil praying in front of the abortion facility
4:30 and was asked to take over leadership of the next year's campaign.
4:35 Before I knew it, my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, was revealed to be secretly
4:40 plotting to be in the process of opening up a late-term abortion facility right on the
4:45 heart of our college campus.
4:46 We're talking about abortions that are so gruesome that the only countries on the planet
4:50 that allow them are countries like the US, Canada, Vietnam, China, and North Korea.
4:56 And so this was a situation where we're realizing, hey, it's a human rights list where we are
5:00 right in between China and North Korea.
5:02 That's not a good list to be on.
5:04 And so we ended up fighting it by the grace of God.
5:07 It took us a year and a half, but we prevented that late-term abortion facility from ever
5:11 opening.
5:12 And so that kind of just got me deeper and deeper involved as I saw how the Lord responds
5:16 very actively and very powerfully to prayer.
5:19 Absolutely.
5:20 And so for you guys as well, you're obviously very versed on the numbers about abortion,
5:23 but that's one thing that whenever I get into this discussion with people, even if they're
5:27 inside the church, they don't have the foggiest idea with the actual numbers of abortion
5:31 are in the United States or even internationally.
5:34 And I feel like the general public, again, even pro-lifers, they just, they don't know
5:37 how, any idea how insane the numbers are worldwide, like the sheer number of those.
5:41 So could y'all give us a little bit of a breakdown as to the numbers in the United States, but
5:45 also worldwide when it comes to abortion?
5:47 Yeah, when you mentioned that people in the church or they don't know, I think it's always
5:52 good to start off by saying, we've never done this and we meaning mankind.
5:58 Mankind has never dehumanized a segment of our population in 95% of the countries around
6:04 the world and funded it with most of the governments around the world.
6:09 So there's never been a holocaust or a genocide like this.
6:13 There are 2,500 abortions a day in the United States alone.
6:18 But the big number to remember is that there are 56 million abortions around the world
6:24 every year, and that's the number where people are like, you have to be making that up and
6:31 don't we wish we were, but we've never done that before.
6:35 The world has crashed down on certain countries, certain cults where persecution has led to
6:43 slaughter.
6:45 And here, particularly in the United States, it is Abraham Lincoln's greatest fear that
6:51 it's not an external threat to our democracy, but internally.
6:55 And most countries, all but seven around the world, are participating in it and it's not
7:00 because of the color of the baby's skin, it's not because of their religion, it's because
7:05 of their size and their location.
7:08 And so we've never done this on this scale.
7:11 Every holocaust, every genocide is an atrocity and it's not that my holocaust can beat up
7:16 your holocaust quite the opposite, it's that we've just never done this at the sheer level
7:22 with these numbers in the history of the world.
7:25 That's one thing when you have those 56, sorry, but that I just want to add those 56 million
7:30 abortions worldwide that Sean talked about that.
7:33 That means that abortion causes more deaths than every other cause of death on the planet
7:38 combined.
7:39 Well, and that's the thing is, we always talk about in our modern context about this technology
7:43 advancement, right, and as technology advances, look how much greater things go.
7:47 But this is a destructive advancement that we see.
7:50 The reasons we're able to pull this off and kill 50 plus million people a year worldwide
7:54 is because of the advent of a lot of these medical breakthroughs and technological breakthroughs.
7:58 But really all this coalesces in the reason why I wanted to have you guys on the podcast
8:01 today.
8:02 And that's because you released a new best-selling book called what to say when the complete new
8:05 guide to discussing abortion, how to change minds and convert hearts in a brave new world.
8:10 So guys, there are plenty of pro-life books out there, anti-abortion books, and I've read
8:13 a lot of them.
8:14 But this one reads like a how-to guide, which is not common for the genre, at least the
8:18 ones that I've seen.
8:19 And you do get decently granular on several of these arguments and we'll get more into
8:22 those here in just a second.
8:24 And the book has done well so far.
8:25 My understanding is that you're already on your second printing and you know, it's always
8:28 kind of hard to know how many to print and how many to do.
8:31 I know that Matt Walsh with the Daily Wire actually wrote the foreword and he breaks down
8:34 the pro-life argument in the most simple way possible.
8:37 He didn't come up with this.
8:38 Obviously he just, you know, it's a redounding thing for him to put out there, but it's that
8:41 abortion intentionally and directly destroys innocent human life and it is always wrong
8:46 to intentionally and directly destroy innocent human life.
8:49 It's period end of story right there.
8:51 But the reason why I like y'all's book so much is that you encourage people on the pro-life
8:55 side to go on offense, right?
8:58 To no longer sit back on our heels and just kind of take all this vitriol, but to actually
9:01 go on offense.
9:02 And you say that right from the beginning of the book, you provide a long list of questions
9:05 that help pro-lifers kind of reframe the conversation with someone when the topic of
9:10 abortion comes up and it really helps him go on offense.
9:13 But why do you think it's important to encourage pro-lifers to do that, to go on the offensive?
9:19 Because abortion has to be justified and life doesn't.
9:23 We like going to our kids' football games.
9:25 We like birthday cake.
9:28 We like, you know, dancing with our daughters before dinner and putting music on.
9:33 We like, like, you don't have to sit there and justify those kind of things.
9:37 And that's why that one of those, or that second chapter, that opening chapter is, you
9:42 know, go on offense.
9:43 But the book, I think that has surprised us to enter our, dig down deep in our inner
9:50 Donald Trump and brag on the book a bit.
9:52 It was surprising.
9:53 You know, we're coming up on our third printing of the book.
9:57 It premiered as a number one Amazon bestseller.
9:59 It was number two for all Christian books.
10:04 Number three was CS Lewis's mere Christianity, which if you haven't heard of that one, yeah.
10:10 Yeah.
10:11 Read that one before our book, by the way.
10:13 But on a secular standpoint, that surprised us.
10:16 We knew that this was needed.
10:17 There's a lot of dated material out there.
10:20 There's a lot of brave new world arguments.
10:22 There's bizarre arguments.
10:23 We don't have safe, legal, and rare.
10:25 We have shout your abortion and fantasize.
10:27 So Steve and I both knew going in.
10:29 We were hitting an audience for sure, but we were blown away by the secular success of
10:35 something like Amazon just exploded and having to go in.
10:39 I mean, we were in our second printing that the end of the release week.
10:45 You know, we didn't make it seven days before we had to order more books.
10:48 And so that was 20,000 more books.
10:50 So the success of the book is good considering the culture war going on, but it's because
10:56 of what you mentioned, that this is a different type of book.
10:59 And we tell you specifically what to say and what not to say.
11:03 And you know, people are like talking about going on offense.
11:07 No abortion supporter has ever been asked, what is an abortion?
11:12 You know, I mean, like we don't have to have all the answers.
11:15 We can ask questions.
11:17 And we've had these conversations with abortion supporters.
11:22 We've had it with Planned Parenthood managers.
11:23 These are proven arguments and they don't know this stuff and they really never thought
11:28 about it.
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13:43 Now let's get back into it.
13:45 And I would say for a lot of guys as well, you get into these conversations on the pro
13:49 life or pro abortion issue, a lot of people will just avoid it entirely because they haven't
13:54 had as much practice as you all where it's just old hat for the two you guys and the for
13:58 the people that work with your organization.
13:59 But one thing that I like to do on my show towards the end of interviews, I do a segment
14:03 called what would you say to someone that said and then I fill in the blank and that's
14:06 kind of my lightning round.
14:07 But in honor of you guys, in honor of the title of the book, we're going to adjust the title
14:12 of my segment here and called what to say when someone says, so we're actually going
14:17 to dig in to the arguments right now.
14:19 I don't know how you guys want to do it.
14:20 If you both want to refer to them, if you want to kind of ping pong back and forth and
14:23 do whatever.
14:24 But I really want to dig into the nitty gritty because most people know that they're pro
14:28 life, but then their entire pro life argumentation disappears when someone on the pro abortion
14:33 side asks them a question and they're like, oh, and they don't know what to do.
14:36 It's kind of like someone not sharing Jesus with someone because they don't know where
14:39 the how to explain dinosaurs or Jonah and the whale.
14:42 It's like, you know, we want to get passed on that.
14:43 So let's get practical.
14:45 Let's get granular.
14:46 So the first one is a message that you guys have to pro lifers, right?
14:49 So what, you know, what to say when someone says, we believe life begins a conception.
14:56 What would you tell them to say?
14:57 We often talk about that in terms of it's not a belief.
15:00 Belief sort of gets lumped into, you know, people believe a lot of things.
15:04 Some of them are reasonable.
15:05 Some of them are not, but empirical, scientifically proven fact is different from a belief.
15:11 It's a more sure form of knowledge.
15:13 And this is where we say we don't have in the pro life movement a problem with science.
15:17 We don't have a problem with facts.
15:19 We don't have a problem with truth.
15:20 All of those things are on our side.
15:22 We have a problem with confidence.
15:24 And so belief is sort of fairly or unfairly.
15:27 It becomes sort of a relative thing like you believe this.
15:29 I believe that we'll agree to disagree.
15:32 And there's just not room for that.
15:33 This is, this is a place where embryology 101 textbooks prove that life begins a conception.
15:39 Not a matter of belief or conjecture or anything like that.
15:42 We need to recognize that we are on solid ground and maintain our footing on that ground
15:49 and be willing to share that with clarity rather than with tepidity or, you know, reluctance.
15:57 If life doesn't start at conception, you don't need an abortion because there's no baby.
16:02 I mean, the baby conception is what puts abortion on the table.
16:07 The fact that someone was conceived is why we're even talking about abortion.
16:12 And so they're assuming life begins at conception by promoting abortion and we need to call
16:18 them out on it.
16:19 And so when we, we kind of like, you know, we believe that life begins at conception and
16:25 we don't, I don't believe that my Astros lost the World Series.
16:30 I know they lost the World Series and it breaks my heart and it makes me mad even though it
16:35 was a while back.
16:36 But we don't believe that life begins at conception.
16:39 We know that it does.
16:40 Well, Sean, I'm just going to just going to give you some breaking news here.
16:44 No one's disappointed that the Astros lost the World Series.
16:49 Everyone in America, including all the people down at Home Depot and Lowe's that, you know,
16:54 they've seen their sales of trash cans go down.
16:56 They are not disappointed at least bit, but we don't have to get into that right now.
17:00 We certainly don't need to get into college football because I know Wisconsin's not doing
17:03 so well and Texas A&M has that one good victory this year, but hey, we'll just keep moving
17:07 on here guys.
17:08 We don't have to get too far.
17:09 Hey, I'm just trying to throw, you know, throw some stuff up against the wall.
17:13 See if it sticks.
17:14 Don't worry about it.
17:15 Let's not get too offended.
17:16 But we're going to go ahead and move on.
17:17 That was kind of through the pro lifers because pro lifers like to say that now we're going
17:19 to get into some common arguments from pro abortion folks.
17:22 Okay.
17:23 So what to say when someone says my body, my choice?
17:27 Well, it's, it becomes one of these things that's something of a slogan and we see my
17:31 body, my choice really becomes sort of a veiled euphemism for saying men don't have
17:36 any right to talk about this issue because men, men's bodies are not the bodies that
17:40 are getting abortions.
17:42 And we've said, you know, this idea of like a woman's body, a woman's choice doesn't seem
17:46 to hold up when the men themselves are pro abortion.
17:50 You know, nobody said, well, it's a woman's body, a woman's choice to the Supreme Court,
17:53 the all male Supreme Court that legalized abortion in 1973.
17:57 No one is saying a woman's body, a woman's choice to the majority of abortion providers
18:02 who are men.
18:03 The majority of abortion facility owners who are men, nobody's saying it to the donors
18:08 who are funding Planned Parenthood to Warren Buffett and all these folks who are putting
18:12 the money there.
18:13 And so I think that's an important thing to mention, but it's also important for us to
18:16 discuss that my body, my choice applies perhaps to the woman's body, but we're talking about
18:21 two different bodies here.
18:22 It is again, a scientifically and empirically proven fact that the unborn child's body is
18:27 a distinct body from the mothers, different DNA, its own beating heart, as we've seen
18:33 with some of the laws, particularly and most notably in Texas of late, you know, everything
18:38 is different.
18:39 Distinct and unique organism exists there.
18:41 And so my body, my choice is a bit of a smokescreen.
18:44 It's not honest.
18:45 It's not intellectually consistent by any means.
18:47 And when we can expose that, you know, that objection sort of falls away pretty quickly.
18:52 And it's important Steve had on something really great there, particularly for this audience.
18:57 We men were supposed to just bow our head and shame and never talk about abortion again
19:02 because we can't have one, which is very offensive to the transgendered people, by the
19:07 way.
19:08 You can always point that out.
19:09 But the fact that we're men, I guess men still exist.
19:11 We can't have abortions.
19:12 My body, my choice.
19:14 That's all BS and men need to call people out that, as Steve said, this, we didn't vote
19:20 on this.
19:21 Women didn't vote on this.
19:22 All male Supreme Court gave us abortion.
19:24 Most abortion facilities in America are owned by men.
19:27 Most abortion doctors are men.
19:29 Nobody profits more financially from abortion than a man.
19:34 And nobody benefits more than a bad man, a promiscuous man who is often we know from
19:40 experience, nowhere to be found, the day of the abortion, the men don't lie on that table
19:45 and have an abortion.
19:46 The women do, and men are nowhere to be found, which is why often women feel the only option
19:53 is to have an abortion.
19:55 The women don't win.
19:56 They don't come out to the parking lot and have this great relief and celebrate reproductive
20:01 rights.
20:02 That's a little garbage.
20:04 The men, bad men benefit from abortion, nothing says, it's a man's world in the worst way
20:11 than a plain parent at abortion facility with an open sign on it.
20:14 And so we need to own that and really and sort of curse our own men haven't been shoved
20:20 to the sidelines.
20:21 We've sprinted there and built condos and said, hey, you do, you know, whatever you do, all
20:26 support it.
20:27 It's your choice.
20:28 It's your body.
20:29 So that's the first way to just get rid of my body.
20:31 My choice is Steve pointed out.
20:34 The other thing is to kind of back up and just think about that phrase like, is it true?
20:42 I got to wear a seat belt and I live in Texas, the greatest state, the freest state in the
20:48 world.
20:49 We can't really do whatever we want with our bodies all the time.
20:54 We can't go streaking.
20:56 We can't get drunk in public and walk around.
21:00 I can't go up to the Dallas Cowboy facility and just start working out and they tell me
21:04 to leave.
21:05 And I'm like, my body, my choice, you know, I'm taking care of myself.
21:09 It doesn't apply to anything.
21:10 It's a made up phrase.
21:12 It's the most common phrase.
21:14 We hit it hard in the book, but it's a great confidence builder because it's the same as,
21:20 you know, don't have a uterus, you know, no uterus, no opinion.
21:25 All that garbage, they're just, it's really a softball for us in a dialogue.
21:32 That's why in the book, we push so hard that we have got to be respectful.
21:36 We have got to be loving because the power of our arguments is overwhelming.
21:42 And I would say a little silly, you know, where we don't like, we just can't do whatever
21:48 we want with our bodies.
21:49 You're just trashing the Astros.
21:51 Remember all the steroid scandals?
21:53 I mean, why can't Mark McGuire take steroids and we all see five home runs a game?
21:57 What's wrong with that?
21:58 My body, my choice.
21:59 So we don't apply it.
22:01 I'm a St. Louis Cardinals fan.
22:03 How dare you bring up a horrible, uh, no, no, I'm not offended because I can't stand
22:07 that man.
22:08 Mark McGuire.
22:09 I'm just, I wasn't planning to get that angry this morning because I tried to pretend like
22:12 he was like, Cardinals, no, it wasn't awesome.
22:15 All right.
22:16 It was all a lie, but we're going to get back to the subject for today.
22:18 But one thing about the, my body, my choice thing as well and the, Hey, no uterus, no opinion
22:21 is you, okay, then explain to me why an overwhelming majority in a lot of cases of pro life people
22:27 are actually women.
22:28 Like, why are there so many women pro life cause if that was part of it?
22:31 But one thing that I loved in the book that you did on the, my body, my choice side is
22:34 you made, you made it explicitly clear that the abortion doesn't happen to the woman.
22:39 It happens inside the woman.
22:40 Her body is the setting for the abortion.
22:43 The abortion doesn't happen to her that her brain is not the one that is, you know, sucked
22:47 out into a trash can.
22:49 Her heart is not the one that stopped her, appendages are not ripped out and like the
22:52 only lifeless body at the end of an abortion is her or is the baby that's inside of her,
22:57 not her.
22:58 And so I think that's important for people to look at when they're like, my body, my
23:01 choice, you know, this baby is an extension of my body.
23:03 If I shove my finger up your nose, I'm not an extension of your body.
23:06 I'm just inside your body at that exact moment.
23:09 That doesn't mean you get to kill me.
23:10 And the other thing that I feel like, so my body, my choice, no uterus, no opinion.
23:13 That's really popular, but then people like to go for broke, right?
23:16 They like to go for the jugular, no pun intended, but it's what to say when someone says, what
23:21 about rape and incest?
23:23 Yeah.
23:24 This is, this is the question and whether it's your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who appears
23:29 in the book many times or the politicians.
23:33 If you're a male and have the benefit of also accepting that reality and identifying as
23:38 a male, you will be given the 14 year old girl who is raped and she doesn't have access
23:45 to healthcare and shame on you.
23:48 And that's where we're just supposed to shrink up.
23:51 And the first point is that rape consists of less than 1% of all abortions and we should
23:58 never say that because it's insensitive.
24:00 It doesn't matter if it's all the abortions, it doesn't matter if it's one abortion.
24:04 The second point to make is that a crime was committed.
24:09 The rapist should go to prison and no one, you know, many times men feel like they're
24:15 on the side of the rapist and they're not.
24:18 And often abortion advocates, they just forget about the rapist in conversation.
24:21 You'll see.
24:22 But so then we need to say, well, the rapist should go to prison and tag that.
24:29 The other thing, and I'll let Steve chime in on this, is that we have personal experience
24:34 with women who have had abortion, of women who have been raped and women who have had
24:39 an abortion, women who have been raped and have chosen life and it's night and day because
24:43 it's a myth to think that a surgery can take away a crime or a tragedy.
24:49 Surgeries aren't designed to do that.
24:51 They don't remove a horrific experience that someone goes through.
24:57 And what happens is the abortion, if you have the abortion after the rape, it will remind
25:01 the woman, the anniversary of the abortion will remind her of the rape and the anniversary
25:07 of the rape will remind her of the abortion.
25:10 And it is an endless cycle.
25:12 And yet the women who choose life or give it up for adoption had a good buddy.
25:16 His mom was raped at 14.
25:17 She gave him up for adoption and he spoke in front of a claim parent at one time and said,
25:21 today as like a 20 year old dude, I'm a product of rape.
25:26 Like I can't remove that.
25:28 I'm a product of rape.
25:30 And we don't, we like the underdogs in America.
25:34 We never punish a child because their dad's a criminal.
25:37 We never punish a child because their dad can't hold a job or is a drunk or whatever he is.
25:43 And the only time we do it and everybody's supposed to go along with it and we're not
25:48 thinking about the woman at all, we somehow just think it's appropriate that anybody raped
25:56 have an abortion and we just totally disregard the child and write them off and judge them
26:03 because of the circumstances of their conception.
26:06 What about you, Steve?
26:07 Yeah, it's very true.
26:08 People need to ask the actual women who have suffered that horrific crime of sexual assault.
26:13 This is inexcusable.
26:15 No pro-life or should ever feel as though they're taking the side of a rapist.
26:18 It's just not true.
26:19 It's a standard political talking point, but it doesn't have any basis in reality or in
26:23 the experience of the women who have had abortions or suffered the trauma of a sexual assault.
26:27 I met a woman out in front of an abortion facility and she said that it's a high school.
26:32 It's sort of the exact case scenario that Shawn is referencing.
26:34 As a high school student, she was the victim of a sexual assault.
26:38 She became pregnant through that assault.
26:40 She had an abortion and through her tears, she explained to me how it took her a lot longer
26:45 to find healing and recovery after the abortion than it even did from the assault.
26:50 This led her into the wilderness.
26:52 She had two more abortions.
26:54 She became addicted to hard drugs.
26:55 She became a prostitute.
26:57 Thanks be to God.
26:58 Our Lord is a great pursuer and he brought her back and she's now an evangelical pro-life
27:02 Christian.
27:03 Thanks be to God, wonderful things.
27:06 She shouldn't be used as a prop or as a tool or as a mascot for the abortion industry.
27:11 We've got another woman who's been a great 40 days for life leader, has saved tons of
27:15 babies and she was a victim of a sexual assault, became pregnant.
27:19 She was run out of her ostensibly Christian church for not having an abortion because
27:24 obviously if you, the victim of a rape, you have to have an abortion.
27:28 It wasn't, apparently it wasn't her body, her choice at that point.
27:30 She was run literally run out of her church for choosing life for her child.
27:35 This is a case where it's foolish, whether it's rape or any other scenario, we don't
27:40 need to pit moms against their babies.
27:43 Life is good for them both and abortion is harmful to them both.
27:47 When we stand on that simple truth, we can make sure that the world sees our compassion
27:52 and our love for these women and not that we're looking to stand in the way of their
27:56 rights or their healing.
27:58 It's so degrading for us, none too.
28:01 I mean, let's think about that.
28:03 The woman that she's raped and then she goes and she has an abortion and we all say abortion
28:12 is bad for women.
28:13 Abortion is bad.
28:14 Well, unless, I mean, look what happened to you.
28:18 I mean, you obviously need one.
28:19 So we just cave on it, I mean, she had shameful church, but we just cave on it, not thinking
28:26 about the woman, but what happens when she goes through the abortion and then now what
28:30 moment hits because it doesn't solve her problems.
28:34 She's now a victim of rape and she's post aborted and somehow we think she's responsible
28:39 and courageous.
28:40 I mean, we just dumped on somebody who is a wounded victim with this notion that this
28:47 surgery is going to fix it and I think it's so degrading the women.
28:53 We need to flip it around.
28:54 We need to share these points.
28:56 We need to be very sensitive often if you have a woman who brings this up and she's
29:01 very passionate.
29:02 She's either a rape victim herself or a close relative and I've had that happen to me many
29:06 times.
29:07 So, but this notion that we men or we society are doing them a favor is is total misguided
29:16 mercy.
29:17 When I think at the same time, that's why I brought up that a lot of people even inside
29:20 the church, their arguments fall apart.
29:22 This is the one where it happens, like people that are in my Sunday school, you know, that
29:26 they'll even say, yeah, I'm I'm 100% pro life, but man, I just don't know if I could tell
29:31 a woman that was raped by her uncle that she shouldn't get an abortion.
29:34 It's like, well, do you know what 100% means?
29:37 You know what pro life means?
29:38 Because it sounds like your your pro life when it's a convenient argument, right?
29:42 Or whenever you're arguing against convenience.
29:43 And the other thing that I've done, the tact I've said, whenever people bring up rape or
29:46 incest, and I go a little bit more extreme than you guys, I don't think that the rapist
29:50 should be in prison.
29:51 I think they should be castrated and killed.
29:53 Like I'm sorry.
29:54 You're destroying the amago day by stealing something from somebody.
29:58 And I'm so sorry that, you know, we don't we don't execute people for rape in the United
30:03 States.
30:04 I don't think that that's a good thing.
30:05 You want to try to stop rapists, if they think if I go through with this, I might get the
30:08 electric chair or bring back the firing squad or something like that.
30:12 That's kind of where I stand on the issue.
30:13 But it's it's all about bringing people back to the fact that the rapist loves abortion.
30:18 That's like what you were talking about earlier.
30:20 It's like they absolutely love a bad guy loves abortion because it gets rid of their crime.
30:24 It gets rid of all the evidence.
30:25 If you can murder people and just snap your finger or pay five or 600 bucks and every
30:30 all the evidence of your crime goes away from the most part, every criminal on the planet
30:34 would take that deal.
30:36 But a lot of pro abortion folks as well are go ahead, see just rapists, incest, human trafficking,
30:43 all these folks, it's their greatest tool.
30:45 It's used over and over again.
30:47 And so oftentimes, you know, incest isn't even, you know, it stuns people and I think it shocks
30:52 people even more than rape does.
30:53 And that's a scenario where it's a simple DNA test.
30:56 You don't need a witness.
30:58 You don't need a he said she said it's not his word versus her word.
31:01 The DNA proves if there's a 14 year old girl and her dad is the father of her child that
31:05 that proves that there's a crime and there's only one way that that can be covered up.
31:09 Absolutely.
31:10 And I think that that's a thing that people give short shrift to or they don't really
31:13 consider that, especially when they're about to enter into a conversation about this topic.
31:17 But another thing that pro abortion folks bring up that they absolutely love to bring up.
31:20 And so I want to know what to say.
31:22 What to say when someone says the fetus might be a human being, but it's not a person.
31:27 And so you'll get people to where it's like, okay, I agree with 95% of biologists on the
31:32 planet and every geneticists and every person that knows anything about, you know, biological
31:36 textbook that yes, it's a, it's a human being.
31:39 Yes, it's human living tissue.
31:41 Great.
31:42 You've wore me down, but it's just not a person.
31:45 What is, what do you say when that happens?
31:47 I think it's a great opportunity, as Sean mentioned before, to ask people questions.
31:51 Nobody wants to listen to them to someone else talk.
31:54 We want to exert our own opinion and so that's why asking questions can be so effective.
31:59 Okay, well, then what is a person?
32:01 When does personhood begin?
32:03 How does it begin?
32:04 What is so magical about the birth canal that on one side of it, you're not a person
32:07 on the other side, you are.
32:10 And sometimes, sometimes you ask these questions and you don't even need to make the case as
32:15 the people try to answer and they hear out loud the insane point of view that they are
32:21 putting into words, sometimes they convert themselves in the process.
32:25 And we don't believe that and neither does the guy or girl who brings that up.
32:31 It's not a person.
32:32 Okay.
32:33 Then we need to apologize to Scott Peterson because he's serving time for second degree
32:38 murder for killing his pregnant wife.
32:41 We also need to apologize to all the women at Six Flags who are pregnant and we wouldn't
32:45 let them on a roller coaster or the women we prosecute because they have ten whiskeys
32:50 and they're pregnant.
32:52 You know, we legally protect the unborn.
32:56 We do surgeries on unborn children.
32:59 It's amazing what we can do.
33:02 When somebody says, okay, it's a human being but not a person, you can just say, neither
33:08 of you, because we're biological human beings here.
33:12 Well, who decides if they're a person?
33:15 I do.
33:16 So it's just kind of like it's part of the dehumanization, Nazi Germany, Nazi law did
33:24 it to the Jews, they're not people.
33:28 You know, all of these things, any we did it to blacks in our country, all of the dehumanization
33:34 you see around the world takes away personhood, which is just kind of made up.
33:41 You're conceived and you're a human being, you're a fetal human, you're a human fetus,
33:46 whatever it is, you're human and you exist and you're a person.
33:51 And so, you know, when it's hard to kill a person.
33:57 But if you're just killing something, you know, it's a lot easier.
34:03 One the same thing goes with people, you don't get announcements in the mail for random clumps
34:08 of cells parties, you don't go to a random clump of cells party to celebrate that.
34:13 You don't ask someone, how is that random clump of cells doing right now?
34:16 My wife is pregnant right now.
34:17 I've never thought to ask her that.
34:19 Maybe it's because we innately know what's growing inside of her is not going to end
34:22 up being, it's not a question mark as to what's coming out.
34:25 Is it going to be a ficus?
34:26 Is it going to be a Volkswagen?
34:27 Is it going to be a water bottle?
34:28 We know that it's a human baby in there, but again, the location is what gets people
34:32 all out of whack whenever they go into these arguments.
34:35 But another thing that people talk about and you kind of alluded to it a little bit there,
34:38 Sean, is what to say when someone says, what about when the abortion is necessary to save
34:45 the life of the mother?
34:46 I mean, that question in and of itself is a little bit ignorant as to kind of where we've
34:50 come to in our modern context when it comes to medicine and what we're able to do.
34:54 We can even take a womb out of the woman's body, do surgery on the woman and put the womb
34:58 back and stitch her back up and the baby can keep developing.
35:01 But what do you say to people when they bring that up?
35:04 This is such an important one because as controversial as you mentioned, the rape issue being where
35:09 there's good pro-life Christian people are like, "Okay, but I couldn't tell a woman who's
35:12 been raped."
35:13 This takes that and puts it on steroids.
35:15 The steroids that Sean was talking about in baseball before, this puts it on steroids
35:19 because it's like, "Well, isn't it pro-life to allow a woman who's going to die from her
35:23 pregnancy to have an abortion?
35:25 Wouldn't that be the pro-life thing to do?
35:27 You know, save the life that's already here."
35:29 Well, okay, both lives are here.
35:30 But let's get beyond that and let's talk about the fact that as far back as 1967, Alan
35:37 Guetmacher, the godfather of Planned Parenthood, said that there's no case where abortion is
35:42 ever needed to save the life of a mother, it just doesn't exist.
35:45 Unless I'm dramatically mistaken, our medical technology has only gotten more and more advanced
35:51 in the last 50-plus years.
35:53 If it wasn't necessary in 1967 to use abortion to save a mother's life, it certainly isn't
35:59 necessary now.
36:00 We've got the former surgeon General C. Everett Coop said in his entire career practicing
36:04 medicine, never encountered a woman who needed an abortion to save her life.
36:09 We've got Dr. Tony Levatino, who did thousands upon thousands upon thousands of abortions,
36:14 said that many of them he justified by saying it was necessary to save the life of the mother.
36:19 How many abortions of those abortions did he actually need to do to save the mother's
36:24 life?
36:25 Big old zero, he said, not a single one.
36:27 He said, not only does abortion not save the life of a mother, but if there is a truly
36:32 life-threatening health condition, the abortion is going to be the time it takes to perform
36:37 that abortion and the efforts and the trauma upon the woman's body is going to be creating
36:42 an unnecessary delay in providing the actual life-saving medical treatment that that mom
36:47 needs to pull through.
36:49 There's even, you know, we can argue this stuff often better than the person who supports abortion
36:57 and so they don't bring this up a lot, but I would if I were for abortion and that is
37:01 ovarian cancer.
37:04 The woman has ovarian cancer, she's pregnant, you got to go in and do radiation, which is
37:09 totally within her right and the baby could die, is going to die, blah, blah, blah.
37:16 And number one, it's amazing what we can do with cancer.
37:22 I live in Houston where MD Anderson's here and you know, like you said, they can move
37:27 the baby, they can target the radiation, they can target the cancer, they can do all of
37:32 that.
37:33 But let's say they do that and as a result, it doesn't go well and the baby dies.
37:39 It's not an abortion.
37:40 It's not an abortion.
37:41 It didn't go well, but an abortion is the direct intent surgical killing of a human being.
37:51 Their crime is that they exist, they're conceived and they're getting bigger and they need to
37:56 go away.
37:57 So it's the direct killing, you're not supposed to survive an abortion.
38:01 An abortion is unsuccessful if the baby lives, only surgery you're not supposed to survive.
38:07 So you know, even these scenarios, which many times they wouldn't think of, sometimes somebody
38:12 will bring up the ovarian cancer.
38:14 You just get so far off in the left field and you're like, what, you know, and it doesn't
38:21 happen in the book.
38:22 We give all these examples at Steve reference where it's medically necessary to say, abortion
38:27 is not designed to save a lot.
38:28 It's designed to take it and if you have a life threatening thing, OBGYNs are going to
38:34 tell you, having an abortion is going to be a waste of time and it's not going to heal
38:38 you.
38:39 It's not going to do anything for you.
38:40 That's why they've expanded to sometimes to say, well, maybe not the life of the mother,
38:43 but the health of the mother.
38:44 Yeah.
38:45 If we break that down to the health of the mother, you know, mothers are their health
38:48 is not improved by abortion.
38:50 And in fact, these health conditions that are used to justify abortions.
38:54 The number one among them, first of all, we're talking about a small, small minority, but
38:58 those who cite the health of the mother is their reason for getting an abortion.
39:02 The number one health condition is listed as fatigue.
39:05 Now Sean and I both have a lot of kids.
39:08 We recognize how fatigue, how much fatigue parenting causes, but this is not the reason
39:12 to take the life of an innocent child.
39:14 Hey, I'm fatigued.
39:15 Yeah.
39:16 I can't get rid of my one and a half year old because I'm tired, you know, that's not
39:21 something anybody would do.
39:22 Yeah.
39:23 Otherwise, no one would have kids in their family anymore after a week long vacation.
39:28 Yeah.
39:29 Absolutely.
39:30 Um, and guys, this is probably a good time for me to mention that you've got to go pick
39:33 up this book.
39:34 It's going to be there in the show notes for you to get for yourself because we are literally
39:37 barely scratching the surface on a lot of these things.
39:39 Even some of these topics that we're talking about, y'all going to much, much more detail
39:42 in the book.
39:43 So you have to get it for yourself and read it for yourself, but there, I want to turn
39:45 to a part of the book that kind of caught me a little bit off guard and maybe it's going
39:49 to be a point of disagreement for the three of us, but it's from the chapter called when
39:52 it turns political.
39:53 So I'm going to read this quote to you though, the abortion industry mongers fear of post
39:57 abortive women being dragged off to prison, the pro life movement has long recognized
40:02 women as victims of abortion and sought to punish doctors who perform abortions, not
40:06 the women who procure them.
40:08 So that's a quote from the chapter.
40:09 Now for me personally, I think that women should be held legally liable for paying an
40:15 assassin to kill their child because the same rules would apply in any other scenario.
40:20 If I decide one day, I hate my sister and I need my sister to go, but I don't want my
40:23 sister's blood on my hands.
40:24 I pay an assassin.
40:26 He kills my sister.
40:27 The assassin gets caught, he, you know, points at me and says, Hey, he's the one that paid
40:30 me to do it.
40:31 We both go down for murder in the United States.
40:33 There's plenty of examples of people being in a car, not even involved in a murder, but
40:37 they drove someone away from a murder scene and the driver got the same exact charges as
40:42 the other people in the car, the ones that actually did the murder.
40:45 So I guess I don't want to assume what y'all's position is on this particular issue, but that's
40:50 always bothered me that the further I got into the pro life issue is why would we consider
40:54 these women victims because then we're just assuming that these women are being dragged
40:59 to the abortion mill to get done to them, what is being done to inside of them.
41:04 So should they not be held legally responsible for that?
41:07 There's a lot there.
41:08 It's a good point.
41:09 The, the victims is, is of an industry and a culture, not that they themselves are not
41:15 personally responsible or culpable for the death of their child.
41:18 They are and they will, they will tell you that when they speak.
41:22 The biggest difference in that and what you say and why I don't agree with it is because
41:27 killing your sister is illegal right now in the United States of America and traditionally
41:33 around the world when there's an atrocity going on and for us it would be abortion and
41:38 it's going on legally, it's promoted, it's paid for by the government for, for abortion
41:45 to be illegal today, if we just banned all abortion, it was illegal today.
41:52 We didn't do this in Nazi Germany.
41:53 We haven't done it for war crimes.
41:55 You don't go back and, and prosecute the underlings, the people at the lowest level, which here
42:00 would just be the women that, that fell for it.
42:03 You would prosecute doctors that continue to do abortions.
42:06 You maybe go back and prosecute doctors.
42:08 You knew that illegal abortions, but the legality of it is, is why obviously you couldn't go
42:14 on prosecute a woman who had an abortion today because it's, it's legal and let me help in
42:19 their shot.
42:20 Yeah.
42:21 So I'm, I'm with you on the legality part of it because again, technically you can't call
42:23 in, this is legal, like legalese technicality.
42:26 You can't call something murder that is not murder by law.
42:29 Murder is, is a, is a legal term and that's how we use it here in the United States, but
42:34 let's say this, this was illegal to do.
42:37 Would you agree at that point that a woman should be held liable?
42:40 I think that's the ultimate question, not, you know, in modern jurisprudence is at the
42:44 acceptable thing.
42:45 I mean, should these women be held criminally liable if it was decided upon as a country
42:50 that that yes is indeed a crime?
42:52 Well, the Texas law now sort of skips over them and says that we can prosecute the doctor,
42:58 which has annihilated abortions here.
43:01 Yeah.
43:02 And my guess is that when Roe v. Wade is overturned, the same would be fit.
43:09 This applies to a lot of things, unlike a lot of the pro-abortion arguments, there's
43:14 a lot of people that use drugs that never get prosecuted because the dealer gets prosecuted.
43:20 So on that one, I will say I don't know because I'd have to look at criminal precedent for
43:27 for other things, whether she should be held, I mean, it's going to be a, it's going to
43:31 be a case, is it her 10th abortion, is there a 10th illegal abortion, is it her first?
43:37 I think circumstances do come into that of whether you prosecute her much like we do for
43:43 many other crimes.
43:46 And that's the point, is that once abortion is made illegal, there will be precedent.
43:52 And we will have those comparisons.
43:54 And I do trust our justice system to figure that out.
43:57 And sometimes you get a drug dealer that gets, you know, six months community service,
44:01 and sometimes they go to the penitentiary for 20 years for a lesser crime.
44:04 But at least there's precedent, and we have no precedent with abortion.
44:08 The doctors, no doubt, they would be practicing medicine illegally, and they should be prosecuted
44:15 and sent to prison for sure.
44:16 I think to commit a crime, you have to know that you're doing something wrong.
44:19 And we've got five decades now of women being sort of brainwashed, and our society being
44:24 brainwashed with this idea that it's not a baby, it's a clump of cells, a product of
44:28 conception, any of those terms that you've used before.
44:30 And so there's got to be knowledge.
44:32 And some of this gets back to what we talked about before, which is that men, selfish men,
44:37 bad men, are the biggest winners of abortion.
44:40 This isn't coming from a pro-life or a Christian news source.
44:44 There's peer-reviewed medical research that shows that about two-thirds of women who have
44:48 abortions are significantly pressured, even coerced into having those abortions.
44:53 And I think that's a mitigating factor that needs to be taken into consideration.
44:57 Hey, and to dig down on your point, under your scenario, and I could see this, so maybe
45:04 this will play out.
45:05 But under your scenario, okay, you'd prosecute the woman, but it wouldn't stop there.
45:13 Did the aunt know?
45:14 Who drove her?
45:16 Who paid for it?
45:17 Did the cousin know?
45:19 It's just like a guy who's molesting children and the wife knows, but she doesn't say anything.
45:28 A lot of prosecutors will prosecute the wife or prosecute the aunt and uncle who knew.
45:32 They'll give them six months.
45:34 So that's why I say that's a hard answer because we don't have any precedent.
45:41 And I don't know how that would play out and how Roe v. Wade is overturned and how the
45:45 state's then enforced it would determine that.
45:49 And I think like a lot of crimes, it would be different state to state and jurisdiction
45:54 to jurisdiction.
45:55 Yeah, I think it's an important thing to think through because let's say I knew somebody
45:59 wanted to murder somebody just because I knew that they wanted to do something doesn't make
46:03 me liable for the fact that they went and did it.
46:05 The same thing is true that I would say even to your point, Steve, is that ignorance of
46:08 something.
46:09 So you've heard about this, you know, oh, I didn't know this was a crime in your city.
46:13 The police officer is going to say, I'm sorry, ignorance is not an excuse here.
46:16 So when you say I didn't know I was doing that, I didn't know that this was killing somebody
46:19 is not a compelling excuse in most in most places that you would kind of come to.
46:24 And so again, it's not an easy, it's not an easy, cut and dry thing.
46:28 But at the same time to pretend like these women are just completely ignorant to what's
46:32 happening during that process.
46:34 It goes back to everything that y'all been saying.
46:36 She doesn't go out into the parking lot and then just go get McDonald's as if it's just
46:38 she got a mole removed.
46:40 There's something different that happens, so this assumption that she doesn't know what
46:43 she's done is, is overly wrong is, is a big deal.
46:46 And I know we can't, we should probably spend a whole lot more time talking about that.
46:49 But guys, we only have a short amount of time and I want to get to this next question specifically.
46:52 I will say real quick, I'll say for guys like right now, listening to this, never say
46:57 that.
46:58 Never say it in dialogue because there's nothing the pro-abortion people want more than they
47:02 hear men saying prosecute the women, lock them up.
47:06 And so it's at our disadvantage, I think, to say that before it's made illegal and then
47:12 people will debate it like all other crimes.
47:15 But I think it hurts us big time if you go out and say, I think the woman should be prosecuted.
47:20 I think the boyfriend should be prosecuted.
47:22 So I think the point there is obviously it may be true, but it may not be helpful to the
47:25 conversation because there's a lot of things in your book that I'm like, oh, I would totally
47:28 say that, but it's like it may not help the conversation overall.
47:31 And the ultimate goal is to change someone's mind, to change their hearts that's in the
47:34 title of the book.
47:35 But one thing that you both talk about in your book quite a bit, you go through the
47:40 scientific and philosophical arguments against abortion.
47:44 But you spend almost no time on the biblical or theological reasons to be against abortion.
47:50 And I don't think that was an accident or an oversight by any stretch of the imagination
47:53 because both of you are professing Christians.
47:56 But there are some organizations in this space that you know, by name, that they will not
48:01 argue the scientific points at all, they will only argue the biblical points.
48:06 Now for me specifically, if someone believes that the Bible is just a conglomeration of
48:10 fables from thousands of years ago, and that's your basis for an argument, you're going
48:14 to lose them from the very, very beginning.
48:16 But for you guys, why did you decide to go more the scientific philosophical route as
48:21 opposed to leaning on biblical or theological truths?
48:24 God's law is written on our hearts, I think, and there's, there's this natural law.
48:28 And in our hearts, we all know abortion is wrong, right?
48:31 You never take the life of an innocent child.
48:33 And that's why we have to go on offense chapter.
48:35 That's why we have this notion that we don't have a problem with the facts.
48:38 We have a problem with confidence and we want folks to be confident meeting abortion supporters
48:43 where they're at, whether they're Christian, atheist, something in between, something else
48:48 entirely different.
48:49 We think that God's law is universally written on the human hearts and that you don't necessarily,
48:55 we make no bones about it.
48:56 We're motivated by our love for God and our belief in Jesus Christ to go out and make
49:00 these points and to stand in front of abortion facilities.
49:03 That's our motivation.
49:04 But you don't necessarily even need to be a professing Christian to recognize a slaughtering
49:08 and innocent child is not the right thing to do.
49:11 Also, the book is designed to go based on what we know and not what people make up on
49:18 a whim when they read scripture.
49:20 And there's a lot of bad religion out there.
49:22 And there's a lot of just Christian sects that read a scripture and say, "This is what
49:27 it says to me and it can be that the sky is green."
49:31 And so we can't get into that.
49:33 I can't prevent somebody from just making something up in their head and believing it
49:36 to be true.
49:38 But I can point to science and I can point to reason and I can point to law and both
49:43 eternal law and natural law.
49:46 And I think that's assumed in the book and we hit it hard in the closing chapters as
49:50 you know.
49:51 You can't give it away, but the eternal consequences and the goodness that we can do by striving
49:57 for sanctity and growing closer to Jesus Christ.
50:01 But for the people that are out in the woods or in some ivory tower and they're like, "I
50:06 believe it's God's will to have an abortion," there's very little we can do to prevent them
50:12 from just making crap up out of thin air and believing it to be true.
50:17 But I can tell them that they are supporting murder and if that's their religious belief,
50:21 I'll skip their Sunday donuts.
50:23 Well, and at the same time for me here in a few weeks, I'm going to be teaching my Sunday
50:28 school class, an adult Sunday school class about the subject of abortion.
50:32 And there are people that are concerned about topical discussions during Sunday school because
50:37 it gets away from scripture, what they say.
50:40 But whenever I have this conversation with people, I root it in scripture.
50:43 I root it in the Amago day, I root it in the image of God being written on all of us and
50:47 being written on us from the moment we're a one-celled zygote, right?
50:50 When all of the stuff that makes us who we are eventually is right there at that moment
50:55 as that one-celled zygote.
50:57 However, I have to give people practical ways to push back darkness in the world because
51:01 that's why I'm down to life is here is to equipment to push back darkness.
51:04 And if you were ill-equipped to go into a conversation because you have the wrong ammunition
51:09 for the battle, that's an issue.
51:11 And so that's what I'm trying to give to these people as we kind of move forward.
51:15 And the Bible speaks one word essentially, one name, and that's Jesus Christ.
51:21 And so not one word of it supports abortion because he didn't pop out of an acorn to save
51:26 us from our sins.
51:28 He showed the greatest event in history is the Annunciation.
51:31 It's the most painted event in history.
51:33 It's not the crucifixion.
51:35 It's the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel declaring that God will come among us.
51:40 And she says, "Be it done to me according to thy word."
51:43 He went into the womb.
51:46 Abortion is the perfect piece of art for the devil because that which Christ came into
51:52 the world to heal and save us from our sins is now statistically the most dangerous place
51:57 in the world.
51:58 And so the idea that abortion is not in the Bible is complete garbage.
52:02 Well, yeah.
52:03 I mean, hey, you can say the abortion is not in the Bible, then I would ask you, can you
52:06 find it in the Constitution for me?
52:08 Because I don't think it's in there either.
52:09 So guys, another thing that I got to in your book, because a lot of the stuff that I read
52:12 in your book, it was incredibly important, but it wasn't like earth shattering for me
52:16 because it's stuff that I heard before, but I didn't hear it all in one place, right?
52:19 So it was great to see all that information in one place where you could easily reference
52:23 it.
52:24 You could just thumb through it or control F and find something.
52:26 But y'all's section that you included on a vitro fertilization absolutely blew my mind.
52:32 And it blew my mind because I love finding segments of the world or of subject matters
52:37 that I don't know anything about, right?
52:40 I didn't even know how to spell in vitro fertilization out, right?
52:43 I thought I had it all different in my head, but this is this hits close to home for me
52:47 because I have very close family members that have used in vitro fertilization to become
52:51 pregnant.
52:52 Other very, very good friends that have used it to try and get pregnant unsuccessfully.
52:56 But there was so much information about IVF that I didn't know anything about.
53:00 And I can just assure you, no one in churches know anything about that as well.
53:03 And I know we can't do a deep dive into all the scientific underlings and, you know, tendrils
53:07 that come out from IVF.
53:08 But can you give our listeners an idea of what you covered in that section of the book?
53:13 I think there's two main levels to the case that we make against IVF.
53:16 The first is on a practical level.
53:17 It is exceptionally deadly.
53:19 In order to get one or sometimes two live births, they're producing numerous, you know,
53:25 a dozen or more embryos.
53:28 And okay, so some of them don't make it in the lab.
53:30 Some of them are filtered out, you know, some of them are implanted.
53:33 Of those that are implanted, oh boy, we got five or six or seven babies here in the womb,
53:37 we're going to need to what they call selectively reduce them down to one or two.
53:41 That means aborting, you know, the ones who remain.
53:44 There's a any given cycle of IVF treatment, you don't get a single live birth.
53:51 All of the children that are created in that lab die.
53:54 So that's not pro-life.
53:55 That's on a very practical level.
53:56 But then there's also sort of the greater philosophical level here where it begins to
54:01 treat children as commodities to be bought and sold.
54:04 They become products.
54:05 That's an inherently dehumanizing process.
54:09 You see women who are being selected based on their ACT score or their SAT score or their
54:14 height or their attractiveness and being the ones who are recruited to donate their eggs.
54:19 They're not donating them.
54:20 They're selling them.
54:21 You've got women overseas in India who are being exploited for their eggs.
54:25 You've got surrogate mothers who are being exploited.
54:27 So the moms are dehumanized.
54:28 The babies are dehumanized, that most fundamental of all human relationships, a mother and a
54:32 child, that is being outsourced and turned into a technological process.
54:37 We could do a whole episode on this.
54:39 But at the basic level, those are the concerns that it turns the life of a child into something
54:45 that can be bought and sold and transacted.
54:49 And that your response to that chapter is appropriate because it's the one chapter in
54:54 there that we don't all agree on.
54:56 People don't have to agree on it.
54:57 We thought it was important to go in there because of the future of abortion and the
55:00 future of human rights and what it means to be a human being.
55:03 I will say, unlike other chapters and abortion arguments, the reason it's in there is because
55:09 the pro-abortion people will bring up in vitro.
55:12 And a lot of people are like, "Oh yeah, I have no problem with that."
55:14 And so we break it down, but you're right.
55:18 Most I have family members.
55:20 I have friends that used in vitro.
55:23 And it's kind of like the first time anybody says, "Carbs aren't really that good for you."
55:28 And like 20 years ago, you're like, "What are you talking about?
55:31 You're crazy?
55:32 We bread is awesome.
55:33 I'm supposed to eat bacon instead, you're nuts."
55:35 So there is that initial reaction, but we have to share it and kind of open people's
55:43 mind.
55:44 It's not like other things where, "Hey, you know, you're like killing a baby when you
55:49 tell a woman to have an abortion and tell her my body, my choice."
55:53 We need to be more sensitive about it, because it's accepted by so many people.
55:57 And mainly because they don't know and you do.
56:00 You get six babies and you keep one.
56:03 And it's a very, you know, we can't get into it, but people need to know that they approach
56:11 for that chapter is as if everyone believes that in vitro is good, because a lot of people
56:16 do.
56:17 Right.
56:18 It's one of the few points in the book in which we're not preaching to the choir.
56:21 This is a case where most of it were equipping pro-lifers to go out and preach to the not
56:25 choir.
56:26 This is a case where, gosh, you're helping infertile family.
56:29 In my family, we've suffered from infertility.
56:31 You're helping infertile couples to welcome a child.
56:33 Couldn't that be, is there anything that could be more pro-life than this?
56:37 And so we really pull back the curtain on that.
56:39 When I think as well, IVF almost feels like to me a delayed abortion to where like, let's
56:45 say you get six and you only take one as you end up having a baby, the ones that are left
56:49 in storage.
56:51 Those are babies, those are lives that are going to be discarded at some point, but it's
56:55 going to be so out of sight and so out of mind for you that it's just going to be very
56:59 different.
57:00 And the thing is, anytime something can be monetized or commoditized, it will be.
57:04 And in this point, we're literally just commoditizing the creation of human beings.
57:07 But I don't want to get off on another diatribe because I know you guys got to get on with
57:10 the rest of your day.
57:11 And guys, we left a lot to be desired on this interview, even though I think it went well,
57:14 and that just should point to the fact that you guys should go get this book because there's
57:17 so many other topics that we didn't have time to get into, some of the best for life arguments
57:21 you've seen.
57:22 Abortion is just health care.
57:23 Planned Parenthood does so many good things.
57:25 Why are you hating on Planned Parenthood?
57:26 All that stuff is in the book.
57:28 But that's all for me in terms of this interview.
57:30 Is there anything else you guys want to get off your chests?
57:32 No, I appreciate it.
57:33 Keep up the great work.
57:35 Christmas is coming up.
57:36 The supply chains backed up.
57:38 All those boats are stuck off the harbor of California.
57:40 We will not be sold out of what to say when copies.
57:44 You get your cool 40 days for life, patriotic camo hoodie for Christmas.
57:49 Hey guys, we're absolutely crushing to hear all of that will 100% be in the show notes.
57:54 But Sean Carney and Steve Carlin, thank you for coming on Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
57:59 Thank y'all.
58:00 There you go guys.
58:01 I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Sean Carney and Steve Carlin, but before we let you
58:04 go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life.
58:06 Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness and specifically we do that by providing
58:10 content like this podcast, it helps you forge spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
58:14 So here are the links I've got for you today.
58:15 I've got a link to the book that we talked about, what to say when the complete new guide
58:18 to discussing abortion.
58:19 I've also got a link to the 40 days for life website.
58:22 There's a lot of great resources on that site and a link to the episode that I did episode
58:25 70 called unplanned.
58:27 And again, the soft hold gun magnet.
58:29 If you use the promo code Kyle, you would get 10% off your order.
58:32 Make sure you do that here very quickly so you can get your stuff before Christmas.
58:35 All right, guys.
58:36 Thank you so much for listening to the podcast.
58:37 We do appreciate it.
58:38 If you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and review.
58:40 If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email
58:44 to info@undaunted.life, that's i-n-f-o@undaunted.life.
58:48 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok and like us on Facebook.
58:50 You can also check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more
58:53 content like this coming your way.
58:54 Just go to www.undaunted.life.
58:56 And we want to also thank the band, August Prince Red, for allowing us to use their music
58:59 for our content.
59:01 For our content, rather, the music track on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Ties,"
59:05 which is off their 10th anniversary re-recording of their album, "Leveler."
59:08 The links are in the description.
59:10 I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
59:12 Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
59:18 Keep seeking the Lion of Judah.
59:35 [Music]
Key quotes
3
Kyle Thompson
It's always interesting when you can get one guy on here to talk about this but now there's two of these guys, they're very well versed on this.
Shawn Carney
Abortion has to be justified and life doesn't.
Steve Karlen
We don't need to pit moms against their babies. Life is good for them both and abortion is harmful to them both.
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